February 20, 2007

Bring Costume Design Competitions to the Internet

The Houston Ballet is holding a costume design competition. Here's a brief description:

You will be creating original artwork to be used as inspiration for the design of a world premiere ballet with choreography by Houston Ballet Artistic Director Stanton Welch entitled A Doll’s House Story with music by István Márta. Your original artwork as well as the final design of the ballet is anime (Japanese animation). Your original artwork will include character images of 16 individual characters - eight men and eight women.

You can view the complete competition guidelines in this PDF file. The deadline for the submission of artwork is July 1, 2007. The winner will receive $2,500. And 8-12 finalists will also have their artwork displayed before and after performances in Houston.

So you can see an example of the Houston Ballet's work, here's a video from last year's performance of Dracula:

A Different Approach to Dance Costume Competitions

This design competition strikes me as a good way for designers to get exposure for their work and creativity. Although I don't know how tempting this competition is for professional designers who already have a number of paying gigs.

I'd like to suggest a couple of modifications to this competition that will

- get more exposure for designers

- help designers better understand the artistic requirements of the Houston Ballet, and

- Drive much larger numbers of ballet fans to the Houston Ballet website, which, in turn, will help sell more tickets.

My idea is pretty simple. Why not post all submitted designs to the Houston Ballet website or MySpace page? Or maybe all submissions that pass a certain basic threshold of creative quality?

The Houston Ballet could even allow website visitors to vote on their favorite costumes in order to help choose the winning sketches.

By implementing this type of web-based design competition, everybody benefits. The ballet company and designers get much more exposure, which means more designers will submit their artwork, and, as I said above, more people will go to performances.

Plus, this type of web competition gets ballet fans of all ages involved in the creation of a ballet, which is not usually possible.

Facilitating the Creative Process

I'd like to suggest one other change based on my very limited exposure to seeing how costume designers work. I attended many rehearsals of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's "Funny Uncles" last year - Peter DiMuro is the artistic director for this work. (The "Funny Uncles" blog is on hiatus until we get closer to the formal premiere later this year.)

During the rehearsals, I watched the customer designer - I forgot her name but I will get it - communicate with Peter so she would have a clear understanding of what specifically was needed from a design standpoint.

So in terms of the Houston Ballet competition, there is no real way for designers to get their arms around this project in a meaningful way. Costume designers can read the guidelines and visit the company's website, but that's about it.

What I think would be especially helpful is if all interested costume designers were invited to an online chat session or Skype-type conference call where they could pose questions to Artistic Director Stanton Welch and others involved in this upcoming production. That way designers would have a better feel for the types of designs they should submit.

Costume Designers on the Web

As I was thinking about this post, I was curious how designers were promoting themselves online. In an upcoming post, I'll link to MySpace pages, Flickr photos and YouTube videos that show how costume designers are using these marketing tools.

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