Like lots of little girls, I did ballet lessons – and while they didn’t make my bedroom twirling any more artful, the rote movements and pretty costumes meant they felt just as potent as any game of let’s-pretend. Standing in the English National Ballet’s costume department, then, faced with shimmering tutus for their upcoming production of The Sleeping Beauty, I am suddenly eight years old again: I’ve come a long way since Moseley Dance Hall, but turns out that fairytale princesses exert an eternal pull.
Fortunately for everyone, I’m not here to try on dresses and flounce around per that childhood fantasy – rather, to speak to Orla Convery and Rachel Kidd, two of the department’s in-house makers, about the extraordinary process of pulling costumes like these out of the realm of fantasy and onto living-breathing, sweating-pirouetting ballerina bodies.
The process begins with a designer (in The Sleeping Beauty’s case, Nicholas Georgiadis back in the 80s) who cooks up the costume concepts; then, it’s over to makers to bring them to life – a process that requires plenty of ingenuity in its own right. “That’s their creativity, to create this vision – but it’s ours to look at it and say, right, what trim do we need to get the effect that you’ve drawn there?” explains Convery. “What colours do we need to layer [to get that tone], what nets do we need to put in, to make that a reality?”
