Léa Pereyre of Verity Studios is a Drone Costume Designer, whose work on Cirque du Soleil's PARAMOUR on Broadway dazzled audiences with dancing, floating, flying lampshades, spoke at the WORLD.MINDS Annual Symposium, on the joy and challenges of dressing the drones of tomorrow.
8 comments:
I love how theatre is influenced by machinery from many different sections of the world and attempts to apply this machinery to different aspects of theatre. This is brilliant and I love how the process was collaborative between engineers and theatre folk. However, the women used the word "costume" and I wonder how someone would wear the costumes that are shown in the video. Nonetheless this is a really cool article.
This is such a cool idea! Like my comments last week on the piece about the floating lights dance project, I love when innovative technology and theater meet to create something new. Costumes for drones is a whole new JOB created because of this intersection, and the possibilities are so endless and fascinating. The use of mathematical principles and engineering to make these costumes, taking into account aerodynamics and motion, really mean more collaboration between fields. It's interdisciplinary at its core, which I love. Not this year, but maybe next, I would love to do something like this for Playground to explore the possibilities of drone lighting, costumes, and motion to act as sets and special effects made real - could you make a whole character with a drone, like a floating companion, and imbue it with a character costume and have it 'act'? That would be something I would love to explore further.
And if anyone has a drone, please let me know - I'd love to try out ideas with it!
Last year in Scenofab I did a project on the potential of drones for use in the theatre industry. I concluded that while drones are being utilized more and more by large-scale construction, they are not particularly useful for the work we do in scenic construction. However, the future of drones as flying devices in performance is very exciting. Lea Pereye talks about both the limitations, such as only being able to put about the weight of a small apple on each drone, and the endless possibilities of incorporating drone technology into theatre. Pereye is coming at this from the very particular direction of dressing the drones. I find it interesting that she refers to the work she does as "costumes." It makes sense in that, in the pieces where I have seen drones used in performance like what she is demonstrating, they are almost another character. We may see, in the next couple of years, a new flavor of designer emerging that focuses on working with new technologies such as drones and robots.
This is not costuming. This work is really interesting and beautiful, but defiantly not anything that I would call a costume. They are beautiful props and add to the show, but for something to be a costume, there are some criteria that I think are very important:
1. It must be worn by an actor. Is a drone an actor?
2. Comfort must be considered. Does the acceptable weight that a drone can carry a type of comfort?
3. You must think about how the costume will move when the actor moves. All of these examples move with the motion of the drone.
Through these criteria, perhaps drone costuming would count as costuming, but I feel that dressing dolls and mannequins is more costuming than this, yet that is historically done by props. The line between costumes and props is often blurred between different theatres.
Swords are props, but who is in charge of the sword belts?
Costume designers have opinions about bags, but they are in the props budget.
Props usually stores the little things like make-up cases and things that go into purses, but costumes has more stake in what is appropriate for the period and what is not.
Costuming flying non-humanoid machines is just another blurred line.
I had no idea that Paramour was using drones on stage. I find this incredibly exciting as the first instance I saw of coordinated drone flying was at the super bowl, with the display of drones that Intel did for the half time show. I had wondered where this kind of magic would be taken next, and it seems like Cirque Du Soleil had already taken notice of this development in technology and already incorporated it into a show. I think there there are kind of endless possibilities and applications for drone flying, such as this, on stage. I can imagine a lot of scenic challenge of the future being overcome by the ability to use drones. I wonder how they managed to work around air space laws, as I know a lot of drones will not allow the user to fly, even indoors, if the outside area is restricted air space.
It is interesting to think of drones having costumes instead of just being considered set pieces or props. I would think of a drone as being a prop because costumes are usually just on humans or animals. Drones do seem like they have human qualities in their movements and I could see how the materials on them would be costumes and designed by a costume designer who understand how fabric moves around and on people based on their movements. The drones are flying in the air and the wind will catch them in certain ways. The fabric on them needs to be able to move with them and this costume designer did a great job in designing the fabric to move in ways that worked with the story and made the drones actually characters. They seemed to have more life to them with their moving costumes. They were given human-like movements that made them life like.
This is such a fascinating practice. Seeing technology creep its way into theatre is a really interesting thing. I recently wrote an essay on the practices of drones in warfare versus in civilian life, and I barely even considered a drone’s application to artistic communities. The ability to apply so many mathematic and engineering practices to designs such as these is also really interesting. It applies so much knowledge from other academic disciplines, which reinforces a belief that I carry about theatre, in that there is a place for everyone in it.
The concept of costuming drones is an incredibly interesting practice that I have never really considered, but now I see as a very interesting idea. The merge of technology and theatre is truly incredible, as highlighted in the article. I find it fascinating to think about the ways one must design a costume for a drone and how it has to react to the movements the drone does, in comparison to the movements a person might do. It's truly an interesting and unexplored area that opens doors for people to find new practices and ways to create innovative art and theatre.
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