Dance Australia: After reading Emma Kingsbury's extensive CV, it was something of a surprise to see how young the face was smiling back at me on Zoom. At 36 years of age, Kingsbury is a theatre designer with a CV as long as Gandalf's beard. She has created sets and costumes for the whole gamut of the performing arts: film, TV, opera, ballet.
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Emma Kingsbury’s journey as a theater designer, spanning ballet, opera, film, and television, highlights the incredible depth of artistry that goes into bringing stories to life. Reading about her extensive and varied work, I’m struck by her ability to merge traditional art forms with contemporary approaches. In creating Possum Magic for the Australian Ballet School, she had the unique challenge of honoring a beloved children's book while transforming it into an expressive dance piece that maintains the spirit of the original.Kingsbury’s work reminds me of the delicate balance in design fields, like architecture or product design, where aesthetics and functionality must coexist. Her approach—ensuring costumes allow for dance, engaging in a collaborative creative process, and respecting others' expertise—is a testament to the teamwork behind the scenes in performance arts. Her designs extend beyond mere visuals; they embody the story’s essence and aid in storytelling. Her dedication to these productions reflects a genuine passion for both the art and the people involved, which is incredibly inspiring for anyone in creative fields.
To start off, the title of this article “The magic of design” drew me in right away. It seems very design choice and artistic to have the low caps letter in the title, so that is why I read this article. However these costume designs are insane. They look so whimsical and scary and one even looks kind of like a cupcake with frosting, which is cute but it also looks bloody so maybe it is not so cute after all. The other designs feel very magical and very natural, which I love. I also love all the detail on these costumes, they are so detailed and have so many different colors that create the costume pieces. This designer has done a lot of different ballets, and they all look super incredible, or at least the ones I see here. She also did a ballet version of The Crucible, which I am very curious about.
The part of this article that stood out to me the most was the line that the designs had to be “recreated but not copied” and that stood out as such a large part of why I love live performance in general. The puzzle of figuring out how the needs of the technical parts of the shows matched up with the director's concept and the thematic needs of the play is my favorite part of theater. The designs by Emma Kingsbury for ‘Possum Magic’ are very beautiful and look very much like the images of animals that they are trying to evoke while still keeping the human shape a large part of the form, which to me emphasizes that the costumes are made for a ballet which showcases the human form quite a lot by the very nature of the dance. I also like the use of water color, it gives the costumes a very dreamy feel which is very nice to look at.
I appreciate how Emma emphasizes the teamwork within the creative process and I respect that a lot because it often feels like the designer carries the majority of the load which I know isn’t necessarily true but it just feels like it is hard sometimes to be able to trust others with your design because there is always a nagging worry that something is going to go wrong the moment you let go of the reins but I appreciate how she says you just have to do a lot of prep work and believe that the team you have will have your back and to just trust those skills. I am also amazed at how much experience she has and I wonder what it has been like for her working in all sides of the entertainment industry and how she got the long sheet of credits that she has and how she builds and uses her connections in the industry.
The way we experience shows is completely reliant on how they have been designed. When shows are adaptations of a piece of literature it can be really important to stay true to the inspiration. It’s a fine line to walk, keeping with a source material and making a show all your own, sometimes the creativity of one designer can bring a story to life in a different and more thought provoking way than the origional telling. It makes me happy to read about how Kingsbury is taking something she enjoyed as a child and bringing it to a different audience.
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