Costume Designer Tracy Lord Awakens Singapore Corps De Ballet

New Zealand-born Tracy Grant Lord has created the costumes for Singapore Dance Theatre’s (SDT’s) 2015 season of Sleeping Beauty. Lord’s designs are a reminder of just how costumes also make a ballet.

“Highlights will be the costumes for the fabulous characters that we are introduced to in the story, from the terrifying Carabosse through to the exceptional Lilac Fairy and Bluebird on to the completely adorable White Cat and, of course, with all the Princesses and Princes and Kings and Queens in between,” Lord describes.

Based in Australia, Lord was invited to design her first ballet for The Royal New Zealand Ballet several years ago.

Since then, she’s designed for ten ballets. When SDT’s artistic director Janek Schergen asked her for the 2010 production. “I was asked to create a ‘very beautiful’ ballet and we were able to take advantage of the range of exquisite fabrics available in Singapore,” she adds.

The key difference between designing costumes for a ballet compared to other stage shows is the extraordinary range and amount of movement that a ballet dancer’s body experiences during the course of a single performance, notes Lord.

“They have to have complete and total flexibility within their costume for the range of movements they are required to do. They are also involved often in partnering, so the costumes have to allow for this also, for example where partner’s hands may be placed, or a good grip needs to be made, there can be no resistance from the costume.”

A Winston Churchill Fellow with a Bachelor of Spatial Design, Lord’s work has been chosen to represent performance design in New Zealand, at the Prague Quadrennial six times and also selected for exhibition at the World Stage Design exhibition in 2005.

Original article by Cheah Ui-Hoonuihoon, The Business Times, March 6, 2015.