What Is Costume?

What is costume?

• Costume can be used as the representation of someones character
• Can portray era's and different periods in time
• It can be purely representational
• Helps distinguish between realistic and naturalistic characters in a play/show
• Helps define social status
• Helps audiences distinguish and understand characters 

In today's lesson we were put into 3 groups and were given one item of clothing/costume to use in a short improvised scene. The first item we were given in our group was a wig that that looked like a wig that a barrister or a judge in a court room would wear. As this was our first initial thought of what the piece of costume reminded us of, we then improvised a short scene with Magic wearing the wig being the judge, Niamh as the barrister, myself as the defender and Ellie as prosecutor. We did a short brief scene where it was set in a court room and the judge was wearing the wig. The second item of clothing we were given was a long skirt, we then used this item of costume as skirt that a teacher of primary school would wear. Niamh was the teacher and Ellie, Magic and myself sat on the floor listening to Niamh talking to us in a primary school setting. The last item of costume we were given were 2 red bow ties, this reminded us of costumes from Seussical so we did a very short snippet of 'Oh the thinks you can think' from the show. 

The reason why we did this exercise was to give us an understanding that costume plays a very big part in any production and can create understand to an audience to visually see costume that is relevant and represents what is being shown in the scene. By doing this exercise it is going to help further in development of costume as when we later start to design costumes for shows we can take whatever the show or play is and look at what the show is about and look in depth about what characters are representing for example their status or if they are a hero or a villain. Also we will be able to look at designing costumes literally for example if someone was playing a character of a cat would you have them dressed head to toe in fur or would you make their costume representational and only have them wear cat ears. All of these ideas and the use of the exercise we did will come into handy so we can create costume that is relevant to the show we are designing for and creates the appropriate theme to where the play is set and to reinforce characterisation and aid audience understanding. I feel it was a good idea to do the improvisation task as it put into context how important costume is and it also have us a better understanding of how to create costume and its purpose in a production.