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Communication by Design: A Collaborative Project for Student Choreographers and Costume Designers

Communication by Design was a year-long project that was developed to foster an important dialogue between emerging student costume designers and student choreographers. Two university professors, one teaching costume design and one teaching dance, collaborated to help their students gain an understanding of how these two disciplines can form a partnership that has mutual benefits. Choreographers benefit in their creative process from constructive relationships with costume designers, just as costume designers gain skills that are specific to designing for dance productions through their communication with choreographers. However, an effective collaborative relationship is difficult to attain when these experiences are not provided in a supervised, educational context. The limited resources that exist in educational settings seldom afford the opportunities for such relationships to develop. Therefore, the desired practical learning environment in which students can learn through their own successes, failures, and guided innovative experimentation is not cultivated. One means of fostering such an environment is to place the emphasis on the process instead of the finished product. From this concept of a process-oriented experience, a collaborative project between student choreographers and costume designers was created. Traditional costume classes at the authors’ university did not include a dance component, and student choreographers were not required to take costuming. Therefore, when student choreographers were faced with the challenge of making costume decisions, they often did so based on convenience and practicality rather than aesthetics; design students also missed important opportunities to work with dancers and choreographers. As a means to address this gap in the existing curriculum, in the fall of 2008, the authors implemented a cocurricular project as an experiment for two distinct classes: Dance Ensemble, a performance-based class in which students choreograph works to be performed in an informal showcase at the end of the semester, and Costume Design and Research, a project-based class that explores the process of design from analysis, inspiration, and research through finalized renderings to compile a final design portfolio demonstrating a range of production styles. Both authors recognized the need for closer communication between designers and choreographers. This project helped the authors gain an understanding of the information and mentoring that students need for effective collaboration.