Storyboards, sets, and costumes

Cathy “One of the big challenges was how to interpret the Australian landscape because we wanted to feel it, but not compete with it. David is Australian so he’s been to those places, and it has been fascinating to watch how his mind has been translating it. He has come up with a structure that’s very flexible that feels like it comes from an Australian place that I can play with. It’s also about the colour and the qualities of colour that’s part of the language and flavour of Australia.”

Construction of the sets begins the year before the premiere. The sets are built in Melbourne by a company that also built sets for Queensland Ballet’s 2018 production of La Bayadère David flies from Sydney to Melbourne to spend time in the workshop informing decisions and overseeing the build. Of the sets, he says: “audiences can expect to see a beautiful kind of compressed allegory of this space.”

In Brisbane, Queensland Ballet moves into its newly redeveloped home, the Thomas Dixon Centre, and by December of 2022 has firmly settled in. Brimming with ideas from his research and workshops with Cathy and their Zoom workshops, David arrives to present his costume designs to the artistic, costume, and productions teams.

David: “The costumes are also a really beautiful part of this space. We’re building every item of clothing from scratch, so there’s a lot of fabric to source. Right now, we’re looking at a wide range of suppliers here in Brisbane, some across Australia. This phase is the exciting one where we’re looking for special things but not necessarily hunting them down. At the same time, I’ve been having discussions with the costume cutters to talk about the construction of each garment. They will draft patterns and construction garments out of a different fabric while we’re looking for the real ones.”

March 2023:

Three months from Opening Night

Cathy The Costume Department is abuzz with energy creating the full set of costumes from David’s designs. David has visited again for a four-day whirlwind trip to refine his designs, and Head of Costume Lauryn Jackson says the pieces will reflect the landscape of the time - rural 20th century Australia: think earthy tones of sand and ochre, with pops of lush navy and deep greens.

“We have dyed them and there will also be art finishing to the fabrics once the costumes are made. Our cutters have made patterns from his designs, which have a combination of period and contemporary elements to them, and once we’ve made all the patterns, we make the toiles (a test pattern created to check sizing). Some of the fittings happened online while David was in Berlin, some of them have been on film footage that we’ve sent over to him, and others have been in person during his visits. Now the final patterns are being tweaked, and the next step is to cut them in the real fabric. We’re at the part that’s getting exciting.” Lauryn says for the three casts, the team will make at least two of each of the pieces.

“At last count, there were about 100 individual pieces. Three months out from opening night, there are still many things to be done: printing, more dying, as well as sourcing some of the main fabrics, including Harry’s suit. Our aim is to have at least one of all the costumes made by the time Cathy arrives in May. At that stage, we’ll find out the casting and we can begin tweaking from there.

March 2023: The dancers and Cathy ‘Zoom’

From her home, Cathy creates material for an upcoming full-day choreographic Zoom workshop with Queensland Ballet. It includes movement demonstrations, performed and filmed by herself in a studio, which she sends to Company. Cathy then conducts the workshop with the dancers via Zoom. During their day together, she talks them through the production and the story, the sets and costumes, as well as how she works as a choreographer. She spends some time watching how the individual dancers move, and from here, she begins to create a skeleton cast which will be refined when she joins the Company in person in May.

April 2023: Hidden labels and supporter love

Each ballet company who creates a set of new costumes sews a label into the inside of each piece that says the company name, who the character is, and the dancer who will wear it. Lauryn says for My Brilliant Career they’re also adding something special. “The Foundation team approached us with a fantastic idea to show appreciation for donor support. We’re adding a second label to say along with the individual donors’ names. It’s something we’ve often thought of doing before, but we’re doing it for the first time now as this production is a special one. Often with shows we do over and over again like The Nutcracker, we’ll actually have layers of labels on them so we can easily determine sizing by looking back to see who wore what. Some of the older ones have a nice wad of labels, like a book. I can imagine one day, the My Brilliant Career costumes will have the same.”

The enablers become a part of the story they are enabling.

Early May: Six weeks from Opening Night

The sets travel from Melbourne to Brisbane and are put in the studio for the dancers to rehearse with. Closer to the season, they will move from the studio to the Talbot Theatre, then finally to the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC).

By the time Cathy arrives at Queensland Ballet in early May, the costumes are mostly done – apart from a few final tweaks, the sets are done, and the videographer is working with David and the music. When she enters the studio on the first day, the back end of the production has been completed.

Cathy then creates the final choreography directly on the cast – a technique which can feel quite special and uniquely collaborative to the dancers.

Cathy: “I’ll spend the first few days with the dancers just making material, not anchored to a particular scene. find it much easier to work with the dancers once they’ve got several phrases, a way of walking and standing, a few motifs they can contribute to the scenes. Then we’ll fill in the scenes and, because I’ve got the structure, it’s like colouring in a picture with movement.

“As a rehearsal tool, I’ll often ask the dancers to speak out the duets and trios, so to have those conversations with words at the same time they’re dancing. It’s really useful because it’s not just about ‘oh, we’re falling in love’, but what are you actually saying? It can be challenging for dancers but once you find the tone of voice it is automatically reflected in the body, so it’s worthwhile.”

16 June: Opening Night of Trilogy

Cathy: “On the day of the premiere, I keep busy, write cards, and it’s still always a rush in the end somehow. The card-writing to the dancers takes quite a lot of time, but once you’ve been through a creative process with people, you want to say something at the end.”

On a production day, the dancers attend their daily class, held on the theatre stage during season. Rehearsals are scheduled for the afternoon, followed by a break for dinner, dressing, hair, and make-up. Then the audience finds their velvet seats, lights dim then darken, an anticipatory hush settles over the theatre, and it’s showtime.

Support New Works

Help support this new chapter for Miles Franklin’s classic novel with a gift to Queensland Ballet. Choose a My Brilliant Career costume to support and have your name acknowledged inside the costume for its life - a personal threat connecting you with the artists of Queensland Ballet for generations to come.

Photos PG 4 Principal Artist Yanela Piñera, photo by David Kelly

PG 5 Soloist