a whole blog dedicated to maddy

Right. The holidays are just about over, and rehearsals have started. For everyone else. I am yet to attend a rehearsal, as I have been interstate getting tanned and being evacuated off rollercoasters. I dipped through everyone's blogs to hopefully get some updates about the rehearsal(s) that I've missed, and haven't really dredged up anything to help me get a handle on what happened.

However, I have given some more thought to acquiring and making patterns for the costumes. Admittedly, I am finding this quite hard as I rarely work to a pattern, and just make things up as I go along. Ms Mace said that I can enlist all of you to do the actually putting together of costumes, so long as I've collated the patterns and materials for you. Which will be difficult if I don't actually have patterns - you see my dilemma?

At the moment I'm feeling a little like my territory has been infringed upon, in particular by Maddy and Jenna. After reading their blogs, especially this one, it seems like they're trying to costume themselves. While I understand that the appearance of a character is very important to building this character, and that everyone probably has a mental picture of what their character will look like, (and I feel ever-so-selfish saying this) I thought this area was kind of my responsibility. I know I need to speak to you guys about what your image of your character is, but I really don't want you to have solid ideas for costuming as I'll probably have completely difference ideas and then one of us will end up being unhappy.

That said, Maddy's annoying blog has helped me a bit with her character. The most difficult part of costuming the straight characters is that I have to be inside their heads. As well as suiting the individual Girl, Friend, Dad I also have to make them a representative of all girls, friends and dads, and that's kind of hard. It feels a little bit like I have to have a similar depth of understanding to these characters as their players do, but while the players only need to understand one character, I need to understand all of them.

Right, that was a little bit of a tangent. Back to Maddy's blog about the Voice. Her comments about androgyny were rather astounding. Androgynous appearances are something that I'd considered a little (but not much) for other characters, and I feel quite stupid that I didn't think of that for the Voice before. But it makes sense. The difficulty with this, I find, is that the kind of androgyny that Maddy was talking about seems to work well with males, and not so good with females. But I think I will follow this, as it contains Maddy's interpretation of her character, as well as being fun to play around with. I'm a little hesistant though, because if I am asked at the end of the production why I created this look for the Voice, all I could say is that Maddy came up with it, not me.

Her blog has also made me change my mind in a big way about the Voice as well. I was going to treat the Voice as a straight character for costuming, but now I've decided to treat the Voice as a circus member. My main reason for doing so is because the circus is the Girl's struggle with anorexia. And the Voice is also her struggle with anorexia. I also found that the Voice is basically the only character who is a member of the circus (Anorexia the Magnificent, a magician who can pull more than the wool over anyone's eyes), and also present in the 'real world' scenes, therefore providing a link between the circus and the real world.

So yeah. I suppose in drama tomorrow, which will be my first rehearsal for Mirror Mirror, all my ideas will be turned on their heads and I shall have to abandon them anyway. BUT I'M RUNNING OUT OF TIME! Designing is the part which should be over with quickly, as it will take time to actually MAKE all these things.

**runs off screaming into the distance**