At the costume shop in the Walgreen Drama Center, dance students are being fitted for the upcoming restaging of Paul Taylor’s irreverent and brilliant Le Sacre du Printemps (the Rehearsal) (1980), the centerpiece for the upcoming 2010 University Dance Company’s (Re)Visionary Dances, scheduled for February 4-7, at the Power Center.

Dance student Sarah Goetz comes out of the dressing room in a shiny black unitard with a high collar. Costumes for this work are in a palette of black, white, and grey, with an occasional jot of red for dramatic emphasis. In Le Sacre—which depicts a typical ballet rehearsal interwoven with a Damon Runyonesque detective story—the corps de ballet is dressed in a textured matte gray leotard and tights. The gangsters and their molls wear black unitards. Goetz, who will dance the role of the Stooge, is wearing a shiny silver vest on top of the unitard, and a white fedora with black hatband.

George Bacon, Associate Costume Shop Manager for University Productions, and the rest of the costume shop staff are building the costumes from the ground up, working from snapshots of the costumes laid out on a floor next to a measuring tape. Typically the costume designer provides the shop with detailed drawings with notations on seams, fit lines, structures, and fabrics. For this project, Bacon had to work from “whole cloth,” researching fabrics, and talking to Ruth Andrien, who danced in the 1980 Le Sacre and is in town restaging the work on our students, for verbal descriptions of the costumes.