Medea: Dress Rehearsal

During our in-class rehearsal, we were instructed to put together our costumes for a dress rehearsal so that we would not need to dress for the after school dress rehearsal. Our costumes consisted of a draped bed sheet. This idea came from Dhara who helped to costume the entire cast of our piece. She got the idea from when she helped dress her brother for his Greek fair. We folded the sheet in half or however long was necessary depending on the individual and the size of the sheet. Then we draped it over the left shoulder and placed safety pins to hold the sheet in place over the shoulder. Then we tied a rope around our waists to hold our togas in place. Our director asked us to have our hair in a bun and to wear sandals with a back in order to create this Greek costume. We wore tank tops and shorts underneath our costumes.

When we walked onstage with our completed costumes, our director was unimpressed with our work. She felt that our costumes looked incomplete, sloppy, and not uniform with the exception of two costumes. This was because some of our cast members had forgotten certain pieces of their costume whether it was shorts or sandals. The nonconformity also came from the fact that we all had different colored tank tops and that our costumes were all draped differently where certain cast members looked neat while others looked uncomfortable. The critique was that we needed to cover more of the upper half of our bodies with the costume to show a minimal amount of the clothing underneath. Another thing was that the toga should have reached our ankles as Greek clothing was longer than the knee-length Roman styles. Luckily, the costuming was the only critique that we had received, something that we would be able to improve. We were glad to hear that our acting had not been critiqued upon which meant that it was up to par in terms of dramatization and physicality. We were sent back to fix our costumes before our after school dress rehearsal.