Bangarra’s costume designers, translating Dreamtime into dance

Posted on 9 July, 2024

In the realms of costume design, there are few assignments as challenging as creating the costumes which adorn contemporary dancers.

These costumes must withstand high physicality, last a gruelling national tour, and convey the movements and character of each performer.

Such challenges are perhaps even greater when the dancers are part of the Bangarra Dance Theatre, performing stories steeped in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage and interpreting totems, Dreamtime and country.

The orchre and body paint of Bangarra dancers

For costume and fashion designers Jennifer Irwin and Clair Parker, seeing the costumes for Bangarra’s latest production Horizon come to life as the national tour rolls out, has been a creative reward. But it follows months upon months of brainstorming, conceptualisation, consultation, trial and error and painstaking stitching, cutting, painting and dyeing (not to mention the odd bit of unpicking and restitching…)

Jennifer is used to the process, having been a costume designer for Bangarra since its inception.

“I’ve done every Bangarra production for 34 years,” she says proudly.

But her multi-award winning career also includes working on ballet and opera productions, major Hollywood movies (the Matrix and Mission Impossible) as well as designing costumes for the Sydney Olympics Opening and Closing ceremonies. In fact, Jennifer’s designs have been staged live in over 90 countries, and over 350 cities and venues.

Multi-award winning costume designer Jennifer Irwin

“But Bangarra holds a special place in my heart – always allowing me to be so much more creative than say the opera or ballet. Bangarra tells dreamtime stories which are artworks in their own right,” she says.

Horizon combines three acts, with Jennifer designing costumes for choreography by Māori choreographer and Arts Laureate Moss Te Ururangi Patterson and Bangarra alumna Deborah Brown.

Jennifer created costumes embodying both Australian and New Zealand First Nations stories— for example, the long chiffon skirt of Daniel Mateo to symbolise the land of the long white cloud, and a shimmering dress of silver to symbolise the evening star as worn by Lillian Banks.

Jennifer says she spends a lot of time altering, dying and painting materials to get the desired effect. Some costumes take many days to create (as was the case in hand sewing the silver strips to Lillian’s dress).

Ultimately form must never overtake function and Jennifer knows  Bangarra dancers well enough now to know they spend “a lot of time on their knees and on the ground…Also we like a bit of dirt at Bangarra and almost always use body paint even when some want it to be a clean show.”

Draped chiffon bring on stage the water and cloud of New Zealand

Collaborating on costuming for the first act of Horizon, Kulka, is Clair Parker, a visual artist, graphic designer, and fashion designer based in Perth.

She is the first Aboriginal graduate from the Whitehouse Institute of Design in 2016 and has worked in New York, created a gown worn at the 89^th Academy Awards and presented a fashion collection at Australian Fashion week. Clair also has her own label of bespoke, ready-to-wear garments named Clair Helen.

Indigenous fashion and costume designer Clair Parker

Kulka is choreographed by Sani Townson, a descendent from the Koedal, Dhoeybaw and Samu clans of Saibai Islands in the Torres Strait.

Kulka means blood and explores Sani’s lineage and how his bloodline was given to him. His totems include the cassowary and crocodile.

Clair incorporated sequin that resembled bird skin and the blue of the bird while the crocodile costume was a full body suit made of power mesh with crocodile skin sewn on in strips. Each costume took her three days to make.

“Dance costumes are very different to fashion in terms of durability and movement. Fashion can be quite delicate but with costumes you need to build them so that people can move and so that they withstand flips and weeks of performances on the road,” she says.

Clair’s cassowary costumes

Clair’s totem is also the crocodile, and this informed her design choices.

“I always think about my culture and my ancestors in particular. I arranged the scales on the body to sculpt the body the way our ancestor’s bodies were built back in the day. I wanted to emphasise how strong and fit our people were like the crocodile. I wanted for you to see the muscle every time the dancers moved.”

Canberra audiences will be able to see the movement and costumes for themselves when Bangarra Dance Theatre brings Horizon, its first ever mainstage cross-cultural collaboration with New Zealand, to Canberra Theatre as part of its national tour.

Bangarra dancers photographed by Daniel Boud.