Pointes and Perspective #48 Wearing All The Hats

Wearing All The Hats

This morning on my commute, I was listening to an episode of The Brainy Ballerina hosted by Caitlin Sloan, featuring Janessa Urwin, founder of Florimund’s, and Resident Costume Designer for American Repertory Ballet, formerly Princeton Ballet.

Immediately, I was hooked, not just as a Princeton Ballet alumni, but as someone who has lived a similarly winding path.

Janessa spoke about the generational life of ballet costumes, and how a tutu can pass from dancer to dancer, carrying memory in its seams. I was transported back to my own days at Princeton Ballet, and the thrill of discovering that principal dancer, Leia Roth, who I looked up to and admired, had once worn the very costume now assigned to me!

She mentioned the male dancers in the current company, hoping they would be given the tunic once worn by Peter Martins. And this week, almost poetically, I received an invitation to the Princeton Ballet reunion, and someone shared an old photograph of Peter Martins onstage with Princeton Ballet, perhaps in that tunic! The past and present suddenly stood side by side.

As I drove, I found myself thinking about how many roles we inhabit across a lifetime in the arts. And how rarely the path is singular. For years, I have described myself, half jokingly, as a one-woman show. Founder. Director. Choreographer. Adjunct professor. Nonprofit administrator. Costume designer. Seamstress. Teacher. Speaker.

I wore different hats, yes. But more than that, I experienced different ways of existing inside the art form.

When I founded my company, there was no costume department waiting to support my vision. So I learned to build the worlds myself. I designed and constructed full-length ballets from the ground up, including my favorite, Babes In Toyland.

Creating Little Bo Peep’s costume taught me that beauty without function is fragile. I had designed her in satin with corset lacing, visually perfect, until we attempted her pas de deux! The satin slipped under her partner’s hands, and the laces tangled in his fingers during lifts. I went back to the drawing board, replaced satin with textured cotton, stitched elastic lacing that appeared authentic but functioned safely. The aesthetic remained. The engineering improved.

Little Miss Muffet's spider descended from the fly space in a rock-climbing harness. The costume had to conceal carabiners and rigging while allowing full range of movement. During tech rehearsal, when the fear of heights overtook the dancer, I quickly had to make a second spider costume overnight for a body double. Adaptation became part of the design.

I remember for Silas Barnaby and the creatures of Bogeyland, I sourced raw sheep wool from a student’s family farm. I washed it (a decision my plumbing system has never fully forgiven), dyed it unevenly to create grime and texture, stitched it onto bald caps and mossy bodysuits. It was painstaking, unglamorous work, but it gave the scene weight, and made the villain believable.

And I transported it all in what my students lovingly called “costume burritos”. Ten hangers rubber-banded together, rolled in blankets, packed into my car, unwrapped at the theater like stage-ready enchiladas.

At the time, none of it felt like résumé material. It felt like responsibility. The production required it. The dancers deserved it. The story demanded it.

Only later, when writing an academic portfolio for Costume Construction, did I step back and recognize the scope of what those years had given me. The story became fabric. Movement shaped construction. Teaching informed organization. And every stitch considered dancers I might never even know. It wasn't a scattered effort. It was a body of work coming into alignment.

Janessa closed her podcast episode with this, “Embrace all the opportunities that come your way because there might be something hidden in there that allow you to be a part of the dance world that's not necessarily dancing.”

So many of us were trained to believe that our place in this world existed only under the lights. But perhaps remaining in the dance world requires a broader imagination, and a willingness to serve it in multiple capacities.

My costuming informed my directing.

My directing informed my curriculum design.

My curriculums led me into speaking, consulting, and scholarship.

Each role built upon the last.

We rarely know, in the moment, which skill will become the bridge. We say yes because something needs doing. We learn because the production requires it. We stretch because the art form asks it of us. And then one day we look back and see continuity where it once felt like improvisation.

The dancer who once wore your tutu.

The tunic once worn by Peter Martins.

The tutu that fits a new Little Bo Peep decades later.

Legacy.

Legacy is not only performance. It is participation. It is stewardship. It is saying yes to what the season requires - building, mending, adapting, teaching - even when it doesn’t look like center stage.

It is trusting that the skills gathered along the way were defining. That the detours were shaping a life’s work. That nothing was wasted.

It is realizing that every skill was essential to the whole, and that it was worth wearing all the hats… and the tiaras!