Over the course of a quarter at UCSB, I collaborated with a design team to create costumes for two dance pieces in UCSB’s 2025 Spring Dance Concert: Afterlight. I worked closesly with the lighting designer and choreographer of each piece to make their visions become a reality.
Piece 1
We Were Light
Design Statement:
This dance was a whimsical piece centered around nostalgia toward one’s childhood and how relationships progress overtime. With themes of realness, rawness, and humanity, this piece honored the dancers not only as performers, but as individual artists with their own stories to tell.
I designed large, billowing skirts that accentuate the playfulness on the choerography. The costumes are primarily white to symbolize innocence and youth, however, each of the seven dancers had a unique color accent on their top and on the bottom-most layer of their skirt. As each dancer moved across the stage, their skirts moved with them, flashing a fun pop of color and personailty. When the dancers stood together, it formed a color pattern reminiscent of a golden sunset palate, reflecting the sun setting on their childhood and the transition into adulthood and independance.
Piece 2
the point being
design statement: we were never strangers. its undoing, its endurable. unwrap what you have done and we shall not flinch. this is the ache of being alive and beautiful. this is the unfair proximity to a dream.
the costumes in this piece were designed to flow with one another in form, creating one fluid piece as the dancers interacted. this reflects how humans are ultimately all the same on the inside, bound together by emotion. in sharing and confronting this raw, aching emotion, we are able to connect with one another. the sheerness of the fabric symmbolizes the vulnerability that accompanies what it means to love and be loved, while red thread wraps around the dancer’s torso, wrists, and ankles to represent the blood and pain that it requires to be truly known.
