Spotlight: Recital Costuming

Recital time is coming up and we’ve got costume fever at Pegasus! Ever wonder how we get all those costumes together or why we handle costumes the way we do? Here it is… the cat is out of the box! All our secrets.

Secret number one: Hanna – Hanna is kind of like the fairy god-mother of costumes. We recycle costumes at Pegasus to try to keep costs down for parents. An average dance costume costs about $60-150 and many of our students need more than one costume! Parents, are the dollar signs starting to ring in your head yet? So instead of adding this extra cost, we invest in new costumes each year but always see what previous costumes we can reuse. But that means a lot of things. Cleaning, organizing and storage facilities – Hanna takes care of all of this. But most of all is the issue of fitting. When we reuse a costume we often find that we have to alter it for certain dancers or even that we have to re-create one or two because we have 12 dancers to 10 costumes. Hanna is the queen!

Secret number two: Missy – Missy is a seamstress that we’ve been working with for years now. Like Hanna, Missy can alter and re-create any costume we need, on top of designing and building wonderful costumes for our dancers. Without Missy… well, let’s not even think about that.

Secret number three: Embrace chaos while being extremely organized! This one is not as easy as it sounds.  The hardest part of this whole thing… making sure each and every student has a costume… that fits! Once that’s taken care of (a process that usually takes about 4 months) we have to make sure each student’s costume makes it to the theatre and in perfect shape.

Secret number four: Make sure you have some relaxation method in mind for directly after the evening of the recital… because the next day the cleaning, re-organizing and move to storage begins.

The best part of this whole process: Seeing the faces of the dancers when they first try on their costumes – it’s usually pretty exciting!