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Two dance costume designers who rewrite the rules

A dance costume designer has to be wildly whimsical on Tuesday and Martha Stewart-practical every other day of the week. Whimsical, to give shape and color to dancing frogs and dying swans and fairy princesses; practical, to design costumes that wear like iron and look like a million bucks while costing ... well, a whole lot less. Two cases in point: Isaac Mizrahi and Liz Prince.

When Mizrahi says, "I don't like to actually finalize costumes until I see the choreography," he has good reason. Dancers are sylphs and princes and swamp creatures and people in the street--but they are athletes, too.

"I go to rehearsal and I think, `How are they ever going to wear anything?'" Mizrahi says. "The partnering and all is so violent. They're on their knees one second and they're spinning. They do penche arabesque and every seam just rips in my head."

Such is the dilemma for designers accustomed to dressing pedestrians: When they enter a rehearsal studio, the rules change. Watching a dancer do a port de bras can be a nightmare: "They reach farther than I thought humanly possible," says Mizrahi.

Mizrahi, the subject of the 1995 documentary Unzipped, began collaborating with Mark Morris, who appears in the film, in 1992. "Honestly, the secret to our collaboration is my incredible awe when I see his work and actually see music come to life," says Mizrahi. "It's exactly what music would look like if it could dance--in the way that Balanchine had music come to life. It's shocking. The way he accents music is always so thrilling ... No one knows as much about music as Mark. I challenge you."

Mizrahi credits his mother for his own introduction to dance: "She took me to see Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, and my sister took me to see Martha Graham. I remember the first time I saw Graham I was like, `What the hell is this?' I was 8 years old." It piqued his interest.

"I studied piano and took singing lessons for years," he says. "I went to the performing arts high school and was an actor. A lot of my background was in the theater." Last spring, Mizrahi incorporated these performing skills into Richard Move's "Martha at Mother" series. As host of one of the performances, he delivered a witty, campy monologue on Martha Graham's passion for costumes. Move, in turn, has directed Mizrahi in Les Mizrahi, a one-man show set to open next month in New York City.

Mizrahi credits Morris with knowing when to collaborate: "He wouldn't ask me to do something that I wouldn't have a lot of fun doing. He asked me to do Platee because he knew what he was looking for. He had a vision in his head. He knew how I could fulfill that gesture for him." The Morris-directed version of Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera, last spring at the New York City Opera, turned out to be the giddiest costume event of the season. Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker and author of the biography Mark Morris, says of Platee, "Because it's a swamp fantasy, it's an invitation to go wild. The costumes are simply marvelous ... and witty in their cultural references." Acocella cites the friendship between Mizrahi and Morris as one reason their collaborations work so well.

"They trust and respect one another," she observes. "There is a real kinship between their visions: They're both classicists, but they're not conservative, a kind of erudition with real boldness. In both there's an element of sweet fantasy and each has the tendency to set it off in the other."

Describing Mizrahi's designs for Morris's Mosaic and United, she creates a medley of adjectives: "... very beautiful costumes, a little Asian, wonderful tunics with pants, and beautiful Indian or Thai colors."

Liz Prince makes costumes for a gamut of choreographers and companies--from Jane Comfort to Doug Varone, from White Oak to Pacific Northwest Ballet. In 1990, she received a Bessie Award for her elegant and at times outrageous designs.

Says Varone, "As a dancemaker, I see visuals in terms of space and lighting. Costume is something that, I know when it's wrong, but I'm not always sure what direction to move in immediately. Liz is a wonderful artist. I'll say, `These are my ideas of the work,' and she'll go away and come back with designs. It's nice to have someone open the door to possibilities."

In demand across the country, Prince costumes approximately two shows a month. Her process begins with watching: "At times, I look at what they're wearing in rehearsal. From my own performing, I know you want to be comfortable on stage."

Varone agrees. With street clothes, he says, "we choose them because they make us look attractive and we feel comfortable in them. It shouldn't be any different on stage."

Prince's designs work well because she is in tune with dancers' needs. Watching a piece of choreography, she considers: "How much contact do people have with each other? Are they ever upside down? What's stylish or trendy so the costume doesn't look old after six months? How much is the costume going to be toured?" Based on these observations, she sets to work.

For Meg Stuart's Remote, made for the White Oak Dance Project, Prince created shirts of cotton gauze. "Just in case something happened when they were out on the road, we made an extra shirt for Baryshnikov," she says.

Traditionally, corps de ballets dancers looked homogeneous. Today's multifaceted groups of tall, short, lean, large and multiethnic artists are wearing similarly eclectic attire. "When I started working with Bill T. Jones, his company was so varied and their personalities quite strong," says Prince. "It made me very aware of `Does this person look the best in this? Or that person the best in that?'"

Prince began costuming as a dance major at Bard College: "My work-study job was doing costumes for the dance department. There wasn't one person standing over me, but people were telling me what they wanted and I would go out and try to do it. Aileen Passloff, head of the dance department, gave us an exercise: to choreograph a phrase on the diagonal. It had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. After we all had our phrases, we sat there and watched them and told each other what we thought the costumes should be. When I did my phrase, I took everybody's ideas and incorporated all of them into the piece," says Prince.

After graduation, she put on a cabaret act that featured her own designs: a gown made of bottle caps, a flapper dress made of cigarettes and a money outfit-"a bodice of pennies and a skirt of dollar bills"--that became part of a 1992 Performance Art Retrospective put together by the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, on New York's Staten Island.

For Mizrahi, the connection between costumes and clothing is obvious: "I don't think so much about fashion. I never did. Even when I was the foremost fashion designer in the country," he says--he closed his company in 1998--"I thought so much more about women and their lives: the reality of their lives and the fiction of their lives, what turns them on, and the beauty of anatomy. I think about that much more than what the skirt length is or what the shoe is," he said.

"When I see a dance, like I went to ABT, I thought, 'Look at those skirts!' They were about mid-calf, like the skirts from the Giselle period, rather than a tutu. And the [dancers'] passes were tutu passes--their feet were way up on their thighs. I was thinking, 'Wait a minute, why is she wearing a long skirt? Or change the [expletive] passe!' That's exactly how I think about clothes in the modern context," Mizrahi says. "I relate to the reality of a woman's life. The reality of the choreography is what dictates the tutu length. That's why I get very annoyed when I see fashion that contrives a woman's life, makes a woman's life more difficult. When I see old thinking or old fashion, I get very mad."

Fashion and dance are inherently coordinated art forms. As Mizrahi points out, dance inspires designers: "I think the reason theater is so important to my clothes is because I am truly more interested in fantasy than I am in reality. I think that ultimately a customer of mine is, too. She's much more interested in the dream of her life--the glorification of her life--than in the actual reality."

Kate Mattingly is a New York City critic for Dance Magazine.

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