Blog 3
My course “Developing a Character” introduced me to theatrical make-up techniques to then be able to create and develop identities that were grounded in their own reality.
This project was very practical and it involved the model being the canvas of the artist. We had to ideate the outcome starting from the characteristics of the actor, keeping in mind that we worked with people of different gender and with different face shape, skin tone and age.
Because it was all focused around developing a character with a story, the human person and his actions, feelings and thoughts were central in this discipline. Therefore Diversity and Social Responsibility were the two main themes in this course. Performance is a small representation of the world, it should be inclusive in gender, size and age to represent the ‘real’ people, the ones that are sitting in the audience, creating a deeper empathic connection between them and the characters. The performers need a makeup, that doesn’t have to look just aesthetically pleasing and it has to have flaws. The actors physical appearance should communicate their story without them saying anything, the looks should speak for themselves and their appearances should convey their identity.
Unfortunately, due to the COVID19, our learning was limited to makeup so I decided to develop a character using the aging technique but reinterpreting the lines of age into expression lines. The subject had to be in a grounded reality so I decided to talk about my friend Umberto’s reality, a member of the lgbtq+ community to raise awareness that homophobia still hasn’t died. An unfortunate event took place when we were outside a bar in Central London and a man came up to us to ask for money for his family, he saw that Umberto was wearing high heel boots and assumed he was “one of them” and proceeded while insulting him on his sexual orientation. Even if we told him to get lost he didn’t stop but no one else outside our group of friends did nothing to stop him.
I wanted to describe the homophobic discrimination that happened to him by just using his face as a canvas, focusing on the contrasting emotions that he felt in that moment that were shock, anger, containment and annoyance. With my final project I wanted to give voice to a negative event that happened to an individual of the lgbtq+ community, no one should go through this experience.
The fashion industry and the performance world have different outcomes but at the same time they are parallel, they both have people at the centre of their projects and their creative message is intended for society. After Better Lives I hope to bring back to my degree of Creative Direction for Fashion the concept of realness and humanity in the type of people portrayed in the theatrical industry.