The Coveteur, went to Toronto and had a peek in the closet of the National Ballet of Canada for their Romeo & Julia performance ... but they also took a look at the outfits for Nutcracker and, of course, Swan Lake. All the following pictures and text are by the Coveteur:
The dancers wear about 120 to 150 pairs of pointe shoes a year. When I order, I order in lots of thirty and it will take about four months for those shoes to come. They are $85 a pair and they last about eight hours maximum. – Lorna Geddes
Alexei Ratmansky asked me to design the show and I went to New York to meet him. At that time I was living in Moscow and we talked about it and he said that he wanted to do it in the period of play - the period that Shakespeare set it in, which was early Renaissance. I was interested in doing that because it was a period of costume I’ve never done before, so it meant a lot of research. – Richard Hudson
Head Pieces, Designed by Richard Hudson for Romeo & Juliet
This is Tybalt at the ball. It’s kind of like an 80’s Chanel look. – Grant Heaps
This is Paris at the ball, who is Juliet’s betrothed, the man that her parents want her to marry. Who in some productions is sort of portrayed as rather ridiculous, I think the way Alexei is doing him is a bit sympathetic. The inspiration for his ball costume came from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Those are guard’s helmets. – Richard Hudson
Coats from the Nutcracker
This is the Sugar Plum Fairy. The black swan tutu’s are from Swan Lake. They are made of all net and are sewn to a panty and then are all connected together. There are usually 16 to 18 layers. – Grant Heaps
This is the black swan queen and the white swan queen from Swan Lake. There is one move every black swan does, this one trick, they do thirty two fouetté. In the film, she didn’t do a single one, even the body stunt didn’t do a fouetté. She did zero fouetté. – Grant Heaps
