Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 2): Costumes

November 4, 2024
2 mins read

A few weeks back, we showed off the production photos for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s excellent, Jeff-Recommended The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. Since the date of that post, The Tempest has received excellent reviews, the aforementioned Jeff Recommendation, and it has become the best selling show in the Idle Muse Theatre Company’s history. As the production closes with a final weekend of sold out shows, I thought I’d post some of the archival photos featuring The Tempest‘s costumes.

In part 1 of our coverage of Idle Muse’s archival photos, we examined scenic painter Breezy Snyder’s beautiful work, as well as the portraits of each character as embodied by the actors. This time, we’ll take a look at costume designer (and Caliban actor) Jennifer Mohr’s costumes.

Costumes Head-to-Toe, Front-and-Back

In our archival photography, we documented each and every costume piece worn by the actors in the show. We made this record for Jennifer Mohr’s portfolio and for her reference. Whereas the goal of the character portraits was to convey the characters’s personas as portrayed by the actors, our sole goal here was to document the costumes; so we’re not going for fancy, artful, lighting or style; rather, we’re shooting for accurate representation of the costume pieces, their true colors, and their textural details.

In our costume documentation, we captured whole costumes, front-and-back, as well as individual garments, front-and-back, and close-up details from multiple angles, as in the examples above.
FIRST ROW: Miranda (Caty Gordon) head-to-toe front-and-back.
SECOND ROW: Ariel (Jacque Bischoff) garment front-and-back.
THIRD ROW: Trinculo (Joel Thompson) head-to-toe front-and-back.
FOURTH ROW: Prospero (Elizabeth MacDougald) collar detail front-and-back.

Documenting Character Costumes

Here’s an example of how we documented a complete character costume, beginning with head-to-toe, front-and-back shots, followed by individual garments, detail shots, makeup, and texture. For this example, we’ll look at the show’s designer Jennifer Mohr and her own costume for Caliban.

Caliban (costume designer Jennifer Mohr), head-to-toe, individual garments, details, and textures.

Textures

In addition to photographing costumes head-to-toe, front-and-back, we came in close to capture the details and textures of costume pieces. From props and headdresses to shoes and painted patterns, we collected all the textures we could from Jennifer Mohr’s lovely designs for The Tempest. The gallery below contains one detail from each character in the production.

A Small Sample

The photos in this post are a small sample of the archival photography we did for each character in Idle Muse’s production of The Tempest. All in all, we took hundreds of costume photos and hundreds more photos of the production. Congratulations to Jennifer Mohr for her incredible work costuming this show and acting in it. This is the norm for Jen, who’s always doing a dozen projects at once. A frequent Distant Era collaborator, she’s one of our most photographed subjects. Those who don’t know her name might recognize her from the pictures below. In addition, Jen created costumes for Distant Era’s current creative series, Gods and Heroes of the Aegean, which is coming very slowly along.

A Jennifer Mohr gallery.

For our final post detailing the archival photography for The Tempest, we’ll show off Laura Wiley’s beautiful lighting.

Once again, here’s the cast and crew of show as listed on Idle Muse’s website:

CAST: Elizabeth MacDougald (Prospero), Caty Gordon (Miranda), Jennifer Mohr (Caliban), Boomer Lusink (Ferdinand), Mara Kovacevic (Ariel 1), Gary Henderson (Ariel 2), Connar Brown (Ariel 3), Emely Cuestas (Ariel 4), Jacque Bischoff (Ariel 5), Emily Pfriem (Ariel 6), Michael Dalberg (Stephano), Joel Thompson (Trinculo), Jack Sharkey (Alonso), Eric Duhon (Sebastian), Orion Lay-Sleeper (Antonio), Xavier Lagunas (Gonzalo), with understudies Riley Doerner, Ethan Carlson, Makenna Van Raalte, Brian Healy and Andre Colin

CREATIVE: Tristan Brandon (director), Shellie DiSalvo (production manager), Maureen Yasko (intimacy designer), Laura Wiley (lighting & projection designer), L.J. Luthringer (sound designer), Jennifer Mohr (costume designer), Becky Warner (stage manager), Lindsey Chidester (associate stage manager), Libby Beyreis (assistant director and violence design), Kati Lechner (music director), Evan Jackson (artistic director), and Breezy Snyder (scenic painter).

In other news…

Since posting part 1 of our archival photography for The Tempest, we traveled to the UK, where we saw Corliolanus at The National Theatre and The Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare’s Globe, participated in The Key of Dreams immersive experience in Wales, Bridge Command in London, and Punchdrunk’s immersive Viola’s Room in London (among many other adventures; it was an action-packed ten days).

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

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Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

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I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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