The Ranger Online

Issue date: 2/23/07 Section: Features

Media Credit: Allison Doyle Award-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell meets admirers, Aaronetta Pierce and Alicia Vasquez, at his lecture Feb. 8. They discuss fabric choices, moods and themes of his collection.

Changing perceptions every once in a while is important, a costume designer and professor said.

"Even when you or I, today, look at the person right next to you, you make a certain number of assumptions about that person and that person's character by how they're dressed," Paul Tazewell said.

Tazewell, who is on leave from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, lectured Feb. 8 at the McNay Art Museum on "The Hip-Hop in Shakespeare."

Placing Shakespeare's work in a setting outside its original context helps the audience to understand the meaning from a different perspective, Tazewell said.

For example, in a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Tazewell worked on, he was able to understand for the first time a speech given by the character Titania.

The way in which the African-American woman read it with her Southern drawl made him look at it from a new angle.

"It does force you to not hear the story with the same assumptions," Tazewell said.

Tazewell spent the first 20 minutes telling the audience about his life.

He grew up in Akron, Ohio, the third son of four children, and was exposed to the arts at an early age by his mother and sister performing puppet shows, he said.

An asthmatic as a child, he did not have an opportunity to engage in outside activity, which drew him even closer to the pursuit of theater.

In school, he had a love for both costume design and performing, but ultimately, chose to focus on costume because he did not want to be typecast in African-American roles, he said.

On the subject of Shakespeare being placed in a contemporary, or hip-hop, context, Tazewell said he had to do research because he did not grow up in an urban setting where hip-hop was most prevalent during his childhood.

"Because I'm not from the same kind of street culture that hip-hop is from, and I didn't come up in that way," Tazewell said.

"I researched in the same way that I would research an Elizabethan piece."

Tazewell said he would often spend time in public places observing people to see how they dressed and why they made the clothing decisions they made.

The end of his lecture included a slideshow of pictures of his past work.

The plays featured included "Bring in 'Da Noize, Bring in 'Da Funk" and "Amadeus."

The slideshow represented a diverse range of styles.

When his lecture was complete, he answered questions from the audience and invited them to the front of the auditorium to allow them to view sketches of his designs.

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