Watching the St. Albert Children's Theatre perform Shrek the Musical, it's hard to keep track of the multitude of characters. But one person knows exactly how many there are: the woman responsible for the costumes.
"It's a huge show - 46 actors, 92 characters and 380 costume pieces, not including shoes, tights or makeup bits like fake eyelashes or prosthetic noses," says Melissa Cuerrier, '05 BFA. She estimates she put in 300 hours working on costumes for the production last November, most of them sitting at the sewing machine.
What makes her efforts all the more impressive is that she was, at the same time, fine-tuning her master's thesis in theatre theory at the U of A. She graduated Nov. 19, just two days before the show's opening at the Arden Theatre.
Costuming is just one aspect of what Cuerrier refers to as the "visual storytelling" of theatre design. Her master's thesis explored how set design and other visual elements influence the audience experience, much of it at a subconscious level.
"If you read interviews or reviews of shows, very seldom is the set mentioned as more than a sentence or two. And yet, if you look at the science of it, 90 per cent of the information we take in, we take in visually," says Cuerrier.
"Set design can aid in the telling of a story almost like another actor. It can have a voice of its own."
"Set design can aid in the telling of a story almost like another actor. It can have a voice of its own."
The U of A has played a starring role in Cuerrier's career path - which most recently has seen her take on a role as acting chair of theatre production at MacEwan University in Edmonton.
She was a history undergrad at the U of A in the late 1990s when she began volunteering in the drama department. She enjoyed it so much she left to take the theatre production program at MacEwan, then returned to the U of A to pursue a bachelor's degree in theatre design. She was hired at MacEwan as resident designer in 2005 and landed teaching roles at MacEwan and the Art Gallery of Alberta. In 2010, she was hired as costume designer for the St. Albert Children's Theatre production of Disney's High School Musical. In 2011, while working on Peter Pan for the St. Albert Children's Theatre, she caught the school bug once more and headed back to the U of A for her master's. She's excited to take the theoretical practices she has learned and apply them to her work.
"I sometimes almost get lost thinking about materials and colours and textures and how this can help inform the story. It's exciting to think about how all these elements combine for this really ephemeral moment."
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