It was not a normal theatre show, it was immersive theatre in that the audience was the main feature of the show, a recreation of the popular social gatherings of 19th Century Paris.
The vision of director Stewart Laing, the audience (roughly 60 people per night. 20 people every half hour - 6:30pm, 7:00pm, 7:30pm), enter backstage where they are immediately swept away to get transformed into period costume (10 people to dressing first, 10 to hair and makeup and then swapped over). After half an hour of getting pampered, poked and prodded they enter The Salon where Laing plays host, and along with guest speakers and Barbican workers as guides (all in period costume), provokes conversation about the future, with drinks and music being played throughout the night it seemed like such a fun experience. The show running from 4th-14th April.
Us interns had a full training day on the 2nd April where we were shown around and taught several different period hairstyles and the signature makeup look created by the show's costume designer. All makeup was provided by the show but we had to bring our own brushes every night. With costumes ranging from Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian and 1920's, the makeup look for everybody was a pale base and a wine stained lip, with some eyebrow definition and eyeshadow as appropriate to the person's wishes, outfit and face. This basic look went well with all of the costumes regardless of the era.
With the hair we were taught a style to represent each of the eras of costumes. We were told if the client already had a well cut and styled modern style just to leave it as it is as they were all for the contrast between the old and new, otherwise to create all of the styles we learned it required a lot of volume to the hair and with a maximum of only 15 minutes per client there was no time to curl the hair to create this volume so a lot of backcombing and hairspray was required. We learned that Edwardian and Georgian dresses were big and came out at the sides and so the hair would match with the styles the head makeup artist called the mock bob and the onion. Whereas Victorian dresses were narrow at the sides and came out at the back and so the hair would match being tall at the top but scraped back at the sides with the styles called the poodle/the elvis and the top knot. The 1920's hairstyle was the classic finger wave at the front of the hair with the rest being sleek and neat.
Taking a week out of uni work to do this internship has set me back slightly with my project work but I am so glad I have done it, it has been the best experience I ever could have received. I feel I have learned so much here in regards to hair styling, proper industry work and working to a strict time frame each night. I have 2 shoots remaining when I get back to Southampton this week and I feel very confident about them after this experience, I will definitely be taking lots of what I have learned here on board with my final shoots.
Here are some images from the show nights I worked on:
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