Wednesday, March 4, 1998
Family festival at the Getty draws both young and old
ART: UCLA professor brings 18th-century
costumes to life for kids
By Emi Kojima
Daily Bruin Contributor
A delicate eight-year-old girl in her chemise stood before the
lecture hall on a black box, smiling and biting her bottom lip.
Enter Michael Hackett, UCLA professor of theater. Using the girl
and her fictional brother as props for his lecture for adults and
children alike, Hackett began to speak.
This lecture, which took place on Feb. 28 and described 1740s
children’s costuming was part of the second family festival day
held at the J. Paul Getty Center in order to promote family trips
to the museum.
The Getty has been holding a series of these family festivals,
which will continue throughout this year. A number of events,
workshops and performances are scheduled so that both young and old
may enjoy the Getty.
"It’s exciting to have so many boys and girls in the audience,"
Hackett said. "The Getty tries to commit to have all sorts of
people at the museum."
The theme of the most recent festival was masks. Children could
create their own masks and puppets. Similarly, in the performance,
the children being dressed were preparing for a masquerade
ball.
Hackett described each piece of clothing and its function in
detail, while attendants dressed first the girl, Erica Sandborn,
and then her brother, Darren Ishmael, a UCLA third-year theater
student.
They played the roles of children of a wealthy landowner or
someone working in the government of King Louis XV.
"She must feel like we’re torturing her," said Hackett, smiling
at the audience made up of some of Sandborn’s peers as well as
professors from UCLA who are well-versed in costuming.
"That’s okay, you can just have us all beheaded," Hackett joked
to motley listeners.
"But actually a good middle-class girl wouldn’t have that
power," Hackett said to clarify the joke, "(although) a princess
might."
Hackett let young audience members in the front row feel the
corset piece of Sandborn’s costume in order to give them an idea of
what children’s everyday clothes would have felt like.
Sandborn described the experience of wearing a get-up that would
make even Scarlet O’Hara cringe.
"The clothes are really tight and uncomfortable," Sandborn
said.
As Sandborn was covered with two more layers of an underskirt
and petticoat, the audience saw a transformed girl who could have
stepped out of the 18th century.
Next Hackett dressed her teenage brother, played by Ishmael.
Ishmael emerged in undergarments of the period with his short
red hair appearing longer as it was tied back in a ribbon.
Hackett continuously focused on audience interaction with the
children, and even called for their participation.
"Will you be my model?" Hackett asked one of Sandborn’s friends
with blond hair in a ponytail, to demonstrate the style of men’s
hair of the day.
"You look so worried," Hackett commented to the girl, who
shifted from foot to foot. When she sat down, however, she grinned
widely, relieved of her duty as a model.
Soon, Hackett’s assistants, three of his first-year theater
students, had dressed Ishmael in a two-piece suit and matching
vest.
As part of the unique event, Ishmael recalled his rare
"performance" at the Getty as memorable.
"The best thing that we do is to walk through the period
galleries with our costumes on," Ishmael said. "We had a tour of
the (French decorative room). We were told this may possibly be the
bed you would have had, and it’s like, wow."
When the two participants were dressed, they promenaded for the
audience, fully transformed into 18th century French children in
all their finery. Children and their parents were equally
fascinated by the change.
Hackett showed slides of paintings in the Getty of what of what
possible parents of the two children would look like. As part of
the effort to make the museum exciting for children, he challenged
children to find paintings of the portraits of Magdaleine Pinceloup
de la Grange and her husband, Charles-Francois Pinceloup de la
Grange.
The costumes for the children were based on these paintings by
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau and others he did of children during the
period.
Roslyn Moore, a UCLA graduate with an MFA in costuming, designed
the costumes.
While Sandborn showed her initial nervousness during Saturday’s
show, after it was all over she ran into the audience to chat with
a gaggle of little girls who had come to the show as part of her
ninth birthday party.
They squealed and laughed as a photographer took pictures of the
casually dressed up 1990s children with their stand-out
eighteenth-century friend.