Though Sandra Woodall is not on stage, her costume work is an integral part of stage performances. In the episode “Backstage Crafts,” Spark looks at this costume designer from inspiration to execution. Woodall and her colleagues speak of her process and work, showing examples from a variety of performances. An award-winning costume designer, Woodall works in many genres including ballet, modern dance, performance art and theater.
An Oakland native and graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute in painting, Woodall was taught to sew at an early age by her grandmother. Upon graduation, she became a design assistant at the San Francisco Opera House. Since 1970, Woodall has had a studio in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA district, where for 18 years she employed up to 35 seamstresses to produce and build costumes for designers from all over the world. Woodall now uses the space exclusively for design.
With more than 200 productions to her credit, Woodall often works on designs for multiple projects at any given time. Organizations like the San Francisco Ballet think of their costumes as major assets that can be used again for future productions or rented out to other companies. For a full-length ballet, the costume budget alone can run as high as $250,000.
Woodall takes all aspects of the production into account, and each piece is injected with her unique perspective and sense of the beautiful and unexpected. She is able to evoke different feelings with even the simplest of details — such as creating a sense of the feminine with the custom placement of delicate lace to the use of black lights to mimic a jellyfish in the ocean.
Woodall often uses motifs of nature and is inspired by the images and objects that she collects. When Woodall was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan (1999-2000), she began collecting local insect specimens, which became a springboard for her costumes for “Welcome to Shangri-La,” a play about a man whose life was in conflict with nature.
Collaboration for Woodall starts at the beginning of each piece, and she is insistent that even if her vision is correct, the costume can’t be realized if the sketch is not. Because of this, great attention to detail takes place at every step of the process, from the medium in which the sketch is created to the fabrics that she selects. For A.C.T.’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” Woodall used a collage process in which she combined a photo of a costume of the period with an overlay with sketches of her own.
Though Woodall is still in high demand for her costumes, she has been shifting her focus, returning to her early interest in painting. “When I was growing up, I never imagined I would be working in theater. I always thought I would be an artist.” She continues to work on things that interest her, but states, “I have to really discover what my painting style is going to be.”
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