The summer is a relaxing time for many university professors – a chance to take advantage of a scaled-back courseload and a relatively quiet campus.
Theatre professor Helen Huang, for example, is not teaching a single course this summer and is vacationing in Turkey this week. But to call Huang a sloth might be a tad untrue.
Huang just finished designing the costumes for the play Measure for Pleasure, which is running this month at Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and is currently designing costumes for three upcoming plays, one also in Washington and others in Minneapolis and Syracuse, N.Y.
As calling her a sloth isn’t necessarily accurate, Huang came up with a better term.
“I describe myself like bumblebees,” joked Huang, while making a rare appearance in her office in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Friday before darting back to Minneapolis to squeeze in a few days of work on Madeline and the Gypsies at the Children’s Theatre Company before her well-deserved trip overseas.
“I plan well,” she added. “I need to recharge.”
Being gone from home, where she lives with her two teenage daughters and her mother, is not strictly a summertime occurrence for Huang.
“My life is a handful,” she said. “Sometimes when I am doing a project out of town I will fly back to teach for one day [and] maybe don’t even have time to go home.”
Despite her hectic lifestyle, Huang still has time to come up with ingenious, playful and somewhat outlandish costume ideas, such as intricate wigs and hoop-skirts, that she describes as “18th-century fashion all the way to contemporary couture.” And those ideas, coupled with her creativity and dedication, is what has impressed peers and students alike.
In fact, Frank Labovitz, Huang’s assistant and a graduate student at the university seeking a master of fine arts degree in costume design, changed his career plan for the chance to work with Huang.
“It was not necessarily part of the plan for me to go back to grad school right now,” said Labovitz, who was a professional designer in the area before meeting Huang at the university’s costume shop. “The opportunity to have Helen as a professor seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up.”
Labovitz, who executed Huang’s wig designs for Measure for Pleasure, said his only previous wig experiences dealt with synthetic hair or human hair, but Huang’s design called for a straw-like material, which Huang said is soaked in water and then sculpted to the shape of the wigs using wires.
“It’s a very artificial element – the big wigs,” Huang said. “We used this very unique translucent material to create a sculpture to capture the shape. It’s unique for each character. This entire process is very organic.”
Huang glowed when discussing her pleasure in seeing Labovitz’s final product, which she cited as an example of why she must constantly move from project to project.
“In this field, you learn by doing it. For students coming to a field like this, it’s very important that their professor is active in the field,” Huang said. “This affects me every year when I pick out a project for my students. … I would like my students to be able to design anything from simple, everyday clothes to Shakespeare.”
Huang’s packed schedule and wide variety of project styles enabled Labovitz to learn immensely in the process, he said.
“Helen is someone who is tremendously busy but always seems to manage to find the balance of being able to give the attention to the show she’s working on as well as to the project she’s working on next,” he added.
Labovitz will continue his work with Huang in the fall as part of his graduate assistantship. Huang said she founded the MFA program in theatre design along with two colleagues in 1995, six years after she started working at the university and 10 years after she first moved to the United States from Beijing to attend graduate school in Missouri.
As for the graduate program’s future – as well as her own career – Huang has no plans of slowing down.
“I feel I will continue the education of myself,” she said. “Every project is a new window to the world.”
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