Becky Bodurtha teaches Costume Design at the Fordham University in Bronx, New York City in the US. At Fordham she also manages the university’s Costume Shop, where garments are made and besides Costume Design, she also teaches aspects of theater design, set design, and sound design.

Becky is currently in Rwanda as one of the Costume Designers for the Ubumuntu Arts Festival that opens today, July 14, at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Gisozi. Organised by the Mashirika Performing Arts and Media Company, the festival brings in theater troupes from eighteen countries across the globe for the four-day do.

Tell us a little more about yourself

Well, other than my work at Fordham University, I’m also a freelance costume designer. I design in New York City, in Vermont, Boston, sometimes in Minnesota …, wherever the job is, I’ll go.

I teach not only designers but also actors how to make clothes, because I believe that actors should know a bit about everything. If an actor knows how they can hang a light or how they can build the costume or the set, how they can run a sound board then they will appreciate what the other people do that are on the team.

What is Costume design?

Costume design is story-telling but with clothes. That’s all it is. When actors are acting they’re telling a story. They use words that communicate a story about people, about a place, and Costume Design is the same thing but with clothes.

If you pick a shirt, you need to make sure that the shirt is the right character for that person, depending on what age they are, where they’re from, how much money they have, where they would go shopping, even what time in the year it is, because it could be contemporary, it could be 1800s, it could be ancient Roman etc. for instance if the client is from India the design may be different than if they were from the US.

Someone who is from the US and living in Rwanda, their clothes could be different from those of someone who is from the US and actually lives there.

So it’s about figuring out who the character is and knowing what the story is, and then you do everything you can to support the story.

Costume design vs Fashion design

They’re very different. Costume designers work on film, on plays, and on TV, while fashion designers create the clothes that we wear every day, and they look at trends, what’s new, what people will want to wear etc. So in a way fashion design is very similar to costume design because both have to take into consideration what people want to wear, what they can afford, and that’s business, but costume design is less business I think.

With costume design I can do more art. In fashion design you want to do art but you have to do business first.

Otherwise they’re similar and have a lot of cross-over. As a costume designer I use a lot of art in my designs because I love fashion. I love designing and creating new things that nobody has ever seen before but I love to put it on stage to tell a story as opposed to selling it for money.

How did you end up with Ubumuntu Arts Festival? 

I teach at Fordham University where one of the participants in the festival, Angel Uwamahoro, is one of my students. Ever since she started working in my shop, because she works in the Costume Shop, she’s been reminding me almost every day that I must come to Rwanda and I promised her I would come eventually.

It’s my first time in Africa.

I am designing costumes for two pieces; Movement for Humanity, a Dance piece by choreographers Tjarda Van Straten and Hilde Cannoodt from the Netherlands and Belgium respectively.

I’m also designing costumes for Africa’s Hope, by Mashirika because I really love the stories that they tell –how deep and how important these testimonies are.

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