Professor will leave you in Stitches

The Student Life section of Utah State Today highlights work written by the talented student journalists at Utah State University. Each week, the editor selects a story that has been published in The Utah Statesman or the Hard News Café, or both, for inclusion in Utah State Today.

Professor will Leave you in Stitches

by Cassidee Cline in The Utah Statesman

Not many women can say they didn’t, at one point, walk out of their mother’s closet with a pair of her black pumps and a suit jacket three times their size. Playing dress up is almost as natural to any women’s childhood memory as learning how to walk. Parents’ decisions and actions often influence what their kids grow up to be. One professor said her parents were a prominent part in how she became the master seamstress she is today.

Nancy Hills has been a professor at USU for the past 20 years and has helped out with and designed a lot of the costumes students see worn on stage. Hills said she has been sewing since she was a little girl growing up in San Mateo, Calif. She said her mother taught her how to sew.

“Both Mother and Dad encouraged us to follow our passions and do things we really loved,” Hills said.

She practiced her skills on creating doll clothes when she was little and then creating her own wardrobe in high school. Hills now uses this skill in her day-to-day life to design creative and sometimes elaborate pieces for actors.

Hills acquired an undergraduate degree in performance and said she realized the whole performing world was something she couldn’t really sink her teeth into. Though performing wasn’t her thing, she said she had a knack for sewing.

“When it came to graduate school I redirected my passions and moved toward design,” Hills said.

Even though the performing didn’t work out, she said her past experiences on the stage helps her ability to design costumes.

“You can’t understand what an actor goes through,” Hills said, “unless you have been in their shoes, literally. Actors are story tellers,” I’m just telling the story from the visual way the story is personified. The actor is the main focus of the story telling, but we (costume designers) are here to enhance it and give the audience directions.”

Being an artist of needle and cloth, Hills said she gets inspiration and ideas from anywhere.

“I can see a painting. I can walk through the woods where the trees are covered with icicles. Crumpled leaves on the floor of the forest can be a really intriguing sort of pattern that will spark something,” Hills said.

Even though Hills’ creativity with patterns and design can be let loose on stage, she said her design is always focused on the show. She said the story is what’s important and finding out how the story can be told with the principles in elements of design. Part of the elements of design is the color chosen for the costume, she said.

Hills said colors are what attracts attention and can tell a story. White, for example, will portray innocence or purity. Red portrays vengeance and passion and physiologically draws attention more quickly than anything.

“Colors tell stories,” she said. “(The audience) needs to understand the layers behind the play and the themes.”

“I’m good at dying and painting fabric,” she said. “I can do things like that, and they’re a good skill to have.”

Hills spent six months as a dyer painter for the San Francisco Opera between 1999 and 2000.

With the skills she has honed, Hills is working on putting together and designing the play Love’s Labour’s Lost, an early comedy by William Shakespeare, for spring semester. This semester she is, for the first time at USU, directing a Japanese fairytale about a one-inch hero called Issun-boshi. Hills said she has directed before but not for USU.

Even though Love’s Labour’s Lost won’t be running until the spring, Hills said the design for plays begin long before the play starts rehearsing. Designing a play takes a lot of preliminary work, she said, including finding patterns, costume designs and researching the meaning behind what the director wants to portray to an audience.

During this process, Hills said she even gets “writers block,” where a costume design won’t present itself to her fully. She said one specific time this happened was during the production of King Leer, where Hills said she didn’t quite understand the relationship between Leer and the fool and sought out the director to give her some ideas.

Even though she designs, she said stage production is a collaborative effort.

“You’re not in a studio all by yourself trying to figure it out,” she said.

Going through the process of designing the shows, Hills said the stage production she is involved with has three dress rehearsals. The costumes are designed before the show starts rehearsing, but the costumes aren’t fitted until actors and actresses are given their parts. Sometimes, she said, the colors or patterns don’t always work the way they were supposed to and the designers don’t notice until they see it on stage.

“Things like that you can’t really anticipate unless you sit in on all of the rehearsals and that doesn’t make very good use of a designer’s time,” Hills said.

The dress rehearsals, Hills said, usually are the final practices before opening night. Usually, she said, the first-dress rehearsal sets the play back a bit because the performers have to get used to another layer of skin. After the final two-dress rehearsal, the play is usually back to par, Hills said.

Opening night is a finite time, Hills said, and production designers have to get used to getting things done within that frame of when the play is chosen and when the show is put on. Performers need some preparatory time to work through all the ideas that people have, Hills said. But overall she said she has the best job ever.

“I love it. I love to get up and go to work in the morning,” she said.

On top of designing costumes, directing plays and teaching students about historical clothing and costume design, Hills is one of the professors that takes students across the ocean to experience theater in different places with USU’s Humanities Study Abroad program.

Hills and Dennis Hassan, associate professor of scene design at USU, travel with students all over Europe focusing mainly on Great Britain and Italy.

“London is the best theater in the English speaking world,” Hills said.

Taking only a small backpack and a suitcase, Hills said she is always on the go.

“I need to see theater in other places,” she said.

She said because she travels it enables her to learn and meet people on the way who enhance her skills.

Her traveling experiences has given her the ability to work on a research project about costume design with the help from Althea Mackenzie, clothing collection docent of the Snowhill Manor Collection and the Hereford Museum and Art Gallery in the U.K.

“I have some opportunities to share things like that with people I have met in my travels,” Hills said.

Hills met Mackenzie during one of her trips to Britain with the Study Abroad program.

“I’m one of those people where the students will be long gone and I’ll still be talking with the docent taking notes,” she said. “I sponge whatever information I can get.”

The information Hills soaks up she puts to use and it shows. She said over the past years, two items of hers were presented in the Prague Quadrennial, a competitive exhibition of sceneography and theater architect in Czech Republic. It’s an exhibit that displays the creative theatrical talents of designers from all over the world.

Her showpieces included the designs for the production of The Miser in 1999. In 2003, she showcased the production of Dangerous Liaisons with the collaborative efforts of Bruce Duerden, lighting designer at USU, and Hassan.

Hills career in costume design has allowed her the opportunity to design a multitude of stage productions. She said she loves researching, trying to figure out what fabrics would work best, she loves traveling and she is passionate about stage production.

Hills said she always tells her students, “You’ll never get paid enough money to hate this job, so learn how to love it.”

Hills lives in Cache County with her twin sons, who are in high school, and plans on doing stage production, traveling and teaching for as long as she is able.

– cassi.joe.cline@aggiemail.usu.edu