Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist play The Gas Heart is known for two things: that its 1923 performance ended in a riot and that it featured geometric costumes by Sonia Delaunay (which, incidentally, impeded the actors’ escape from the riot). All that survives of these costumes are sketches by Delaunay and production photos, but iconic homages have been worn by David Bowie and Klaus Nomi. In conjunction with the exhibition Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, Broadway costume designer and BGC MA student Sydney Maresca has reconstructed two of these costumes and will reanimate them with actors to explore what happens when two-dimensional modernist design meets three-dimensional performing bodies.
Sydney Maresca is a clothing and textile historian with a strong background in clothing construction, textile crafts, and costume design. Her design work has been seen on Broadway, cable television, and around the world. Notable projects include the Broadway premieres of The Cottage directed by Jason Alexander, The Lighting Thief, and the award-winning play Hand to God. She is a visiting assistant professor of theater at Williams College and has held full-time faculty positions at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Marymount Manhattan College. She just completed her master’s degree at Bard Graduate Center with a focus on clothing and textiles in the early American Northeast that speak to Indigenous and immigrant encounters, as well as craft, labor, and women’s roles in their communities. Maresca has an MFA from NYU’s Tisch Department of Design for Stage and Film and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.