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Flourish Online Magazine | Summer 2007 |
Student Spotlight: Erik Teague
The Nation's Top Student Designer
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| Erik in the design shop at KSU. |
By Cheryl Anderson Brown
When Erik Teague graduated from Cartersville High School, he didn’t know that he was going to become a celebrated costume designer. In fact, he intended to study fashion design at an art school before a few twists of fate landed him in the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies at Kennesaw State University.
When he won the regional and national awards for costume design from the American College Theatre Festival at the Kennedy Center last year, he was humbled and a little overwhelmed. When he won both titles again this year, he was truly amazed. And, he wasn’t the only one.
“It’s not unprecedented for someone to win the region two years in a row,” says Teague’s professor and mentor Jamie Bullins, who himself won back-to-back regionals in the mid-1990s, “but no one has ever won the national award two years in a row.”
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| Two of Erik's award-winning costume design sketches from KSU's production, "Urinetown." |
Teague says he was nervous heading into the competition. “The stakes were definitely higher this year. People know who I am now. I’m always surprised
when they recognize me.” And recognize him they do. Almost immediately after he returned from the national competition at the end of April, he was contacted by the National Shakespeare Company and offered a prestigious internship.
Not bad for an undergraduate student who was competing against some of the top grad students in the country who had designed for productions with much larger budgets. The show Teague designed last year, “As You Like It,” was one of KSU’s studio productions, which meant he had very little money for costumes. “It was the little show that could,” he says.
This year, he competed with designs from “Urinetown,”
a mainstage musical production satirizing society’s economic disparities. To meet this challenge, Teague developed a modern look at the 1930s, a style he calls “neo-Weimar” that harkens back to the German
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| Erik's costume design for Pennywise, a character in "Urinetown." |
theatrical influences of people like Bertholt Brecht.
Bullins, who has helped Teague secure professional
design jobs while assigning him KSU productions, sees a bright future for Teague. “These awards mean that he
will be able to get into whichever graduate school he wants.”
Teague, who will graduate in December 2007, plans to pursue the graduate school route after taking a little time off to work on some more professional projects, like “The Last Night at Ballyhoo,” which he recently designed for Georgia Ensemble Theatre and for which he earned a nod from the theatre critic at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
But, he still has one more show to design at Kennesaw State, the Fall production of “The Robber Bridegroom,” which could secure him a previously unimaginable three-peat at next year's theatre festival.