Costuming on a Shoestring

Dance Teacher, November, 2007 by Smagatz-Rawlinson, Diane

K-12 teachers share their creative and thrifty solutions for dressing students for the stage.

Outfitting large numbers of dancers with varied body types and little or no budget is a challenge that most K-12 dance teachers face. "Because I used to have a studio where parents wrote checks for costumes, it was an awakening to have to be more inventive with costuming in a public high school," says LeAnn Haggard, a dance teacher at North Central High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. Luckily, creativity and thriftiness are all that's required to get the job done. Here are some tips to help you tackle this dilemma.

Start with the basics, then accessorize.

One of the simplest ways to costume a group and allow for individual creativity is to jazz up basic black with some...