![]() ![]() While on furlough from Howard Law, she met Reggie Ray, the late theater costume designer and Howard professor who would become her first mentor. “At the time, I was playing it safe,” says Rodgers (who had also earned an MBA from Florida International University), but fate intervened. For a time, she hedged her bets - taking Howard fashion design courses electively, using vacations to earn a fashion design certificate from London’s Central Saint Martins. ![]() The Evanston, Illinois, native studied marketing at Howard University and upon graduation spent eight years working in the admissions department at the storied HBCU’s law school, all the while harboring fantasies of becoming a costume designer. Mentorship - and a touch of serendipity - have been the governing forces in Rodgers’ career. Carter, Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh among her mentors. The contrast between the women’s respective worlds - and the tension that Irene feels about Clare’s precarious position - is heightened by Hall’s decision to shoot in black and white, a storytelling device that presented a creative but rewarding challenge for her department heads. Whereas Irene has married a Black man and fully immersed herself in the Harlem social scene, Clare is passing for white and is wedded to a white man and avowed racist. The film, an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, centers on the reunion of childhood friends Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), two light-skinned Black women. ![]() It’s fitting, then, that Hall - whose multiracial grandfather passed for white - staffed her crew with such Black women as costume designer Marci Rodgers, hair department head Barbara Roman and production designer Nora Mendis, who share a personal connection to the themes, setting and original novel on which Passing is based. P assing, the directorial debut of actress Rebecca Hall, is a film about identity - specifically, the identity of Black women living on the racial margins during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. ![]()
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