Award-winning costume designer to visit campus

Milanka Berberovic's work neglects the ordinary. An internationally recognized Yugoslavian costume designer, she creates costumes that are at once brilliant, distinct, vivid and sensual. Although her costumes are wildly modern and highly fashionable, Berberovic herself could easily be mistaken for someone's grandma. She emanates gentleness, baked goods and worldly wisdom.\nShe has received many prestigious awards, including a Prague Quadrennial gold award -- one of only 10 awarded throughout history.\n"(It's) the very highest award conferred on a costume designer," said George Sullivan, director of audience development for the Department of Theatre and Drama.\nBerberovic was born in Yugoslavia in 1941 and graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Costume Design in 1966. Since then she has worked as a costume designer for staged plays all over the world. She worked at the Belgrade Drama Theatre from 1967 to 1982, after which she began teaching in the costume department of the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. She began as dean of the Faculty of Applied Arts in 2001.\nBut Berberovic is interested in designing costumes for more than the stage.\n"Stage-related art is complex," Berberovic said. "It asks total subordination of all participants in the play, confining them to the space within the limits of the director's conception."\nShe was looking instead, at the process of creating the concept for her current exhibition, to create something new and entirely different. Her artistic partner, Ivana Veljovic, said although they are working within the realm of traditional costuming, they are also searching for a completely unique idea.\n"Things that have been done…well, they're done," Veljovic said.\nThis is Berberovic's fifth visit to IU. She was invited by Leon Brauner, the chair of IU's Theatre and Drama Department. In preparation for this auspicious event, Berberovic said she decided for the first time in her life to work with costuming as a form of "pure art," rather than something that is simply a part of another work.\nBerberovic joined with textile designer Veljovic to make costumes that "live in new space and acquire all characteristics of a real piece of art," she said. "Costumes as objects, costumes as three-dimensional pictures in whose modeling artistically modified fabrics and materials were used to speak their own changeable language, giving the space they fill a totally new dimension."\nShe chose to work with Veljovic because she said they share similar feelings, perceptions and ideas about the nature of costuming as a fine art. Berberovic likes to "play" with new concepts for design, while Veljovic delights in "(making) experiments with materials -- different types, structures…in order to express her best artistic thoughts."\nBerberovic said she is also having fun learning to draw on fabric.\nRobbie Stanton, a costumer at IU, said Berberovic is not only an incredible artist but a good teacher, as well.\n"She really helps students make a big change in their art, and they love it," she said.\nBerberovic's teaching style and technique have been working well for her in Belgrade, Brauner said. She goes out of her way to explain the nature and process of her work to her students. The students that Brauner witnessed there when he went on sabbatical were "really quite good."\nStanton commented on Belgrade's teaching style.\n"They use a system we admire very much," he said. "The first two years of their program is just art training -- they paint and draw all the time; that's all they do. So they get a really good background as fine artists before they start learning to design."\nThe result of such training is displayed in the talented artists of all venues that the Faculty of Applied Arts produces. Berberovic said the competition to get into her program is fierce.\n"We only let in 10 people every year, out of over 100," she said. "I am proud of my students."\nBerberovic, Veljovic and Ljiljana Petrovic -- the third costume designer displaying work this week at IU -- have all worked hard to defy the norm and present something that is fitting to a progressive and modern society.\n"Metamorphosis is a textile-costume story of the creation of new forms (that) has its beginning (at IU) but has no end," Berberovic said.\nThis is only the beginning.\n"I am happy in this moment," Berberovic said. "We have a nice exhibition; I have many friends around me; I have my students. I am happy"