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Kathy Udaondo
Kathy Udaondo is a costume designer and maker from the Basque Country. She moved to London to complete an MA in Costume Design for Performance, after working primarily in wardrobe departments for film. Now focusing on live performance, her practice explores the intersection between costume and set, focusing on the dialogue between people and their surroundings.
Kathy designs with functionality at the core, ensuring that garments are embedded in the action of the character and that aesthetics emerge naturally from purpose. She works with deadstock fabrics and zero-waste patterns, approaching each project with sensitivity to both materials and context. Her recent projects investigate the extension of the self toward the other.
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Hansel & Gretel
Music by Engelbert Humperdinck
Libretto by Adelheid Wette after The Brothers Grimm
• Costume Designer: Kathy Udaondo
• Performer: Yi Ching Wang
• Movement Director: Peta Lily
• Lighting: Vlada Nebo
The opera is set within a person’s psyche, each character representing a different fragment of the self in conflict. The children’s journey becomes one of self-discovery, trying to understand themselves without being consumed by the space that surrounds them.
The boundaries between costume and set are distorted, reflecting the internal landscape of the psyche. In this imagined mind, there is no inner-outer, only one shifting, merging space. Here, costume, set and character each fight to pronounce their own individual existence.
The realised costume represents a fragment of the woods and the witch’s house. Garments were used to express this idea of self-identification, how what we wear can define or engulf us. The treatment of fabrics mirrors the emotional weight of trauma: light, delicate textiles for the domestic space; translucent, layered fabrics in the woods to evoke confusion; and heavier, padded materials within the witch’s
house to embody the weight of fear and sadness.
Midsummer Night’s Dream – Puck
After William Shakespeare
• Costume designer: Kathy Udaondo
• Performer: Alanca
• Movement Director: Peta Lily
A silk and cotton organza panel hangs vertically, suspended from the ceiling. In the centre is a mannequin bust, wrapped in the same fabric. Duvet-like fabric rises up to engulf the figure from the floor.
This project explores the idea of the liminal - the space in between two worlds, two states of being. Inspired by Puck, the trickster, it reflects on transformation, thresholds, and the undefined. Puck moves freely between Athens and the Dream, blurring their boundaries, confusing their order, and making both their own.
As an extension of the previous project on Hansel & Gretel, the work continues to question the relationship between costume and space, but this time through what lies outside the self. What if space is something we carry with us? A veil that settles over us as we move through life, shifting and layering without us realising.
Athens represents order and reason, built on the geometry of the chessboard. Dream distorts these shapes, filling them with symbols, textures, and emotion. Between them lies the liminal, a place of overlap and understanding. The realised costume represents a fragment of this threshold: three transparent panels — Athens, Dream, and the Liminal — that layer together through Puck’s movement. Each piece interacts with the other, coming together as a visual metaphor for balance between the conscious and unconscious mind.
The Inseparables
After Simone de Beauvoir
• Designer: Kathy Udaondo
• Performers and choreography: Monique Humphreys
and Elisa Blasi
• Choreography support: Tea Hockey
This project comes from a need to understand what it means to belong and how our surroundings play a crucial role in shaping our identity. It views belonging as an embodied process of repetition and return through craftsmanship. It also examines how identity is reconstructed after leaving a place of belonging or after breaking long-held beliefs.
These themes are explored through The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir, which follows Silvie and Andrée, two young women in post-war France navigating the
expectations society places on them. Silvie ultimately reconstructs her identity by rejecting the norms imposed on her, while Andrée remains confined by them. At its heart, the story reflects the tension between living for oneself and living for others.
In this realisation, the costume becomes an extension of the self toward the other. The movements of the performers unfold in a silent repetitive conversation, echoing the movements of a weaving loom, where one gestures to call and the other answers. Each movement finds its meaning only through the echo of the other performer. Design choices are heavily influenced by my Basque heritage and the functional aesthetic at its core.
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