Castille Ritter
By Zoë Eitel
Being a wardrobe attendant and doing acrobats’ sweaty laundry isn’t glamorous, jokes Castille Ritter, but it was a necessary step to put herself into the costume technology industry. The glamor-less work paid off. Castille now loves her current job as a costume fitter for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas.
After graduating from DePaul’s Costume Technology program, Castille found her way to Las Vegas to work on Michael Jackson: ONE with Cirque du Soleil. Though she had another job offer with the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C., Castille had already shadowed two Cirque shows while she was in college and decided to accept Cirque’s better-paying offer to be an on-call wardrobe attendant, which she knew would be a great foot in the door to a full-time position.
Costume Fitter at Cirque du Soleil
BFA Costume Technology 2015
After Michael Jackson: ONE, Castille worked as a floating costume technician for the Wynn’s Le Rêve acrobatic show working on things like headpieces, shoes, stitchings and fittings before leaving to work on opening Criss Angel’s MINDFREAK at Planet Hollywood. After that, Castille found herself back at Cirque working on projects including R.U.N. as a costume fitter.
“This is the perfect environment for me, being in a shop where we’re building and working on stuff day in and day out. It’s exciting, there’s always new things coming,” Castille says. “The scale of Cirque du Soleil is unlike anything I worked on in Chicago, but all of the experience from Chicago was perfectly transferable.”
“The production practices that The Theatre School has the students do are incredibly important; that was one of the big draws to DePaul for me, getting to work in different spaces with directors in actual settings that give you hands-on experience for when you graduate.”
Though the Costume Technology program at DePaul isn’t very large, Castille says it is one of very few out there that doesn’t only focus on costume design. Because she was interested in the tech-focus of costuming, DePaul was a great fit. That became even more clear when she realized how many different specialties and skills are taught in the program.
“You have your hands on a little bit of everything that this field offers, and that helped people choose a focus,” she says. “I kept doing a little of everything and that helped me get these jobs that require all of those skills.”
Castille attributes an independent study she did her senior year with giving her the hands-on, real-world experiences she needed to succeed in her career after graduation. She pursued stitching stretch knits–a very important skill for costume fitting at Cirque.
“The production practices that The Theatre School has the students do are incredibly important; that was one of the big draws to DePaul for me, getting to work in different spaces with directors in actual settings that give you hands-on experience for when you graduate,” Castille says.
