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Having only a month to come up with designs, advancing to state for UIL Theatrical Design can be a challenge, but one student, senior Rishika Desai, left for Austin on Monday to showcase her work with the goal of winning state.

“I am quite excited,” Desai said. “Advancing to state is a difficult feat in itself but I am happy that I was able to do it with just a month-long process.”

Competing against thousands all across Texas, she was one of the few from her division to advance to state for her costume designs for Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. 

“I am incredibly proud of all of my students’ designs,” technical theatre teacher Laura Darce said. 

After reading Murder on the Orient Express, Desai moved on to researching what clothes looked like in the 1930s and then revising her work repeatedly.  

“First I had to choose the characters,” Desai said. “So when we read the play, I was thinking of who the best characters would be to design for. I drew rough drafts of what I wanted them to look like.’

One of the biggest things that helped her was that she competed last year and took the critiques given to her with a positive attitude. 

“I learned a lot about shadows and highlights when designing costumes;” Desai said. “Last year, when I competed, that was the thing that the judges had the greatest problem with, so this year I really focused on that, and I think that’s what helped me advance.”

Darce believes Desai’s attention to detail is what made her stand out.

“The thing that sets her apart from the competition is her attention to detail,” Darce said. “Rishika worked incredibly hard on the entire process, not just the sketches. She focused on the prompt which was based in historical research.”

Her biggest obstacle was the time constraint though with just one month to plan, prep, and paint. 

“I also learned that when doing something, you should assume that you are going to take longer than you think,” she said. ‘I had a whole schedule planned out to do each step, and it kept taking me longer than I thought, and then I was behind.”

In the background during theatre productions, the UIL Theatrical Design contest puts Desai in the spotlight. 

“Technical designers don’t get as much recognition as actors,” she said. “They need a way to show their talents where they won’t be overshadowed, and this competition helps keep the focus on them.“