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Slashed throats, bruised eyes, infected cuts — theater makeup professor Dorothy Baca said she is not one to shy away from violent theatrics.
“I love big accident wounds, bones sticking out, guts hanging. I love that kind of stuff. The more gore, sickly and ill, the better,” she said.
Baca has been teaching UNM’s theater costume and makeup courses for the past 16 years. She said her students focus on everything from changing genders to turning into animals with makeup and students’ faces. Baca’s class recently wrapped up a project based on Día de los Muertos, in which students transformed into animated skeletons with the help of thick white-and-black makeup.
Baca said makeup design is best looked at as a way to transform into a different person.
“I think the advantage of makeup design is it’s really easy to create an illusion with it,” Baca said. “Makeup design is really just being a good painter, a good manipulator. When you take a flat surface and make it look three dimensional and give it depth, that’s all makeup is.”
Baca didn’t begin her career as a makeup artist, but as a costume designer. She first got involved with theater as an undergraduate student at UNM by helping student actors apply makeup and change costumes. Then Baca moved in the early ‘70s to Los Angeles, where she worked as a costume designer for various films and television programs. She has worked on costumes for the funk-influenced “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” and on Mr. Freeze’s costume for “Batman and Robin,” among work for other films. Baca returned to UNM in 1996, where she has balanced a teaching job with working on films shot in New Mexico. Her most recent work was on “Terminator Salvation.”
Baca said she keeps instruction flexible, allowing her students to try nontraditional techniques.
“I think it’s just like anything else: you have to do a lot out on your own, you just keep trying things,” she said. “Makeup isn’t like math, where x plus y equals z — so much of it is your own finesse. The other day I had a student use hair gel as glitter for their lips. I’ve never seen that. They’re so nimble about what’s in their medicine cabinet, what’s in their kitchen, that they can make things work.”
Student Kendra Aguilar-Chavez said the course has helped her in her goal of becoming a plastic surgeon.
“It seems unrelated, but I think the technical aspect of it — using your hands, using the hand-eye coordination — I think it’s really important to the field I’m going into, so the whole aesthetic thing is related,” she said.
Student Claire Gutierrez has applied concepts from the course to her career as a photographer. From shadows to facial structures, Gutierrez said she’s switched up her approach when applying makeup to the subjects of her photography.
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Baca said Gutierrez’s makeup work stands out in the class. It includes projects such as transforming herself into Oprah.
“Our face shapes were different. We both have oval-shaped faces, but hers is more round in her cheeks,” Gutierrez said. “I had to completely change the shape of my eyebrows, and even change the shape of my nose. It was a lot of fun. It was interesting.”
