Listening through and with costume : A dialogical performance-making process

Abstract

In performance contexts we often perceive costume as visual expression and as something that servers something else. The objective of this presentation is to discuss costume’s performance-making potential. How can listening through and with costume become a performance-making strategy? With a few historical and examples from own research practice the ambition is to expand the notion of costumes as a scenic and world-making agent.

In Orientation Matters Sara Ahmed write that ‘bodies as well as objects shape though being orientated towards each other. An orientation that may be experienced as the cohabitation sharing of space’ (Ahmed, 2010:245). This suggest that it is through and with the costume (and it’s crafted materialities) that we, designer and performer, are orientated towards each other. Hence, it is by sharing and navigating between our different ways of being affected by observing and inhabiting costume that a potential shared or co-creative space occurs. Ahmed continues ‘if orientation affects what bodies do, then they also affect how space take shape around certain bodies’ (Ahmed, 2010:250). This indicates the way that we dialogically share our difference individual experiences will affect the way we co-inhabit the co-creative space. In otder to cultivate a co-creative culture indicates that I, the designer and researcher, have an ethical responsa-ability (Barad 2007) to listen to how a costume affects a performer with the awareness of that how a costume affects one performer doesn’t equal how another performer are affected. I propose that it is in the dialogical process of negotiating through and with the costume that we can co-explore and co-create a scenic ‘world’. A co-creative process where the costume ‘has the ability to instigate performance and tell a story in its own right’ (Marshall 2020:165). In performance-making process, in our openness and willingness to ‘make kin’ (Haraway 2016) with crafted materialities ¬costume offers us a co-creative space ‘to debate and navigate the world’s becomings’ (Pantouvaki et al. 2021, p. 202).

• author: Østergaard, Charlotte
• organization: Teachers (Malmö Theatre Academy)
• publishing date: 2022
• type: Contribution to conference
• publication status: published
• subject: Performing Arts; Design
• keywords: Costume design, Crafting, Co-wearing, Artistic research, Keynote, Co-creation
• conference name: 15th NOFOD conference
• conference location: Copenhagen, Denmark
• conference dates: 2022-07-05 - 2022-07-08
• project: Crafting material bodies - exploring co-creative costume processes
• language: English
• LU publication?: yes
• additional info: Ahmed S. (2010), Orientation matters, In (eds.) Coole D. & Frost S. (2010) New materialism – ontology, agency, and politics, Durham & London: Duke University Press, p. 234–257 Barbieri, D. (2007), Proposing an interdisciplinary, movement-based approach to teaching and learning as applied to design for performance related areas, Working papers, Prague Quadrennial, Prague June 14–27 2007, p. 3–23 Barbieri, D. (2017), Costume in performance: materiality, culture and the body, London: Bloomsbury publishing Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the universe halfway – quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, London: Duke university press Barad, K. (2014), Diffracting Diffraction: cutting together-apart, Parallax, 20(3), London: Routledge, p. 168–187 Bauhaus Ballet: A Dance of Geometry, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo_BLRSuz7s Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter–a political ecology of things, Durham London: Durk University Press Elo, M. (2018), Light Touches: A Media Aesthetic Mapping of Touch, In Elo, M & Luoto, M. (Eds.), Figures of Touch, (p. 33–58), The Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Haraway, D. (1988), Situated knowledge: the science question in feminism and the privilege if partial perspective, Feminist Studies, 14(3), p. 575¬–599. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble – making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press. Ingold, T. (2013), Making – Anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture, Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2016), On human correspondence, Journal of the royal anthropological institute (N.S.), 23, Royal Anthropological Institute, p 9–27. Kleida, Danae (2017), Cinematographic motion & Serpentine Dance – towards a media archaeology of modern dance, Junctions, 2(1), Graduate Journal of the Humanities, Utrecht University, s. 53-63. La Guin, U.K. (1986), The carrier bag theory of fiction, Dancing at the edge of the world – thoughts on words, woman, place, New York: Grove press, p. 165–170. Listening Biennial https://listeningbiennial.net/about Marshall, Susan (2021), Insubordinate costume (phd thesis), Goldsmiths, University of London. Pantouvaki, S. (2020), ‘Costume thinking’ as a strategy for critical thinking, Paper presentation at Critical Costume 2020 conference (online), https://costumeagency.com/project/sofia-pantouvaki/ Schneider, L. & Zerfass, A. (2018), Polyphony in corporate and an organizational communications: exploring the roots and characteristic of a new paradigm, Communication management review, 3(2), p. 6–29. Trimingham, Melissa (2017), Agency and empathy: artists touch the body, Costume in performance – materiality, culture, and the body, Bloomsbury Academic, s. 137–166.
• id: dc78913b-a440-4c40-8862-7bbf6e259fa6
• date added to LUP: 2022-08-18 10:49:21
• date last changed: 2022-11-22 17:11:46