Costume Agency
Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Design
Project leader: Christina Lindgren
Presenters: Sodja Lotker and Christina Lindgren
Costume Agency is four-year artistic research by costume designer and director Christina Lindgren and dramaturg Sodja Lotker. This research aimed at exploring ‘how costume performs’: it’s role in the constellation of a performance as well as what happens when the costume is the primary element of a performance. Since the appearance of post-dramatic theatre costume has gained new position in the dramaturgy of the performance but this phenomenon has not been extensively researched before. Costume Agency included working with many different costume designers to create a possibility for exploration of multiplicity of approaches, attitudes, aesthetics, topics and materials.
The first two workshops of the project were mapping the basic terrain, one was focusing on working with classical dramatic text and the second one worked with ready-made garment in a devised theatre process. The following workshops allowed for multiple costume designers to work with dancers and performers and to create a work-in-progress, including extensive feedback sessions and formal and informal interviews. Explorations allowed to the makers to listen to, and follow, the material. Costume, that ‘thing’ that takes a shape of a human body, that mimics, expresses and hides human behaviour and character – is one of those things that illustrate the complexity of agencies the best. Always between materiality and behaviour, between made and found… always in between human and non-human.
Within the project a large international online conference Critical Costume took place, where theorist and artists presented and joined discussion groups. An extensive online video library of presentations exploring the idea of costume and its performative agency, and an online exhibition of international work are still available since the conference.
Costume Agency created a platform for designers to explore, for theorists and researchers to exchange but it also provided the main researchers to explore through exchange with other creators.
Project website: www.costumeagency.khio.no
Website for the conference and exhibition hosted by the project: www.costumeagency.com
Sally E. Dean: The Somatic Costume Dressing Room: Attending through Touch & the Poetic
Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Design
The Somatic Costume Dressing Room is an artistic research practice and portal into material and sensorial re-connection - widening and high-lighting our intimate experiences of the world (Pallasmaa 2012).
As an online or live meeting place, often in home environments, Sally guides wearers through the transformative potential of wearing-dressing-making with simple materials. These haptic focused processes of embodying materiality become ´embodied conversations´ (Osmond 2020), through the somatic method of ´processual attention´ (Bacon 2019); attending to the non-verbal/verbal and the unstable assemblages (Deleuze 2006, Bennett 2009) of bodies (designers, performers, materials).
What if costumes are co-designed in the moment, from the wearer’s arising psycho-physical needs - such as rest, grief, or reconnection to the heart? Instead of costume being a visual effect to serve a theme/character within a performance, or a garment to sell, could it be a haptic-focused process - advocating embodiment, consciousness, and well-being?
When placed and applied to a performance context, dressing rooms, as liminal sites of ´entanglement´ (Barad 2007), along with attending to costumes´ touch, rupture the pre-defined roles of costume-designer-performer-audience. In this presentation, Sally will give examples from her recent midterm performance in progress, Give Them Wings & We Shall See Their Faces- reflecting further on how these roles are challenged artistically and politically. In particular, she will articulate the artistic techniques of designing and choreographing attention and begin to address questions that were raised by her midterm opponent, Dr. Rachel Hann: Is this work political? What is your relationship to the therapeutic? What is the distinction between somatic costume & somatic sceneography? In terms of the performance event, does touch extend to the atmospherics?
Sally E Dean (NO/UK/USA) is a PhD Research Fellow at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her artistic research investigates designing/choreographing attention through the touch of Somatic Costumes. Sally leads (2011-2022) the collaborative SMCP Project, co-designing Somatic Costumes that generate psychophysical awareness in wearers and immersive sensorial performances. She has been a professional artist and teacher for over 25 years throughout Europe, USA and Asia between the fields of costume design, dance and somatic practices. www.sallyedean.com / www.betwixtduo.com