Design-in-Motion: Sculpting Choreosonic Wearables

Oskar Schlemmer’s constraining costume concepts and wearable objects for the theatre of the Bauhaus in the 1920s were central to his movement research. His aim was to limit movement through design intervention to more precisely hone in on the abstract mathematics of lines and geometries created by the mediated body in space. In The Triadic Ballet (premiered 1922) for example, he analysed the restricted movements of the performing body in relation to costume’s physical material characteristics as geometrical form located on the body. While his later stage-space-architecture movement pieces (1927-1929), such as Stick Dance, scrutinised the motion of performers’ bodies as they engaged with abstract material forms in space. Altering physical movement was for Schlemmer not the only intention; he also explored the relationship of the dynamic body to the making of sound, appropriating materials with inherent percussive characteristics such as glass as new instruments of sounding [Trimingham 2011, 146]. This visual essay, concerns the use of choreosonic wearables in the devising process and explores wearable movement-sounding in interactive performance contexts. It reveals how Schlemmer’s methodologies have inspired design-in-motion explorations, both as wearable movement initiators and movement sonification systems that can stretch aspects of movement improvisation.