The Body as the Matter of Costume: a Phenomenological Practice

Proposing the notion of the designer’s own ‘mind-full’ body as critical to a costume-practice-led methodology of performance-making, this chapter draws on movement and materials workshops that I have adopted and devised to expand costume practice, research and pedagogy since 2004. Such practices are considered via perception and the Merleau-Pontian philosophy of the body, thus framing costume here as phenomenological. While I have deployed parts of this research into the founding of the MA Costume Design for Performance at London College of Fashion (LCF) in 2006, other workshops scrutinised here were devised for invited participants who were practitioners, researchers and educators. They form part of a long-term research aim to re-define costume as agent and instigator in making performance. Curriculum development and the research into the agency of costume in performance are intertwined, and are both initially informed by three research projects. Firstly, the AHRB funded Designs for the Performer exhibition (2002 -2005) questioned the established exclusion zones and hierarchies of traditional design practice. Secondly, the cross-institutional, international and devised production of LES/Forest (2005) proposed alternative processes to those of mainstream practice. Thirdly, my participation in the École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq’s Laboratoire d'Étude du Mouvement (L.E.M.) in 2005 saw a new emphasis upon the engagement of participants’ bodily movement through material interaction. More crucially, these initiated an on-going practice of devising material-movement workshops as a radical departure from traditional designing that is the subject of this chapter.