Greenham: Memory, Costume and Activism in site-responsive performance

Greenham was a site-specific performance made by Ceschi + Lane in 2019. The performance was situated on the site of a former RAF and American Army base in the English countryside, which is now common land. It was the site of Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp, set up in 1981 to protest against the British government allowing American cruise missiles to be stored there, the protest camp remained for 19 years. In response to the scarred landscape of the post-Cold War dereliction and the contested history of Greenham Common, we created costumes that embodied imaginative and provocative ideas around landscape and memory, the body and its environment and women’s relationship to power. These costumes acted as critical intervention and commentary in a public space, developing a wider discussion around costume’s agency and costume as carrier of meaning in public spaces and as part of site-responsive performance practice.

Ceschi + Lane develop performances through a costume-led methodology developing the relationship between the body as scenography to direct the choreography.
This talk will reflect upon our working process for Greenham presenting images and short films from the project. It will examine the choreographic role of costume in relation to the ecology of a landscape, and its embedded physical and cultural memories, asking how costume can give materiality to memory and become a critical commentary in the context of a contested landscape and how site-specific performances develop dramaturgical responses?