Phenomenological costume-making: an embodied approach to movement and materiality in the making of performance wearables

This practice-led research examines the creative agency of costume through a phenomenological framework that defines the relationship between the designer’s body and materials within processes devised through this PhD. While scholarship on costume materiality and creative practice is gaining ground, by leading this research through a sustained and iterative examination of the development of my own embodied costume design and making processes, an original approach to costume creation as movement practice is developed. This entails a constructing of costume as elemental, iterative, and abstract, rather than its representational, text and character-centred form.

Questioning how costume might be understood as valuable creative agent within performance emerges from my own experience as costume design practitioner for both conventional theatre and expanded approaches to performance making. As traditional costume design procedures embedded in hierarchies of performance practice do not engage with the costume maker’s own bodily movement, this analysis provides a phenomenology-led methodology that positions the costume designer as the initiator in processes of performance making. This research therefore extends the theorisation of costume as open-ended and collaborative process, which can engender performance within the workshop space and positions costume as integral to the development of movement and sense making at the core of performance.

Such embodied costume design process is framed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body-in-the-world (1945, 1964a) and the first-person experience of the phenomenon as relational to self, materials and others. In the devising of MovementWearable Making laboratoire, this research builds on Jacques Lecoq’s Laboratoire d’Étude du Mouvement framed through phenomenology as site for co-creation with and through costume materiality.

The experiential movement-led methodology that results from this PhD advances understandings of the relationship between costume and performance by examining the unfolding of phenomenological costume-making processes and materiality as a mutual and co-creative process. Situated in the scholarly development of interdisciplinary approaches to costume, movement and performance, this research also contributes more broadly to phenomenology-led, experience-led and practice-led research methodologies beyond performance. This research could be applied within other disciplines that employed embodied research methods.