Conversation costume

The centre of the research ‘Conversation Costume’ was an investigation of co-creational costume process. An important starting point for the research was verbal and non-verbal conversations. One aspect of the conversation was the practice of listening, for example, sensing the costume ‘things’, ourselves, each other, and the space as costume-body-space-improvisations. Another aspect of the conversations was daily ‘dialogues’ where we, for example, shared our different experiences, perspectives, including discussing, and planning the next explorations.

In the rehearsal process, we explored ways of entangling with the costume ‘things’ and with the space by teeing the costume ‘things’ together, wearing and moving with or being moved by them individually and collaboratively. Or said in other words, the costume ‘things’ acted as agential vehicles for our co-creational conversational (verbal and non-verbal) process and led us to build a common vocabulary.

My ambition was not to produce a work-in-process-performance but to investigate co-creational-work-in-process-potentials-or-fabulations. Daring to continue the process after finding one potential performance format (the work-in-progress-participatory-showing) was a way of producing other potentials or fabulations. In two weeks, we managed to produce (among many other things) two quite different but connected performance potential which I hadn’t imagined beforehand.