Listening with costume: a material-discursive practice

This chapter is a dialogue between practice and theory and between human
and non-human companions about what listening with costume might imply.
Whereas hearing is the passive process of perceiving sound through our ears,
listening requires attention, understanding and interpretation. It is an active skill
that involves knowledge, memory and our imagination and it may call upon our
other senses. Moreover, listening is an action that we can cultivate in particular
ways when we collaborate with both humans and inanimate objects. Listening
with costume can change the concept of just wearing or using a costume if we
listen to its ‘inner voice’. Careful listening fosters a deeper involvement with the
material or costume which thereby takes on a greater role in the design and performance process. My quest is to speculate on how we, as costume designers in
collaboration with our colleagues in costume and performance-making situations,
can cultivate our listening cultures in ways that make us aware of how we listen.
Listening with costume is a material-discursive practice, a term used describe
how materiality and thought intertwine to produce meaning. Through the practice
of careful listening we can cultivate our lydhørhed (responsiveness and attentiveness)
towards both the material properties or qualities of the textile or costume
and the embodied experience of wearing the costume, without one subordinating
the other. In the TED talk ‘The Difference Between Hearing and Listening’, composer
Pauline Oliveros says that ‘listening is a mysterious process that is not the
same for everyone’ (Oliveros 2015). She emphasises the fact that listening is subjective
and that we never listen in the same way. This chapter approaches aspects
of what listening with costume might entail and puts forward the idea that how
we listen, and to whom or what, can change or challenge the way we collaborate
with both materials and performers.