Alarming the heart: Costume as performative body-object-event

Scene ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorita Hannah
Keyword(s):  
Costume Design ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Human History ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Action Verb ◽  
Anais Nin ◽  
Daily Experiences

The word ‘costume’, like ‘design’, connotes both artefact (noun) and action (verb), highlighting costume design as an active practice and activating object, capable of dynamically intervening between the body and space. This article looks to the affective and effective impact elicited by highly performative quotidian garments outside the theatre and how, linked to ancient mythology, human history and current sociopolitical events, they have been critically adopted for live performance. Focusing on the universally beguiling red dress, referred to by Anaïs Nin as capable of ‘alarming the heart with the violent gong of catastrophe’, the costume is discussed as a spatial body-object, disrupting and charging social environments to reveal their ‘evental’ nature: calling up monumental moments, productive aesthetic encounters and multiple daily experiences. This reiterates the complexity of our contemporary condition, in which we cannot separate the theatrical from the sociopolitical: something Jon McKenzie maintains could be understood through the critical tool of ‘performance design’ – a constructive means of drawing upon and critiquing the proliferation of manifold events played out in the new century. Referencing my own research-informed practice (created and often articulated in collaboration with choreographer/dancer, Carol Brown), this article will theorize costumes as spatial body-objects as well as active and activating agents that are integral to complex spatiotemporal webs, particularly in relation to our highly mediated reality.

Embodied interactions: Towards an exploration of the expressive and narrative potential of performance costume through wearable technologies

Scene ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Pantouvaki
Keyword(s):  
Smart Materials ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
The Body ◽  
Wearable Electronics ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Wearable Technologies ◽  
Opening Ceremony ◽  
Interactive Interfaces ◽  
Specific Fragment

The use of smart materials and wearable electronics has rapidly expanded in the field of fashion, introducing new interactive qualities of surfaces, materials and garments. In fashion garments, the performative environment functions as an abstract site for experimentation, expression and communication of the wearer through the intelligent garment. However, there is still limited use of embodied technologies in the field of performance costume for text-based and music-based performance, with the exception of integrated lighting technologies, currently broadly used in musical performance. This article provides a critical review of specific examples of technology-led garments in live performance, and uses a specific fragment from the Athens 2004 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony as a case study to highlight how technologies embedded in costume can create interactive interfaces between the body of the performer and the environment – the space, the other performers, the audience – becoming a transmitter and receiver of emotions, experiences and meanings in innovative ways. By analysing this case, as well as by posing questions, this article aims at generating a discourse on the expressive and narrative potential of the use of intelligent materials and embodied technologies within the creative practice of costume design.

scholarly journals Digital costume sketching through embodied awareness

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsi Manninen
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Method ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
The Body ◽  
Digital Medium ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Methodological Choices ◽  
Method Approach ◽  
Initial Results

This article presents a method for costume design, where empathy and embodiment are used as methodological choices by the designer in the character-creation process. In creating references for the sketching process, costume designers combine photos in which they portray themselves as the character that they imagine. These role-selfies, taken with a handheld tablet, work as starting points for the sketching procedure. The material for the present study is collected from MA costume design students who participated in digital character-creation courses at Aalto University, in Helsinki, Finland, and is a part of doctoral research by the author. The data are collected through a mixed-method approach and is organized as a case study investigating the experiences of using the body as a source for costume design. The research question in this study is as follows: does an awareness of one’s own body facilitate the sketching process? The initial results show that the research participants consider the method useful because it enables them to experience a stronger bodily connection with the digital medium, the imagined design and the emerging character in the costume sketching process. Hence, the findings of this study can be used to develop design and teaching practices not only in the field of costume design but also in other design processes involving character creation.

scholarly journals Visual body size adaptation and estimation of tactile distance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regine Zopf ◽  
Veronika Kosourikhina ◽  
Kevin R. Brooks ◽  
Vince Polito ◽  
Ian Stephen
Keyword(s):  
Body Size ◽  
Adaptation Effect ◽  
The Body ◽  
Size Perception ◽  
Visual Adaptation ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Body Images ◽  
Tactile Stimuli ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Adaptation Effects

Estimating the size of bodies is crucial for interactions with physical and social environments. Body size perception is malleable and can be altered using visual adaptation paradigms. However, it is unclear whether such visual adaptation effects also transfer to other modalities and influence, for example, the perception of tactile distances. In this study we employed a visual adaptation paradigm. Participants were exposed to images of expanded or contracted versions of self- or other-identity bodies. Before and after this adaptation they were asked to manipulate the width of body images to appear as “normal” as possible. We replicated an effect of visual adaptation, such that the body size selected as most “normal” was larger after exposure to expanded and thinner after exposure to contracted adaptation stimuli. In contrast, we did not find evidence that this adaptation effect transfers to distance estimates for paired tactile stimuli delivered to the abdomen. A Bayesian analysis showed that our data provide moderate evidence that there is no effect of visual body size adaptation on the estimation of spatial parameters in a tactile task. This suggests that visual body size adaptation effects do not transfer to somatosensory body size representations.

Epigenetics and the Biocitizen

2018 ◽  
pp. 70-92
Author(s):  
Kelly E. Happe
Keyword(s):  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Health Sciences ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Environments

Epigenetics, it is claimed, has opened the door to considering the ways that human bodies undergo environmentally-induced change and more radical still, how those changes can be inherited. Researchers are especially interested in whether epigenetics can explain how physical and social environments influence health outcomes, including those understood to be racially based. The turn to epigenetics as a more compelling, actionable type of evidence of racism over and against what is produced by other health sciences rests on a number of assumptions about the body—including its temporality and embodied becoming—thereby necessitating an elaboration of what we mean by the “bio” of biocitizenship. This chapter argues that epigenetics’ method for constituting evidence and translating it into action enacts a biologistic and deterministic racialism, one animated by a materialism more likely to sabotage than enable biocitizenship and its claims for redress.

Threshold

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuele Castrucci
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Basic Material ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mind

The human mind has phased out its traditional anchorage in a natural biological basis (the «reasons of the body» which even Spinoza’s Ethics could count on) – an anchorage that had determined, for at least two millennia, historically familiar forms of culture and civilisation. Increasingly emphasising its intellectual disembodiment, it has come to the point of establishing in a completely artificial way the normative conditions of social behaviour and the very ontological collocation of human beings in general. If in the past ‘God’ was the name that mythopoietic activity had assigned to the world’s overall moral order, which was reflected onto human behaviour, now the progressive freeing of the mind – by way of the intellectualisation of life and technology – from the natural normativity which was previously its basic material reference opens up unforeseen vistas of power. Freedom of the intellect demands (or so one believes) the full artificiality of the normative human order in the form of an artificial logos, and precisely qua artificial, omnipotent. The technological icon of logos (which postmodern dispersion undermines only superficially) definitively unseats the traditional normative, sovereign ‘God’ of human history as he has been known till now. Our West has been irreversibly marked by this process, whose results are as devastating as they are inevitable. The decline predicted a century ago by old Spengler is here served on a platter....

Liveness and Mediatization

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-126
Author(s):  
Tereza Havelková
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Singing Voice ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Sound Theory ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Louis Andriessen ◽  
Film Sound

Chapter 3 approaches liveness as an effect of immediacy. It analyzes how hypermedial opera constructs an opposition between live performance and that which is “mediatized,” that is, generated or reproduced by media technology. Relying, among others, on film sound theory, the chapter shows how the effect of liveness becomes a function of a particular relationship between sound and its source, and especially voice and body. Where some scholars have played up the discrepancy between the voice heard and the body seen in opera, this chapter is attentive to how an apparent unity of voice and body is maintained within the context of hypermediacy. With the help of Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer, the chapter suggests that an alignment of liveness with femininity and body-voice unity subverts some of the critical claims that have been made with respect to both live performance and the embodied singing voice.

Queer Dance

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Wide Range

Queer Dance argues that dance has a particular charge in the larger field of queer activism and study because it emphasizes and offers language for how public, physical action can be a force of social change. It considers how queer dance has political potential and how it could productively challenge more conservative dance forms, both in terms of making meaning and in terms of institutional practices. Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project—book, website, and live performance series—to ask: “What does dancing queerly challenge us toward?” The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online, stage a wide range of genders and sexualities as a way to challenge and destabilize social norms. Queer dance is a coalitional project, a gathering that works across LGBTQ identities and in concert with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial artmaking, activism, and scholarship. The book engages with dance-making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and a host of other fields, always asking how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. Might the slide of a hand across a hipbone be just as much an act of coming out as an announcement offered in words? How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might be revealed about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?

scholarly journals A study on somatotype characteristics affect to design correlation coefficient for Vietnam women’s basic block by 3D V- Stitcher

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-75
Author(s):  
Hien Thi Mong Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Factor Analysis ◽  
Applied Research ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
Simulation Software ◽  
The Body ◽  
Basic Block ◽  
Design Basis ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Common Group ◽  
Spss Software

This paper presents the results of applied research and classification to design Vietnam women’s basic block by 3 D- V- Stitcher software. The study was conducted on 171 women aged 18-24. The study results were divided into 6 groups of the body from the analysis of data body’s measurement for factor analysis, discriminant analysis and ANOVA test on SPSS software. On the table measurement, author calculated common group for 6 groups that will be used to design basis block. This block simulated for 6 different groups to analyze errors which appear on the costumes. Through that find ways adjusting to fit. The results of study basic block to fit for various somatotypes were evaluated through simulation software by the display of different colors on the tension chart, pressure chart. Beside that the results were evaluated through sample teaching. The results of this evaluation were tested reliability by Cronbach's Alpha terms. These results service teaching costume design.

Perceptive Fragility: Movement and porcelain

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Summerlin
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
The Creation

This visual essay focuses on the perception of fragility through the costume design and making process and subsequent creative interaction with performers, central to the creation of a piece of choreographed contemporary dance. Working with porcelain clay as wearable material, examples of emerging methodologies for researching costume are demonstrated. Through this practice its position as the governing element to the piece is explored as costume becomes the ‘text’ determining the choreography. Can the costume shape the physical and emotional responses, as its resistant, yet fragile form dictates the movement and senses of the body?

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