I have been collaborating with this costume diva for over two decades. She has made costumes for Branch, The Yellow Wallpaper, Antigone’s Dream, Wonderland to name a few. She is a wild woman.
Now she is building my costume for Mammal.
Mammal is a “shape-shifting” dance in which the character is a pentimento: repeatedly under-drawn and over-painted aspects of male/female, human/animal qualities, movements, responses and perceptions. The dance is a cellular, poetic echolocation that viscerally connects male and female, human and non-human at the porous borderland where they intersect and blend.
The design r & d period for this one has been particularly strange and interesting, beginning with when it was called Beast. The costume ideas have morphed then morphed again and again. We think that we have it. Part of the challenge is that the dance is a growing, shifting, live thing – so that catching it in color and shape has been slippery.
I will be performing Mammal as a work-in-progress at the Body-Mind Centering Conference at Reed College in Portland, OR on July 25. If you are in the neighborhood, come and see!