Material, Body and Movement

Atelier from fashion artist Alexandra Börner, Photo: Mara Trübenbach

Finding ways to look for material literacy outside of architecture

I reflect on my observations of an artistic collective of eight people from different creative professional backgrounds who experiment with contemporary dance, cineastics and fashion design. I turn to the study of performance to understand the material’s agency in disciplines outside of architecture. I don’t claim that this information should be incorporated into performance studies, but I try to borrow from such to apply to architecture. The performance Mind the Rage by GoPlastic Company was partly followed by me during rehearsals and had its premiere just last Friday at the Lofft Theatre in Leipzig. Once the performance is brought onto the stage (whatever that may be), a certain distance is created from the audience, who are more outside than inside the action. The artist, however, reveals the most intimate inside to the outside, which in this case is mediated by the material. On the one hand the material performs, on the other it has to function as costume/stage design. There is a shared knowledge of material in the performance production, which I use to bridge a three-stage observation: first the fashion designer and visual artist’s knowledge of the planning/design of the costumes and set, then the dancers’ experience of what it feels like to perform in the given materials, and finally my observation in the audience of the effect the material has visually and aurally on me as a spectator. The following paragraphs are excerpts from a text, which focuses mainly on the fashion designer Alexandra Börner and is based on observations of rehearsals during this year and an interview I conducted in October 2022.

WUK Theater Quartier in Halle (Saale), Photo: Mara Trübenbach

It’s a sunny autumn afternoon and the first run-through rehearsal begins. The audience stands outside an independent theatre, which will not be the final theatre for the performance, but currently serves as a residence for Go Plastic Company. Usually, you go into the foyer of the theatre building and wait for the show to begin, but this time it is different. A woman enters the room and begins with an introduction to what this evening is about: anger. She goes on to explain that one does not go to a performance to understand, but to feel. Ironically, tonight I want to understand how to feel attentively. The audience follows the instruction; each of them now forms a fist, first in the air, then against their own body (thigh) and finally against a surface around them. As I follow, I choose the floor beneath me and I notice the effect the surface has on my body. Unlike the fist in the air or against my body, there is something that reacts to the pressure I exert. This even multiplies my resistance. The surface, which is asphalt, feels cold and stings the lower palm of my fist. What is left when I let go of the fist is gravel and dirt on my skin, which I gently wipe off, but there is something else: anger coming from the hands over the arms near my chest that was not there before. I experience first-hand how my body movement/gestures in exchange with material, trigger my emotion. We enter the building and as we see four performers moving, breathing, and being restless, we are told that we always have two images in front of us in our minds, one that we see and one that evokes associations and memories, if not ours, then someone else’s, to whom we can be sensitive by empathising. With this information, the dancers begin to move and I ask myself: can architecture also be empathetic and trusting?

Rehearsal snapshot of the performance Mind the Rage by Go Plastic Company at the Lofft Theater in Leipzig, Photo: Mara Trübenbach

As a fashion designer, you learn in your studies to create mood boards on a certain topic, for instance the theme “lion”, explains Alexandra Börner, the costume and set designer of the performance. With the lion in mind, she starts collecting everything that somehow has to do with the lion and then creates chains of associations. Alex continues, and as she lists her associations (ranging from the colour orange-red to the cigarette pack that fell out of her father’s pocket during a fight), she chooses not only objects but also situations that are associated with a certain feeling, and I realise that in architecture we lack exactly this ability to express memories. The object that is then associated with that certain moment is the starting point to tell a story. She would describe herself as a storyteller who creates ideas of the human being through reassembly.

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