Textiles, model making and choreography
Rehearsal of GoPlastic at the Lofft Theater, Leipzig
Alternative ways for dealing with material
It’s a sunny afternoon in March at the Lofft Theatre, located in the building complex of the former cotton-spinning mill in western Leipzig. A familiar face opens the door. I meet Alex, a fashion artist who is part of the artistic collective GoPlastic, a company of eight people from different creative professional backgrounds who experiment with contemporary dance, cineastics and fashion design. Few weeks earlier Alex told me a about how she is exploring material in fashion. Unlike architecture, performance is a crucial part of the curriculum in fashion design. Here, students learn how textile responds to (non)human encounters. Fashion designers are sensitized to the properties of material and how material can be performative. This is an approach I was eager to follow.
Accordingly, I am now accompanying three of the company for two afternoons – Cindy, a contemporary dancer, Susan, a dance educator and as mentioned Alex, a fashion designer. They are rehearsing their current project, which explores the topic of anger. After spending a year of research, they are experimenting with how to embody and express the emotion of anger through the use of bodies and materials. The focus is on the properties of the materials. The material actually determines the movement of the body.
Alex has various pieces of clothing and objects scattered around the performance space. The dancer chooses a material and begins to experiment with it. It is very stimulating to see how the materiality of her body interacts with the material. Depending on her movement, it looks like a symbiosis of movement, material and body. Cindy comments that it is a feedback loop between passive and active guidance of material and body. My eyes follow the tractability of the different textiles in relation to Cindy’s movement. Depending on what material Cindy in wearing, the music is turned on or off, as in some cases the material responds particularly with sound.
Alex, Cindy and Susan experimenting with material and the full body
In the center of the room lays a full-body suit made of neon green mesh stocking with light metal threads hanging from it. Cindy puts it on and searches for suitable music. As the dancer moves her body, she experiments with the metal threads, which gently touch the floor, creating a scratching sound. Alex asks Cindy to play with the threads and, in reference to the theme of anger, to pull them tighter as well. The neon fabric responds by tearing. However, it is interesting to note that the material does not always react in the same way. Sometimes you can see that the dancer needs all her strength to strip off the metal threads, you can even see a trembling of her muscles. It is very touching to see the expressed emotions of the dancer in relation to the material. This performance made me think of how I patiently glued the different layers of my ship together and how the MDF bent in response to my action. In contrast, the act of building a model is not (yet) considered a performance, but rather a means to an output. After Cindy is done with her performance, we reflect on what we perceived and, more importantly, what feelings were triggered. Alex says that every time the metal thread broke off, her rage rose – all the work she had put into making these clothes was destroyed (although it had been directed). The surface of the material conveys her working capacity, which one becomes much more aware of as the dancer interacts with the body and textile.
Cindy wearing a neon green mesh with light metal threads
We move on to the next “material station” in the space. There are a bunch of distorted, oversized stuffed animals with long tentacles that Alex designed a few years ago. Cindy has one of the giant toys on her neck and begins to slowly move her body in waves. It looks like she, the toy and the material are melting into one another. As Susan begins to put one toy after another on Cindy as she dances, the image of unity transforms. It now looks like Cindy is rather wearing the toys, and instead of being one, the objects become an additional surface on her skin. At one point, Cindy’s head is covered by the mass of toys. Her extremities and the tentacles of the toys become one again. Following this, Cindy describes that it felt warm to wear the material, but that it was not as heavy as she had imagined. The surface was smooth, and it had the effect of layering. This layering was also evident in the complexity of body parts and body levels Cindy was working with.
Cindy accompanied by giant toys
The last station is a black large man’s suit. The suit is static and maintains the shape of a body because Cindy previously treated the textile with glue. The suit looks a bit eerie with its empty body filling the clothing and the space. Cindy puts on the suit. The sound of the static textile is very present and Alex decides to turn off the music. She wants to listen to the sound of the material while Cindy dances. Her dance style is very different from the previous one. The movements are not fluid but rather static, adapting naturally to the character of the material. The piercing noise becomes louder and more aggressive as Cindy speeds up her movements. It is inspiring to see that no words are needed as the body moves to follow the dialogue between the dancer and the material. Both the locomotor material of the body and the language of the material are sufficient to express material literacy.
This approach encourages me to include performance in the architectural design process. Ellie, the model maker I shadowed, mentioned that her model building process follows a specific sequence and her body performs a choreography that she once practiced. What would change in the architectural design process if architects considered performance as a method? What if we discussed emotions and soft skills and experimented with our bodies? What if we acknowledged our rituals in relation to material? Could we reveal material literacy?
Static suit designed by Alexandra Börner