Costume-based scenographer and researcher Donatella Barbieri (PhD) is motivated by the radicality of costume, transformative agent in new approaches to performance and wider sociocultural contexts. Her Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture and the Body was awarded PQ19 Best Performance Design & Scenography Publication Award and shortlisted for the Society of Theatre Research Book award, 2018. Her costume-based practice has been performed and displayed in museums and cultural sites internationally. Her long association with PQ includes the curation of PQ07 Scenofest costume workshops and the co-production of LES /Forest performance with Jana Zborilova (DAMU), the devised performance Old into New for PQ 11, Wearing Space at PQ15 and Material Interactions at PQ19, included in the on-line Critical Costume 2020: Costume Agency exhibition. The experimental MA Costume Design for performance which she founded and teaches on at LCF, has produced several ground-breaking costume-centred designers and performance-makers.

 

Production Title: Material Interactions

 

Role: Concept development, maker, producer

 

Production Response

The twenty-minute performance in the centre of the Industrial Palace at PQ19, attended by an audience of about 200, was not only the culmination of a two-day workshop held at DAMU with twenty participants, who were designers, performers, directors, researchers and writers. It was also for the members of the Wearing Space Collective, the result of months of preparation in the UK. In various sites between Lime Grove and Trinity Laban Conservatoire, we shifted constantly between being makers and movers, guided only by the performativity of matter, exploring the performativity of matter through our movement and vice versa. This reciprocal relationship with performance matter emerges from the shared desire to explore a non-binary, non-hierarchical relationship with the materiality, inviting an engagement with the ecoscenographic, scenographic and costume entanglements with new materialism (Bennett 2010; Beer 2021; McKinney 2015; Barbieri and Crawley 2019), which are explored through Laboratoire d’Etude du Movement methodologies (Barbieri 2006, 2007, 2012, 2021).

 

Year: 2019

 'Representation of dance artist Mary Kate Connelly and two participants' improvisations with dynamic wearable objects during the Material Interactions result-driven workshops, in London and Prague'.

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Location/Venue: Industrial Palace, Prague

 

Credits

Author and company: Wearing Space Collective co-creators are Donatella Barbieri (concept development and production), Mary Kate Connolly (movement artist), Giulia Pecorari (costume artist), Pinar Gercek (costume and sound artist)

Photograph composites: Carol Wyss