Performer: Sue Swallow Designer: Shivani Kokkonda Photographer: Valeria Torresan
Direction by Peta Lily Project Leadership by Donatella Barbieri for MA costume LCF
#movement #costume #costumedesign #physicaltheatre #magic #performance

In January (2020) I led seventeen intensive 1-2-1 workshops as part of the Costume Design for Performance MA at the London College of Fashion, led by international designer Agnes Treplin.

Each January, 17 new design students are invited to design for a radical re-telling of a text (in previous years: The Government Inspector, Woycek, Mr Broucek’s Trip to the Moon, Caucasian Chalk Circle and Ubu Roi) – this year, Englebert Humperdinck’s Opera Hansel and Gretel. The design students are coached in this module by the remarkable Donatella Barbieri (author of the wonderfully readable and insightful ‘Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture and the Body’).

Donatella Barbieri coaches the students to push the boundaries of design, to create costumes which transform; to employ materials in such a way that there can be a creative dialogue between performer and costume. The result is an imaginative dreamspace, a heightened reality. 
 
Peter Brook said that with Opera, performers enter a heightened reality due to the music. The same applies here with these costumes. The performers who participate in the workshops leave the sessions having had a vivid imaginative and emotional experience. They also gain an expanded awareness of the possibilities of creative costume. Donatella holds a rigorous and nurturing dialogue with each design student, inviting and entraining them to expand their horizons, their way of thinking, to explore a range of inspirations, to weigh and realise the potentials of textiles and other materials, to think and feel into the metaphors of their concepts and their materials, to explore their impulses and interrogate and push further as they envisage a full, innovative costume design for the text and make a single costume for one character from the text. I call this work #costumeembodiment.
 
The costumes Donatella guides the students to create not only serve each student's original vision (and of course serve the character) but also serve the chosen character’s narrative journey and existential predicament.

These costume creations transform ... twice, maybe three times!

Each costume is a playground whose terrain shifts and provokes and leads the performer to make connections with powerful themes of human and material existence.
 
And I get to facilitate this journey – I use my experience of Butoh, Commedia, comedy, Opera, mime, physical theatre, and theatre making to guide each performer to immerse into the possibilities of the costume and discover how a character can be realised in full depth and vigour and complexity from an experiential process.

At the start of each session, I check in with the designer and the potential of their creation. (I ask each designer to prepare in advance a story board, but also, Donatella and I brief them in advance to let go of all their plans and projected outcomes). It is beautiful after the sessions to see the designers bedazzled by the unexpected richness in terms of atmosphere, emotion, shape and narrative they have seen unfold in the room.

​I speak with the performers and ask them what connection they might have with the character and their predicament. First the performer is given free range to warm their body into its new shape(s), then I offer suggestions and also encourage the discoveries of the moment, the impulses arising from play, from the interaction between human and material.  
 
Al the end of the workshop days, my dreams are more vivid - fuelled by the experience.

At the end of each year the students of the Costume Design for Performance MA go on to create a costume inspired by a character or theme in a text of their own choosing. I have directed pieces for this graduating showcase for four consecutive years - you can see the work in the students in their November 2019 show called  Hidden Stories here. 

The journey towards the May 13 showing continues. 

I've just done the seventh rewrite of the original 1999 show, Topless*. 

New jokes have been added. Old ones upgraded or snipped off and left to curl on the cutting room floor. A keen eye has been put to the themes. Changes made to the songs.

I've written (with the invaluable help of my 'outside eyes' including producer Sharon Burrell) a brief bit at the top of the show to ready the audience to travel with me, to contextualise a script written 20 years ago.

My outside eyes are all women younger than me - they tell me how many of the issues in the show: identity, body image, autonomy versus relationship speak to them now. Hooray, the work is still relevant!  Boo, much of the muddle is still going strong...

Something about the date for the first work-in-progress  run has been nudging at me.
​
I finally go and look something up - oh, it's the anniversary of my Mother's death.  I don't like to be sentimental or portentous (neither did my Mum), but Mum (and her death) is/are in the show. There's other more fun stuff, too, I promise! Mum loved live theatre and lounge songs so might I think of it as a tribute she would appreciate? 

​

​Marking moments, marking changes, marking time? Moving forward and back. 

I am also currently reviewing Mad Men on netflix. Don Draper was pretty much my father's age. I just saw the Cuban Missile Crisis episode - an interesting resonance with the current 'major, major' stuff going on right now. It was interesting seeing all the characters weighing up their pasts and simply carrying on. May we all look back on this as an interesting moment in time. 

Back in 1996 there were some events that took my life right off-track. I didn't like it at all at the time, but I found after a few years had passed what a fantastic benefit it was to have been thrown a few existential curveballs. 

* Topless went to Edinburgh 1999 with the racy byline : 'a show about life and death and love and hate and sex and sticking plaster and breasts.' And was described this way by the press:

a macabre comic style...her accounts of failed relationships, low self-esteem, and her brush with breast cancer...are both hilarious in their frankness and moving. ..with her consistently high energy and warm, engaging stage presence, Peta Lily captures and maintains the attention of her audience throughout. Total Theatre
 a talented comic, she takes the departure of her husband and the illness and death of her mother and turns them into something which is not just entertaining, but is even funny  Edinburgh Evening News
a refreshingly comic, intelligent and informative exploration of the turbulent events in one woman's life crisis...consistently funny...Lily recounts her experiences with an incisive and inventive wit...guiding her audience away from unnecessary sentiment but not losing a sense of poignancy The Scotsman
instead of erotica, Lily gives her audience something far more outrageous and personal...told with consistent humour. Lily has lightness of touch, instinctive wit ...one of those rubber faces...and a silky singing voice. Lily manages...to keep them laughing right up to the end. The Stage
Do see her perform her uniformly funny, yet unabashedly realistic play about ageing, breasts, cancer, sex, music, movies, life and death. Totally HK (Hong Kong)

How would you feel if you were handed a transcript of words you said twenty years ago and had to speak them aloud, in public?

I am about to re-tell some awkward truths. Re-open a few old wounds.

Currently preparing for a first raw run of autobiographical show Topless - a show which opened at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre and played the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1999. Fitting slightly differently into the same dress is one palpable reminder of things changed since then. Cutting the cigarette smoked onstage is another.

Even more strange is revisiting a tone of voice I can hardly recognise. Sentiments and syntax reveal a different mindset.

Content-wise I am revisiting a time when I felt disoriented, helpless, lost.

Given recent world events we all now feel disoriented, helpless and lost.

​Doubt has always been a big part of my process (who knows whether it's a vital part or simply an annoying side-affect). One commits to a performance date. Progression towards that date moves  through spikes of fear, occasional elation and regret. (I even lost my voice on the run-up to the very first performance - nods to Freud and Louise Hay).

Back then it was the transgression of revelation which woke me in the middle of the night. This time the discomfort is different.

Topless was written in the present tense. ​I am having to mouth thoughts and attitudes on which I have since closed a door. 

In the making of recent show Chastity Belt I embraced Artemis. 

'I am not who I used
to be. I am not used.
I am not touched.
I no longer burn scorch smoulder with fire -
like an angel
-or a bathroom sponge-
I am the opposite
of desire.'
 
Topless recalls duvet days of bison grass vodka, the euphoria of pre-op medication and kitchen sex -  it's a little scary remembering the power of the libido and having to embody it again.

This is where it started.
During 1996 and 1997, friends kept saying 'you should make a show out of this'. 

In 1999, I made that show. I asked a friend 'what's a funny title for a show about breast cancer?' and, experienced improviser as he is, he immediately said: Topless.

1996/7 were the years when I racked up 5 of the things often listed as 'the most stressful life events'. (I am ashamed to note, that, compared to the fates of so many in the world right now it was a bunch of nothing, but tell that to the subjective nervous system). 

Topless is not only about breast cancer it was also about divorce, upheaval, heartbreak and getting things off one's (my) chest, but ultimately (I only discovered through the process of writing it), it was about facing changes and the attendant necessity to renegotiate a sense of identity.  The show made its debut at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre (and subsequently toured to Greece, Hong Kong and Australia).

On opening night I had no expectations as to its appeal. I had made the show as funny as I could (with a couple of moments where pathos was allowed to rub through). I thought women might appreciate the show but was surprised in the bar afterwards to hear men engaging with it - one of them put it like this: 'everyone has had to deal with illness and death, or fears having to deal with it.' 

Soon people began to ask, 'what's next?'. I joked:  'It's going to be a trilogy'. 

In 2002, I made Midriff. About mid-life, family, loss, decisions, courage and cowardice. And theatre - the 'flesh and blood' as my mother used to call it.

It then took until 2011 for enough life to have been lived (including a 6 year period when I didn't perform at all) and enough thoughts to have been gathered for a third 'chapter': a show called Chastity Belt.

​This January I sat at my dining / work table with producer Sharon Burrell and did a read through of the shows asking ourselves how to approach a possible durational event where the pieces would be performed one after the other. 20 years of a life (with two intervals). 

We noticed, as I read, some of the sharp differences between the larger world then and now. At the personal level, I found myself facing  the vivid doubt whether this proposed project was, in any conceivable way, wise.

It was strange and little alarming to feel the rhythms and attack of Topless in my mouth. Certain passages shocked me; 'Wow, so I actually said that?' Someone once described Topless as 'raw and emotional' - I failed to see it at the time. Then there were details - details of my own lived life 'important' enough to have made it into a show text - which had evaporated completely from my memory, but were here, still, suspended in the strange aspic of a theatre script.

Midriff wrestled with choices and quibbled with chance and paid homage to few losses: a mother, a brother and a person who (I realised, in retrospect) provided the concrete start point for my theatre making career. But during the read-through, I saw how Midriff pulled together diverse threads of my life at that point. Threads which got slowly stretched and then fairly desperately unravelled in the six years that followed (see Invocation - a show which is chronologically but not anatomically implicated). It was after Midriff, in 2002, that I turned my back on self-indulgent foolishness in pursuit of future financial security (hold, hold your gales of laughter). By 2008, I had reached a flavourless and dusty place I affectionately call 'creative death'. I was working in a field where people are exhorted to 'find their passion' to take them to the next level. I began to feel uncomfortable but brushed the feeling off - after all, the recipie to success and fulfilment is 'getting outside of the comfort zone', isn't it?!

Then one day I looked down and noticed I was shuffling (dynamically shuffling, mind you) along with my tattered passion around my ankles. 

I was compelled to make Topless, despite my terror of how it would be received or what it would reveal about me. Theatre making is a compulsion (or so I believe). Autobiographical work will always have to justify itself against self-indulgence and rightfully so. But having visited a place where no compulsion was pushing at my back, I cannot help but champion the practice of honouring creative nudges and risking to express and examine and explore and tell stories and re-weave persistent themes. 

In 2011, Chastity Belt began as another joke - making light of my current personal situation. Ridiculously, and unexpectedly, it became a joyful and exuberant embracing of my single, celibate status - think Artemis, think autonomy! In the third anatomical chapter, I found a new place to stand. And I like to think I brought a little extra business to organic lemon growers. 

Midriff leaflet (above)
Photo: Graham Fudger. Design: Jamie Zubairi  (note clever repurposing of the flowers from the Topless shoot)