This is a sample of the design that Christine Joly de Lotbiniere is designing for Mammal, one of the dances in Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs.
Here is her latest note to me: “This is one of 12 panels for the skirt; each panel having a variation on a theme. I think the hand sewing of the black appliqués, though labor intensive, lends a very interesting quality to the pattern…. we just would not have achieved this with machine stitching them down. I used vintage threads throughout, some of them from the 1950’s and the quality of the thread is so superior to what we have today! You can decide to leave the hanging threads or to remove them. I believe they lend a fantastic “mammal” organic feeling.
I purchased leggings and will be overdyeing those, possibly painting into them as well. The gloves have been patterned so they are next up: extra length added to them and ombre dyed from black at the fingertips to nude at the top of the arms, I will be applying texture and pattern to those as well. They will have latex applied on the palm and fingers.”
Exciting! The journey of this dance has been intense. This is how I describe the dance: Mammal is a “shape-shifting” dance – a cellular, poetic echolocation that viscerally connects male and female, human and non-human at the porous borderland where they intersect and blend.
It feels like I have been invoking this dance for two years. In the process, I have experienced a re-wiring of my nervous system and a re-configuration of my body’s systems: fluid, bone, cells, fascia. It is as if my flesh had to be readied to receive the transmission.
For Christine, this has meant staying in the saddle as the dance bucks, shifts and morphs. But then, she is good at that, really, really good, which is why we have worked together for so long.
If you love dance, if you love theater, design, please help to support this audacious, ambitious project. We are nearing the end of our Indiegogo campaign, but not the end of our work, our inspiration, and our desire.