#101 - You are Well-Suited For You
A second skin. That was how a dancer in Instruments of Movement described moving in the Soundsuits designed by Nick Cave and recently on display at the Chicago Cultural Center.
After performing out of costume in pieces that mixed hip-hop militancy with modern-dance expressivity to emphasize virtuosic bodily control and liberating self-display, Instruments of Movement donned Nick Cave's Soundsuits and became something else, something not quite human anymore, yet deeply alive, sentient, and communicative -- something utterly human.
These suits -- amalgams of African shamanic clothing, Mardi Gras costumes, Sesame Street puppetry, and patchwork quilt folkways -- were meant to be worn, not just looked at in a museum display.
Such is the power of the mask. When donned, it becomes a hideout, a keyhole, a dark passageway between the everyday and the uncanny.
As the dancers moved, their costumes swished and whispered. Layers of fiber interacted with gravity, as one dancer explained, to create a new awareness of time and space, a new sense of muscle and movement.
Sex was unmade and new erotics unleashed in the de-gendering of the dancers within their suits of sound. The wall between self and other became visible -- permeable, malleable -- when the dancers joined arms and legs, their costumes blending into a giant, friendly beast of cotton, sequins, felt, buttons, and feathers. A thread of trust held the dancers together as they lost themselves to their second skins -- especially the two Soundsuiters on stilts who had to lean into each other for balance.
The Soundsuits took on a life of their own -- a life they paradoxically could only live when inhabited by the dancers.
As Instruments of Movement performed, the mirror-like space between the you inside and the you outside appeared in its disappearance. Its boundaries were marked only by wire, Afghan wool, and found fabric.
04 August 06