ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, the interest in wearables as intermediary devices in mediatized performance has become notable in artistic explorations and research inquiry in the sonic arts and dance fields alike. Moreover, dress/costume is becoming more studied in academic contexts for the multifaceted and significant role it can play in performance. The latter is evidenced in newly emerging journals that raise questions about the criticality of costume to making performance, for example, the biannual Studies in Costume and Performance 1 which debuted in 2017, and the special issue of Scene on “Critical Costume” (2014). 2 The body of practice-based research presented in this chapter is situated, where these paths converge. It investigates the performative and affective potentials of sounding garments/accessories—“choreosonic” wearables—as bodily extensions in interactive dance. Choreosonic is a term that implicates both movement (choreo) and sound (sonic). According to Stan Wijnans (2009, 16), who describes herself as a choreosonic artist, this term was coined during a research project between herself and Sarah Rubidge, Professor in Choreography and New Media, at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam (the Netherlands) in 2006. I have adopted and adapted the term for my research into the generation of movement and sound that links wearables and the act of wearing to an amplificatory, multisensorial (tactile, aural, visual) and perceptual performance technique for the dancer, enabling a new collaborative movement-sounding or choreosonic creativity. Moreover, the wearable, engaged in this way—specifically as musical material or rather quiescent medium of sound—to be activated by the dancer-wearer inside the immersive performance space, adopts a new collaborative and dynamic role in the process of making dance that, crucially, links to a notion of a choreography that is wearable, distributed and audible.