In the summer of 2023, Virginia Grise approached me to discuss joining the creative team for Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind. This second piece in our collection of works speaks to our commitment to a unique evolution of collaborative design and creative research. Working with Virginia through a multi-year collaboration allows me to continue my investigation of a decolonial process of costume design and making that blends traditional creative practices, rigorous research, and experiential and sensory exploration.
The seeds for the all-in-one theatrical concert and concept album, were planted over a decade ago when Virginia first had the desire to adapt the novel, Their Dogs Came with Them, for the stage. This first adaptation had its premiere in 2018 at a maximum security prison in Goodyear, Arizona. As the piece has continued to evolve, collaborators were brought into the work - music director Martha Gonzalez, director Kendra Ware, and scenic designer Tanya Orellana. During the COVID19 pandemic, the work focused on music and its driving narrative force within the piece. The concert, featuring songs and spoken word adapted from the novel, is the culmination of this collaborative work.
The prospect of engaging in a work that is a decade in the making and had an established collection of long term collaborators felt daunting. The script I was given at the time was only three pages long, and I had never read the novel. However, having come off our last project together, Tremble Staves, Vicki felt that my intuitive process and practice was the correct fit for the piece. What I bring to my work as a maker and designer: the dramaturgy, the reverence for personal narrative and labor, is the gift I was invited to bring to the piece. Thus began a year-long process of inquiry, discovery, and engagement with the work.
I attended several workshops of the production, at Cornell University and Emerson Los Angeles, where I created intuitive drawings of the performers while watching the rehearsals. I interviewed the three women who embody the characters on stage, Martha Gonzalez, Tylana Renga Enomoto, and Lulu Matute, to find strands that connected their lives to the experience of performing this piece. I wrote about the work in my sketch book, considering how my own lived experience collided with this work. Over the coming months I read the novel and I drew intuitively while listening to the album on repeat. I conducted visual and historical research about the LA freeways, Boyle Heights, and other themes from the novel like displacement, community, and resilience. This work became refined through a practice of intuitive digital collaging, creating mood boards, sketching, and having conversations with the director, playwright, and other designers. The costume renderings seen below are a result of this process.
For Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind, the design process continued as I custom designed fabrics, swatched materials, and made intuitive decisions as I worked on the mannequin. I am, by nature and training, a laborer. Each piece in the final costumes was custom made or altered by me. Building, fitting, and finishing clothing is the final step in my design process.The completed costumes are a collaboration between myself, performer, and the narrative. Martha Gonzalez's costume features fabric that was designed and printed based on my early intuitive drawing exercises. The skirt was ombre dyed to create an invisible transition from red and black feathers into the unspoiled natural white fibers of the bodice. The ombre dyed effect is visible on all three costumes and speaks to the connectedness of each woman to the earth and to each other. Hand applied feathers are featured on both Martha's and Tylana Enomoto's costume in reference to the themes of flight in the text and to the voladores, dancers from several regions of Mexico who descend a thirty meter pole by suspending themselves from rope and slowly spinning to the ground.
