Tremble Staves

In the Summer of 2023, Virginia Grise approached me about collaborating with her on the site-responsive adaptation of Raven Chacon's Tremble Staves. While the piece had its original opening in San Francisco, the second iteration would make its premier on the shore of the Colorado River on the grounds of Laguna Gloria. Virginia would be writing and performing the role of the Narrator, with completely new text inspired by the land, and our home: Texas. I was asked to design and fabricate her costume for the one-time performance of the piece. 

This first collaboration with Virginia Grise provided an opportunity for me to exercise a practice of active and embodied design and making that is at the heart of my work. The process places reverence in labor and personal history and explores their collision with narratives. Through a blending of traditional costume design practices, rigorous research, and experiential and sensory exploration, I am inspired to create designs that are striking visual sculptures informed by the narrative, the performer, the audience, and the space. My costume making and design for the Narrator were devised via this practice. 

A critical aspect of my research involves a practice of embodied dramaturgy—a study of how materials, labor, and space can interact with a creator’s body to build visual narratives that communicate character and intention. This non-traditional approach to costume design is difficult to implement in a traditional Western theater model. It demands flexibility with deadlines, details, and decisions.  Every choice must be responsive to the moment in which I make it. I am unable to fit this style of work into most professional costume design contracts due to the production practices of professional theaters. Virginia Grise has become a partner and champion of this decolonial process of performance design. 

Traditionally, costume designers work from a written narrative and study the text to make informed decisions about character through clothing. As this was a new work, I was given minimal text by Virginia to start with. I had access to Raven's brief description of the piece (quoted above) and to a recording of the original San Francisco performance. 

Tremble Staves is a site-specific sound composition and performance that demands a conscious integration of land into the performance. My design process began with an embodied investigation: with Raven’s composition in my ears, Virginia’s words in my mind, and the shore of Lake Austin beneath me, I painted through an intuitive process for several hours on the grounds of Laguna Gloria. This abstract and highly interpretive painting became a sieve through which my continuing research must pass through. I collected texts and images that were inspired by my painting, Virginia's text, and Raven's composition.

This collection of literal and non-literal research, including a trip to the San Antonio Zoo to visit the Texas Blind Catfish, helped to inform the final text spoken by the Narrator and was fundamental in the design and execution of the final costume. I dyed fabric to match Virginia's skintone because she was born from and is this land. I selected materials that felt connected to the ecology of the land and the history of people who have lived on it, including a heirloom crocheted lace tablecloth that once belonged to my great aunt. I painted and designed much of the dress through an intuitive process executed outside, while listening to a recording of Virginia speaking her text, with my feet on the earth, grounded on land that is referenced in the piece. 

About the Collaborators:

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and visual artist, creating videos, prints, photographs and installations that bring sonic experimentation into the gallery. Score-based creation is fundamental to his practice, encouraging generous forms of collaboration among performers and audiences, sights of significance, nonhuman actors, found sounds, and natural elements. In this way, he connects Diné (Navajo) worldviews and relationship models with Western classical, avant-garde, and art-music traditions. Chacon’s own renown is increasingly cross-disciplinary and international, with artworks in museum collections from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Los Angeles County Art Museum, and compositions commissioned for ensembles around the world. One of these, Voiceless Mass, commissioned for a cathedral in Wisconsin, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for music, making him the first Native American and art-music composer to receive this honor.

The Contemporary Austin at Laguna Gloria is a historic art museum and sculpture park located on a lush 14-acre estate in Austin, Texas, originally the home of civic leader Clara Driscoll. Renowned for its commitment to contemporary art, the institution showcases innovative exhibitions, large-scale outdoor sculptures, and site-specific works by internationally acclaimed and emerging artists. Blending art, history, and natural beauty, Laguna Gloria stands as a cultural landmark fostering creative engagement and community connection.