“An alter ego is a second self, which is believed to be distinct from a person's normal or original personality. A person who has an alter ego is said to lead a double life.” - Julia Bardsley
This workshop sought to enable us, as performers to become an 'other' through the introduction to including garments or rituals to our aesthetic.
In preparation to the workshop, we were asked to bring with us:
Garment Ritual Clothing: A number of garments (these can be extreme and/or ordinary), including at least one pairs of shoes/footwear, various kinds of tops, trousers, shorts, skirts, dresses etc. (at least one of each of tops and bottoms) These will go into a ‘garment pool’ so nothing precious or fragile.
Items for disguise: such as hats, glasses, facial hair, scarves, wigs - whatever you have at home. No masks though.
Props: a provocative/intriguing object or two of your choice - for example an umbrella, gun, doll, box. These should be an item that specifically relates to your research project in some way - again, nothing precious or too fragile.
Through the use of interacting with these items we were able to:
- Manifest our personas through experimenting with material aesthetics in a number of environments e.g. at a disco
- Begin asking the question of how to translate our research enquiry into a complete outfit 'kit' in order to create an alter-ego, persona or second self
How I responded to this workshop:
- I explored using loud, 'alive' items of clothing like party accessories and neon colours to emerge myself into the ambience that I want my performance to create (see photos below)
- I then began to imagine how I want to place myself within my world
- I wanted to decide on what aesthetic perception I want an audience to have of my in thinking about my final performance
- Currently items that I feel may fall into this category and may be a performative costume are dungarees, Doc Martin boots, and general trendy, androgynous clothing
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