{"id":118,"date":"2026-02-13T14:12:03","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T12:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.wrkshp.fi\/carpa9\/?p=118"},"modified":"2026-03-30T11:04:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T08:04:30","slug":"head-seeks-hand-regenerative-artistic-research-in-costume-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nivel.teak.fi\/carpa9\/head-seeks-hand-regenerative-artistic-research-in-costume-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Head seeks hand: Regenerative artistic research in costume design"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This essay examines regenerative artistic research in costume design, focusing on pedagogical practices rooted in queer theory, material reuse, and embodied experimentation. It highlights how dismantling and reconstructing garments can foster critical awareness of identity, ethics, and social context. Through radical design methods, students are encouraged to challenge norms, embrace unpredictability, and rethink relationships between bodies and materials. Ultimately, the work argues that (costume) design can be a transformative and political act.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Costume design, often understood as a representational practice \u2013 one that visually articulates character, narrative, and aesthetic cohesion \u2013 for me, encompasses more than mere ornamentation: it pulses as a form of artistic research \u2013 a way of thinking with the body, with materials, and with the messy intricacies of socio-political structures. Over fifteen years of teaching at the Academy of Theatre and Dance (ATD) in Amsterdam, my practice has evolved into what I term regenerative artistic research: an embodied, improvisational method rooted in queer pedagogy, radical material reuse, and the urgent creation of spaces for other(ed) bodies. My approach is inherently personal \u2013 as a queer and gender-fluid costume designer raised in theatre \u2013 and arises from a refusal to view bodies as fixed, knowable entities. Instead, I ask: What can bodies become inside costumes? What do costumes provoke in bodies? How might design intervene in, and reimagine, the ethical and political circumstances in which bodies appear?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My methodology centres on what I call staging coincidence<\/strong> \u2013 a practice that embraces the unexpected and the intuitive. Rather than starting with fixed concepts or predetermined aesthetic objectives, I craft environments where unplanned connections, material surprises, and embodied discoveries can happen. This philosophy underpins one of my core first-year scenography courses, Hoofd Zoekt Hand<\/em> (Head Seeks Hand). Students are sent out to purchase a second-hand grey suit \u2013 not as a blank canvas for an idea, but as a situation to explore. Through the slow process of dismantling and reconstructing it into a wearable item that diverges as much as possible from the human silhouette, they give in to missteps, accidents, and the resistance of materials, learning that artistic research thrives on chance rather than control. The suit, a symbol of Western patriarchy, heteronormativity, and bureaucratic power, is taken apart to reveal its hidden architecture: pad stitching, interlinings, a forgotten handkerchief, and nearly 140 individual pieces that make up a suit (Prins 2018). This hands-on engagement reflects Cornel Bierens\u2019s view that artistic insight emerges from the interplay of head and hand (Bierens 2014). Ultimately, students understand that a garment\u2019s value does not lie in its market price but in the embodied time, labour, and histories embedded in its material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To contextualise this work, I read aloud an excerpt from Anne Boyer\u2019s Garments Against Women<\/em>, which foregrounds sewing as an act linked to gendered labour and structural inequality. Boyer reminds us that each garment contains \u201chours of women\u2019s and children\u2019s lives,\u201d an observation that redefines craft as political history (Boyer 2016). Students come to see sewing as a practice intertwined with ethics, class, gender, and care. This understanding resonates with Marie-Ren\u00e9e Bourget Harvey\u2019s reflection, cited by Tanja Beer, on matter \u201ccirculating\u201d through several lives and uses \u2013 a foundational concept within ecoscenographic design (Beer 2021, 42).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beer\u2019s ecoscenography provides an essential framework for archiving and articulating these pedagogical methods. During a 2025 research internship, Nana Yasukawa helped organise the Hoofd Zoekt Hand<\/em> and Radical Thinking<\/em> course materials using Beer\u2019s regenerative cycle of Co-creation, Celebration<\/strong>, and Contribution<\/strong> (Yasukawa 2025). In the course, co-creation emerges through collective unpicking; celebration occurs in group critiques, photoshoots, and public presentations; and contribution unfolds as costumes circulate into new communities, contexts, and interpretations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public encounters act as crucibles for transformation. When students wear their hybrid creations through subways or tourist sites, they become living laboratories of embodied difference. One student, whose costume had no discernible head, shoulders, or arms, appeared as a spectre to passersby \u2013 overheard but never acknowledged \u2013 highlighting how unfamiliar bodies disrupt social scripts of recognition. Another, crafting during the isolating quiet of the COVID-19 lockdown, layered transparent plastic over images of an empty Dam Square, conjuring the spectral, distanced textures of pandemic life. Such moments demonstrate that costume design extends beyond theatre; it acts as a catalyst for social inquiry, poetic disruption, and embodied world-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hybrid, grotesque, and amplified forms students create align with Francesca Granata\u2019s analysis of the \u201cgrotesque body\u201d in contemporary fashion, which she situates within Bakhtin\u2019s theorization of the open, ever-becoming body (Granata 2011). Such forms resist normative ideals of whiteness, thinness, ability, and gender stability. They invite experimentation with new movement vocabularies and challenge students\u2019 assumptions about bodies \u2013 what they should look like and how they should move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Movement is central to this pedagogical methodology. In collaboration with Maria Ines Vilasmil of ATD\u2019s Embodied Knowledge group, we co-developed a workshop that uses padded and hybrid costumes to access what Vilasmil calls the body\u2019s \u201cmovement archive.\u201d Wearing costumed forms that alter weight, balance, volume, and silhouette, students discover movement possibilities otherwise inaccessible to them. Costume becomes an interlocutor rather than an accessory \u2013 an active agent shaping thought, motion, and perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regeneration, in my practice, also describes how costumes travel across projects, disciplines, and political contexts. The mountain costumes I constructed from second-hand tents and raincoats for The NeverEnding Story<\/em> (2016) later appeared in a performance about refugee experience, in a Glamcult photoshoot supporting Palestinian solidarity, and in environmental research meetings examining dying mountains. Each iteration transformed their meaning, showing how design participates in multiple communities of struggle and care. This approach echoes the ethos of non-commercial carnival traditions from my hometown Bergen op Zoom, where \u201cdweil\u201d costumes made from household scraps constitute a joyous, anti-elitist, ungendered form of performance. Such methods resonate with Jack Halberstam\u2019s theorisation of queer failure, which reframes improvisation and nonconformity as generative political resistance (Halberstam 2011).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her attendee reflection on my CARPA9 lecture, Hiroko Oshima noted that the session\u2019s tone reminded her of Natalie Rogers\u2019s principles for empathetic, psychologically safe creative environments, where exploration and uncertainty can unfold without judgment (Oshima 2025; Rogers 1993). Although this interpretation is hers rather than my own, it underscores how crucial emotional safety is when students navigate sensitive territory around identity, representation, and embodiment. My classrooms prioritise such conditions: students must have space to fail, reconsider, and revise without fear. This is particularly vital when navigating sensitive terrain around race, gender, disability, and identity in design contexts. Through embodied experimentation, students encounter \u2013 and sometimes exceed \u2013 the boundaries of social normativity. What emerges is not merely technical skill but critical, intersectional awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These pedagogical commitments align with recent institutional efforts at ATD to integrate regenerative artistic research within the Scenography curriculum. A four-step structure for an artistic design process underpins the Scenography programme throughout the bachelor\u2019s course: engaging with a fascination, conducting artistic research, conceptualising insights, and realising a design. This pedagogical framework, already present in \u201cHoofd Zoekt Hand<\/em>,\u201d is expanded in the Radical Thinking<\/em> course, where students are encouraged to examine and articulate their own socio-political embodiment as a foundation for artistic research. While \u201cHoofd Zoekt Hand<\/em>\u201d begins with material unmaking and coincidence, Radical Thinking<\/em> shifts the focus inward, prompting students to locate their design impulses within their lived experiences, identities, and positionalities. Both courses \u2013 though differing in method, pace, and starting point \u2013 frame design as a form of analysis rather than product, and as a process rather than an outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In closing my CARPA9 lecture, I cited Anne Boyer\u2019s resignation from The New York Times<\/em>, an act that underscores the intimate entanglement of aesthetics and ethics. Rosie Elnile succinctly articulates this interdependence: \u201cDesign is a political act\u201d (Elnile 2020). In a climate-changed world marked by structural inequality and overproduction, costume design cannot remain apolitical. Regenerative artistic research thus becomes both a pedagogical method and a form of activism: a way of imagining \u2013 and practising \u2013 more inclusive, sustainable, and compassionate futures for our bodies, our materials, and our shared world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Beer, Tanja. 2021. Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance<\/em>. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bierens, Cornel. 2014. \u201cHoofd zoekt Hand.\u201d De Groene Amsterdammer<\/em> 14 April 2010. www.groene.nl\/artikel\/hoofd-zoekt-hand<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boyer, Anne. 2016. Garments Against Women<\/em>. Boise: Ahsahta Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elnile, Rosie. 2020. \u201cDesign is a political act \u2013 let\u2019s use it to reshape the future\u201d. The Stage Magazine<\/em>. www.thestage.co.uk\/opinion\/design-is-a-political-act–lets-use-it-to-reshape-the-future<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Granata, Francesca. 2011. \u201cThe Grotesque Body in Contemporary Fashion.\u201d Fashion Theory<\/em> 15(2): 139\u2013166.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure<\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harvey, Marie-Ren\u00e9e Bourget. 2022. Quoted in Tanja Beer, keynote lecture, Future of Performance Design<\/em>. Nicosia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oshima, Hiroko. 2025. Reflection on CARPA9 presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prins, Maartje. 2018. Reflection sheet. Hoofd Zoekt Hand<\/em> course archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rogers, Natalie. 1993. The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing<\/em>. Palo Alto: Science & Behavior Books. Quoted in Hiroko Oshima\u2019s reflection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yasukawa, Nana. 2025. Internship report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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