War, Revolution and Design: exploring pedagogy, practice based research and costume for performance through the Russian avant-garde theatre

This article recounts an edited conversation that took place at the V & A symposium ‘Russian Avant-garde Theatre: War Revolution and Design’ held on the 24 January 2014, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name. Fashion historian Amber Jane Butchart (V&A and London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London) led Melissa Trimingham (University of Kent) and Donatella Barbieri (London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London) in a conversation discussing the relationship of Russian costume design with the avant-garde in early Modernism across Europe

An Embodied Approach in a Cognitive Discipline

Academia can be an uncomfortable place to work. Academics are examples of professionals who have multiple stresses and pressures. Being an academic is often a fundamental part of someone’s identity. Academia can be a cerebral, critical, competitive and judgmental environment. This chapter draws from a study using creative research methods with academics who self-identified as having an embodied practice. There are different definitions of embodiment. I use embodiment to mean both a state of being and a process of learning about the self, and so embodied practices are ways of bringing conscious self-awareness to and about the body. The academics reflected on the meanings they attributed to these embodied practices, tensions with their embodied identity, and how they used them to impact on their wellbeing

Agency and Empathy: Artists Touch the Body

The chapter researches empathy in relation to mainly Modernist costumes using a costume centered and practice orientated methodology. Trimingham ascertains the gestural empathy of costume and the dynamic impulses that are generated by the wearing of costume, all of which were discovered in the early years of the twentieth century by avant-garde performers and visual artists moving into the medium of theatre and performance. Trimingham looks at early twentieth century Russian costume, the Viennese dancers of the 1920s such as Hilde Holger, the Bauhaus and finally Robert Wilson

I Feel Different: Autistic Girls

Short animation exploring the untold stories of autistic girls and women in their own words to provide an insight into the intensity and sensory reality of their experiences