1. Shakespeare’s Fools Costume Design - Oliver Cronk, London College of Fashion Director - Caroline Williams Museum Location - The Dorothy and Michael Hintze Galleries The Fool questions, probes and provokes. He disrupts form to reveal truth. He is an agent that bends or gnaws at the ear of the powerful. Our Tribe of Fools revels in unearthing the hidden through lucid observation. It whispers, laughs and dances through the constraints of environments in which it exists. Our Tribe of Fools draws on characters from across Shakespeare’s plays (Feste, Touchstone, the Gravediggers and Lear’s Fool). Analysis of the characterization and narrative function of these figures has allowed us to essentialise a ‘stock’ fool, which serves a performative model for our work. As the Shakespearean fool disrupts and alters the narrative mechanics of the plays it inhabits, so our performance seeks to distort experience and question the environments in which it occurs, be they in provincial England, the V&A Sculpture Galleries or beyond. In addition to our live performance, we also present a short film interpretation of a journey made by Shakespeare’s own ‘fool’ collaborator, William Kempe. In 1601, Kempe danced the entire way from London to Norwich. In response, our fools dance the entire way back. 2. The Merry Owls of Windsock Costume Design - Max Johns, Bristol Old Vic School Museum Location - The John Madejski Garden “Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, colour, feasting, and dance?” (Barbara Ehrenreich) When designing costumes for Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor Max was persistently drawn to the final scene at Herne’s Oak. The characters suddenly abandon their collars and corsets to run about the fields by moonlight dressed as fairies and goblins – all in the name of mischief, revelry and energetic saturnalia. Did this kind of social behaviour die out along with Shakespeare’s merrie England? Or is there more to today’s maypoles and Morris dancing than we now recognise? Drawing on carnival and festival ritual, this choral tribe is a celebration of the group as opposed to the individual; it is about buying into the illusion and the subversion of hierarchy. It employs costume as a tool that allows us to temporarily step out of our atomised, neurotic selves. Finally, it is about unmediated collective joy. 3. The Tempest: Displacement & Reorientation Course Leader - Agnes Treplin, London College of Fashion Costume Design: Maria Alejandra Anaya N. Martina Montorfani BronyaArciszewska Megha Khanna Maria Bruder Pooja Malhotra Maria Costa Pallavi Patel Viola Cesa De Marchi Yufan Xiao Daphne Karstens Xinyu Zhang Clare MacGarrigle Museum Location – Raphael, Gallery 48a MA Costume Designers from London College of Fashion are showing a selection of live performances, short films and exhibits as part of the Shakespeare’s Tribes event. Their work is drawn from a recent project based on The Tempest in which a character from the play is explored in depth through a narrative expressed purely through the means of costume, movement, light and sound, recorded and edited into a short film. At times we see relationships between mortals and spirits, or spirits struggling to break free from human constraints. At other times we see a character taken into another context and culture related to the student’s own background and experience, which like the exhibits of the V&A collection and the students themselves originate from all over the world. Do they too, like the characters in The Tempest, find themselves displaced from their context, and begin to form a new tribe? 4. Othello Costume Design - Sophie Barlow, Edinburgh College of Art Museum Location - Ironworks, Gallery 114c Shakespeare’s Othello is set against a background of military conflict. Within it, the characters appear to be on the same side, but all is not as it seems. The apparent binary reflected in the physical military conflict is complicated by the internal war taking place within individual characters. The military was the basis of Sophie’s inspiration. She decided to limit her colour palette to black (representing ‘bad’), white (representing ‘good’) and red (representing ‘blood’) because she wanted the costumes to have a clean cut, calculated, and methodical look. Each character has a role and a position to uphold, like in a game of Chess. These roles are reflected in the costumes. Both in the military and in chess there is a hierarchy, an order. Through dance/physical theatre the characters not only defend their “tribe”, but express the enemies within. It is performed in silence – the deadliest of warfare. 5. Making Up Course Leader -Michael Spencer, Central Saint Martins Museum Location - Theatre & Performance, Gallery 103 Students on the Performance Design & Practice course at Central Saint Martins have created a performance piece that explores the idea of tribes as an artificial construct of society. In this case we see Shakespeare - an artist representing western culture - creating groups of people who perform everyday actions in synchronised unison. The artificial nature of these groups is highlighted by the fact that, over time, each 'specimen' is transformed from one tribe to another, whereby they immediately adopt the appropriate code. The performers interact with both the environment of the museum collection and their viewing audience, sharing and inhabiting the same space. Does Shakespeare create archetypes for his own purposes? Do we comply with our own 'tribes' out of self will, or because we are programmed to do so? .