This workshop will introduce you to the inspiring world of costume performance. Dance artist Lorraine Smith will guide you through exercises and creative tasks to experience how costume can impact both performer and maker. This will include exploring the somatic nature of costume and how design choices can change how you feel, move and interact with others, and encourage a breaking of habitual movement, exploration of identity and the creation of engaging characters. Costumes and clothing items will be provided, but please consider bringing a few garments you are happy to share as exploratory tools with others.

Lorraine Smith is a dance artist and costume performance researcher currently working on new project You Can take Me Home Toni (Dance City Early-Stage Commission). Lorraine was artistic director / choreographer of Silversmith Dance Theatre (2006-2014) and member of UK Arab dance troupe Al Zaytouna (2007-2014), touring contemporary productions in the UK and internationally. Her passions include devising dance theatre and costume performance, which inform her research into the impact of costume on the performing body, costume as somatic tool, performance pedagogy, identity and ‘otherness’.