Body of movement : (in)forming movement

Abstract: In dance many choreographers uses neutral garments not to distract too much from the movement the ”natural” body performs. Still these garments paints the body with color, form, identity and movement qualities. The work exemplifies how the body can extend into materiality and through this it questions the borders of the body not only in form, which is usually the case in fashion design, but also in movement qualities as temporal form. Further it high lightens the importance of awareness of movement qualities in materials of dress as they express the form. The potential of dress in dance is explored in three chapters. For each of these, materials were chosen and arranged in order to provide an additional layer to the movement that the body naturally performs, allowing material to transform the body into various figures of movement. The first part introduces the use of dress in dance and how dress acts with the moving body. The second part explores how movement with the origin in the body can extend spatially and the last part focuses on the materials ability to interpret and materialize the movement.  The result of this work suggest that dress has the potential in dance as both choreographic tool and movement quality of equal importance as the movement of a body in a dance performance. Further it intersects the aesthetics of dance, a temporal aesthetic, with the aesthetics of garments, as a form based aesthetic, as it suggests dress as temporal design, allowing dress to create a new body of movement.