MODERN LIVING 2019
Villa Savoye, France

Artists: Gerard & Kelly
Costumes: Stacey Berman

MODERN LIVING is a site-specific performance piece developed in chapters, asking questions of intimacy and relationship in Modern houses. The project originated at the Schindler House, in Los Angeles. Chapters have since been created at the Farnsworth House, The Glass House and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. I have worked on all of the chapters, and linked the costumes through a monochromatic visual language.

The Villa Savoye chapter of Modern Living focuses on Josephine Baker, who met Le Corbusier on a cruise ship in 1929. Gerard & Kelly and I used this encounter as a prompt for many lines of analysis, including Baker and Le Corbusier’s unique relationships to Modernism (both aesthetically and conceptually); race relations, the social construction of gender, nationalism and citizenship, the study of romantic parternship, and nudity versus nakedness versus skin. My initial pool of research included visual references of French and American clothing and art from the late 1920s and 2019, filtered by themes or subjects that were relevant to the project (i.e. NAUTICAL, SAFARI, BANANA/SLIT SKIRT, ORNAMENTATION, SKIN). I simultaneously amassed biographical information about Baker and Le Corbusier, and included images of the subjects themselves, along with their work, to my visual research.

To actualize the costumes, I attended rehearsals, and took photographs and videos of the performers and choreography. The artists and I determined which visual references could/should be highlighted, and I navigated how to map these ideas onto specific performers. The costumes then developed from thrifted materials, combined with items I built.

Images from other chapters of Modern Living

Production stills: Martin Argyroglo
Reference image credits available upon request