The Experience: Costume, Culture and Family

I worked for 10 days, incubated in the making, the writing, the dreaming it all just kept flowing.  Momo didn’t arrive in time for my project proposal presentation, but like every other unfolding of this story, it arrived in its own time – just after the project was approved.  One of the questions that came up from the board, as well as from Rob, was why Kimonos, how did it relate to me?  Marsha had sent me this gorgeous book on the history of kimonos and, in reading it, I discovered the origin of the kimonos came from the Chinese Hanfus.  I did more research and spoke with my secondary supervisor Siying Duan.  I learned more about the history of Hanfus and asked if Marsha was ok for the original design to be modified.  

I was semi-clear on the design, but sewing and making are not my speciality.  Another gift from the wild card of heading home, mom’s years of experience in costume making couldn’t come at a better time.  We discussed the design, the modifications and how we were going to make them.  The paper arrived and we cut out a template altering the original design.  The first one didn’t work out: we needed to go back to the drawing board and start again.  The first hanfu took the longest amount of time as we had to wait for the paper, modify, make, adjust.  We quickly discovered working with paper is a much more fragile process: a single tear meant we had to start again.  It originally took us around 30 hrs, including all the trials, to give life to our first piece.  Once we had set the design things moved along smoothly.  We had to make quite a few as the hanfu gets destroyed with every video shoot, and performance.   Each hanfu is hand crafted with their own unique twist.  

The conceptualization of this project is a process--a process to discover self within the Universal Self and to give space to others to find their own paths and journey.  Mooji says, “awareness cannot be at the end of a process because the very striving and the process itself, is arising and appearing in the Awareness which is timelessly present.”  Being in constant conversation and sharing the process of my work is new to me. In the past, I’ve been product driven and more often than not, had a level of certainty in what was being created.  Sharing the process has been a vulnerable, challenging, and liberating experience. In some ways, it may take away from the magic revealing the ‘behind the scenes’, but in other ways, accentuates the visibly hidden aspects of process.  What if the magic is in the mundane and in fact the ordinary was never really that ordinary to begin with? 

The most invaluable part of this whole costume process was spending time in creation with my mother.  Although I loved the conversations, it was the silent moments when we were both in creation mode where I felt a connection with her that transcended the need to speak.  In these moments of stillness, silence and pure conscious company, we healed generations of our own past and truly met as we are today.  Beyond flesh and bone, we connected in spirit. 

**Coming Up Next: How other projects fed into the bigger picture.