THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE’S SINGER 

The Caucasian Chalk Circle’s Singer is a Live Performance costume based on the eponymous play. My version of Brecht’s play is placed on the Amazonian Rainforest, but a version of the formerly ancient and natural environment that has fictitiously been invaded by drug barons.

When those figures steal the tribal people’s place in the forest they are forced to flee deeper into the wood. After the conflict with the drug barons is over and the nature has to regenerate itself, the environment turns into a comical version of nature and it’s inhabitants then become a mix of both tribal peoples and the outer culture that was brought by the drug dealer’s invasion.

This entire situations relates to the plot of the Brechtian play. In this upside down world the characters are also all turned into female. All my designs are then for women versions of the characters, including my realised costume, the singer’s.

The singer narrates the plot in a very careful and emotional way, as if she knew what went on in every single one of the character’s minds. This quite caring aspect I was able to locate during my reading of the play inspired me to create the singer as Mother Earth. She would give birth to the characters and from within her womb the tree-root-like umbilical chords between her and her children would be broken once the child started behaving in a mad manner, taken by the ambience of chaos of their natural environment being controlled by the drug barons.

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Costume designed as the live performance unit project for the MA Costume Design for Performance course at London College of Fashion - UAL.

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Play: The Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Bertolt Brecht 
Character: Singer
Concept and realisation by: Gabriela Lotaif
Performer: Nancy Yuk
Movement director: Peta Lily
Project Leadership by: Donatella Barbieri for UAL: LCF
Photography by: Mark Dinoulis 

Drawings of the Singer and some other characters in Caucasian Chalk Circle: