Shade
a project by Jacky Puzey with Baljinder Bhopal, Liz Lambert, Hilary Ramsden and Folake Shoga
Shade is about influence and exchange. Its about beautifully tailored suits acting as passports, getting you into places that you might not otherwise expect. Its about the act of wearing the suit, dressing to pass into new communities. It starts from my memories of travelling the business circuit from
England to Europe, USA and Africa when I was growing up, where invitations and image meant a lot on the diplomatic social circuit, but it also considers dressing to move countries, to migrate, to arrive in new cities, to create a passport into new communities and the rules of those passports........
Its also about creating Shade, a slang term from Trinidadian Carnival, meaning to make such a fabulous costume that everyone else is literally in your shade, under your influence. In a world of globalised business, its also about the unwritten influences and traditions in the suit itself, having the right suit, being part of the networks of cash and economic exchange, and how you access those, the human cost of migration and aspiration....
Will you pass?
Shade suits bear their allegiances and influences embroidered on their sleeves, rather than subtly hidden in social codes and exclusive invitations, and become a carnival cartel, exposing the deeply traditional codes inherent in the fabric of the suits as the wearers do business with themselves and their audience. As such, they interrogate the ideas of shared histories of trade and exchange -they are also not above showing their gang colours on their backs, their mob allegiances..... Their umbrellas, based on traditional West African royal umbrellas and canopies, are both about the necessity of shade in a hot country, and used as standards, royal banners that announce presence. As the Shade envelopes you, it also becomes a literal metaphor for influence and power, whether royal ceremony or post-colonial influence.........
On show…
…showing off…
Saturday 21 June 2008, beginning at Easton Community Centre in the triangle garden by the entrance to the cycle track, between 1:30-2pm. (see guide)
For this event, Shade is a performance piece which will tour around a few specific locations in Easton. Three performers, the Hostess, the Activist and the Urban Dandy, wearing immaculately tailored suits, carrying umbrellas, leading a group of people to different locations, work with poets, musicians, a historian, Transitions Easton and supporters to make a new kind of collaborative tour. We investigate territory, influence, and how to make positive connections across places and communities, through dress, land, gardening, culture and shared histories; coming together to create a space for conversation and food, thinking about public identities and shared influences in a multicultural space. We invite you to join us, to share your thoughts, contribute your recipes and growing tips, to tour together through the fabric of Easton, from dress shops to local growing centres, food cultures to public space....will you join us and manage to secure one of only 20 visas for the full tour? or will you migrate without passport....
Who can pass?
Thanks to everyone who helped, sewed, fed and supported this project, including Mike from Living Easton, Transitions Easton, Roud Fabrics and The Thali Cafe, and all our helpers on the tour.
funded by Easton Arts Trail 2008 and Bath Spa University School of Art and Design 2008
Shade Dandy
The Shade Dandy is a true hybrid and contradiction of desires and subversions. S/he attempts to transgress by inhabiting the mantle of male power – the Suit. But does s/he merely re-enact and re-produce that power over…over everything that she walks on and through? By being so visible does s/he overshadow or take shade from the others?
The Dandy Suit is modeled on, and has its ancestry in, the Zoot Suit through a contemporary style of suit called the Husky, created for young African-American men by way of a Jewish tailor in Detroit. It also draws on the Dandy from Beau Brummel’s Regency era and the flaneur, celebrated by French poet Charles Baudelaire and employed by Walter Benjamin to signify the ending of an era in French and other West European societies before modernism. [More recently the term flaneuse has been used by Lauren Elkin to write about women who walk the city.]
The Dandy Suit’s got a lot going on in and on it!
Jacky Puzey made this visible through the extravagant stitching, embroidery and style. The Suit needs close attention and detailed investigation – which is what the Dandy loves – attention, being the centre of it. It all goes and comes around in a magnificent circle of self-admiration and elegance!
This is clearly a man’s Suit and it is tailored but in a different way to a woman’s Suit. And how does being a lesbian fit into this hybrid? Sally Munt has written a great piece about the Lesbian Flaneur and a quick look back into the history of lesbian identity reveals a heap of stories and herstories about dress codes, etiquettes and gender roles.
Traditionally the Dandy and flaneur pose, hang around, and most importantly, are seen. Because of the nature and construction of the Shade event, I walk. And this affirms my desire to make women’s presence seen and visible. Taking time over a walk is unusual – we only do it for leisure and in the places that we are supposed to walk – the park, mall, beside a river. To walk slowly and visibly with seemingly no purpose is a transgression - against the time-motion oppression of capitalist production, against the assumption that as women we should be doing something useful and against the notion that we are commodities that can be shunted around and traded within a male economy.
There is a further transgression, which emerges as a literal over-stepping of boundaries between where we are allowed to go and where we are not. The Dandy Suit typically moves in and around places of power such as corporate buildings and political institutions re-creating hierarchy wherever he enters. What happens if I, s/he, wearing the Dandy Suit, enter such institutions? What happens when I move to other, traditionally non-powerful places such as a piece of derelict land off the Easton cycle track or the Spar shop on Greenbank Road, where I have to queue? Or do these become places of power by the very fact that I inhabit them? What happens when I trespass onto the paths of the Landowner? Are we equals? Will there be a stand-off, a duel of the Suits?
Are you suitable to pass?
Suited and booted: an investigation of the contemporary flaneur through performance and street parade.
I continue to explore hybrid perspectives on the contemporary flaneur and flaneuse drawing on thoughts and writings of (amongst others) Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel, Janet Wolff, Alice Cicolini, Sally Munt and Lauren Elkin. These have been investigated and developed through a number of enactments, performances and street parades . One of these was Shade, a collaborative performance process for which I devised and performed original material in the character of the Dandy, over a two-year period.
Shade was a collaborative performance parade about influence and exchange, beautifully tailored suits acting as passports; dressing to pass across borders, traditions and identities.
Jacky Puzey, Shade director, created a bespoke Dandy suit for me modelled on a Zoot-suit style three-piece I had bought in Detroit, Michigan, some years previously. The suit, called Husky style, was made for young African American teenage boys, so the sizing works well.
The Dandy crosses borders through style - street style, radical tailoring, dandy style, gender/public place politics, drawing on Le Sape collective of Congolese Dandies, and on my own histories of living in Detroit, dressing in suits, and being out on the streets as a woman. Although, the Sapeurs form the main strand in the creation of the Dandy suit, I was not attempting to re-present the Congolese experience, rather to create opportunities for conversation through cloth across cultures, of which the Dandy is an overt presence, and how that act of parading style in contested locations resonates across histories of dress, colonialism and postcolonialism, visibility and place, gender and cross-dressing politics.
