Tilda Swinton Incorporates the Audience's Outerwear Into Her Latest Performance Piece

From sleeping inside a box to taking your jacket, Tilda Swinton's performance art is always strange.

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Complex Original

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Over the years, Tilda Swinton has somehow managed to balance her career as an actress and her interest in performance art. In 2013, she staged a performance art piece where she slept inside a box at MoMA. This year, according to The New York Times, Swinton and long-time collaborator Olivier Saillard, Director of the Palais Galliera​ fashion museum in Paris, have created a new piece that was first performed on Nov. 22 at the museum and will run through Nov. 29. Titled Cloakroom — Vestiaire Obligatoire, the performance requires that Swinton take on the "personae of the audience members by way of their outerwear."

In describing the preview performance, Sarah Moroz writes that Swinton took the coats and jackets of the audience to a wooden table and began to interact with them. "Swinton laid each garment out, held it up, smoothed it out and contemplated it, sometimes crouching or lying atop it," she writes. "Every so often, Swinton added a keepsake to each coat: an envelope, scented, sealed, and then slipped into a pocket; a hair plucked and placed on a lapel; a lipstick-blotted tissue snuck inside a motorcycle jacket. At the end, each owner reclaimed his or her item."

Swinton said that the collaboration with Saillard was "built on a shared complicity and a shared determination to be playful...Our idea this time was to have no structure at all…We dared each other to be this sauvage. Who knows what will happen—it will be different every night."

For tickets to the performance, click through to the Festival d’Automne à Paris​ website

[via New York Times]

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