Anna Telcs is the costumer to performance-art/dance-troupe collective Saint Genet and its affiliate Implied Violence. The latter, says its company statement, "makes plays that are not plays," and both groups are marked by their uneasy spectacles, stocked with themes of rituals, suffering, messes, and rawness. The narratives "are lyrical, in a way... They aren't linear, but instead they fold into an experience," says Anna, and as the actors push on, their costumes collect strange residues: sweat and dust, of course, but also blood, flour, honey, ashes, wax.

To enable the story, Anna uses weird materials in her designs: leeches, which are "purpley silvery. They're actually really beautiful." Pheasant pelts, culled from the internet, more commonly used to train hunting dogs. Caul fat, draped over the dancers like clumpy lace: "It's sort of clammy." And to construct a wig: "bags and bags of dog hair, rolled into florets... It stank, making it painstakingly laborious."

Anna's garments carry a mesh of conflicting information. Her men's high-waist drawers are clean and delicate and made of plain white cloth, evoking the spare beauty of baptism-wear. "I love how cute these are," she says. The drop-front panel brings a baggy-diapers silhouette and is trimmed with loop-edged ribbons—drawing upon Jean Genet's work, they're "holding the filth within, or tying it off. Or siphoning the area, in a way, or cauterizing it, or cutting off circulation." During the performance, they're tied and untied and tied and untied—someone pesters the wearer, repeatedly burning his pubic hair with a cigarette.

Promoting a "cultlike uniformity," Anna hems her billowy, Amish-inspired sleeping gowns to hit everyone's knees at the same level, while underneath are incredibly tight corsets and crisscrossing leg wraps of thick black elastic, referencing horse dressage and framing the "big chunk of calf." The dancers are "still genderless, but it is very sexual and kind of S&M-y." And Anna builds plain-clothes shirt-and-shorts sets from a lightweight acetate, which becomes gauzy when drenched in olive oil, and the dancer's bodies get "shiny and gorgeous and sleek."

Communion wafers scale down a woman's netted headpiece—some are crumpled with sweat, others coated with silver paint, suggesting coinage, and Mary Magdalene, and prostitutes. "For some reason, I collected them as a child." Instead of eating them, she'd fake it and pocket them away, and she "kept them in a photo box under the bed for years and years." Looking back, watching herself, Anna says: "I stole communion wafers. This is so sacrilegious. How bizarre." recommended

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