Fire Tribe Gathering

A Foundation for Costume, Adornment and Body Decoration

by Brandon Stone and Trish Brubaker

See also the Adornment Playshop Page

Throughout time, people have decorated their stone tools, their hide clothing, woven beauty into utilitarian floor mats, painted their cave walls and their bodies. Why? Why decorate, adorn, and costume our bodies for the fire circle? Is it simply to express our aesthetic selves? To communicate our vision of beauty? To communicate our Vision? Is it the desire to create? To change? To create change? To change creation? Because we simply cannot help ourselves? YES!!! Our body decoration may be simple or ornate; it may be beautiful, touching, awesome, or moving. The process of creating it, from inception to final display, opens a portal to deeper experience and to other realms. It is to the eye what drumming and chanting are to the ear. It adds the vibrations of color and the evocative dimension of design. Through the textures of materials, it marries the visual to the kinesthetic, to movement and rhythm. In the circle, as many of our senses as possible are engaged, and that enhances our journey.

It's useful to have a foundation, a common vision, a philosophy, even, for these provide a satisfying unity to the celebration. Departures from the foundation can then serve as spice for the event.

Costuming and adornment for the circle have no clear shape yet, no common vision, no theory or philosophy, no norm, and no box of tools that's freely available to the tribe. This message is a first effort at establishing a foundation for costuming, adornment, and body painting within the tribe. We would like to provide some ideas for tribe members to use, extend, react to, and bounce off of. We don't want to tell people what to do; we just hope that they'll do *something*. Eventually, our practices will evolve out of our collaborative efforts.

What are the outcomes we might hope to achieve through costuming and adornment? Here are some:

Transcendence

The drumming and chanting and dancing all lift us out of our everyday experience and allow us to enter other realms. Costuming and adornment does the same thing through visual and tactile means. We can honor ourselves and one another by consciously choosing how we wish to look for the celebration.

 

Comfort

However we wish to look, we need to be fairly comfortable throughout a long night's celebration. What we wear needs to accomodate our need for comfort.

 

Transformation

Many of us thrive on the opportunity to try on other guises, literal and figurative, for all sorts of reasons. In a supportive atmosphere such as ours, there are no limits to who or what we might become. Costuming and adornment are an important part of these beneficial mutations.

 

Freedom

Costume and adornment "rules" are one of the strongest means by which society keeps us all in line. Are any of us really free of these arbitrary conventions of taste, class, group, gender, appropriateness, and so on? Playing with your appearance must be one of the safest ways to break out of societal norms, and doing so at our gatherings is particularly safe because everyone else will be doing it, too!

 

Self-acceptance

Costuming and adornment cannot be separated from one's sense of oneself, one's body. Our simplest costume is nothing at all. We're all skyclad under our clothes, as they say. In our society, many people, maybe most people, are convinced that they don't measure up, aren't attractive, need to look different from the way they are, and basically ought to be ashamed of themselves. Our celebrations offer a safe place to work consciously on body acceptance by shucking off shame and clothing ourselves in our own splendor, whether that means being skyclad or painted or garbed in whatever sort of raiment we like.

 

Discovering our Roots

Again and again during our celebrations we become aware of our connections with the ancients. Our time on Earth, 99% of it, was spent without the things we take for granted today, from jeans to watches to spandex to hiking boots. What would happen if we all chose to appear around the fire as one of our predecessors of ten or twenty thousand years ago might have? What would happen if we did our best to make use of natural resources, especially those found in our tropical home? What would happen if we emptied ourselves, as much as possible, of our arbitrary fashion judgments, our bodily inhibitions, our reliance on store-bought stuff, and our fear of ridicule, and listened to what the drums and the chants and the dancing tell us about how we might costume and adorn and paint ourselves? What can we recover from the amazing riches of the past? How do we go about doing so?

 

Fun

If nothing else, it's just plain fun to play with one's appearance. Give yourself up to it like a child.

Possibilities

Imagine that all tribe members are going to enter their own cocoons before the lighting of the fire. As we approach the fire, we will see all of our fellow butterflies for the first time. The transformation of our physical appearance sets the stage--literally--for the other magical happenings of the circle.

• Change your appearance as many times as you wish throughout the night.
  
  
• Team up with one or more tribe members to get costumed, painted, etc., before or during the event. Share your materials and techniques. Beguile those who are a little shy to join in your magical transformations. Paint one another.
  
  
• Visit the fire circle as a group with a unique look, just as a small group might bring a chant or musical piece to the circle.
  
  
• During the gathering, offer your support to any and all for their costuming and adornment efforts. Kind words are like gold when people are trying to stretch beyond their comfort zones.
  
  
• Examine your own reactions to people's appearance and consider where your judgments come from. Are they coming from decades of exposure to societal propoganda or do they grow out of the values of the circle?
  
  
• Choose an appearance "block" of your own and try to pass through it. Wear something you thought you'd never wear. Get gooey with some mud. Let whatever spirit comes into you express itself through your appearance.
  
  
• Bring extra materials that you might have (ti leaves, lengths of cloth, flowers, cords, etc.) for use by the tribe. Bring a garment or an item of adornment just to give it away to someone else.

Material Resources

In practice, there are readily available, inexpensive, or free (!) tools that we could use for our costuming and adornment explorations, such as cordage made of ti leaves, dyes made of stream rocks, simple muslin, shells, etc., etc. Here is a list of possibilities:

Fabrics for wrapping

• lengths of cotton
• pareos
• saris

Cordage

• various commercial, natural ropes and strings (cotton, raffia, etc.)
• ti cordage (like ti leaf leis, but longer)
• leather
• thin strips of rags and other cloth
• paper

Body "paint," etc

• mud and stream rocks (the soft kind, which can be easily ground into powder) should offer yellows, reds, grays, browns, black
• charcoal
• ash
• cornstarch
• turmeric (yellow)
• lampblack, soot
• flour and water paste
• commercial body paint

Other elements for body decorations

• raffia
• grasses
• ti and other leaves. Note: Ti leaves need to be soften in advance, by microwaving them for a few seconds, ironing them briefly, or freezing them for a few day. Click here to see how to create a ti leaf cape.
• flowers
• feathers
• seashells
• kukui shells
• palm frond hats (brimmed, brimless)
  

See also the Adornment Playshop Page

For information on upcoming Fire Tribe events please contact 808-864-1701, or visit http://www.firetribehawaii.org/