He Fa on Hugo Ball

A tall flat-topped cylindrical hat rises upward; torso and legs enter separate cylinders, and rigid panels beside the shoulders connect these volumes. This geometric costume relates to Hugo Ball's stage image. My body borrows clear boundaries from it, yet He Fa's round-nosed, heavy-lidded face emerges like a sound that cannot quite be boxed.

A cylinder is reassuring. Inside and outside are easy to distinguish, its cross-section can repeat, and standing before it, we know where it starts and ends.

Treat it as an apparatus for voicing, however, and the question changes. Sound needs breath, breath changes the chest and abdomen, and gestures and knees may not move according to cardboard seams. A clear exterior must leave some tolerance for an interior that is not perfectly orderly.

This design leaves flexible connections at the knees and exposes the hands and shoes. I see those places as its real syntax: they let one part follow another without casting every part into one block. Form's strength comes from connections that can last. If its wholeness depends on my holding my breath, it has achieved its own display but not the conditions of expression.

A wholly loose costume would lose the force of this geometric experiment. Adding joints does not mean every cylinder must become ordinary cloth trousers. Strict form can sometimes concentrate an indistinct voice, just as a beat lets different people sound together. But a beat must allow breaths, or collective voicing becomes a contest over who endures more.

I therefore keep the hat's height and the less-than-solemn softness at the knees. This concerns choices for the fictional body, not the original figure's actual performing experience. If a sentence can hold only at the cost of the body's movement, I would rather let the tube crease at the joint and, once breath returns, send out the next sound.