The Dress from Love Letters: Wearing the Stories Told

Love Letters is an on-going performance project, conceived by live art practitioner and applied researcher Yiota Demetriou that combines aesthetics of live art, theatre, sound art/installation and ubiquitous computing. It involves sharing private memories, exhibiting public histories, and uses audience participation and the act of storytelling. The original form of the piece invited audience members to write anonymous love letters to a significant other using the four types of Greek love: Agape, Eros, Filia, Storge. In turn, the audience selected and read aloud other audiences’ love letters (from the bank of letters collected from each performance); they inscribed the name of the sender and the addressee on the performer’s dress and/or body and furthermore pinned the narrated letter onto the dress. Since then, it has taken the shape of a performance lecture, a sound installation and a durational, processed-based performance installation. The performance’s shape may have shifted several times, however the work’s main content – which through every performance emerges from the very act of participation, engagement and interaction of the audience – remains unchanged