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Volver
Recently, the multi-generational female-perspective production Volver premiered in Los Angeles, drawing attention from both the creative team and live audiences for its visual language and character construction centered on women and family memory. In this production, Chinese costume designer Kaiqi Zhang led the full costume design as the project’s Costume Designer, translating themes such as “matrilineal inheritance” and “embodied memory” into visible, traceable visual cues through material choices and structural composition. The work continues the transnational stage practice she has developed across the UK and North America.
Positioned by the creative team as a story about family ties, dispersion, and reunion, Volver builds its narrative around imagery of kitchens, cornfields, food preparation, and domestic labor, weaving together the life trajectories of women across different generations. To give these themes tangible form, costume design was treated as a central narrative device. Zhang selected textiles drawn from everyday domestic life—cotton, linen, old bedsheets, kitchen towels, fragments of embroidery—and processed them through smoking, overdyeing, acid washing, and mending to create garments that appeared “long-used,” as though passed down through multiple generations within a household. According to the production team, this approach clarified the intergenerational relationships and emotional ties among characters, allowing audiences to perceive family histories through the layers and wear of the clothing.
Costume design for Dolly Rocket
In contrast to the family-centered narrative of Volver, Zhang’s earlier UK project Costume Design for Dolly Rocket emerged from a different performance context. Inspired by Brighton-based cabaret artist Dolly Rocket, the project explored how female performers navigate the balance between being watched and maintaining personal agency in both stage and everyday identities. Brighton, a coastal UK city, is known for its open and diverse cabaret culture, with venues such as Proud Cabaret and Stanmer House serving as representative sites within this ecosystem. Zhang’s costume series for Dolly Rocket has been used in performances at these venues and has received positive responses from both creative collaborators and audiences.
For the Dolly Rocket designs, Zhang intentionally departed from the conventional reliance on “sexualized imagery” in cabaret costuming. Instead, she rethought the relationship between ornamentation and strength through the lens of bodily weight, stage presence, and material ethics. She replaced real feathers with hand-woven fabric fibers that replicated feather-like textures, giving the costumes movement under stage lighting while ensuring structural clarity and durability. This material strategy supported both performers’ physical needs and broader sustainability concerns, while also symbolizing “reconstruction” and “repair”—a symbolism that the creative team viewed as deeply aligned with the ethos of the work.
Across both cabaret performance and multi-generational narrative works like Volver, Zhang’s design methodology demonstrates a consistent focus: costumes function not merely as visual styling, but as integral components of narrative architecture. In Dolly Rocket’s performances, costume design helped the performer maintain agency under intense lighting and close audience scrutiny. In Volver, costumes recorded the passage of time and shifts in identity through reuse, repurposing, and material migration. Though distinct in form and genre, both works revolve around the central inquiry of how women are seen and remembered within specific social and structural conditions.
Designer Kaiqi Zhang
Industry observers note that Zhang’s practice spans the European and North America, covering cabaret, theatre, and cross-context collaborations. In the productions completed to date, she has consistently participated as Costume Designer or Lead Designer in the core creative process—rather than providing isolated pieces or partial styling. According to collaborators, she typically begins with thematic analysis and character relationships, establishing an internal logic of materials and structures before working collaboratively with directors, lighting designers, and scenic teams to align costume systems with the broader stage language. This approach positions her not merely as a visual executor but as a contributor to the overall narrative strategy.
In recent years, growing international attention to sustainable materials, diverse narratives, and bodily representation has reshaped the role of costume designers in the creative chain. Within this context, Zhang’s practice—anchored in material research and women’s narratives—has established a distinct professional orientation. She examines textile origins, usage, and social meanings, integrating these factors systematically into the conceptual structure of each work rather than relying solely on stylistic surface aesthetics. Collaborators note that this research-driven methodology enhances the citation value of her projects in academic discourse, industry exchange, and future exhibitions.
The Volver production marks a new milestone in Zhang’s transnational creative trajectory. In this project, she extended the material vocabulary developed for Dolly Rocket into a theatrical text centered on family, land, and matrilineal memory. As documentation and archival materials continue to be consolidated, these works are expected to feature in future screenings, exhibitions, and research, offering concrete case studies for examining how contemporary costume design engages with themes such as women’s narratives and cross-cultural stage practice. Through these projects, Zhang is establishing a traceable professional portfolio that supports her long-term development in contemporary stage costume design.
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