Wellington’s extravagant World of WearableArt is back for 2025, including pieces by 85 finalists that showcase today’s most elaborate and fanciful costumes. One hundred designers from 17 countries competed for a prize pool of more than $200,000 New Zealand dollars across 25 awards. The competition culminates in an elaborate performance, with this year’s top honor, known as the WOW Supreme Award, handed to design duo Dawn Mostow and Ben Gould.

The U.S.-based designers have been finalists several times since 2017, and this marks their first win. Mostow and Gould’s piece “Tsukumogami” draws on Mostow’s time living in Japan, nodding to the country’s folklore and craft traditions through a reference to mythological tools that can be imbued with a spirit, or a kami. Two figures completely covered in blue-and-white latex stand like elaborate classical vases, with ikebana flower arrangements on their heads.

This year’s runner-up is Fifi Colston’s “Meine Erste Liebe,” a title which means “my first love” in German. The wearer is transformed into a medusa, with an elaborate bodice and globular headdress, plus an elaborate, bell-like skirt embellished with detailed jellyfish.

2025 World of WearableArt Show: RISE performances continue through October 5 at TSB Arena in Wellington. Explore more, including an archive of pieces from earlier shows, on the contest’s website.

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In a new music video for Lisbon-based musician Xinobi’s song “Strides,” a quirky concept came to fruition thanks to the Callner Brothers. Both directors and producers who specialize in commercials, Ben and Adam Callner worked a different kind of filmmaking magic for this dance-worthy track.

The video opens on two men, seated near a fountain, who discover—or are perhaps chosen by—a pair of floating fanny packs. The accessories, which appear to glow and sparkle, are filled with stickers that read “muy bien,” or “very good.” As the two frolic around Lisbon, practically effervescing with good cheer and a desire to connect with others, they facilitate a diverse and joyful group of people who gather in a court.

But not everyone is happy about this new movement, and in a dramatic clash, anti-muy-bien demonstrators let everyone know how they feel, even though the temptation to join in the fun is real. “Is this about embracing different people and ideas, or is it about two guys wearing fanny packs getting their 10,000 steps in?” the Callner Brothers ask. (There isn’t a right answer.)

See more on the creators’ Vimeo and website.

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With acrobatic finesse, the figures in Artez’s large-scale murals interpret the boundaries of the walls themselves through contemporary dance and moments of repose.

Currently working on an ongoing series titled Simple Acrobatics, the artist explains that he aims to “break away from the conventional approach of depicting the human figure on a mural and offer a fresh perspective on how the human form can be portrayed in public spaces.” Dancers fill the sides of buildings, sometimes using a chair as a prop, stretching around the confines of the wall as if challenging its boundaries.

Another recent theme, Thirst, portrays people drinking from vases of flowers. The unusual gesture nods to a sense of awareness, inviting viewers to consider society—its conventions and expectations—and contemplate the world around them anew.

Artez is currently in Gothenburg, Sweden, working on a new Simple Acrobatics mural. Find more on Instagram.

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“For me, costume has always been part of everything,” says photographer and multidisciplinary artist Victoria Ruiz. “Culturally, I grew up in Venezuela seeing costume not as something separate from daily life but as something deeply embedded in it, especially through the lens of carnival. Carnival is in our blood. It’s not just a festival; it’s a way of expressing history, resistance, joy, and grief. A costume, at the end of the day, is something you wear that tells a story.”

In striking, saturated images, Ruiz channels a fascination with nature, dance, spirituality, and African diasporic religion. Citing belief systems of the Americas like Santería-Ifá, Candomblé, Umbanda, and Espiritismo, the artist delves into the histories and cultural resonance of religion as modes of resistance and adaptation. These faiths often blend “African spiritual traditions with Indigenous and colonial influences,” she says in a statement.

Currently based in London, Ruiz draws upon her childhood experiences in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, where she and her family encountered both nuanced ancestral practices and urgent political violence. “I grew up surrounded by characters, some from folkloric traditions, others from more disturbing scenes like military or police repression,” the artist tells Colossal. She continues:

I realized early on that uniforms are also costumes. What people wore during those moments of violence or protest created powerful symbols. It was a kind of dark carnival. And I became very curious about what those garments meant and how they could inspire fear, power, or solidarity.

In her series Para Tú Altar: Las Fuerzas Divinas de la Naturaleza, which translates to For Your Altar: The Divine Forces of Nature, Ruiz draws upon a seminal music album by Cuban salsa artist Celia Cruz, who incorporated ceremonial Santería music into one of her early albums. Para Tú Altar references one of Cruz’s songs about different types of flowers used to honor the divinity of nature.

At the time, African diasporic religions like Santería, in which Yoruba traditions, Catholicism, and Spiritism converge, were largely hidden from view due to widespread prejudice and marginalization. Ruiz adds, “It could be said that Celia did not truly understand that what she was doing at the time was transcendent for Cuba’s musical culture and the religion itself.”

Music and performance are central tenets in Ruiz’s work. Since she was young, she studied ballet, flamenco, and contemporary dance, but it was only when she moved to London and began collaborating with dancers that elements of her practice began to truly gel. “Seeing them embody the costumes—activating them with movement and intention—transformed my whole practice,” she says. “It became a way to make the pieces alive and to create immersive, emotional storytelling.”

Ruiz works with a range of fabrics and materials like faux flowers and other props, depending on the theme of the series. She often reuses the costumes to emphasize sustainability. “Each costume and each image is a portal to the divine; it is a visual offering, a spiritual invocation,” Ruiz says. “They’re my own interpretations of how these forces have shaped and protected me. I’m still on that journey, and this work is a kind of gratitude, a love letter to those unseen powers that have carried me.”

The artist is currently working on a series of protective masks, drawing on the ingenuity of handmade masks used during protests that Ruiz witnessed while living in Caracas. “At one point, gas masks were actually banned from entering the country, so people responded with creativity and survival instinct creating masks from water bottles, cardboard, even stuffed animals,” she says. “I found it so powerful: this creativity in the face of danger—this need to resist and survive through making.”

See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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How do we keep ourselves from feeling paralyzed by change? An international group of dancers, choreographers, directors, composers, and more have come together for a five-part series that confronts that increasingly urgent question through movement.

Led by Jacob Jonas of the eponymous Jacob Jonas The Company (previously), the initiative is the latest project for Films.Dance, a platform aiming to make dance accessible and explore its intersections with music, fashion, and film.

Released one by one during the last five weeks, the films center around the theme of beginning again. Presented in the order in which they were created, each confronts the destabilizing, heartbreaking world in which we live by emphasizing beauty and a reverence for nature. They remind us that seeking complete control is futile and that humanity is only a blip in the universe’s timeline.

“Moncalvo” was the first to be released and emerges from a period of profound grief and anxiety. “This film was created in June 2023 during one of the most challenging times in my life, immediately following a battle with stage 4 cancer,” Jonas says. “As I navigated the aftermath of illness and trauma, art became my way of processing the darkness and rediscovering my light.”

Filmed in Moncalvo, Italy, where it gets its name, the work juxtaposes tenderness and intimacy with passion and intense unease, reflecting the inescapable push and pull of healing.

Each part of the series similarly channels the ways feelings can overwhelm. “Infinity” features dancers performing repetitive movements back and forth in a nondescript space. Wearing minimal costumes in neutral tones, the figures carry and drag each other from one end of the frame to the other. Dubbed a “study of the spine,” the short film hones in on the burdens, commitments, and experiences we all carry and what we need for an inevitable release.

The last in the collection is the Dramamine-necessitating “Lotus,” which rapidly shifts from one angle to another like the vertiginous movements of “water in a river, the flame of fire, insects flying, and rain dropping,” he says.

Overall, Jonas shares that the series brings together an international group of artists guided by curiosity and existential queries. “The question is the answer,” he says. “Is life guiding us, or are we in control? Are we all in a cycle of death and rebirth? Is the sun, the moon, and all things living around us in a rotational pull? Are we spinning or still?”

Watch all five films on Vimeo, and follow the latest projects by Jacob Jonas The Company on Instagram.

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Given the emphasis on functionality and design for industrial production, the Bauhaus movement is rarely associated with disciplines like dance. But for Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), translating its principles into movement and performance was as compelling as a well-conceived chair or building.

In the last century, the Bauhaus has indelibly shaped our modern built environments and the ways we think of the relationship between form and function (it even inspired conceptual cookbooks). German architect Walter Gropius founded the school in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, with the intention of uniting architecture, fine arts, and crafts. The school focused on minimalism and creating for the social good and involved artists and designers like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Anni and Josef Albers.

The Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, Schlemmer was a painter, sculptor, and choreographer responsible for the under-known Triadic Ballet, a striking, playful dance structured around groups of three. Debuted in 1922, the avant-garde production comprises three colors—yellow, pink or white, and black—and three costume shapes—the square, circle, and triangle.

“Building on multiples of three,” says an explanation from MoMA, “transcended the egotism of the individual and dualism of the couple, emphasizing the collective.”

In true Bauhaus form, the idea was to eliminate the decorative frills associated with ballet, including tutus that allow bodies to bend, twist, and explore a full range of mobility. Instead, Schlemmer’s costumes restrict movement and add a modern quality as dancers appear stifled and almost mechanical, a nod to the movement’s focus on accessibility through mass production and turning “art into industry.”

Several of Schlemmer’s illustrations for the ballet are available online, including his bizarre sculptural costume designs with wide, bubbly skirts and vibrantly striped sleeves. MoMA’s collections contain a print titled “Figures in Space,” which reveals one of the performance’s foremost preoccupations: how bodies move and interact in space.

As seen in a fully colorized film of the dance from the 1970s, the dancers are incredibly deliberate as they navigate sparse sets with clean lines. Open Culture notes that they appear almost like pantomimes or puppets “with figures in awkward costumes tracing various shapes around the stage and each other.”

A few years back, Great Big Story created a video visiting the Bavarian Junior Ballet as it prepared for a performance. The costumes are faithful to Schlemmer’s vision and retain the rigid geometries and bright palettes. As noted by director Ivan Liška, the strange attire combined with the jilted, robotic choreography often leaves the audience laughing. “It’s very successful because the audience can’t believe this is 100 years old,” he says. “There you see the visionary power of Oskar Schlemmer.”

Triadic Ballet is rarely reproduced, but Bavarian Junior Ballet will bring the work back to the stage this June to celebrate its 15th anniversary. And if you’re in New York, you can see one of Schlemmer’s studies in Living in the Age of the Machine at MoMA. It’s also worth exploring The Oskar Schlemmer Theatre Estate and Archives, which boasts a trove of archival imagery and drawings on its website.

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Championing the next generation of dancers in The Netherlands, CDK Company (previously) has made a name for itself through large-scale interpretations of pop music involving numerous dancers in playful, themed outfits. For the group’s latest video, director and choreographer Sergio Reis and team took on Billie Eilish’s “Bittersuite” from her 2024 album Hit Me Hard and Soft.

Set among paintings and installations in Museum Voorlinden, three dozen performers don pastel garments evocative of 1960s fashion, all wearing identical dark, bowl cut wigs.

Whether moving through a gallery of paintings by Michaël Borremans, stationed inside a 4-meter-high Corten steel sculpture by Richard Serra, or synchronizing around the edge of Leandro Erlich’s “Swimming Pool,” CDK leads us on a vibrant, emotive journey through Eilish’s music and the museum’s art collection.

Find more on CDK’s website and dance along to more videos on Reis’s YouTube channel.

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More effective than medication, therapy, and yoga, dancing recently topped the list of successful treatments for depression, and for good reason. Since time immemorial, boogying has permeated every culture and formed the basis of social bonds, a linchpin of community and strong mental health.

A delightful short film directed and animated by Rosanna Wan and Andrew Khosravani for Aeon details the scientific link between dance and good feelings. When people come together to tango or jump-step through a polka, they often experience what’s known as collective effervescence, a concept coined by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim that describes the harmony and joy that arises when gathering in a group with a shared purpose.

As the film notes, “dance is the great accelerator of collective effervescence,” hurtling us toward synchronicity and happiness through a euphoric rush of neuro-hormones, endorphins, and more. When we dance together, we experience ourselves merging, becoming one energized, exuberant unit.

Watch “Dance, Dance Evolution” below, and find more from Aeon on Vimeo.

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If you were anywhere near a radio in the early 2010s, odds are you’re familiar with Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.”

The ballad rose to popularity as it topped international charts and won awards, and today, the complicated love song boasts more than 1.6 billion streams on Spotify alone. Over a decade after its release, CDK Company revisited the hit,  choreographing a dance performance that’s just as iconic as the track’s original stop-motion music video.

On a single stage, the Netherlands-based collective showcases a wide array of sequences and movements in under four minutes. Dressed in ’70s business casual complete with blazers, vests, embroidered blouses, and flared pants, the troupe incorporated ripple effects, tutting, and sharp jolts to bring forth a sense of urgency and intensity, creating a satisfying visual contrast against a rather mellow song. Wide-angle shots and cohesive color grading enhance the performance, evoking a heavily stylized environment that could be part of a Wes Anderson film.

Watch the number along with the company’s other works on Youtube.

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“Our role as artists is always to search for the light,” says French artist JR (previously) about the second act of his Retour à la Caverne project. “We know this much: You don’t chase away the darkness with more darkness. You chase it away with light, however tiny.”

The work he’s referring to, though, is far from tiny. Cloaking Paris’s Palais Garnier while the building is under construction, Retour à la Caverne is an enormous trompe l’oeil facade, the first part of which depicts a cave carved into the grand structure that houses the opera. Illuminated at the center, the temporary piece highlights the physical and metaphorical interactions between light and dark. Broken into two acts like an opera libretto, the work references Plato’s allegory that emerging from the depths of the cave, and from darkness, brings knowledge.

“Act I” debuted earlier this fall with four nights of projected works, while the second part was held on November 12. “Back in September, we invited you to step out of the cave to go and explore. This time, we’re inviting you back inside the cave,” JR said while introducing the work. Whereas “Act I” portrays the cavern gouged into the center of the building, “Act II” switches perspectives, placing the viewers entirely inside the space.

Titled “Chiroptera,” the performance featured choreography by Damien Jalet and music by Thomas Bangalter. More than 150 dancers appeared through an elevated seven-story scaffolding after an eerie introduction by ballerina Amandine Albisson, who appeared to open the cave, causing a plummet into darkness.

As with many of JR’s works, the artist asked the crowd to participate by using headlamps and their phones to illuminate the remainder of the performance, revealing the ways light can emerge from collective action.

Watch the full performance below, and find more from JR on Instagram.

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