ABSTRACT
When more than 2,000 garment workers died on April 23, 2013 after the collapse of a commercial building in Bangladesh, there was a brief media focus on the conditions under which clothing is produced for the global market. The cracks in the walls of the building had predicted the catastrophe and serve as a theoretical tool in this chapter to analyze Erica Mott’s technopera 3 Singers that begins in the cotton fields of the antebellum American South and ends in a busy square in Bangladesh. I argue that Mott’s performance piece inserts cracks to reveal the precarity of lives sustained by and sustaining the global business structure by experimenting with sound, light, and setting and especially by putting the costume and the costume maker in an unexpected spotlight.
