Studies in Costume & Performance - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2016

Swedish artist Tobias Bernstrup (b. 1970) works with multimedia, music, performance, video and computer games. He creates fictional alter egos in his works and returns to his characters in an ongoing re-mediation, digitally or in real-world artistic performances. In explicit stage costumes made of latex, leather and metal, Bernstrup performs in the interface between digital character, human being and artwork. The costume becomes a bearer of physical experiences, a bridge between the portrayed and the perceived. Through our gaze, bodily experiences are transferred in the form of embodied knowledge or haptic vision. Materiality conveys meaning and communicates with our tactile memory through glossy latex, cold metal or bare skin. The costume is a paradoxical entity: both an inseparable part of the artist’s body in the performance process and something that can be removed, yet remains part of the character. The nude body onstage can be seen as another costume, the bare skin serving as an interface between visual and physical experience. Bernstrup and his virtual alter egos slip between existences where skin, body and costume tie his virtual and physical realities together.

Leg-of-mutton sleeves, Victorian mourning feathers, stiff, white governess dresses; Harvey’s costumes for her performances on stage and in music video for the three albums White Chalk (2007), Let England Shake (2011) and The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016) position her as English Gothic. Referencing literary and cinematic readings of the term, this article argues that Harvey performs an English, Victorian Gothic. We argue that she recuperates the female Gothic for contemporary times allowing it resonance beyond its literary and cinematic beginnings. Drawing on some of those literary and cinematic debates on the Gothic and the eerie, we consider how her costumes across these albums showcase ‘remnants’ both of the past and, of the forgotten. Harvey stitches those stories into her performances, allowing her to present spectres of both the past and present in the form of the forgotten, excluded and misunderstood.

This visual essay illustrates some of the curator’s basic ideas behind the Tribes project at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2015. This project presented over 80 costume and mask projects over the course of 11 days in June 2015. Costumes were ‘exhibited’ on live performers in the centre of Prague, where the city performed the gallery of this exhibition. The Tribes was conceived mainly through an open call that invited professionals and students to propose their ‘tribes’. The tribe was to be defined as a minimum of three people, having the same or similar ‘dress code’ (costume, or fully body mask) and similar behaviour code.

Costume before and beyond the production: The SpaceLab costume workshops at Prague Quadrennial, 18–28 June 2015

The 56th annual United States Institute for Theatre Technology Conference and Stage Expo (USITT 2016) Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, 16–19 March 2016

International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) 2016 Conference Stockholm University, Stockholm, 13–17 June 2016

I Vestiti Dei Sogni: La Scuola Dei Costumisti Italiani Per Il Cinema, Museo Di Roma, Palazzo Braschi, Rome, 17 January–22 March 2015

Fashioning Bollywood: The Making and Meaning of Hindi Film Costume, Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber (2014) London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 212 pp., 978-1-847-88697-2, p/bk

Shakespeare and Costume, Patricia Lennox and Bella Mirabella (2015) London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Publishing, 291 pp., ISBN: 978-1-472-52507-9, h/bk

Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-garde, Juliet Bellow (2013) Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 280 pp., 67 b&w and 18 colour illustrations, ISBN: 978-1-409-40911-3, h/bk, ISBN: 978-1-138-24736-9, p/bk