Studies in Costume & Performance - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2020

Focusing on the archival records of the production and performance of Dance in Trees and Church by the Swedish independent dance group Rubicon, this article conceptualizes a records-oriented costume ethics. Theorizations of costume as a co-creative agent of performance are brought into the dance archive to highlight the productivity of paying attention to costume in the making of performance history. Addressing recent developments within archival studies, a feminist ethics of care and radical empathy is employed, which is the capability to empathically engage with others, even if it can be difficult, as a means of exploring how a records-centred costume ethics can be conceptualized for the dance archive. The exploration resulted in two ethical stances useful for better attending to costume-bodies in the dance archive: (1) caring for costume-body relations in the dance archive means that a conventional, so-called static understanding of records as neutral carriers of facts is replaced by a more inclusive, expanding and infinite process. By moving across time and space, and with a caring attitude finding and exploring fragments from various, sometimes contradictory production processes, one can help scattered and poorly represented dance and costume histories to emerge and contribute to the formation of identity and memory. (2) The use of bodily empathy with records can respectfully bring together the understanding of costume in performance as inseparable from the performer’s body with dance as an art form that explicitly uses the dancing costume-body as an expressive tool. It is argued that bodily empathy with records in the dance archive helps one access bodily holisms that create possibilities for exploring the potential of art to critically expose and render strange ideological systems and normativities.

This article considers how by shifting culturally anchored design materials from one context to simplistic placement in decontextualized settings, cultural appropriation takes place in costume design. Building on that, it discusses how production teams need to be cognizant of such issues in the design process given that availability of such materials has historically been possible because acquisition has often aligned with political and commercial ambitions. Reviewing scholarship on appropriation that includes performance, costume, fashion and cultural studies, it questions how designing costumes through intercultural interaction might be navigated in a globalized context, where artists are excluded through travel bans, but cultural materials are permitted free movement. The article then discusses how to create productive intercultural projects with teams willing to invest in ethical engagement. By including case studies in which such processes were less successful as well as one that indeed created new intercultural exchanges, this article is one of the first texts to address this complex issue. It intends to engender future forward thinking conversations with practitioners and researchers on the thorny but urgent issue of cultural appropriation through costume.

With his extraordinary self-styled personas, the late London-based costume designer, nightclub extravaganza and subcultural icon Leigh Bowery constantly unsettled clear divisions between fashion, performance and visual art. His performative costuming reflects in a prolific manner his hybrid aesthetic and his ability to fuse a wide range of visual elements stemming from high fashion, art, mainstream culture and underground practices that en masse render his bizarre presence highly enigmatic. Inspired primarily by the aesthetics and the representations of South Asian culture, and noticeably deviating both from the subcultural style of the early New Romantics and mainstream fashion trends, Bowery’s allegedly first performative look, the ‘Pakis from Outer Space’, integrates an array of clashing symbols and motifs in a distinctively postmodernist fashion. As fetishization of South Asian iconography, Bowery’s enactment provides a platform for deeper analysis in regard to the problems that postmodernist cultural appropriation poses for the politics of representation of the ‘exotic’, non-western other. Drawing on the discourses of postmodernism and orientalism, this article examines the visual codes of the controversial look and unfolds the ways in which by constructing a distorted and eccentric image of an inclusive South Asian identity, Bowery slips in cultural stereotyping and ethnic generalization. Although his postmodernist parodic ethos could potentially be read as an attempt to create a critical – but politically problematic – dialectical space regarding orientalist clichés, it does not only fail to deconstruct monolithic representations but, conversely, reinforces oriental banality.

Review of: Digital Design for Custom Textiles: Patterns as Narration for Stage and Film, Amber Marisa Cook (2018)

New York and London: Routledge, 146 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-13808-417-9, p/bk, £29.99