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- Volume 5, Issue 2, 2020
Studies in Costume & Performance - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2020
Volume 5, Issue 2, 2020
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Historical materiality of performance: On the costumes of The Rite of Spring (1913)
More LessBy focusing on surviving costumes of the 1913 production of The Rite of Spring, this article asks how a close examination of costumes and their role in historical performance practice can change our understanding of a canonical work of art. It argues for methodological pluralism in examining material remains together with manuscript annotations, images and reviews of the production rarely considered in previous research and, consequentially, for a critical examination of all previous claims, including the so-called reconstruction (1987) of The Rite of Spring. Compared with designs and costumes of other productions by the Ballets Russes company, those of the 1913 production explain much of the contradictory ways in which the work figured in discourses relating to art and modernism in France and Russia at the time. Most importantly, the costumes exemplify a particular tradition of making theatre that has been obscured by the prevailing Orientalist view of the Ballets Russes company that is hegemonic in what is claimed to be ‘known’ about The Rite of Spring and its reception.
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Tricity Vogue’s ‘blueing up’ as sedimented resistance: Extravagant costume and the expanded field of dressing up
More LessMy focus in this article is to understand the way theatrical costume is performed in subcultural cabaret spaces, specifically The Blue Lady Sings Back by London-based cabaret singer Tricity Vogue. This show premiered at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the area of Vauxhall in South London that already has an embedded history of hedonistic pleasure. With reference to Dorita Hannah’s ‘expanded’ notion of costume as a ‘body-object-event’ and Jasbir Puar’s broader understanding of categories of race, gender and sexuality as events and bodily encounters, I seek to understand the way theatrical feminine costume enfolds dissident and marginalized histories of resistant urban space and site. In this show, Tricity Vogue undertakes multiple costume changes that embody various histories and contexts of cabaret performance: as Bollywood dancer Madhuri Dixit, as a European Marlene Dietrich-like cabaret singer and as a Josephine Baker-esque character in a banana skirt. All of this whilst wearing a blue stocking and blue body paint, effectively ‘blueing’ up. This steps into an uncomfortable territory in what could be seen as cultural appropriation, racial stereotyping and speaking for others. This concern also has currency within the contemporary burlesque community who are acutely self-conscious and politicized as regards this kind of costume and performative appropriation. Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of feminist killjoys (2017) will be employed to better understand these difficult conversations about dressing up with Aoife Monks’ (2010) discussion of multiple costume changes being used as a strategy for ‘undoing’ stereotypes and rethinking a feminist ‘we’. By also drawing on diva studies, which builds on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘diva citizenship’, and postcolonial feminism, I will argue that the costumed cabaret body becomes a medium for women to politicize and reframe pleasure through the costumed spectacle of cabaret’s various erotic and exotic muses.
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Tawny fronts: Colonial whiteness, Orientalism and representations of Cleopatra on the Australian stage
More LessThis article traces how notions of colonial identity have played out in theatrical representations of Cleopatra on the Australian stage in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries – focusing on culturally produced costumed bodies as a site on to which ideas of colonial whiteness, Orientalism and modernity are projected. These representations of the ‘exotic’ Other also absorb popularly accepted ideas of femininity and female power in the circulation of familiar visual tropes. In the temporal space of the twentieth century, Anglo-Australian’s dominant theatrical references shifted from those associated with its European colonial subject’s cultural origins to those of a more globalized and culturally diverse nation still struggling to decolonize its cultural edifices. Close examination of the costumed bodies of Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Brayton as two touchstone versions of Cleopatra on the Australian stage at the dawn of the modern period, reveals the nascent creation of an aesthetic and stylistic cultural vernacular that would slowly develop throughout the twentieth century in the circulation of meaning between costume, bodies and audiences. For the contemporary practitioner, this provides some insight into the historical context of stereotypical costume tropes in which Orientalist ideals are circulated, as well as drawing attention to a particular political and ideological aspect of the complex relationship between the performing body and performance costume.
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Big heroine dramas in contemporary China: Costume, authenticity and an alternative history of women of power
By Zheng YingBig heroine dramas (da nü zhu jü) – a specific category of Chinese costume dramas – have been popular recently, due to the big market of female audiences/consumers in China, and brought up fierce debates on feminism. The shows, written by female authors, are about the stories of powerful women in imperial China. A critical hypothesis here is that the shows combine the figuration of ancient, powerful women and a persona of neo-liberalist feminism. Why do audiences accept the anachronism of big heroine dramas, and how does historical authenticity become coherent with a modern narrative? With costume as an analytical corpus, this article involves the approaches of feminist theory, historical theory and costume studies. The costumes of big heroine dramas are a hybridity of authentic antique and imaginary design. They contribute to building up historical authenticity and the neo-liberalist ideas of power and hierarchy. Costumes thus become the field where the authenticity of the past folds with the reality of the present. Meanwhile, big heroine dramas rewrite an alternative history of powerful women for women audiences. The assemblage of historiography and modern feminist fiction offers rebellious narratives that disturb the state-advocated notion of heterosexual romantic relationships, marriage and family.
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An ‘armour’ against anguish: Costume design considerations around protecting actors in emotionally distressing roles
More LessActors and singers frequently portray characters who experience distressing events, yet this may cause anguish for the performers themselves and require them to perform personal emotional management to cope with their own feelings during a production. This case study discusses and documents my costume design ethos and processes for the Sydney 2018 production of Clare Barron’s play, You Got Older (2015), which required the two lead actors to play characters who were experiencing profound fear, grief and loss. The design approach drew on Monks’s work on the relationship that actors have with their costumes and d’Anjou’s interpretation of Sartrean ethics within the context of a design practice. Once I had determined that the nature of my role as designer for this production would be to offer the actors emotional support through costume, I applied Woodward’s notion of comfort in everyday dress to the context of performance costume to ascertain how costume might contain a talisman and/or function as a form of psychological, ‘soft armour’ within the context of the play. Finally, this report uses Tonkinwise’s writing on ethical design alongside a semi-structured interview with the lead actor in You Got Older, Harriet Gordon-Anderson, to examine the forms that such protections took within my designs for the play and offers methodological considerations regarding designing costumes to protect and comfort performers playing emotionally distressing roles, should the actors require it.
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Cuttlefish – performing body
More LessThis research report discusses and reflects on the development of the costume design and choreography of the performance piece Cuttlefish, 2017–19. In the performance, the costumes played an essential role as they completely transformed the movements and forms of the dancers. To enable this, costumes were designed as temporal forms, garments that contain a particular movement language based on the structural possibilities of the body. The costumes are discussed here from two perspectives: in relation to their role in constructing a narrative for the audience, choreographer and dancers and secondly concerning the practical aspects of their development as temporal forms. The suggestion is that garments constitute material opportunities, designed to provide a system of possible movements and expressions that the choreographer and dancer can explore. The result has implications for both fields of fashion design and costume design as it proposes fundamental parameters for a method of constructing garment as temporal form.
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Costume at the National Theatre, with introductions by Dr Aoife Monks, Foreword by Rufus Norris (2019)
More LessReview of: Costume at the National Theatre, with introductions by Dr Aoife Monks, Foreword by Rufus Norris (2019)
London: National Theatre in association with Oberon Books Ltd, 207 pp., ISBN 978-1-78682-975-7, p/bk, £25/$29.95
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Making Victorian Costumes for Men, Sil Devilly (2019)
By Liz GarlandReview of: Making Victorian Costumes for Men, Sil Devilly (2019)
Marlborough: Crowood Press, 160 pp., 232 colour photographs and patterns ISBN 978-1-78500-575-8, p/bk, £25.00
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The Costume Supervisor’s Toolkit: Supervising Theatre Costume Production from First Meeting to Final Performance, Rebecca Pride (2019)
More LessReview of: The Costume Supervisor’s Toolkit: Supervising Theatre Costume Production from First Meeting to Final Performance, Rebecca Pride (2019)
New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 170 pp., ISBN 978-1-13818-260-8, p/bk, £34.99
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