Studies in Costume & Performance - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2022

This article attempts to unpick colonialist and racist stereotypes in costume, in an effort to think through decolonization in relation to costume design and research. Examining Sidney Nolan’s costumes for the Royal Ballet’s 1962 production of The Rite of Spring, which misappropriated Australian First Nations cultures for visual (and choreographic) inspiration, the primary aims are to articulate the complexities of the production’s oppressive colonial roots, and to situate it within the wider context of recent challenges from scholarship and discourse around traditional ballet that have reframed it as a potentially racist art form. The discussion positions the costumed dancers from this production in relation to problematic binaries articulated more recently in scholarship around modern dance. A consideration of the damaging perpetuation of stereotypes the costumes propagate offers a way of understanding the ongoing impact of ballet’s colonialist history, and the role costume (and those who create it) plays in this.

This essay introduces an unpublished talk by Greek stage designer Ioanna Papantoniou (born 1936) entitled ‘Local costume in a theatrical performance’, originally presented at the First Panhellenic Meeting of Ephors (Curators) and Dance Teachers at the Lyceum Club of Greek Women in Athens, in November 1990. Prior to and alongside her professional design career in the field of theatre, Papantoniou was actively engaged as a researcher in ethnography studies on Greek local costumes and folk dances. Driven by her passion for the study of Greek local dress combined with her professional experience as a stage designer, Papantoniou has given several talks on the connections between theatrical performance and folk traditions, as well as on the interrelationship between local dress and theatrical costume on stage and in festivities. In this talk she conflates local costume and folk dance as a form of performance and discusses how these two elements become an artistic creation when it comes to staged performances outside their original setting in a village. Thus, she draws a line between the ‘authentic’ and the staged performance, the latter of which is what she considers contemporary folk dancing in reproduced folk costume to be. The published text is based on a transcript of the talk, translated into English, and further edited by costume designer and scholar Sofia Pantouvaki, who also provides an introduction and numerous annotations to make the talk accessible by an international audience.

My research project, Drawing and Performance: Creating Scenography, looked at the way drawing is used during the creative process of scenography within the performance arts. It was my intention to analyse and reflect upon the artistic and pragmatic relationship scenographers have with drawing as a device for the creation of space and time of performance, and also as mediator between the bodies of actors or dancers onstage and our drawing pages. In this article I discuss examples from this research project and from my own practice where costume sculpted during the process of rehearsal came to generate a specific presence onstage and consequently moulded the performance. I argue that this working method expands the function of drawing in the creative process of the costume designer by applying it as part of a back and forth process of analysis and composition which includes the designer’s experience of movement and touch. With this in mind this article follows three examples of Portuguese costume designers who use drawing extensively in their practice: Clara Bento, Claudia Ribeiro and my own.

In this visual essay, I discuss how clothing made for an expanded cinema performance entitled Film as Fabric took on significance. The live work shows analogue film as fabric and stitching as editing to highlight historical relationships between textile practice and experimental filmmaking. The work developed through iterations from 2013 to 2017 as a part of doctorate research carried out from 2012 to 2020. My position as an experimental filmmaker with a background in embroidery grounded the study. Annabel Nicolson’s seminal live expanded cinema performance Reel Time (1973), in which she punctured 16mm film with her unthreaded sewing machine, was also a point of departure. Feminist critique from both disciplines – film and textile studies – supported the possibility of repressed relationships between the fields. Feminist scholars have repeatedly problematized contextualization of experimental filmmaking as narrow and misplaced (Blaetz 2007; Hatfield 2006; Reynolds 2009, 2012; Rhodes 1979). Until now, connections with textile practice in experimental filmmaking have been largely overlooked, most likely because domestic crafts have a long association with women’s work (Barber 1994), are central to deep rooted Western stereotypes of femininity, and remain denigrated art forms (Parker 2010). The development of Film as Fabric led to the creation of hybrid tools, forms and gestures, such as optical sounds and moving images made from fabric and stitch patterns. These were measured on the body, cut with dressmaking scissors, stitched, spliced into loops and projected in former cotton mills. This process allowed sounds associated with textile production and my personal textile ancestry to re-surface in new ways. The live context demands attention is given to material practices, which typically take place out of sight in the home and the film cutting room and have also recently undergone significant shifts in cultural status.

Review of: Performance Costume: New Perspectives and Methods, Sofia Pantouvaki and Peter McNeil (eds) (2021)

London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 398 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35009-879-4, p\bk, €22.96 (£22.99/USD 30.95)