Studies in Costume & Performance - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2023

As an active force in the rich cultural ecosystem of performance in Africa, the Yoruba traditional Alarinjo travelling theatre itinerant masked performance is historically entangled with ritual practices that are specifically situated within communities and families through dress, ceremony and performance. Ancestors manifest themselves as enveloped masqueraders in familial and community relationships, through specially constructed material assemblages. These are charged spatial, movement-based forms, marked by their energetic performances in which the individual body of the wearer disappears into layers of fabric. Such practices are embedded in Yoruba everyday life and culture and nurture Alarinjo expressive theatre making. Rather than creating paradigmatic or canonical characters, the exchange between situated ritual and travelling performance has enabled a shared fertile environment of invention in which the fabric of the performance can provide a sociocultural weaving together of the community as performance and ritual reinforce one another. This study is aimed at examining the criticality of costumes to the performance of Alarinjo performance through the analysis of the sociocultural meanings in Egungun ritual from a cultural and situated perspective. Exposing how Alarinjo and Egungun ritual performances intersect in colourful displays of traditional fabrics and attires, their material performativity points to a role in the survival of this ancient performance practice at the core of Yoruba civilization.

Prozodezhda, or ‘production clothing’, arose in the early Soviet Union amid the post-1917 enthronement of the proletariat as the Soviet nation’s hero. Loose and practical clothing that evokes the dress of labourers, it found traction in the theatre, where Vsevolod Meyerhold famously used prozodezhda in his constructivist productions The Magnanimous Cuckold, of 1922, and The Death of Tarelkin, also of 1922. Prozodezhda as costume, because of its functionality, easily lends itself to an ideological reading in line with the socialist avant-garde’s post-revolutionary efforts to embrace Soviet principles. But an emphasis on the ideological significance of prozodezhda often occludes careful investigation of its aesthetic function and heritage, including its place in modernist costume history. Prozodezhda was very much a new and radical form of costume in line with other modernist experiments, but it seems to facilitate attention to the physical and expressive skills of the performer, rather than to treat the actor as an obstacle that must be concealed, constrained or inhibited. It thus challenges narratives of modernist fragmentation of the human, or it even attempts to overcome this fragmentation in itself by restoring to a modernist aesthetics the possibility of movement that celebrates the wholeness of the human body. It further joins in the modernist resistance to naturalism, character and figural representation, but it does so, curiously, through mimetic reference to the Soviet labourer. My argument relies on analysis of production and costume design images, as well as of primary writings by Meyerhold and his collaborators, by costume designers and by poet and costume theorist Mikhail Kuzmin. I show that prozodezhda draws attention to the fundamental question of the purpose of acting, a question that is particularly potent given the political stakes of theatre in the early Soviet era.

Hanging on racks and squeezed into shelves, past performances’ ghosts are visible in the costumes left behind. The costumes held in stock by most theatre companies are material memories of previous productions. They hold traces of the performance, have eased and shaped to fit performers’ bodies over weeks or months of daily wear, have been stressed by a consistent action or absorbed stains from ‘blood’ despite diligent washing. These traces, and the costumes themselves, provide a history of the performance that contradicts the routine complaint of theatre as an ephemeral medium. However, despite, or perhaps, because of these traces, costume stock is often regarded with misgivings. A pejorative attitude to stock costume reflects a significant change in its valuing over the last two centuries, one that does not reflect its active role in producing new works. This article contrasts costume stock’s position in the theatrical imagination with the many and often overlapping roles it plays in the costume workshop, rehearsal room and onstage to develop a taxonomy of costume stock use. It argues for a revaluation of costume stores as a creative tool in theatrical design and performance making.

Review of: Vestuario Para La Escena 2022, curated by Edyta Rzewuska and Jerildy Bosch, Vestuario a Escena MX

National Centre for the Arts (CENART), Mexico City, 12 May–3 July 2022

Review of: Costume in Motion: A Guide to Collaboration for Costume Design and Choreography, E. Shura Pollatsek (2021)

New York and Abingdon: Focal Press and Routledge, 218 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-81536-687-4, p/bk, £38.99

ISBN 978-0-81536-688-1, h/bk, £120

ISBN 978-1-35125-852-4, e-book, £35.09