Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage, Sarah Balkin (2019)

Review of: Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage, Sarah Balkin (2019) Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 198 pp., ISBN 978-0-47213-148-8, h/bk, $65

Romaison 2020 Rome, an Extraordinary Maison: The Archives and Creations of Its Costume Studios, curated by Clara Tosi Pamphili

Romaison 2020 Rome, an Extraordinary Maison: The Archives and Creations of Its Costume Studios, curated by Clara Tosi Pamphili Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Roma, 23 October–29 November 2020

Dream weaving: A conversation with Jennifer Irwin

In December 2019 as I made my way through Bangarra Dance Theatre’s exhibition Knowledge Ground, Australia was in the early stages of a devastating bushfire season and Sydney was shrouded in a cloud of smoke. It was Bangarra Dance Theatre’s 30th anniversary and I was fully immersed in a theatrical display of set pieces, soundscapes and costumes from landmark productions by Australia’s premier First Nations performing arts company. Bangarra’s body of work draws on over 65,000 years of Indigenous culture and fuses the language of traditional and contemporary dance to create a compelling narrative based on a shared knowledge of country. These works have served as markers of revelation in the development of my own understanding of Australia and have made Bangarra an internationally acclaimed source of powerful story telling. They have also fuelled a long-lasting appreciation of the costumes designed for the company by Jennifer Irwin with whom I shared a series of discussions.

Organic entities, costume, human body and neo-liberalism

This visual essay presents four of the author’s artistic projects, which respond to prevailing eastern European neo-liberal conceptions of the human body and the subjects it produces. The first project is concerned with the use of human skin as an organic material donated by its ‘owner’ for the manufacture of a corset and belt, which become parts of a new costume. The second project explores the characteristic of the ‘ideal’ neo-liberal human subject by means of the costume produced by manipulating the author’s own blood. The third project highlights the cultural norm according to which one is expected to present oneself to the known and especially unknown others in line with the dominant standards of feminine beauty – erotically attractive, healthy, youthful and slim. The fourth project focuses on the almost obsessive endeavour to preserve or rather achieve ‘the perfect skin’, as evident in countless beauty advertisements and artificially ‘optimized’ selfies.

Naked villainy: Encounters with an archetype of disfigurement

This research report is focused on an emergent methodology developed to support a transformational actor–researcher engaged in heuristic inquiry. Rooted in Stanislavskian practices, transformational acting outlines a character building technique that is, at its core, a physical process. By including costume as an integral component of this physical character-building process, the actor is equipped with a material tool with which they may alter their means of perception. A combined reading of modern cognitive theory and feminist theory asserts that such perceptual alterations as costume affords may then result in a fundamental shift in the performer’s identity, facilitating a lived experience of the character’s identity. Considering costume within a Stanislavskian context introduces a material set of given circumstances; an embodied experience of another’s possibilities or impossibilities of movement. While these perceptual changes stimulate transformation, an actor–researcher may also find themselves in active collaboration with a ‘character’ outside of themselves, potentially lending new-found insight within a research setting. Starting from a materialist approach to character, I chose to use Shakespeare’s character Richard III as a case study to test my hypothesis. What I soon began to realize was that this unidentified ‘materiality’ that I had been drawn to could not be distinguished from Richard’s ‘disability’. I began to ask, what are the ethical implications of an actor donning various external costume-based tools in embodying a disabled character? How does such an approach help us move away from the medical model of disability to the social, and perhaps even towards the affirmative and to resituate disability as a lived experience rather than metaphor? This research report details an emergent methodology confronted with the ethical implications of costume’s impact on the portrayal and understanding of disability in theatre today.

La Robe à la Française et la Robe l’Odalisque: Wearing women’s clothing in The Rose of Versailles

The androgynous heroine of Ikeda Ryoko’s manga The Rose of Versailles (1972–73), Oscar Françoise de Jarjayes, is usually depicted in masculine, specifically military, attire. The sixth daughter of an important military colonel during the reign of Louis XV and Louis XVI, Oscar is raised as a son and follows her father into the military. Oscar is only ever depicted in one dress, known as the robe l’odalisque – a gown that is adopted at a pivotal moment of character development. It is while wearing this dress, which Ikeda intended to serve as a wedding dress, that Oscar comes to terms with her unrequited love for Marie Antoinette’s lover, Count Axel von Fersen. In doing so, Oscar places more importance on her allegiance to France than to romance. This article investigates the complicated gender and social politics that are symbolized by the choice to wear women’s clothing in The Rose of Versailles.

Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children’s Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime, Jennifer Schacker (2018)

Review of: Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children’s Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime, Jennifer Schacker (2018) Detroit: Wayne State University, 284 pp., ISBN 978-0-81434-590-0, p/bk, $29.99

Innovative Costume of the 21st Century: The Next Generation, Dmitry Rodionov, curated by A.A. Bakhrushin Museum

Innovative Costume of the 21st Century: The Next Generation, Dmitry Rodionov, curated by A.A. Bakhrushin Museum State Historical Museum, A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Center for Contemporary Art MARS Moscow, Russia, 17 June–2 October 2019

From historical materiality to performance: Choreographic functions of the costumes in The Rite of Spring (1913)

Examining the surviving costumes of the 1913 production of The Rite of Spring, this article explores how costumes functioned in the Russian ‘new ballet’ choreography, of which the Ballets Russes Company is the most internationally famous example. The materiality of costumes – the fabric, cut and dye – organized the dancing bodies onstage in a manner that, in part, relied on Russian contexts invisible to the predominantly foreign audiences of the performances in Paris and London. Subsequently, these Russian reactions where The Rite of Spring was part of a continuum of representations of Russia’s past have been largely ignored in favour of the opinions of French and British critics, for whom the work appeared extraordinary and alien. The so-called reconstruction (1987), where the surviving costumes were used to compensate for the absence of choreographic understanding, has further obscured what the choreography was and what costumes actually did (and do) in performance. Although decisions made in recreating performance differ from historiographical research, exploring the practical making of costumes also draws attention to perspectives often forgotten in discussions of past performance more generally – such as changes in how costumes are experienced, or what that experience explains of later reminiscences.