Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture, and the Body 9781474236874, 9780857855107, 9781474285353, 9781474236898

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COSTUME IN PERFORMANCE

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“This is essential reading for anyone interested in performance and costumes, providing an exciting and accessible scholarly exploration of the uses and significance of costumes from prehistoric ritual to contemporary theater. It is valuable for its international range of productions and detailed descriptions of significant costumes, including dance, circus performance, street theater, and traditional stage.” Patricia Lennox, New York University, USA “Donatella Barbieri has crafted a unique and intriguing way of looking at the history of costumes for performance. Drawing on case studies and in-depth analysis of performance costume, this book is a marvellous addition for researchers in the costume discipline.” Colleen Muscha, School of Theatre, College of Fine Arts, Florida State University, USA “This poetic work is a tour de force of lively research and imagination. Charting the transformation of performance costume across time, space and material, Barbieri, with Trimingham, takes us from the Ancient Greek chorus to modern trapeze artists, revealing how costume creates new thresholds of human experience.” Peter McNeil, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia “With compelling scholarship and great artistic sensitivity, Barbieri deftly explores the cultural, societal and creative agency of the costumed and performing body. In tracing the complex artistic, historical and cultural journey from every day clothing through the designer to the cutting table to the stage costume, this magnificently illustrated book makes an absolutely essential contribution to our understanding of scenography.” Christopher Baugh, University of Leeds, UK “Donatella Barbieri’s own breadth of skills as a passionate lecturer, an inspiring teacher and a practitioner are all evident in this wonderful and uncompromising new book. Through the agility of her themes and connections from Palaeolithic cave painting to the most recent performances or archival discoveries, she never loses sight of the metamorphic power of costume. This is a daring and inspiring book.” Judith Clark, Research Centre for Fashion Curation, University of the Arts London, UK “Costume in Performance provides a convincing challenge to the marginalization or near invisibility of the role that costume is afforded in performance making in theatre and dance research and practice. In this meticulously researched book, which draws on historical and contemporary examples, the material object, which is the costume, becomes a key collaborator in the making of performance. The book’s argument is developed through a thematic framework which is supported by 195 pertinent, beautiful illustrations. Costume in Performance will be an invaluable resource for senior undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and practitioners in theatre and dance. Interest in the role of costume in performance is certainly in the air and this book represents an important marker in this emergent area.” Helen Thomas, Professor of Dance Studies, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, UK ii

COSTUME IN PERFORMANCE Materiality, Culture, and the Body

DONATELLA BARBIERI with a contribution from Melissa Trimingham

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Donatella Barbieri, 2017 With a contribution from Melissa Trimingham Donatella Barbieri has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN :

HB : PB : ePDF : ePub:

978-1-4742-3687-4 978-0-8578-5510-7 978-1-4742-3689-8 978-1-4742-3688-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design: Sharon Mah Cover image: Pina Bausch-Viktor, Pina Bausch Tanztheatre of Wippertal, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, 1999, Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgments xviii Preface xx Introduction xxii

1 The First Costume: Ritual and Reinvention

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2 Costuming Choruses: Spectacle and the Social Landscape on Stage 3 The Grotesque Costume: The Comical and Conflicted “Other” Body 4 The Flight off the Pedestal: A Sublime Second Skin 5 Agency and Empathy: Artists Touch the Body

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Melissa Trimingham

6 A Different Performativity: Society, Culture, and History on Stage

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Notes 213 Bibliography 219 Index 229

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

COVER IMAGE : Eddie Martinez and Julie Shanahan in Viktor, by Pina Bausch, costume design by Marion Cito, Tanztheater, Wuppertal. Photographed by Graham Brandon at Sadler’s Wells in January 1999, by kind permission of the Lutz Foerster and Pina Bausch Foundation. © Victoria and Albert Museum. 1.1

William Louther, costume by Peter Farmer, The Consolation of the Rising Moon choreographed by Robert Cohan. Photograph by Anthony Crickmay, 1971 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Lascaux Cave, The Shaft Scene, in which the masked man stretched out on the ground next to a disemboweled bison is rapt in a shamanistic trance. Photo by Norbert Aujoulat (N. Aujoulat © MCC /Centre National de Préhistoire).

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1.3a The Sorcerer in the Trois-Frères Cave, discovered by the Abbé Breuil, whose drawing, first published in 1920, provides an analysis of the worn animal elements that may have contributed to a shamanic ritual performance © Getty Images.

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1.3b Photograph of the sorcerer by Serge de Sazo, collection Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images.

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1.2

1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7

Pronomos Vase, at the center of which is a satyr caught mid-dance, while others are in repose, holding their masks. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività culturali e del Turismo—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

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Costume design for Oberon, the Faery Prince, costume design by Inigo Jones, 1610 © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

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Satyrs from the antimasque that preceded the masque of Oberon, The Faery Prince, costume design by Inigo Jones, 1610 © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

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Satyr and satyress statuette, by Andrea Briosco, Padua, Italy, 1515–20 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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1.8a Madame Desargus-Lemière and Amalia Galster. Second quarter of the nineteenth century, depicting a ballerina dancing a male role © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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1.8b Adèle Dumilâtre and Henri Desplaces in The Corsair, 1844, the latter dancing in a costume mirroring his female partner in shape and composition © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.9

Vaslav Nijinsky as the Faun in L’Après-midi d’un faune, costume design by Léon Bakst © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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1.10 Adam Cooper as the Swan in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, costume designed by Lez Brotherston. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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1.11 Ram Gopal. Photograph by Houston Rogers, 1956 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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1.12 Mrinalini Sarabhai, mid-twentieth century, photograph by Gordon Anthony © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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1.13 Iphigenia at Aulis, by Euripides, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, Théâtre du Soleil, 1990. Costumes by Nathalie Thomas and Marie-Hélène Bouvet. Théâtre du Soleil/Michèle Laurent © Photograph: Michèle Laurent.

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1.14 Japanese print by Utagawa Kunisada, late Edo period, of backstage at the Ishimuraza Theatre © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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1.15 The chorus from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Théâtre du Soleil, 1990. Costumes by Nathalie Thomas and Marie-Hélène Bouvet. Théâtre du Soleil/Michèle Laurent © Photograph: Michèle Laurent.

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1.16 Iphigenia at Aulis: Simon Abkarian’s Agamemnon, with Nirupama Nitayanandan playing Iphigenia. Photograph by Martine Franck © Martine Frank/Magnum Photos.

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1.17 In his most recent production of Hamlet, which toured to the Barbican in London in 2015, Yukio Ninagawa reprised the idea of the Hinamatsuri presented here through the costumes as much as the tiered set, utilized for the play within the play. This Ninagawa Company production of Hamlet, with costume designed by Ayako Maeda, was his eighth. Photograph by Geraint Lewis/Alamy Images.

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1.18 Hina dolls, traditionally displayed as part of the Hinamatsuri festival, which was focused on young women. Photograph by JTB Photo/UIG via Getty Images.

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1.19 Carlotta Ikeda as the Ghost in Search: Hamlet, directed by Ong Keng Sen, with costume designs by Koji Hamai, 2002 © Koji Hamai.

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2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4

Tragic chorus of warriors. Attic red-figure column krater vase 500BC –490BC in the Mannerist style © Antikenmuseum Basil und Sammlng Ludwig/Andreas F. Voegelin.

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Performers holding their masks. Their costumes could be identified by the audience as those of Heracles and Papposilenos, through Heracles’ breastplate and his lion headdress-topped mask. The turfed surface of the Papposilenos costumes associates him to the satyrs, and the older, bearded face of the mask defines his seniority. Detail, Pronomos Vase, c.400BC . Reproduced by permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività culturali e del Turismo—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

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Bronze muscle cuirass, fourth century BC , Classical Greek style, Ruvo, Italy © British Museum.

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The first intermedio, designed by Bernardo Buontalenti in 1589, of Girolamo Bargagli’s La Pellegrina, depicting the harmony of the spheres, with parting clouds revealing mythical, celestial choruses © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The fire-breathing dragon was vanquished by Apollo, allegory for the Medici ruler, thus saving the inhabitants of Delphi in the third intermedio of La Pellegrina. Costume design for female characters by Buontalenti, 1589 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Costume designs for two female characters, most likely to be played by male performers. Costume drawing by Bernardo Buontalenti, c.1589 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Early court dance, in which the “noble” male dancers’ costumes and headdresses invited an upright stance. Jacques Callot’s print of the first Intermedio della veglia della liberatione di tirreno staged in the Teatro Mediceo in 1616 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Phasma Dionysiacum Pragense, a court dance at Prague Castle in 1617, in which the deciphering of meanings inscribed in the choreography of geometric symbols necessitated identically shaped costumes © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Ballet de cour costume for male dancer from Meleto Castle c.1750, and detail © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.10 Gaétan Vestris in Jason et Médée Ballet Tragique, 1781, which satirized tragic poses. His costume appears to parody the exaggerations of tonnelet skirts, combining the panniers with draping © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.11 Two dancers in the classically inspired high waists and flat shoes, characteristic of post-revolutionary dance as much as of fashion. When compared with images of dancers from the preceding decades, they appear to have stripped away an entire layer of clothing. Two Sisters, by Adam Buck, 1796 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.12 Marie Taglioni as the Sylph in La Sylphide by Alfred Edwards Chalon, printed in 1845 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.13 Ballet class, 1850s, probably at the Paris Opera, to which rich patrons were allowed access. Notice the threatening stick held by the dance master © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.14 Painting by Edgar Degas capturing the fusion of light and costume in the final act of the Romantic opera Robert le Diable, when deceased nuns come back to life to seduce the central character © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.15 Les Sylphides, Michel Fokine’s tribute to the Romantic ballet, devised for the Ballets Russes in 1909 and much revived since, including in this mid-twentieth century version at the Royal Opera House © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.16 Black and white backstage photograph of The Talk of the Town by Houston Rogers, 1960 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.17 South American routine from a floorshow at The Talk of the Town, 1962, London Hippodrome. Photograph by Anthony Crickmay © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.18 Tiller Girls, c.1960, in identical costumes and with very similar physical shapes © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.6

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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2.19 Costume for the Chief Polovtsian Warrior in Fokine’s ballet Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, Diaghilev Ballet, 1909, designed by Nicholas Roerich © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.20 The women in The Rite of Spring, 1913, in costumes by Nicholas Roerich © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.21 Sidney Nolan and Kenneth MacMillan’s The Rite of Spring, in repertoire at the Royal Opera House, first staged in 1962, photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.22 Pina Bausch and Rolf Borzik’s Rite of Spring, first staged in 1975. Photograph © by Zerrin Aydin-Herwegh.

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2.23a The Rite of Spring performed by The Fabulous Beast Dance Company in collaboration with the English National Opera, 2009, reproduced by permission of Michael KeeganDolan, choreographer, and Rae Smith, designer. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.23b The Rite of Spring, 2009, reproduced by permission of Michael Keegan-Dolan, choreographer, and Rae Smith, designer. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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2.24 Rae Smith’s costume designs for The Rite of Spring, 2009 © Rae Smith.

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3.1

3.2

Costumes designed by Daniel Rabel for Ballet du Sérieux et du Grotesque, 1627, court of Louis XIII, l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris: (a) design for the character Le Sérieux; (b) drummer; (c) Guard of the clown Grotesque; and (d) Gigantic head and hat on legs. All © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Daniel Rabel’s costume design for a Headless Character in the Ballet Royal du Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626) Paris © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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3.3a Calyx-krater with theatrical scene, showing a comedy actor wearing both female breasts and male phallus c.400BC –390BC ; Apulian terracotta. Courtesy The MET, www.metmuseum.org.

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3.3b Comic actor, late fifth/early fourth century BC from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rogers Fund, 1913. Courtesy The MET, www.metmuseum.org.

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3.4

3.5

3.6

Engraving depicting Hell, c.1470, based in Francesco Triani’s fresco in Pisa, in which a three-headed Satan simultaneously eats and gives birth to sinners, surrounded by rows of devils tormenting souls © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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In this scene the depiction of the skin covering of some of the devils is formalized into regular rows of triangles, pictorially anticipating the costume of Arlecchino, a few centuries later, while also connecting to the satyr (see Figure 2.2, Chapter 2). The Last Judgment (f.38) in The Winchester Psalter, mid-twelfth century to the second half of the thirteenth century, British Library.

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A sartorial analysis of this early version of Satan’s Temptations of Christ, in the Winchester Psalter, mid-twelfth century to the second half of the thirteenth century, reveals a mixture of contemporaneous clothing, such a front-lacing female gown with

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3.7

3.8 3.9

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

knotted hanging sleeves and train, and a short, maybe monastic, hooded cape, layered with pelts and the attributes of various animals. The Three Temptations (f.18) in The Winchester Psalter, British Library.

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Spoon enameled on the bowl with an anthropomorphic ape riding a stag through a forest, believed to have been made in the Netherlands, c.1430 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Mamuthones, Mamoiada, Sardinia, Italy, 2010. Photographed by Charles Fréger/Wilder Mann.

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Harlequin mask, sixteenth century, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris.

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3.10a Harlequin and Zany. The latter’s costume has been linked by Katrizky to the working clothes of farm workers and sailors. The Zanys preceded and paralleled the development of stock commedia characters. Harlequin wears his tattered costume, from the Recueil Fossard (1570–80), Nationalmuseum Sweden, photograph © Nationalmuseum.

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3.10b Harlequin with Zany, Recueil Fossard (1570–80), Nationalmuseum Sweden, photograph © Nationalmuseum.

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3.11 Statuette of Arlecchino, mask-free, taking his hat off. The surface of his costume is tidied into neat triangles and theatricalized elements of livery appear on his body, c.1740 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.12 Jacques Callot, engravings of dwarfs: Varie figure gobbi, early seventeenth century © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.13 Balli di Sfessania, street performers, by Jacques Callot c.1622 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.14 Four Punchinellos cooking, 1751, etching based on Tiepolo’s drawings © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.15 Victorian doorstop in the shape of Punch snoozing © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.16 Fool placing his hand on a grotesque old woman’s breast, in a woodcarving which was once a towel-holder, c.1520–5. He is wearing the canonical particolored motley © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.17 Engraving of Richard Tarlton (d. 1588), Shakespearean fool, in a rustic costume © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.18 “Mr. Follett as the clown in the pantomime of Harlequin and Oberon” showing a clown as represented on the English stage in 1797 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.19 Joseph Grimaldi in a version of his clown persona, Joey, in Harlequin & Friar Bacon, early nineteenth century © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.20 Grimaldi as Bold Dragoon in the pantomime of The Red Dwarf, recasting objects such as the coal scuttles which satirize the Hussar boots of high-ranking officers’ uniforms © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.21 Joseph Grimaldi, portrayed in character as he performs the song “All the World’s in Paris,” published early nineteenth century © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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3.22 Leap Frog in the comic pantomime of The Golden Fish, 1812, by which time Grimaldi’s Joey’s clown persona was well established © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.23 Victorian clown Charlie Keith, 1878 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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3.24 Charlie Chaplin, in his tramp clown persona, first developed in 1914 for the film Mable’s Strange Predicament, as related in his autobiography. Accreditation: Ronald Grant Archive for Tramp Picture.

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3.25a Charlie Chaplin as The Great Dictator, Charles Chaplin Productions (for Great Dictator) Accreditation: Ronald Grant Archive for Tramp Picture.

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3.25b Charlie Chaplin lies on a gigantic gear in a scene from Modern Times, 1936. Photo by United Artists/Getty Images.

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3.26 En Attendant Godot by French company Théâtre NoNo, with costume design by Serge Noyelle, November 2013, photographed by Cordula Treml © Cordula Treml.

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3.27a Design for the costume of the Chief Clown: The Buffoon in the ballet Chout by Mikhail Larionov, 1915 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS , London 2016.

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3.27b Costume for a Soldier in Larionov and Slavinsky’s ballet Chout designed by Mikhail Larionov, Diaghilev Ballet, 1921 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS , London 2016.

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3.28 All characters’ heads in King Ubu were covered by a skintight balaclava designed by Ene-Liis Semper in 2006, © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

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3.29 The world is upside down in the shoe-hands designed by Ene-Liis Semper for King Ubu in 2006, © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

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3.30 Groin heads, for King Ubu © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

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3.31 Contemporary Arlecchinos, for King Ubu in 2006, © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

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3.32 King Ubu, designed by Ene-Liis Semper in 2006, co-directed by Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

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4.1 4.2

4.3

The Rhinemaidens, 1907, in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, in a newspaper article that illustrates the mechanics of stage flight © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Flying harness in the form of a contemporary corset made, however, with scenic materials such as heavy canvas, buckles, and leather straps. It was developed by George Kirby in 1904 at the time of the first production of Peter Pan © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Harnessed aerialist and corps de ballet for “The Snow Ballet” in the comic opera A Trip To The Moon by Offenbach, 1883 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.4a Tea Table Lady by prolific costume designer Attilio Comelli (1858–1925), for the Drury Lane Theatre, exemplifying the way in which female bodies would be put to use for scenic effect © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.4b Costume design for a Green Orchid Girl in an unidentified production, probably for The Land of the Orchids, designed by Attilio Comelli, c.1900 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Orchid Ballet, January 1898, Drury Lane Theatre, was set in the “Land of Orchids” and featured a flying ballet by the Grigolatis aerial troupe, with Madame Grigolatis as Queen Humming Bird © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.6a Nellie Farren in the title role of Little Robin Hood at the Gaiety Theatre, 1882 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.6b Ganem, son of Ali Baba, played by Nellie Farren, in The Forty Thieves at the Gaiety Theatre, 1880 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.7 4.8

4.9

Madame Vestris, performer and theatre manager, as Don Giovanni in Giovanni in London, or The Libertine Reclaimed, 1820 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, with the Grigolatis Flying Troupe. The Finale of Tableau 5, 1894, Alhambra Theatre. Costumes designed by Howell Russell © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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The Houris, in the musical Chu Chin Chow, which ran from 1916 to 1921. Costume designed by Percy Anderson © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.10a Oscar Asche who plays the menacing male lead Abu Hasan in Chu Chin Chow © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.10b Lily Brayton as the female lead Zahrat al-Kulub in Chu Chin Chow © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.11 Sketch by Léon Bakst, for a bacchante in Narcisse, 1912 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.12 Freire Troupe, early 1900s. Author’s own collection.

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4.13 Photograph of Jules Léotard wearing the maillot invented by him and which took his name, the leotard © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.14 Miss La La at the Fernando Circus, 1879, Edgar Degas’ sketch © The J. Paul Getty Museum; digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

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4.15 Steel hook and leather strap used by Pansy Chinery (1879–1969) in her teeth-spinning act © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.16 Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (c.1880), albumen silver print on paper. Unidentified photographer, collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. Museum Purchase 1999.0187. Modern photograph of the image by Jack Abraham.

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4.17 Maud Allan (1873–1956) in costume as Salomé for her solo dance Vision of Salomé, c.1910 Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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4.18 Ruth St. Denis as Radha © Alamy.

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4.19 Helena in Troas (1886), an influential production designed by architect and dress reformist Edward W. Godwin, who based his designs on the material knowledge recently acquired through archaeological research © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.20 Henrietta Hodson as Endymion, Ellen Terry as Cupid, and Kate Terry as Diana in Endymion at the Theatre Royal, Bristol (1862). Knee length classical draping, while hiding a corset, is worn here over fleshings and satin character shoes. These draped

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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costumes preceded Isadora Duncan’s corset-less and barefooted dances © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.21 Isadora Duncan dancing with a scarf, c.1918. Anonymous artist. Photograph by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

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4.22 Isadora Duncan, 1905, in a photo lithograph by Edward Gordon Craig © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.23 Josephine Baker in “Danse des Bananas” for La Folie du Jour at the Folies Bergère, 1926. Author’s own collection.

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4.24 Letty Lind’s skirt-dance, 1889 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.25 Loie Fuller © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.26 Peggy Lyman Hayes in Lamentation, choreographed by Martha Graham, photograph by Martha Swope. Courtesy of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc.

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4.27 Female dancers on lined-up chairs wearing heels, seamed stockings, and floral dresses, standing upright as if ready for examination, in Pina Bausch’s Viktor, Tanztheater Wuppertal, designed by Marion Cito. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.28 A female dancer in Pia Bausch’s Viktor spouts water from her mouth while two men wash their hands and feet, with costumes by Marion Cito. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.29 A moment of release through circus rings flight and ball gowns in Pina Bausch’s Viktor, designed by Marion Cito. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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4.30 Violetta from La Traviata at Malmo Opera, directed by Thomas de Mallet Burgess and designed by Jamie Vartan, 2008, falls in slow motion in a prerecorded film projected during the overture. Excerpts from the slowed-down filmed movement were shown at various points during the performance. Still from the overture film for La Traviata at Malmo Opera, Cosamia Stage & Film Production (Cesare Righetti).

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4.31 As the “fallen woman” Violetta hits the water, her presence is magnified by the bubbles that leave her skirt, like a disappearing trail that ends when she reaches the bottom of the pool. La Traviata, Malmo Opera, 2008. Cosamia Stage & Film Production (Cesare Righetti).

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4.32 A child Violetta and her grown-up self wander past each other. Like the slowed-down film of the fall, the child returns at various points in the opera. La Traviata, 2008, Malmo Opera, directed by Thomas de Mallet Burgess and designed by Jamie Vartan, photographer: Malin Arnesson.

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4.33 Nicky Gillibrand’s costume design for Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2001 © Nicky Gillibrand.

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5.1 5.2

The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922, designed by Liubov Popova © Bakhrushin Museum, Moscow, General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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Vladimir Tatlin’s design for Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangesi, 1923 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Vladimir Tatlin’s costume design for Grief, Zangesi, 1923 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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Vladimir Tatlin’s costume design for Laughter, Zangesi, 1923 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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Kazimir Malevich’s costume design “The Mugger,” for Victory Over the Sun, 1913 designed by Kasimir Malevich © St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

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5.6

Hugo Ball, Karawane, 1916 © Maike Steinkamp/Arp Museum.

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5.7

Alexandra Exter: costume design for Three Slaves, Romeo and Juliet, 1921 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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Alexandra Exter: costume design for Aelita, the Queen of the Martians, 1924 © St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

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Varvara Stepanova’s design for Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin’s play The Death of Tarelkin, 1922 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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5.4 5.5

5.8 5.9

5.10 Varvara Stepanova, costume design for the Doctor, The Death of Tarelkin, 1922 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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5.11 Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt: costume design “Die Toboggan Frau,” 1923 © Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.

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5.12 Hilde Holger in the costume by Anton Josef Trcˇka for Mechanical Ballet, 1926. Digital photograph courtesy of Thomas Kampe.

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5.13 Costume drawing for Mechanical Ballet, 1926, by Artur Berger. Courtesy Primavera Boman, Hilde Holger private collection.

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5.14 Gertrud Bodenwieser-Gruppe in Dämon Maschine (Demon Machine), 1924 © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung, ÖNB/Wien/205141-D.

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5.15 Mask for The Golem. Courtesy Primavera Boman, Hilde Holger Private Collection, photograph by Donatella Barbieri.

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5.16 Costumes from The Bauhaus Dances, Oskar Schlemmer: Form Dance © Consemüller. Image courtesy Bauhaus Dessau.

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5.17 Disc skirt, dancer: Marta Navarrete Villalba, The Triadic Ballet by Gerhard Bohner, Bavarian State Ballet II © Wilfried Hösl 2014.

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5.18 Spiral, dancer: Nagisa Hatano, The Triadic Ballet by Gerhard Bohner, Bavarian State Ballet II © Wilfried Hösl 2015.

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5.19 Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican Centre, London 2004, performers Monika Tahal, Janet Henfrey, Matt McGrath, Gabriela Santinelli. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

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5.20 Rehearsal photograph for Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican Centre London 2004, performers (left to right) Sonˇa Cˇerviná, Janet Henfrey, Dean Robinson, Gabriela Santinelli, Jake Thornton, Mary Margaret O’Hara, unknown, Jack Willis, Matt McGrath, Nigel Richards, Marianne Faithfull. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

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5.21 Rehearsal photograph for Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, costumes by Frida Parmeggiani, Barbican London 2004, performers (left to right) Jack Willis, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Matt McGrath. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

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5.22 Rehearsal photograph for Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican London 2004, performers (left to right) Mary Margaret O’Hara, Ann-Christin Rommen. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

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5.23 Rehearsal photograph for Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican London 2004, performers (left to right) Nigel Richards, Jack Willis. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

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5.24 Alexandra Exter, costume design for the costume of a Russian Soldier in the comedy The Death of Tarelkin, c.1921 © Rodchenko & Stepanova Archive, DACS , RAO .

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Swimsuit designed by Coco Chanel for Lydia Sokolova as La Perlouse in Le Train Bleu, Ballets Russes, 1924. Courtesy of Chanel, Paris. Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Carte-de-visite featuring Lillie Langtry in couture, late nineteenth century © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Photo of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in the play Private Lives, 1930 © Photograph by GAB Archive/Redferns.

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George Alexander as Lord Windermere, Ben Webster as Mr. Cecil Graham, A. VaneTempest as Mr. Dumby, J. Nutcombe Gould as Lord Darlington and H. H. Vincent as Lord Augustus Lorton in Lady Windermere’s Fan, St James’s Theatre, London, 1892. The onstage world and the audience mirrored one another, and Oscar Wilde made use of this in his costume dramaturgy, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Irene Vanbrugh as Lady Rosamund in The Liars by Henry Arthur Jones at the Criterion Theatre, 1894, designed by Lucile, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.6a Marion Terry and George Alexander as Mrs. Erlynne and Lord Windermere in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, St. James’s Theatre, 1892, designed by Savage and Purdue, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.6b Winifred Emery and George Alexander as Lady and Lord Windermere in Lady Windermere’s Fan, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.6c Marion Terry and George Alexander in Lady Windermere’s Fan, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.5

6.7

Illustrations from Twelve Designs for The Costume of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, 1830, by J. R. Planché: (a) Richard, Duke of Gloucester, (b) Archer, (c) Richard as King, (d) Nobleman, (e) Richard in his ducal robe, and (f) Earl Rivers, all © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Three interpretations of Richard III: (a) photograph by London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company of Barry Sullivan in Richard III, 1876, at Drury Lane, (b) cartede-visite depicting Henry Irving as Richard III, 1888, published by Virtue & Co. Ltd, and (c) photograph by London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company of Richard Mansfield also as Richard III, 1889, at the Globe Theatre, all © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Silk boned bodice by C. F. Worth, 1890–3: (a) view of lining and (b) front view, both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.10 Design created by Jules Marre for the House of Worth, 1860 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.11 Sarah Bernhardt playing male characters (a) as Hamlet, which she first performed in 1899 and (b) as L’Aiglon c.1900, both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.12 Sarah Bernhardt (a) in her studio, cross-dressed and (b) photographed in a couture gown, 1880, both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.13 John Singer Sargent portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, in a costume by Alice Comyns-Carr, made by Ada Nettleship, 1889, Tate Modern © Getty Images Hulton Fine Art Collection.

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6.14 Portrait of Henry Irving as Macbeth, c.1880 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.15 Mariano Fortuny dresses of dark pleated silk c.1920 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.16 Ellen Terry as (a) Ellaline in The Amber Heart, Lyceum Theatre, 1887, and (b) Portia in The Merchant of Venice at the Prince of Wales Theatre designed by William Godwin, photograph by Charles Watkins, both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.17 Ellen Terry in an everyday kimono, 1875 by S. W. Walker © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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6.18 Photograph of the model for the Royal Shakespeare Company for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970, designed by Sally Jacobs and directed by Peter Brook © Sally Jacobs.

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6.19 Costume design by Sally Jacobs for (a) Sara Kestelman as Titania and (b) Ben Kinsley as Demetrius for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970, both © Sally Jacobs. Images courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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6.20 Costume design by Sally Jacobs for the Mechanicals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970 © Sally Jacobs. Image courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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6.21 Costume drawing for Pyramus, by Lez Brotherston for Dawn French’s interpretation of Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Lez Brotherston.

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6.22 Lez Brotherston’s costume designs for (a) Puck and (b) Philostrate, for London’s West End production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Lez Brotherston.

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6.23 Hermia design drawing by Lez Brotherston, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Lez Brotherston.

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6.24 Nicky Gillibrand’s design for Tree, Royal Shakespeare Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001, directed by Richard Jones © Nicky Gillibrand.

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6.25 Costume design for Puck by Nicky Gillibrand, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Nicky Gillibrand.

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6.26 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2002. The photograph by Manuel Harlan shows Bottom (Darrell D’Silva) and Titania (Yolanda Vazquez). Costume design by Nicky Gillibrand © Royal Shakespeare Company.

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6.27 Nicky Gillibrand’s design for First Fairy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Nicky Gillibrand.

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6.28 Costume designs by Marie-Jeanne Lecca for The Adventures of Mr. Broucˇek, 1992, at the English National Opera. The scene is set on the moon in a future defined by the clothing that the characters wear, which in this production parodies the present of the production. © Marie-Jeanne Lecca, costume designer.

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6.29 The historical past set in fifteenth-century Prague, where the time-traveling Mr Broucˇek finds himself © Marie-Jeanne Lecca, costume designer.

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6.30 The present of this production was set in Prague at the time of the opera’s first production, 1920, and was perceived through the filter of Mr Broucˇek’s inebriation © Marie-Jeanne Lecca, costume designer.

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6.31 The maids, designed by Brigitte Reiffenstuel for Richard Strauss’s Elektra, at the Royal Opera House, directed by Charles Edwards, in 2002 © Brigitte Reiffenstuel.

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6.32 Elektra, in a photograph by Peter West. Costume design Brigitte Reiffenstuel, direction, set, and lighting design, Charles Edwards © Donnington Arts.

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6.33 Costume design by Brigitte Reiffenstuel for Chrysothemis, layering mourning veils over a nuptial white skirt © Brigitte Reiffenstuel.

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6.34 The costume designed by Brigitte Reiffenstuel for Klytämnestra represented the character’s inner conflicts © Brigitte Reiffenstuel.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the support of London College of Fashion: University of the Arts London’s Pro Vice-Chancellor, Frances Corner; Jane Harris, Associate Dean of Research; and Judith Clark, research mentor. Equally, Helen Thomas who led research at LCF when the project was initially discussed, has been a constant source of encouragement since. The research fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum that enabled the development of this publication was initially under the supervision of Christopher Breward, its then Head of Research. His successor, Glenn Adamson, acknowledged the complexity of the subject by granting an extension to the fellowship. Bill Sherman, the current Head of Research, offered insightful considerations, which facilitated the completion of the first draft. The Head of Publishing at the V&A, Mark Eastment, was critical in his involvement and practical advice, as was Geoffrey Marsh, Head of Theatre and Performance. Instrumental to the developmental stages of the research was the dialogue with senior V&A curators, most crucially with Kate Dorney and Jane Pritchard, whose vision to expand knowledge on costume had first drawn me into the museum. The Theatre and Performance archive, held at Blythe House, has provided invaluable sources for the research, and the entire team of experts whose work is sited there, has, over the years, continued to support the probing of the extraordinary costumes collected and cared for by the V&A. Conversation with critically engaged designers of costume has informed aspects of this work: they include Sally Jacobs, Nicky Gillibrand, Marie-Jeanne Lecca, Brigitte Reiffenstuel, Lez Brotherston, Charles Edwards, Rae Smith, and Jamie Vartan. Scholars who have advised on specific aspects of the arguments advanced in the various chapters include classicist Rosie Wyles on Greek costumes, Michael Walling on intercultural theatre, Joslin McKinney on scenography, and Amy de la Haye and Peter McNeil on different aspects of fashion history. Anna Wright, Hannah Crump, Pari Thompson, Frances Arnold and the Bloomsbury Academic Division have been a source of continued support and guidance throughout the publishing process. This project is the grateful recipient of a grant from The Society of Theatre Research which has permitted the publication of some of the wonderful images included. The Society of British Theatre Design deserves a special mention: their support was though the exhibiting and touring of the initial research for this book, the Arts and Humanities Research Boardfunded project Designs for the Performer, between 2002 and 2005, through which costume designers were able to articulate their work and demonstrate its depth. Special gratitude goes to Greer Crawley, editor of the Society of British Theatre Designers journal Blue Pages, for the encouragement to write the book proposal for Costume in Performance which was drafted with her involvement. I am indebted also to Sofia Pantouvaki for taking over the launch edition of Studies in Costume and Performance research journal thereby releasing me, so that I could complete this book. A succession of talented young researchers has provided support at the various stages of its development, including Nadia Saccardi, Bronya Arciszewska, Ilaria Martello, Jenny Munday, Matteo Augello, Emily Collett, Molly Lempriere, Anya xviii

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Pearson, and Anastasia Miari. Their passion for the subject, as well as that of many of my students and ex-students, continues to embolden my own. Generous help in recovering the lost history of women dancers in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s, especially the work of Hilde Holger, was given by Holger’s daughter Primavera Boman, and Holger’s pupils Thomas Kampe and Liz Aggiss. Special thanks are due to those photographers who generously gave their work gratis to enable the richness and breadth of imagery this book contains. Finally, the greatest debt of gratitude goes to Melissa Trimingham, who has been involved in this project since 2012 and has been an unwavering source of enormous wisdom in our many conversations around costume. Her reading of the first drafts of individual chapters has provided intellectually rigorous questioning that has been invigorating as much as it has been challenging. The enlightening chapter she has contributed to the book (Chapter 5), that applies new research on empathy to modernist costumes, also provides a uniquely insightful exposure of costume-centered methodologies in her analysis of theatre-making.

PREFACE

The costumes brought together here reveal themselves as a tangible and critical nexus of human interaction in the making and in the experiencing of performance. This study emerges from the knowledge that as a material, performed-in object, costume renders ideas physical and embodies thoughts. In their active life, costumes have journeyed packed into trunks, squashed into costume skips, and hung upon rails, and have done so ever since the first itinerant performers set off on their journeys. They spread ideas wherever they go. Primavera Boman, daughter of dancer Hilde Holger, still lives in her mother’s house and dance studio in Camden. Holger’s archive of objects and costumes survived, like Holger herself, the Holocaust. Holger was forced in 1938 to flee Vienna, her family, and everything that had made her the teacher and star dancer she was. Costume ideas that traveled with her as drawings, photographs, and objects as well as physical memories of the dance in her body, made their way to India and then to England, and are still tangibly manifest today. My friend, colleague, and co-contributor Melissa Trimingham and I entered the archive’s only home, the top-floor room of that house in Camden, with Primavera as our guide, where together we lifted the lids of boxes, gently sifted through the costume crowded on rails, and handled infinitely precious designs and photographs: and all were ideas that had helped, supported, and inspired the work of many others. Holger’s costumes, like others hung on the imagined rails assembled from the costume skips of history this book has perused, are charged material objects of performance connected by ideas intersecting through them. The power of the mask designed by Kathe Berl for Hilde Holger’s Golem in 1937, and archived by her daughter, lying so fragile within layers of protective tissue paper, simply took our breath away. From it and other costume elements in the Holger collection, Trimingham has ascertained the gestural empathy of costume, the dissolving of the body into it, and “the dynamic impulses” that are generated in the “wearing and bearing the costume.” “You have to become it,” Holger said, during rehearsal to Liz Aggiss, dance artist and Holger’s pupil. Aggiss has herself gone on to make work to which costume is central. If a material and methodological analysis puts costume under the microscope as an object in performance, a telescopic reading is shaped through the connection with other performances and costumes in differing historical times and geographical spaces. Together the unpicking of the threads of individual costumes and their connections to others across time and space, provide layers and thicknesses. In turn these offer methodologies of performance-making based on costume. This change of focus parallels costume’s own existence as a practical object that negotiates proximity and distance in the microcosm of performance-makings. From the material gesturality and the tactile communication of its stitches and folds, to the structural links that trace the wide-ranging contours of concepts in the chapters that follow, the journey of costume from the cutting table to the stage is reflected in the makings, wearings, and readings of it. In this, hands that make, limbs that wear, and eyes that watch implicate the body as its central shared core, as costume becomes an object in movement—from material into embodiment on xx

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stage—in the affective communication between performers and audience. Through this bodily communication, costume’s influence extends beyond the moment of performance as it acquires the corporeal, worn and performed in existence as an idea, in the shared here-and-now of the performance. As such and beyond the performative continuities that we find as it weaves itself in and out of the history of thought, it also marks political positions and cultural raptures, through tears and tatters, or in dramatic costume changes in which the body is rearticulated in new and previously unseen forms. Being by the body and for the body these may often have to do with gender relationships, in ways that may potentially be effecting of changes in culture. In the balancing of the impulses it generated, and the underlying synthesis of ideas it contained, the Golem mask was not only a mnemonic device through which, in the 1980s, Hilde Holger and Liz Aggiss re-devised a dance from before the trauma of World War II . Its performing was conceived though an awareness that “extends from the nakedness of your existence” – Trimingham quotes Holger’s pupil Litz Pisk – to which a new temporary shape is given by the material costume, in the living laboratory for existence that performance can create. In this context, ethical consideration and the meaning of ideas expressed inform one another in a collaborative process that for the designer, the dancer, the choreographer, and the audience, extends beyond the performance moment. Set apart from the everyday through a framed space and time, performance turns clothing into costume, the charged and complex objects at the center of this inquiry, through which readings of human existence can be articulated in the fictionalized performing body.

INTRODUCTION The immaterial presence of costume Costume, in this book, is viewed as a crucial aspect of the preparation, presentation, and reception of live performance, revealing the relationship between dress, body and human existence in a way that causes us to question the extent to which it co-authors the performance with the performer. As a method through which performance can happen, costume embodies histories, states of being, and previously unimagined futures in the temporary space of the performance. It can guide movement, define place, and structure relationships, as well as of course reveal the character. The process of the staged body becoming a site for artistic experimentation from the start of the early twentieth century has not precluded costume’s defining of social interaction, individuality, and inner conflict. It has continued, as it has done for millennia, to articulate an infinitely complex human nature through material and form. Its ability to communicate metaphorically and viscerally provides a direct, visual, and embodied connection to the audience. It draws attention to the performer’s corporeal and material here-and-now reality, one which is shared with the present, sentient, and dressed spectators. Given its ubiquity, why has so little been written about costume throughout its long history of performance?1 In the extensive attention that has been given to acting, theatre, drama, and performance, references to costume can be gleaned only occasionally, from, as it were, the margins. The work of costume may be detected in depictions and descriptions of the costumed actor, albeit often subsumed into their work. This elusiveness may be the result of the physical disappearance of the material costume that, separated from the performer, may have left traces of the coalesced, transient, onstage existence only on the wearer’s physical memory. These traces are sometimes recorded in the performer’s memoirs and, occasionally, in audiences’ and critics’ recollections. Although records of the material processes involved in its development as a fabricated object may have survived, the made costume itself simply wears out or disappears into other performances. The few costumes that make it in into the archive as preserved objects and as fragments of the performance may have been collected because of their association with famous performers. However, if the absence of the costume itself limits our probing, external evidence—from wide-ranging sources including drawings, records of performances in print and in photographs, programs, and publicity material—mark costume’s presence in archives and museums. Responses to costumed performances by artists, writers and designers expose the impact of the dressed performing body on other fields of artistic practice; and its reproductions in popular and decorative arts permit specific connections to be made with wider culture and society. Overlaps with dress history and material culture afford other routes into costume research from a historical perspective. The study of contemporary practice, on the other hand, offers access to designers, makers, and performers and their costumes, as well as detailed analysis permitted by the viewing of the production itself, which make it possible to xxii

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ascertain the full impact of the performed-in costume within its context, and to focus on its role in the making of the performance. Nonetheless the lack of historical perspectives may deny such analysis the opportunity to link with its rich and varied history. This book intends to provide thematic, analytical frameworks connecting past costumes that have left indelible marks via their performances, and to associate these with conversant examples of contemporary practice. A dialogic relationship also exists between costume and fashion, and although the eloquence of costume may too easily dissolve into the priorities of the more established and better documented study of fashion, the latter offers inexhaustible sources from which costume, as a worn entity, constantly draws. Both costume and fashion act through the body, intending to influence behavior and thoughts, and to communicate. In costume this is organized not as a production of personal identity but within a “staged” world governed by its own interior aesthetic logic, functioning as an ordering principle that evaporates at the end of the performance. When produced by influential fashion designers however, similarly to those designed by famous artists, costumes may stand a better chance of being collected in archives and museums. If a dissolving of boundaries with other fields characterizes costume’s history, and if this may account for a paucity of scholarship as a distinct subject, it also creates a space for an interdisciplinary investigation. With examples brought together from various historical points, that range from ancient cave paintings to contemporary opera productions and which acknowledge a global as well as an Anglo/Eurocentric perspective, costume’s ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary boundaries may prove one of its defining characteristics. In the dispersal of the material costume, conversely its immaterial presence emerges, shaped by the confluence of ideas that may be detected around its making, as well as those that are refracted through its performance. Through individual costumes, presented here as touchstones, sometimes positioned centuries apart, strands from a number of scholarly fields intersect one or another of the various chapters. Not only do the costumes appear as markers of cultural and theatrical changes, but they also illustrate larger themes, trends, or movements, and become part of the construction of cultural memory. This investigation therefore explores the significance of costume by selectively making use of existing scholarship in the fields of theatre, performance, dance, opera, art, dress history, and material culture; the applied voices of anthropologists and classicists; new thinking about cognition and performance; and philosophical and sociohistorical contexts. Gender studies guide some of the analysis in certain aspects of the research on historical and contemporary presentation of the body through costume, while intercultural discourse and post-colonialism are implicated in the globalized context of performance.

Thematic frameworks In an attempt to encompass the complexity of the subject, the six-chapter structure can be broadly defined in opposites: the individual performer and the chorus in Chapters 1 and 2; the grotesque and the sublime in Chapters 3 and 4; art and history in Chapters 5 and 6. The presentation of the body on stage requires an ethically instrumental position and within each chapter a specific reading is proposed: liminal and societal agency in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively; transgression and emancipation in Chapters 3 and 4; empathy and authenticity in Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter  1 is initially informed by anthropology in a reading of costume as part of early tribal ritual practices, in which it is a critical part of performance intended to affect the future for the benefit of the community. The shaman’s semidivine hybrid merging of animal and human reemerges in the satyr in

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ancient Greece, who is instrumental in the founding of Western theatre. His descendent in Baroque times, several centuries later, is found bolstering the power of princes, who are in turn rendered godlike by their own heroic costumes in the court masque. The satyr’s twentieth-century modernist version, however, reestablishes a masculine sensuality through his costume and dance. The liminal status of ritual costume performance is then considered more broadly. A process of cultural embodiment builds, I suggest, preparedness for a globalized world during the twentieth century, by Western theatre practitioners adopting traditional Asian theatre practices which are fundamentally costume-centric. Objectors to costume-based intercultural practices perceive the wearing of the cultural and geographical Other’s costume potentially as cultural appropriation. However, the process of walking in someone else’s shoes may also be seen from the point of view of contemporary Asian companies whose influence on Western theatre, particularly in their use of costume, arguably enables a greater understanding of a shared humanity. In Chapter  2, the costuming of choruses defines the relationship of the individual to the group, a ‘civilizing’ perspective initially established in classical Athens. It views costume in choral practices through the opposing examples of the Athenian citizens and the court of Renaissance princes. The latter’s magnificent propagandist theatre led to the first ballets and operas, performed largely by male dancers. After the French Revolution, for the first time, large groups of women were recruited onto the stages of Romantic ballet, where, while being exploited, they also established a tradition of dance through their professional uniform, the tutu. By the twenty-first century, in enactments of gender instability through costume and its connection to community, performers challenged the inevitability of the female human sacrifice that had been inscribed in The Rite of Spring (1913), and which had reflected the femicides of nineteenth-century dance and opera. The central argument of Chapter 3 is around the grotesque, disorderly, and transgressive body, which through costume enables a comedic dramaturgy to emerge. The porous body is extended in a distorting manipulation of its proportions in characters of the Old Greek comedy. Wild Men of Europe and the devils from the miracle plays fed into the commedia dell’arte, the nineteenth-century Victorian clowns, and the Theatre of the Absurd. Through costume and comedy, the audience meets its own “Other”, the outsider, in a revelatory moment of recognition and laughter in the face of the solitary performer exemplified here by the global phenomenon of Charlie Chaplin. License to existential laughter is permitted in the work of contemporary experimental companies in a new, expanded Europe, as their work traverses boundaries between cabaret, dance theatre, and performance art. Starting from the idea of the sublime, Chapter  4 reads costume from a feminist and post-colonial perspective in which the female bodies on stage are examined via their ability to transcend physical and societal limitations. The comparison between the harnessed, corseted and “flown” tutued fairies of the second half of the nineteenth century and their contemporaries in the circus, the leotarded female aerialists, demonstrates how restrictive notions of femininity have been challenged via performance and costume. This has also involved experimentation with luxuriating Orientalist costume as much as the reinvention of the draped, classical fluid costume. If the decorated flesh became the costume, then veils, scarves and drapes became an extension of both gesture and of skin in the work of modernist dancers such as Loie Fuller and Martha Graham, extending the body of the dancer across the stage space. Contemporary practitioners have continued to explore the relationship between the female body, dress, and the space it occupies as a means to express its desire for emancipation and agency. In Chapter 5 Melissa Trimingham describes the deeply affective power of costume in performance. Visual sensibility in artists and sculptors combines with haptic and proprioreceptive sensitivity so that, in

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her words, “meaning emerges from contact of body and material form.” Taking a phenomenological and embodied approach, and concentrating on the twentieth-century avant-garde for the good reason that this is when visual artists moved into performance, she explains Russian constructivist costumes through the artists’ sympathy with and feeling for the human body in conjunction with contemporary concern for geometric form. She traces costumed humor and mystical longing in equal measure, epitomized in Russia by the costumes of Tatlin and in Europe by Dadaist Hugo Ball’s costume in Karawane. Female Expressionist dancers, especially those Jewish dancers in 1920s Vienna, are at last given some recognition for their extraordinary work with costume. Oskar Schlemmer trained as a dancer as an extension of his artistic practice, thus creating some of the most compelling costume forms ever seen. Finally Robert Wilson’s work demonstrates the contemporary power of the contact of body and material form. The final chapter, Chapter 6, focuses on costumes as representations of real garments, standing in for psychological, social and historical “truths” in the portrayal of a world of characters on stage. Designers exploit, and subvert, notions of authenticity and nostalgia, projected desires and constructed glamour, in order to create a language of the body in performances shared with their audiences. Oscar Wilde demonstrated how writers can inscribe this in their text in establishing the interior logic to the play through costume. Historical over-accuracy builds on formulas prescribed by antiquarian and dramatist James Robinson Planché in the 1820s. Though limiting in terms of what costume and performance can be, these have been instrumental through a successful “wearing” of history in instigating a number of political and methodological agendas. The second part concludes the chapter with the voices of five costume designers whose work epitomizes some of the key ideas in the book. This final section is framed initially around Jan Kott’s analysis of the contemporaneity found in historical plays, inviting Sally Jacobs into the conversation, with her seminal Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970 directed by Peter Brook. Both the creative agency and the critical and ethical engagement informing design for performance are made evident through the voices of contemporary designers, who articulate the complexities of thinking through costume. This book aims to expand, diversify, and qualify a notion of the centrality of costume to performance, with examples drawn from a time frame that ranges from prehistory to contemporary practice, on the grounds that as long as performance has been recorded, so costume must have been in existence. Ephemeral and eloquent, costume’s material presence in this book often transmutes into a powerful, visceral, and permanent immaterial presence, pervading aesthetics, culture, politics, and history.

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1 THE FIRST COSTUME: RITUAL AND REINVENTION Costume and liminality

Figure 1.1 William Louther, costume by Peter Farmer, The Consolation of the Rising Moon choreographed by Robert Cohan. Photograph by Anthony Crickmay, 1971 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 1

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Why is costume, costume? Why is costume not just clothes? These questions run through the whole of this book. The opening chapter focuses on costume as an element of the performance of ritual, a material object through which the wearer becomes other than their everyday self for the benefit of the community. The wearing of costume in early human society separates the individual from the group in a temporary performed ritual. The mask/costume wearer is rearticulated into Victor Turner’s “threshold” persona, a transitional being, as part of a ritual practice (Turner 1967: 95–105). Ritual, therefore, a “sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interests” (Turner 1973: 1100) creates “thresholds,” or in-between states, giving access to different understandings of existence. Placing the enactment of ritual at the root of Western theatre, in “Performance as Event– Reception as Transformation,” Erika Fischer-Lichte draws parallels between the transformative liminality, the in-betweenness of ritual and the effect of performance described in Aristotle’s Poetics (2010: 38). The performance of ritual demands that its participants shed habitual thoughts, feelings, and actions, to engage with a process that addresses “their society, their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them” (Turner 1967: 105). These first costumes held privileged status in the life of the community as agents of liminal enactment that enabled the preparation for what was to come beyond the “threshold.” Dressed like a hybrid animal/human, the shaman (who represented the group in the ritual) had access to an “otherness” that went beyond the quotidian, countering the limitation of the human body by simulating the scrutinized prey, the overpowering of which was indispensable to the survival of the community. I will propose that, similarly to the artist accurately capturing moving animals on the Lascaux Cave walls, the ritualistic costumed imitation of animal movement built preparedness for the hunt ahead. With the invention of agriculture, the ritual dressing-up became linked to fertility through calendar cycles of performance, such as those that evolved into the Dionysia of ancient Athens. Ritual costuming thus eventually changed function, becoming displaced into narrative roles, while maintaining the original powerful ambiguity of its hybrid nature and its ability to transform. As such it operates in a more complex definition of ritual. In Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change, Bobby Alexander presents ritual as being “organised in an ambiguous context in which the everyday world is symbolically transformed” under conditions that can “alter everyday life in concrete ways” potentially generating social transformation (1991: 4). Although a contested notion in theatre scholarship,1 the connection between ritual and theatre finds a material link through costumed and masked performance.2 The transformation of the everyday through costumed performance is a common thread that runs through much of the recent and contemporary theatre case studies proposed in this chapter. Its enactment via costume is not only in the articulating of a different persona, but also through its role in the preparation of character in the rehearsal room and in the dressing room ahead of the performance. Furthermore, I will go on to suggest that, collectively, certain traditional performance practices from Asia that have emerged from long-established costumed ritual have supported the building of preparedness toward a globalized world at pivotal points of social and cultural transformation. As theatre practitioners from both East and West have, through much of the twentieth century, engaged in international touring, traditional performance practices have been adopted to communicate understandings of the cultural and geographical “Other,” with sometimes mixed results. Initially, we shall explore costume through what are considered among the earliest extant examples of drawn human bodies, in particular the shamans painted in the caves of Lascaux and Trois-Frères in southern France. They are linked, though remotely, via costume to the masked satyrs, mythically credited

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with the invention of Western drama in Ancient Greece, where costume became established as the necessary condition through which the performer could enact a particular role. Following on, the paradigmatic satyr of Renaissance art became the foil to princes masquerading as gods in the courtly masques. In the early twentieth century this costumed character marked a threshold moment into renewed understandings of masculinity, via the Ballets Russes’ L’Apres Midi D’un Faune, later influencing the all-male swans in Adventures in Motion Pictures’ Swan Lake in 1995. In the post-colonial decades, Western theatre-makers have renewed the connection between ritual and performance through non-Western, physical, and non-naturalistic performance techniques. The final part of this chapter considers the influence of practitioners, from both Asia and Europe, whose work draws on Butoh, Noh, and Kabuki theatre, as well as Balinese and Kathakali dance, where the effectiveness of culturally specific, traditional performance is embedded in costume, makeup, and mask, exposing the infectious relationship between ritual performance and costume.

The first drawn costumes The recognizable human bodies drawn in the prehistoric caves of Lascaux (Figure 1.2) and Trois-Frères (Figure 1.3) in Southwestern France, are wearing masks and costumes. On the walls of these two caves are hundreds of animals but only two human figures. One in each cave, both understood to be shamans wearing elements of animal costume, the latter thought to have been created 15,000 years ago, the former up to 20,000.3 The ceilings of underground chambers are covered with images of bison, horses, stags, and mammoths, striking by the direct expressiveness of the mark-making, as “prehistoric art does not permit erasure or obliteration” (Ruspoli 1987: 171). Drawn from memory, in the flickering light of the fat-burning lamps,4 they depict, often accurately, animal forms in movements, sometimes caught in an airborne pose, as if fleeing their hunters. The mark-making resembles a gestural expression of physical embodiment, resulting in drawings that look not only as if in movement, but also in progress against the unchanging solidity of the rock surface, forms “sensed as being halfway between the void of eternity and the world of time and change” (Ryan 1999: 42). Such in-betweenness and the repetition of the act of mark-making in the sequestrated cavernous space, may, in Turner’s terms, be considered as a performed ritual act. The artist is therefore a shaman, as “the Shaman becomes the mediator between the individual human mind and the archetypal, transpersonal realm beyond it” (Ryan 1999: 3). The temporal and gestural nature of the drawings is akin to the act of costuming to perform ritual: both appear to be envisioning a propitious hunt through differently embodying and representing the animal form. The human–animal hybrid, found in the cave of Les Trois-Frères (Figure 1.3), is a rare depiction of a Paleolithic man. The body is represented as a composite of elements, with the antlers and ears of a stag, animal forepaws, and a horsetail, all presumably acquired as animal skins. He is caught mid-movement, dancing, in an upright human stance with bent knees and upper body leaning forward as if keeping balanced. In this synthesis of forms, the shaman/dancer is in relationship with the animal world by inhabiting its skins, intent on channeling its powers. This costumed performer may be understood in terms of a “universe of relationships between different kinds of beings that possess an inherent capacity for metamorphosis” (Boric 2007: 92). The wearing of animal skins by the dancing shaman may be a negotiation between his humanity and animality, through a process of metamorphosis to which costume is critical. In a remote corner of the Lascaux Cave is a scene in which the human figure is depicted with greater economy of line than the adjacent wounded bison, whose entrails are hanging out (Figure 1.2). The man’s

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Figure 1.2 Lascaux Cave, The Shaft Scene, in which the masked man stretched out on the ground next to a disemboweled bison is rapt in a shamanistic trance. Photo by Norbert Aujoulat (N. Aujoulat © MCC /Centre National de Préhistoire).

Figure 1.3a The Sorcerer in the Trois-Frères Cave, discovered by the Abbé Breuil, whose drawing, first published in 1920, provides an analysis of the worn animal elements that may have contributed to a shamanic ritual performance © Getty Images 1.3b Photograph of the sorcerer by Serge de Sazo, collection Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images.

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body is created by a few straight, parallel, directional marks, arms and fingers are single marks, stretched out to the side, and, in what seems like a frozen, trance-like state, his masculinity is made explicit by an erect penis. Noticeably, the shape of what appears to be a bird mask or headdress, echoed in a nearby staff topped by a bird, transforms his head. These two figures hold a performed narrative, as if caught in a “scene,” the shaman/hunter and his wounded prey. They confirm the central role of the animal mask in the trance-like state, its charged presence, and possibility of success through its use. Dusan Boric suggests that these drawings and those of fleeting animals are not just the remembered every day, “but rather the world of exposed animality encountered in dreams or indeed while experiencing altered states of consciousness” (2007: 98). To this costume is essential as, “[t]he presence of an animal mask indicates that . . . it is the body metamorphosis (i.e. the change of perspective by acquiring a new body form) that enables the communication and cross over between different kinds of beings” (2007: 92). The changed perspective gained by acquiring new body forms to become a different kind of being, finds common ground with Dionysian Satyr. Before meeting him, however, it is necessary to discuss the role of costume in the Dionysia and in the invention of Western theatre in Athens.

Holding the characters: costumes and masks in Ancient Greece In ancient Athens, when theatre established itself alongside an early form of democracy, costume for performance emerged as a key condition through which tragedy could develop. The wearing of animal masks had been part of sacred ritual, and, as in Lascaux, it was conductive of the transformation critical to the rite. As Rosie Wyles explains,5 the familiarity with ritual and animal masks had prepared the audiences of the first tragedies for the experience of the performance of otherness through mask (2007: 46–51). In the staging of ancient myths, the fitted, full-head masks and costumes acquired the semiotic specificity of the individual characters of the tragedies, which were readable by the spectators in the outdoor performances of the yearly Dionysian festival (Wyles 2011). The process of wearing costumes and masks was the means through which ordinary Athenian citizens could be rendered other than themselves, in a concealing of the everyday body, allowing the exclusively male cast to inhabit different roles, including those of women. Oliver Taplin (2001) proposes that masks and costumes “may also have given the actor some kind of protection against what one might call the danger of acting.” He suggests that when ordinary Athenians turned into mythical beings and gods, became female characters or transformed into barbarians, the wearing of mask and costume offered license and even some kind of immunity. Costume may have been able to create the physical conditions in which embodiment could happen, transforming the performer while simultaneously empowering him. In her Costume in Greek Tragedy (2011), Rosie Wyles analyses several visual and textual sources from sixth and fifth centuries BC , and the role of costume in the development of Western drama. She proposes that in many cases the playwrights, responsible for the staging of the productions, either held in their possession the physical costumes before the plays were written or were the driving force behind their development.6 She concludes that “[t]he tragic character could continue to exist after the performance of the play, embodied in the costume” (2011: 53). Masks, with their connection to the god Dionysius, were critical in this belief, and, with the costumes, could be construed to have been instrumental in the writing process. Costume and theatre were intrinsically linked “since without costumes there could be no

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play” (2011: 40). Tragedy masks were made out of layered strips of linen and glue, molded into the shape of the face. Unlike the later Roman equivalents, with their gawping expressions, these early Greek masks’ tight fit could be imagined as assimilating the actor’s face, rendering body and mask a single organism. As Peter Meineck writes, in the open air, simply “donning a mask indicates that a performance is about to take place,” as the linen face separates the performer from the spectator, but ultimately it “demands to be watched” (2011: 121). Masks and costumes therefore may be understood as holding within themselves not only the body of the performers but also the action of performing. They represented in J. L. Austin’s definition of performativity (1962) a “doing” of the character, as well as its semiotic “describing.” This gestural quality is reiterated by David Wiles who claims the mask “reveals the physical impulse that is in the words” (2007: 151).

The extended, semidivine dancing satyr The Satyr play concluded each of the three days of the yearly dramatic Dionysian festival in Athens, featuring alongside communal processions, feasting, and the sacrificial slaughtering of bulls. Often subverting the plots of the intense cycle of tragedies that had preceded it, the Satyrs’ play engaged the audience in a riotous letting-off of steam. Painted on vases dancing in lewd poses, inebriated, and driven by indiscriminate lust, the satyrs were also found playing the lyre and the flute. In the Pronomos Vase (Figure 1.4), the satyr displays a dancing body practiced in physical dexterity and extended into the pictorial space. He is wearing a goatskin loincloth with an erect leather phallus sewn onto its front and a horsetail at the back, and his mask is bearded, with horse-like pointed ears (Taplin and Wyles 2010). The erect phallus has been explained through the satyr’s association with Dionysus, god of fertility, winemaking, and theatre, and is reminiscent of the Lascaux Cave shaman. Larissa Bonfante in “Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art” writes that the satyr’s phallus served as a “reminder of the powerful magic” believed to be residing in the alert male member (1989: 549). The combination of mask and partial nakedness draws attention to the human body as animal rearticulation. The satyr’s costume combined nakedness and extensions: phallus, tail, wig, beard, animal fur, growing out of the body, which amplified his movement. Only when holding his mask in his hands is the satyr stilled, in a relaxed everyday pose (Figure 1.4). The synthesizing of different animals is reminiscent of the masked shaman of the Trois-Frères Cave. Here too the costume extends performative movement, which in turn defines what the body is. Movement, body, and costume are intertwined; they express the satyr’s corporeal liminal persona, transforming the Athenian citizen into a mercurial semidivinity, in a process involving inebriation. In Robin Osborne’s words “the encounter with wine was also an encounter with the gods” (2014: 40). Through this the satyr performer could combine “an ability to do anything that men could do with an animal lack of inhibition” (2014: 44). Osborne also notes how satyrs and maenads— female counterparts, wearing animal skin over their chitons7—were able to handle snakes and leopards like domesticated animals. Similarly to the shaman in trance in the Lascaux Cave lying next to the disemboweled bison, they were believed to be able to subjugate nature, while also embracing its animal powers. We shall see how these early costumed performances endure while resonating differently in the early modern period and into early twentieth century modernism. Figure 1.4 Pronomos Vase, at the center of which is a satyr caught mid-dance, while others are in repose, holding their masks. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività culturali e del Turismo—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

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The satyr and the Baroque masque In the Renaissance and the Baroque period, Ancient Greek myths and ideals of classical beauty underpinned the privilege of the erudite few, and contributed to the upholding of the power of monarchs and courts across Europe. The satyr’s lewd corporality, transposed into Christian bodycensoring morality, was placed low within hierarchies of culture. In the magnificent spectacles of the courtly masques, these mythological characters that had come into existence to explain humans’ ambiguous relationship with nature, here acquiesced to the divine rights of kings. Costume was instrumental in the affirmation of princely virtue performed in allegorical form, and staged by and for a courtly audience. Satyrs appeared in the antimasque that preceded the masque of Oberon, The Fairy Prince (Figures 1.5 and 1.6), staged in London’s Banqueting Hall, written by Ben Jonson and designed by Inigo Jones in 1610. Leaping around, they presented a spectacle of disorder devised to enable the fifteen-year-old Prince Henry Frederick, playing the part of Oberon (Figure 1.5), to exert control and reestablish order in the masque. The antimasquers playing the satyrs were professionals from Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, while the courtiers performed the masque. Barbara Ravelhofer in The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music proposes that satyrs’ costumes from the antimasque may have been used in the public performances of what Queen Henrietta Maria subsequently labeled as the “Mercenary Stage” (2006: 146). In a letter sent from Hampton Court in 1636 to the vicechancellor of Oxford University, Ravelhofer detects the opposite treatment being reserved for the courtiers’ masque costumes which, the Queen demanded, were to be used exclusively at court and not exposed to the “vulgar gaze” of the public, something she compared to a prostituting of the costumes (2006: 145). Making a clear social and moral distinction between courtiers and professional actors through costumes, those worn by the court were considered precious attributes of jealously guarded privilege. Oberon, The Fairy Prince opened with a pastoral scene populated by satyrs, whose “shaggy thighs” (Figure 1.6), reminiscent of their Dionysian counterpart, were, in this instance, covered in bells: Trap our shaggy thighs with bells That, as we do strike a time In our dance, shall make a chime. JONSON 1610. See Orgel 1969: lines 86–89 Far from the semidivine disinhibition of their predecessors, the bells coyly described here connect them to farm animals (more on this in Chapter 3), not the lyres and flutes of their mythical antecedents. Howard Skiles links their vigorous movements and their bells to the Morris, a folk dance performed by male professional performers (1998: 125). To bring order to the satyrs’ riotous scene, mountains parted and a gothic palace split open, ushering in Prince Henry as Oberon (Figure 1.5). On a chariot drawn by two polar bear cubs with a retinue of thirteen knights/courtiers, Henry was the paradigmatic martial hero in Roman emperor’s cuirass and plumed helmet. Jones’ drawing shows him wearing laurels, epaulettes sculpted with lion’s heads, which also fronted each of his sandals, and a flowing cloak draped over his shoulders. His muscular form, the worn powers of the lion and the imperious costume combine to transform the youthful royal into a god-like hero. Ravelhofer questions whether, given his age, the drawing

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Figure 1.5 Costume design for the character of Oberon in Oberon, the Faery Prince, costume design by Inigo Jones, 1610 © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

“simply anticipated the effect of stockings padded with cotton wool” (2006: 201). Inigo Jones’ drawing of Oberon in fact projected the fitness to rule of a future monarch. In contrast the ragged fur of the bare-chested satyrs’ breeches (Figure  1.6), depicted in Jones’ drawing as if growing from their legs, matches their beards, disheveled hair, and dirtied skin. Their bellsounding movement inspired laughter, in opposition to the martial dance of the courtiers’ entrance. The lionized prince harnessed the forces of nature as wild bear cubs pulled the chariot on which he entered.

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Figure 1.6 Satyrs from the antimasque that preceded the masque of Oberon, The Faery Prince, costume design by Inigo Jones, 1610 © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

The subjugation of nature had been a prerogative of the satyrs in Ancient Greece and of the shamans before them, through ritual costume and performance. In this antimasque the satyrs’ acquiescence implied not only the loss of the erect phallus but also of their power over nature. The masque performed social, cultural, and political superiority, and constructed a myth around the future monarch. Meanwhile the sensuous vestiges of satyrs could be found in ubiquitous decorative representations, consumed in the privacy of the domestic interiors, in prints, decorated furniture, and statuettes for centuries to come (Figure 1.7).

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Figure 1.7 Satyr and satyress statuette, by Andrea Briosco, Padua, Italy, 1515–20 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Modernity, masculinity, and the Faun The satyr survived in the decorative arts and as a sublimation of male sexuality. The nineteenth-century Romantic ballet had been dominated by ballerinas, with male roles often performed by female dancers in costumes that could often mirror the shape of the romantic tutus (Figures 1.8a and 1.8b). As “[a]ny explicit expression of male sexuality was against the conventions of nineteenth-century middle-class gender ideologies” (Burt 1995: 82) the dominant spectacle of female sexuality was the only permissible

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Figure 1.8a Madame Desargus-Lemière and Amalia Galster. Second quarter of the nineteenth century, depicting a ballerina dancing a male role, en travesti © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 1.8b Adèle Dumilâtre and Henri Desplaces in The Corsair, 1844, the latter dancing in a costume mirroring his female partner in shape and composition © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

expression of sensuality. Against this background, L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876) by symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, in which the satyr resurfaces in a moment of sensuous awakening as the Faun, inspired Debussy to compose his celebrated prelude. This was later adapted into dance by Nijinsky with costumes by Léon Bakst (Figure 1.9) for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, opening in Paris in 1912. The editor of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette was horrified: “[w]e have a faun, incontinent, with vile movements of erotic bestiality” (quoted in Buckle 2012: 242). He was referring to the final moment of the twelve-minute dance, when Nijinsky alone, enthralled by a shawl stolen from a nymph, stretched out on the stage reaches a climactic moment. Calmette went on to describe the “ill made beast, hideous, from the front, and even more hideous in profile” (quoted in Nijinska and Rawlinson 1992: 436). The Faun wore full body tights, painted like an animal-hide with piebald patches wrapping around his thighs, a second skin that placed him somewhere between the human and the animal world. Antithetical to the decorated epicene ballet costumes, his costume highlighted the male body in movement, whose angular and explicit choreography was inspired by the satyrs painted on Greek vases exhibited in the Louvre. Against the draped costumes of the nymphs, Nijinsky appears naked. As a vibrant, inescapable presence, his modernist aesthetics marked, through dance and costume, a threshold moment into a renewed way of thinking about the male body. In an article in Le Matin, Auguste Rodin wrote that Nijinsky’s body “is totally expressive of the mind within” (Rodin cited in Scheijen 2010: 248) and he was longing to draw and sculpt it. The costume and choreography of L’Après-midi d’un faune embodied revolutionary ideas in the hybrid persona projected

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Figure 1.9 Vaslav Nijinsky as the Faun in L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune, costume design by Léon Bakst © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

by Nijinsky in his skintight, animalesque, and boldly modernist costume, while reassuringly the nymphs looked back to an acceptably codified nymph-hood. Looking forward and back at the same time, this short performance could be considered as marking a threshold moment through costume. Choreographer Matthew Bourne has spoken of the connections between Nijinsky’s Faun and the Swan played by Adam Cooper (Figure  1.10) in his Swan Lake, devised in 1995 and produced by Adventures in Motion Pictures (Bourne and Macaulay 2011: 193). With an all-male corps de ballet of Swans and with Odile, the Swan’s alter ego, also played by Adam Cooper, homoerotic desire displaced the hetero-normativity of the Tchaikovsky’s ballet, first staged in 1895. Designed by Lez Brotherston, the bare-chested, bare-footed swans wore, low on their hips, breeches made of feathered tulle, which, though gesturing materially to romantic tutus, were reminiscent of the physical expansiveness of Ben Jonson’s satyrs’ “shaggy thighs” breeches. Their texture, although suggesting, at least to this audience member, a shredding of the Romantic ballerina’s tutu tulle, is a complex construction, as Jane Pritchard, Senior Curator of Dance at the V&A, describes in her material analysis of a recently acquired example for the archive: “The iconic feathery legs . . . are made of loops of white silk chiffon stitched individually at

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Figure 1.10 Adam Cooper as the Swan in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, costume designed by Lez Brotherston. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

approximately one centimetre apart to white lycra calf-length tights. There is a corset-style, elasticated waist with flesh-coloured insert to suggest a low cut.”8 This layered construction reflects the equally complex thinking behind the concept of the swan. In conversation with Alastair Macaulay (2011: 191), Bourne refers not only to Nijinsky’s Faun but also to Peter Shaffer’s play Equus as a critical inspiration, in which a deranged stableboy who worships horses, engages in ritual bareback horse-riding intended to unite his human nature with the horse’s animalism. Shaffer’s representation of the boy’s marginalized and fragmented identity through animal embodiment appears to inform, in Bourne’s Swan Lake, the Prince’s desire for the Swan. Some dance scholars have found Bourne’s Swan Lake problematic. Martin Hargreaves, for example, detects how the male dancer’s body becomes fetishized in a production, he reasons, that is haunted by the absent ballerina (2000: 236), while Ramsay Burt concludes that the performance ultimately “reinforced dominant gender norms” (2007: 179). The commercial success of the production remains unstoppable, having become the longestrunning ballet on London’s West End and on Broadway and touring internationally with two DVD s of the

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production on sale (1996 and 2010), while the male swans have become iconic. Given the sociopolitical context in which it was devised (1992–5) during the AIDS crisis and the UK government rendering the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools illegal through Clause 28,9 the ballet was never promoted as being about sexuality, something Bourne was specifically advised against. He speaks of conceiving the Swan a universal symbol of freedom, yet he admits, as a gay man, projecting his own relationship history and desires into the choreography of the show (Bourne and Macaulay 2011: 191–3). It may be because of this ambiguity, navigating between political acceptability and desire, that the disavowal of the homoerotic dynamics that shape the performance may, ironically, have forced “a long-simmering relationship between homosexuality and dance out of the closet and into mainstream popular culture” (Drummond 2003: 237). The inescapable spectacle of sensuous masculinity presented by Brotherston’s Swans is performed through composite beings made not only by a perceived shredding of tutus and the channeling of the satyr via Nijinsky, but also from the embodiment uniting human and animal in one body, which, like in Equus, reaches back to the shaman’s costumed performances. The Swans as liminal, composite creatures, may have contributed to a preparing for a cultural transformation that, in a relatively short timeframe in the UK , has seen homosexuality progress from being the subject of censorship in schools to the acceptance of its equality with heterosexuality through the institution of marriage.

The Asian turn in costume Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Western audiences have been exposed to the traditional performance practices of touring companies from Asia. In these the costumed body is the primary means of communication as an embodiment of a culture with its roots in ritual performance. The theatre pioneers who have been affected by these performances include: Sergei Diaghilev, Max Reinhardt, Edward Gordon Craig, Alexandre Taïrov, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Vsevolod Meyerhold. The seeking of renewal in theatre-making via the influence of non-Western performances has contributed to propelling theatre and dance into modernity. In the post-colonial context of the decades after the 1950s, increasing numbers of Western practitioners traveled East to seek to engage in the corporeal performance of traditional Asian practices. In this context, costuming, via the use of cultural and ritual objects, has become contested territory when perceived as the grafting of one body (the costume from a cultural, racial, and geographical “Other”) onto an appropriating one. More than any other element of performance, costume holds within itself a process of transformation that is physical, embodied, and that can be deployed politically or can contribute to cultural transformation, as evidenced in our previous discussion on the journey of the composite being of the shaman/satyr/faun/Swan. Experimental practitioners working in the second half of the twentieth century including Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, and Ariane Mnouchkine have been attracted to the study of Kabuki, Noh, Kathakali, Balinese dance, and Chinese circus among others. These traditional practices engage audiences through a powerful physical presence, expressing a mythical dimension via specific gestures, movement, costume, and mask and are embedded in ongoing cultural traditions within their respective communities. Among the practitioners who have disseminated their costumed performances internationally, Ram Gopal (1912–2003) was the first to bring pared-down, classical Indian dances to the UK from the late 1930s, eventually being filmed for documentaries and even being cast in feature films (Figure  1.11). Classical Indian dancer and educator Mrinalini Sarabhai (1918–2016) toured internationally and visited London initially in 1949 (Figure 1.12); her daughter Mallika (b. 1954) played

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Figure 1.11 Ram Gopal. Photograph by Houston Rogers, 1956 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Draupadi in the film of Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata (1989). Paired down versions of Asian dance costumes, such as that worn in 1971 by William Louther in The Consolation of the Rising Moon (Figure 1.1), designed by Peter Farmer and choreographed by Robert Cohan for London Contemporary Dance, can be said to have created liminal moments on stage. The expansive skirt, tied to the waist like a Samurai hakama and flaring outward like a full Kathak skirt, conceals Louther’s legs entirely, while highlighting his bare upper body. Louther was the first black dancer to appear regularly on the British contemporary dance stage. The sense of a physical explosion of raw energy is palpable in Crickmay’s photograph, which also demonstrates the extent to which costume must surely have been part of the making of the dance, given its size and rearticulation of the body. As he leaps across the space, in a moment suspended between past and future, he may be channeling, through composite and pareddown referencing, a worn common denominator between cultures, while physically and spatially conquering the stage. His costume is crucial to the exchange: resisting propensity toward any decorative Orientalizing, it lends space and timelessness, by borrowing to create a hybrid, expansive stage persona. Even if Sarabhai, Louther, and Gopal’s costumes may appear as modernist versions of the complex paradigmatic and spectacular ensembles from which they were drawn, they may retain the gestural

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Figure 1.12 Mrinalini Sarabhai, mid-twentieth century, photograph by Gordon Anthony © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

performativity of their sources, which were distilled over several hundred years of performing characters from sacred stories. Richard Schechner elaborates in Between Theatre and Anthropology on the relationship between theatre and ritual as “[p]eople, ancestors and gods participated in simultaneously having been, being and becoming,” in repeated performances in which paradigmatic costumes are “[m]nemonic devices [that] ensured that the performances were ‘right’—transmitted across many generations with few accidental variations” (1985: 36). These costumes are deeply connected to the physical and cultural memory of the performance. Victor Turner goes further, noting in the introduction to Schechner’s text, that “[a]ctors are deeply aware of how the human body can be made by costume” (Turner in Schechner 1985: xii). For Eugenio Barba, in his study of Kathakali and Kabuki movement, costume plays a crucial role that ensures the performance efficaciousness, in symbiosis with the performer as a living partner: “the costume then becomes a prosthesis . . . which assists the performer’s body, dilates it and conceals it while continuously transforming it. Hence the effect of power and energy which the performer is able to manifest is reinforced and heightened by the metamorphosis of the costume itself in a reciprocal relationship of exchange: performer-body, performer-costume, and performer-in-the-costume” (Barba and Savarese 2006: 249). This synthesis of performer, costume, and movement is one that Ariane Mnouchkine identifies as a type of embodiment to which exteriority and form are central. She considers that psychological and

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naturalistic acting “does not reach the truth: it is slow, complicated and narcissistic” (Williams 2005: 175). Her theatre is a communal act: “I hate the word ‘production.’ It’s a ceremony, a ritual—you should go out of the theatre more human than when you went in” (Dickson: 2012).

Re-devising Greek tragedy through borrowed costumes Mnouchkine has visited various parts of Asia since the 1960s and the practices she encountered have influenced extensively the work of the Théâtre du Soleil which she founded with fellow ex-students from the Lecoq School in Paris in 1964. She has repeatedly organized research visits for members of her multicultural and multiracial company, as “[w]e look for a basis for our work in Asian theatre because that’s where the very origin of theatrical form is” (Williams 2005: 90). Her debt to Asian theatre and dance is particularly evident in Les Atrides (1990–2) in which she prefaced The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s trilogy of tragedies of the House of Atreus, with Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. Les Atrides toured extensively in Europe and North America and was seen by 286,000 spectators. Aeschylus and Euripides’ tragedies were originally produced for the Dionysia respectively in 484BC and 408BC , and are among the founding texts of Western drama. Mnouchkine chose to stage them “in order to ‘return to school’ and delve into theatre as a ‘ritual articulation of a community in crisis’ ” (Richardson 2010: 258). By opening the performance with Iphigenia at Aulis, in which Iphigenia is sacrificed to the gods as a result of her father Agamemnon’s ambition, Mnouchkine explains the cycle of revenge shown in Oresteia as derived from patriarchal oppression. Misogyny is therefore exposed as a community crisis in Les Atrides, as the violence unleashed by Iphigenia’s killing is so powerful that it “ought to blind us” (Williams 2005: 193).10 To expose the enduring dimensions of the story, she went “back to school” via Asian theatre to develop her and her collaborators’ knowledge of the affective power of Kathakali layered with elements of Noh and Topeng dance. The paradigmatic, codified costumes of Kathakali dance performance are gods, demons, kings, heroes, and mythical figures, derived from the Ancient Hindu sacred texts of Ramayana and Mahabharata, and are performed as part of communal ritual. Indonesian Topeng dancers are considered interpreters for the gods and their masks are related to the cult of ancestors, while Japanese Noh theatre traces its roots to Shinto shrines. Through their ancient, ceremonial purpose these costumes produce mythical, even semidivine bodies. Mnouchkine’s use of costume for Les Atrides adopted, controversially, aspects of sacred practices. Her intention can be understood as wishing to absorb their material and performative rituality to unlock the meaning of the Ancient Greek texts, thereby making a theatre that had the power of ritual as both a communal and global act. The development of the costumed body in Les Atrides was fundamental to the making of the shape of the performance. From the very beginning of rehearsals, performers applied versions of Kathakali makeup daily. Their painted “mask” rendered them other than their everyday selves, in a makeup which was bold, or “violent” as Mnouchkine called it, and which together with costume and headdresses covered the whole body (Figure  1.13). Designed by Nathalie Thomas and Marie-Hélène Bouvet, Kathakali-inspired costumes were worn and developed throughout rehearsal, an approach that may place the costume as equal to the text in the process of theatre-making. Unlike the paradigmatic originals, the final characters had been finalized collaboratively within the ensemble, with the performers, and the director, to define characters within the narrative of the play. The importance of preparedness was further

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Figure 1.13 Iphigenia at Aulis, by Euripides, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, Théâtre du Soleil, 1990. Costumes by Nathalie Thomas and Marie-Hélène Bouvet. Théâtre du Soleil/Michèle Laurent © Photograph: Michèle Laurent.

evidenced when the audience, prior to taking their seats in the theatre could observe, through screens, actors finalizing their makeup, witnessing the extent of the preparation inherent to their “becoming” during the final stages of the extensive preparation rituals.11 The process through which the actor enters another state via costuming is reminiscent of Noh performers for whom dressing within the confines of the mirror room is a crucial ritual of preparation for performance (Figure 1.14). The resulting dancing, singing, and spoken performance engaged the audience through sensory spectacle, heightened in a weaving together of music played live, dance, meters and meters of luxuriously trimmed fabrics, headdresses, wigs, and makeup. Hélène Cixous, a long-time collaborator of Théâtre du Soleil, comments, referring to Sigmund Freud, that the experience of pleasure in the engagement with performance is essential as “[t]heatre only exists because it procures for us a bonus of pleasure” while spectacle creates the condition in which the audience is able to engage with the searing pain of the

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Figure 1.14 Japanese print by Utagawa Kunisada, late Edo period, of backstage at the Ishimuraza Theatre © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

tragedy: “‘spectacle’ does not destroy profound emotions . . . pleasure permit[s] us to tolerate the intolerable” (quoted in Franke and Chazal 2005: 161). The spectacular costumes of the chorus of elders in Agamemnon (Figure 1.15), which exploded onto the stage in the swirling forms of full circular skirts to the sound of Indian kettle drums, transformed the multiracial, mixed-gender cast into a mass of red and gold fully skirted Kathakali-inspired uniforms, topped by sculptural headdresses, fringing, and belts, their heads transformed by masks of makeup, long wigs, and braided artificial beards. Simon Abkarian’s Agamemnon, first encountered in Iphigenia at Aulis, appeared intensely forbidding, bearing a sword in the straight posture of Kathakali martial heroes (Figure 1.16). His body and movement were emphatic in the fully skirted, belted

Figure 1.15 The chorus from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Théâtre du Soleil, 1990. Costumes by Nathalie Thomas and Marie-Hélène Bouvet. Théâtre du Soleil/Michèle Laurent © Photograph: Michèle Laurent.

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Figure 1.16 Iphigenia at Aulis: Simon Abkarian’s Agamemnon, with Nirupama Nitayanandan playing Iphigenia. Photograph by Martine Franck © Martine Frank/Magnum Photos.

black gown, headdress, stylized beard, and wig. His figure is formalized further by the “white face with red mouth and black eyeliner magnifying the slightest change of expression” (Bryant-Bertail 1994: 14), which renders his daughter Iphigenia (Nirupama Nitayanandan), in black knee-breeches and a white shirt and makeup, powerless in contrast. Following the ritual sacrifice of her daughter, Clytemnestra (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha) will not be seen in a skirt again but trousers, boots, and a forbidding white shirt will be visible under her tunic-skirt. Although highly indebted to Kathakali, the costumes and dance of Les Atrides did not reproduce specific places or times but were a synthesis of Asian performance practices, filtered through Mnouchkine, Thomas, and Bouvet’s intention of making sense of the mythical dimension of the Ancient Greek

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tragedies. Maria Shevtsova writes on how Mnouchkine learns constantly from these practices, in particular about the ways in which “states of being are transformed into physical symptoms” (Shevtsova 1997: 102). These states are also embodied into the highly crafted costumes, which become valued talismans. Mnouchkine herself notes you must “[f]inish your costumes well. They can be your friends. They are your enemies if they are badly made” (Féral 1989: 84). In the process of communicating the meanings of two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old plays, their construction became like a rediscovered ancient artifact: arriving at the theatre, on the way to their seats, the audience walked past a staged archaeological dig in which terracotta figures wore the same costumes as the actors they had previously observed preparing. Bryant-Bertail’s sense was that of characters that had “unearthed themselves to walk up from the past, dance for us, and rewrite the old new story of the House of Atreus” (1994: 30). The creative synthesis of traditional performance practices has since been considered conflicted and criticized as an appropriation of source cultures by the target culture. Mnouchkine herself has not returned to this territory in recent years, engaging instead directly with refugees from the Sangatte center as co-authors or opening the doors of her theatre in Paris to offer them shelter. She continues to fund the study of Asian practices through travel bursaries to many in her company, including designers, and students from Asia are often found participating in her workshops, with Mnouchkine holding some in Afghanistan. She is known to have actively encouraged Asian theatre-makers in the development of their own companies (Lan 2010: 189). Intercultural theatre remains contested territory. Theatre director and costume designer Julie Taymor’s exposure to Indonesian theatre as a young theatre-maker has contributed to the ongoing global success of her musical, The Lion King, having enabled her to develop ways to adapt Asian and African performance costume into a commercial Disney musical. Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata (1988), which adopted and adapted Indian traditional dance and costume, toured internationally, and was made into a film in 1989. In Theatre and the World, Rustom Bharucha criticized Brook’s Mahabharata extensively, evaluating it as cultural colonialism, and concluded that: “[c]olonialism, one might say, does not operate through principles of ‘exchange.’ Rather, it appropriates, decontextualizes, and represents the ‘other’ culture, often with the complicity of its colonized subjects. It legitimates its authority only by asserting its cultural superiority” (1993: 1–2). Bharucha’s criticism points to the uneven relationship that exists between India as a former colony and developing country, and former colonial masters, particularly Britain and France, demonstrated in aspects of the staging of Brook’s The Mahabharata. The latter, he believes, trivializes Indian culture, by dehistoricizing it, through misreading and exploiting the sacred texts from which it draws. Arguably, however, the London-born Bangladeshi Kathak dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, who toured as a fourteenyear old dancer in Brook’s Mahabharata, might not be as globally influential, now, had cultural acceptance not been developed through performances that are clearly heavily indebted to Indian practices and practitioners, such as exactly those by Mnouchkine and Brook in the 1980s and early 1990s. The influence of emphatically spectacular costumed dancing bodies, and their voluminous, sensuous, powerful, and dynamic presence cannot be denied. Borrowed from Asian traditional theatre practices with the intent to re-devise affective performance, these costumes extend the bodies and the sensory presence of the actors in a performance that addressed the audience of an increasingly globalized theatre. Erika FischerLichte concludes her analysis of how during the last century theatre has acted as a space for cultural diversity through both aesthetics and politics, by affirming a global identity that allows for difference, kinship, and the imagination: “[b]y interweaving cultures without erasing their differences, performances, as sites of in-betweenness, are able to constitute new realities—realities of the future, where the state of being in-between describes the ‘normal’ state of the citizens of this world” (2009: 400).

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In the constitution of new realities and new “normal” states, costume, as we have seen, is critical in projecting a physical embodiment of previously unimagined onstage worlds.

Meanings transferred to costumes in ritual exchanges In contrast and directly countering notions of Western dominance within the intercultural dialogue, Asian practitioners have themselves provided audiences from both East and West with staged metaphors, exposing complex meanings inscribed in classical Western texts (Kennedy and Lan 2010: 11). Japanese pioneer Yukio Ninagawa was driven to experiment with traditional theatre practices in response to the reverence that existed in 1970s Japan for all things Western, which in Shakespearean productions included actors transforming the shape of their noses with putty to emulate Caucasian physical traits. He was repulsed by the phoniness of a perceived authenticity, “[j]ust seeing people wearing tights and blond wigs on stage fills me with a sense of embarrassment, which alone is enough to alienate me from the theatre” (Brokering 2007: 373–4). Ninagawa’s uncompromising aesthetics have been key to liberating both the performers’ bodies and the meaning of Greek tragedies and Shakespearean texts, in productions that have toured internationally since the mid-1980s, when his Samurai Macbeth took international audiences by storm (Suematsu 2010: 159). As the Tokyo audiences arrived to see Ninagawa’s production of Hamlet (1995), which transferred to London in 1998, the inhabitants of Elsinore were already on stage. They were wearing costumes by Lily Komine, drawn from Kabuki aesthetics, which, during the unraveling of the story, became Westernized as the voluminous kimono-like layers were gradually shed. The actors were initially found in tiered dressing rooms surrounding the stage, reminiscent of the mirror rooms of Noh theatre. From the outset the Shakespearean text was performed through the traditional rituals of Japanese theatre-making, which emphasizes the intense self-absorption and ceremony of the preparation for performance. Japanese social ritual was equally critical in this production, connecting Ophelia with the yearly Hina dolls festival. In the latter Japanese girls display, each year in March, a set of dolls representing the imperial court (Figure 1.18) in strict, hierarchical order on a tiered shrine (a Hinadan) with the Emperor and Empress at the top. The Hinadan dolls communicate patriarchal notions of self-discipline and obedience, here identified with Ophelia who wore the same neatly folded kimono as the dolls on the shrine she tended to. As part of the ancient cleansing ceremony conducted during the Hina dolls festival, which is no longer practiced, homemade versions of the dolls were discarded in a river, taking with them the impurities of their owners (Murguia, 2011). In Ophelia’s “watery grave” scene her self-sacrificial drowning for the impurities of the Elsinore men would not have been lost on the Japanese audiences. They would also have read Ophelia’s giving away of the dolls, rather than of flowers, as the loss of her predisposed place in the world, given that the caring for Hina dolls augured a good marriage and health to their owner. When staged in London’s Barbican Theatre in 1998, the significance of Ophelia’s beautifully crafted dolls could be understood by the audience via the identification with their owner’s place within a family hierarchy, made explicit in the initial scene during which she places the dolls in the tiered shrine. The shape of the tiered set, with Hinadan-like steps reaching the higher level, echoed Ophelia’s shrine, as did Figure 1.17 In his most recent production of Hamlet, which toured to the Barbican in London in 2015, Yukio Ninagawa reprised the idea of the Hinamatsuri presented through the costumes as much as the tiered set, utilized here for the play within the play. This Ninagawa Company production of Hamlet, with costume designed by Ayako Maeda, was his eighth. Photograph by Geraint Lewis/Alamy Images.

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Figure 1.18 Hina dolls, traditionally displayed as part of the Hinamatsuri festival, which was focused on young women. Photograph by JTB Photo/UIG via Getty Images.

the placing of the court on the steps, during the play within the play. The watery grave scene was marked by the loss of the miniaturized female bodies of the dolls, costumed like her, and previously found on her shine. Thus imbued with the distillation of centuries of a ritual, which firmly defines girls within a patriarchal, hierarchical, social system, the dolls carry significance beyond Japan, in their determining of women’s sole purpose as wives and mothers. Through the Hina dolls Ninagawa unraveled the meaning of Ophelia’s madness not as purely contingent to her situation but as symptomatic of the unsustainable role apportioned to women, within the family and in society. This production connected dressing for performance in the secreted spaces of the mirror rooms, and the orderly dressing of Hina dolls, to the human drive to fit into roles and structures that ritual practices can represent, while also exposing the tragic consequences of their failure. The meanings created through dress and bodies went before and beyond the specificity of both the Shakespearean text and the ancient Japanese rituals, to expose, at least to this viewer, the systemic misogyny that can define family and social relationships. Ong Keng Sen considers intercultural theatre as second nature, having collaborated, through Theatreworks, the company he leads in Singapore, with non-Singaporean performers since the 1990s. In the bringing together of artists, dancers, musicians, and performers—who often possess different mother tongues—from some of Asia’s diverse performance traditions, the body in movement becomes privileged over spoken language. The use of interpreters in rehearsal and extended, periodic preparation, have been some of the necessary strategies for the weaving together of individual cultural practices into a single

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Figure 1.19 Carlotta Ikeda as the Ghost in Search: Hamlet, directed by Ong Keng Sen, with costume designs by Koji Hamai, 2002 © Koji Hamai.

production. The visual nature of his performances and the practice of a working dialogue between artists across borders, have resulted in Ong’s frequent collaborations in North America and in Europe. In the sitespecific interpretation of Hamlet at Kronborg Castle, Denmark, the Elsinore of the original play, the Japanese costume designer Koji Hamai was part of the Asian and European company assembled by Ong to devise Search: Hamlet (2002). The title refers to the absence of a “searched for” Hamlet, and of Ong’s prompting of the performers to question what Hamlet meant to them and their communities as part of their devising process (Lan 2010: 206). Similarly, the initial idea for the costumes was for them to be made in washi (Japanese paper) as it could, in Ong’s words “convey the fragility of personal memory, memory of the characters and our physical excavation of the different spaces” (Ong 2002). In the experimentation toward the performance the fragility was explored through gesture and space: “we tore our trial paper costumes and brought these rags into the finery of the ballroom. From this simple exercise, we realized the frailty of human nature and our attempts at concealing these vulnerabilities in the public self” (Ong 2002). If, in Mnouchkine’s words, “[f]rom Asia comes . . . the perpetual metaphor which the actors produce” (quoted in Pavis 1996: 97) the costume metaphor, produced here by material, form, and the body, were

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intrinsically Asian too. Hamai’s costumes, though referent to voluminous kimonos, were neither imitation nor a description of something that preexisted them. Rather they proposed new metaphors for the human condition. They held their own interior performative and experiential logic, including countering translucence and fragility with metallic, light-reflective fabrics, thus creating material tensions between characters. Paper-likeness was intrinsic to the Ghost, played by Butoh dancer Carlotta Ikeda, whose otherworldliness was expressed in a costume that contained her, exceeding the edges of her body, in a tensely moving cocoon of transparent organza, holding the space by capturing light as in a haze. Recalling productions of Hamlet he had seen in the past, Ong compares the Ghost of Hamlet’s father to the ghosts of Noh plays, concluding that he had “wished for more longing, more evocation; a more holistic vision of life and death” (Ong, 2002). For Kazuo Ohno, a key exponent of Butoh dance, the relationship between costume and body transcends the limitation of both material and flesh as “[t]he Butoh costume is like throwing the cosmos onto one’s shoulders. And for Butoh, while the costume covers the body, it is the body that is the costume of the soul” (Hoffman and Holborn 1987: 129). In Ikeda’s performance, neither body/movement, nor light/material can be separated. The otherworldliness constituted in the cosmic dimension of Butoh is a performed, liminal, costumed moment that simultaneously transforms body and material. As “cultural negotiations” (Ong 2001: 126), the borders crossed by Ong’s work are both cultural and methodological. He has been criticized for creating performance assemblages that are aligned to global market economy (Bharucha, 2001). Much of Ong’s oeuvre, however, engages with community crisis—in some cases as extreme as genocide—and with it, the survival of cultural memory. A year before Search: Hamlet, another performance, The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields which had been in development for two years, had begun its decade of international performances at Yale University. About the harrowing and systematic killing of the Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge, it was devised by Ong with surviving Cambodian dancers in a ritual performance that had supported their and others’ healing processes. Through touring globally, teaching, and workshops, the project had enabled the transmission of dance movement retained in the physical memory of some of the few dancers that survived Pol Pot’s determination to wipe out all art and performance. Ong’s and his cast’s process of “excavation” in those early workshops while developing Search: Hamlet, may be seen in a continuum with Beyond the Killing Fields. The tearing up of the paper costumes in the Search: Hamlet rehearsals stands in contrast with the indifferent permanence of the “finery of the ballroom” (Ong 2002), and may be read as a ritual articulation of the vulnerability of memory and of the body, acknowledging the atrocities humanity can commit, through repeated gestures, in a ritual unmaking and in the destruction of fragile costumes. As worn, performative metaphors embodying states of existence, these costumes enabled a collective inhabiting of the here-and-now of the rehearsal and of shared human compassion. Ultimately not included in the performance, the torn, rejected rehearsal costumes had nonetheless proposed a way of devising, by focusing on form, material performativity, light, and movement as channels for empathy in the making of the show. The first costume, therefore, carries a privileged status. A hybrid that inhabits the real and the imagined via the initial merging of human and animal in the shaman, it can envision the future in the here-and-now of the ritual of performance. Its liminal status enables it to mark and even anticipate cultural and social transformation, as demonstrated by Bakst’s Faun and Brotherston’s Swans. In mutually respectful cultural exchanges, it can facilitate communication in a globalized world, as in Mnouchkine’s Atrides and Ninagawa’s Hamlet. Renewed languages of the body and of costume evolve in the space between cultures in Ong and Hamai’s Search: Hamlet through the ritual and gestural interaction with materials in the rehearsal room, intended to be transformative of everyday existence as much as of the moment of performance.

2 COSTUMING CHORUSES: SPECTACLE AND THE SOCIAL LANDSCAPE ON STAGE Choruses, costume, and community The early choral practices that were the antecedents of the opera chorus, the corps de ballet, and the chorus line, were inextricable from the communal existence of tribal society, where they performed a socially cohesive role (Rutherford 2013: 77). These early choruses asked the audience to participate in a group unified through performance. They became critical to the establishment of Ancient Greek theatre, as the chorus was embedded in plays that are among the founding texts of Western drama. In this chapter we shall ascertain how the chorus can embody an image of community through what it wears and how communication acts directly through dressed bodies performing en masse. The choruses discussed here therefore could be considered, broadly speaking, as groups ordered through “uniforms.” In her analysis of uniformed bodies Jane Tynan builds on Michel Foucault’s articulation of the relationship between body and power, concluding, “uniforms construct bodies in ways that promote a particular order of things” (2013: 23). Via the multiplicity of costumed bodies, the relationship of individuals to power in society can be embodied, as the community of the audience perceives itself represented in the performance through the chorus. The chapter initially sets out the role of costume in Greek theatre’s choruses and their connection to later forms, such as when, during the Renaissance, singing choruses, clad in costumes illustrating classical culture, developed into the first operas in second half of the sixteenth century, in Medici’s Florence. As we shall see, early choral practices included not only singing but also dancing together. Much of the discussion that follows is in fact about dance, as the moving landscape of bodies are rendered emphatic by repetitions in movement and costume. In Louis XIV ’s court, for example, the spectacle of multiple male courtly dancers, in heroic and martial costumes, embodying the ancien régime, was instrumental in the establishment of early forms of ballet. However, it is the French Revolution that is at the root of the ballet blanc female corps and their Romantic tutus. These first groups of women on stage in turn gave rise to alternatives such as the cancan and the twentieth-century chorus line, both making spectacular uses of costume. The Rite of Spring (1913) countered the endurance of the Romantic ballets into the twentieth century. We will explore through four productions the ways in which this revolutionary dance has provided a channel for the expression of social and gender conflict, reifying political consciousness through costume and choreography in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. At key points in history we find costumed choruses reflecting historical changes and even presaging transformative moments in society and culture. 29

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The exchange between chorus and community was implicit from the very beginning, through communal singing and dancing processional performances. At the height of the annual celebration of the Dionysia, in fourth- and fifth-century BC Athens, the nondramatic, festival choruses of the dithyrambs (iterations of which had preceded and paralleled both the satyr dances discussed in Chapter 1, and the tragedies) thrived around the cult of Dionysius, the god of fertility, wine, and theatre. As part of the same festival, inclusive processions of Athenian citizens and noncitizens—that is, women, young people, slaves, and foreigners (metics, distinguishable by their red costumes)—wove the community together in large-scale civic events (Seaford 2013: 262). As noted by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, Plato describes communal choral practices as a civilizing force, educational and promoting of social cohesion, in direct contrast to mimesis, or acting, which Plato defined as fundamentally deceitful (2013: 23). Aristotle instead, who saw theatre in a more favorable light and identified the chorus as performing an active role in the onstage world of the play, a major character of the drama, points to its narrative agency. Tragedy, Aristotle’s Poetics proposes, acted through “pity” and the engagement of the audience with human suffering, while they may also experience “fear,” imagining themselves subjected to a similar fate (Hall 2010: 6). It is possible to speculate that as Greek choruses are often cast as a marginalized group—of women, the elderly, and even slaves—they can be understood as a sentient, though unified, character that, in Platonic terms, was also inseparable from the community it served. In Aristotelian terms, nonetheless, the chorus may have drawn the audience into the narrative through mimesis. Edith Hall writes that Greek theatre is “community theatre, as a significant proportion of the men in the production were what we would call amateurs” (2010: 14). The direct connection between the chorus and the spectating community of voting male citizens may have been critical to the democratic process, as the intellectual and emotional engagement of the tragedies confronted them with moral dilemmas and the consequences of flawed actions. Plato feared the influence of this engagement. In the Laws, as Hall points out, he insisted that “state censorship was essential,” given “the powerful political effect that tragedy could produce” (2010: 10). The kinship between audiences and choruses is introduced in Billing, Budelmann, and Macintosh (2013) via new debates within the cognitive turn in performance studies. The effective agency of choruses connects to new cognitive science research, recognizing the body/mind fusion and affective experience through the somatic.1 Philosophy has also eroded the separation of the audience from the action via studies in spectator/performer relationship.2 Viewed from these perspectives, the collective body on stage plays not only a narrative and social role, but also one that enables engagement as a “surrogate participant, who literally provides, through singing and dancing, an active way into the performance” (Billing, Budelmann, and Macintosh 2013: 7). In the visceral connection with a group of performing, dancing, or singing bodies, costume plays a significant role: the affective material performativity projected by the dress of the performer is extended through the numerous bodies on stage. The perception of the body as felt, a body wearing, is multiplied, emphasized, and woven across other bodies. The chorus communicates the shape, dynamic, and the feel of a community through dress and choreography. As a surrogate participant, it draws attention to its own corporeal and material here-and-now reality, shared with the present, sentient, and dressed spectators.

Mythical warriors materialized through costume The Dionysian festival provided the context in which theatre became established in Athens, through plays that, though relevant to the city’s present, were drawn from myth. The tragedies, still being

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performed millennia later, have continued to channel the mythical characters and ancient stories that gave rise to them. David Wiles proposes that the tragedies’ chorus could present “a Panhellenic voice which bound the singers into a wider collectivity” but may also be heard “as a more ancient voice, reaching back into a collective memory” (2007: 175). Aristotle wrote in his Poetics (c.335BC ) that the separation of individual from the dithyrambic chorus marked the invention of tragedy. Characters initially belonging to the Homeric epic were eventually scripted into tragedies during Pericles’ golden age in fifth-century BC Athens (Aristotle 2013: viii). Their costumes materialized the mythical characters, creating, as we have seen in Chapter  1, a synergy between mask, garment, and body into a single organism. If for Aristotle the chorus was also a single character, subsuming its members into a choreographic, vocal, and aesthetic whole, it nonetheless appears to have presented variations between individuals. It created a group resemblance between the individual members, rather than total uniformity, as Rosie Wyles’ analysis of the young soldiers on the Attic red-figure column krater from between 500BC and 490BC (Figure 2.1) demonstrates (2011: 9). Played by citizen-actors in full-head fitted masks, their battle dress appears similar to the light armor worn by citizen-soldiers during Athens’ frequent wars. Their corselets were tight to the chest and made of linen, layered and stiffened with glue, Wiles writes, like light

Figure 2.1 Tragic chorus of warriors. Attic red-figure column krater vase 500BC –490BC in the Mannerist style © Antikenmuseum Basil und Sammlng Ludwig/Andreas F. Voegelin.

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armor with the top layer woven into striking patterns, visible in the vast auditorium. Arranged differently on each body, these motifs allow variance while also fitting into a canon, thus presenting a rich moving pattern in the choreographed presentation. The chorus is performing a lament to the dead hero whose ghost appears perched at the top of the tomb with several headbands placed at his feet as tributes (Wyles 2011: 6). War was never far away in Ancient Greece and many in the audience would be holding memories of fallen soldiers. The leaving of headbands on tombs as part of mourning is in itself indicative of the powerful symbolism of battle dress, to this day connected to commemoration, hero worship, and self-sacrifice. It might have reminded the audience of the ceremonies which had preceded the plays, in which suits of armor were given to the military-age sons of the war dead (Hall 2010: 24). As Hall elucidates, many in the audience would have been, or would still be, soldiers, hoplites owning their own armor in readiness for battle (2010: 107). If the masks discussed in Chapter 1 demanded to be watched while separating the performers from the audience, the chorus costumes may have created a sense of proximity. It is likely that the male spectators would be wearing a plainer version of the decorated chiton, seen here unfolding in symmetrical pleats below the corselet, as everyday dress was rendered costume through emphatic adornment and reshaping (Wyles 2011: 42). In these costumes they may have performed mythical warriors as a heightened version of the real, everyday soldiers of their community. To elaborate on Jonas Grethlein, the chorus costumes may have acted as a dramatic “zooming device,” one that allows the “heroic vagueness” (2013: 98) of the tragedy to be made present in the here-and-now, materializing and embodying a mythical story from the past in order to understand the present. Wyles notes that the costumes of the young warriors were especially designed for extra movement, with less cumbersome shoulder straps than the military version (2011: 7). Holding the upper body tightly, they compress the gathered chiton inside their form, which they release over the hips in organized folds into a short, full skirt, so that the movement afforded to the legs remains focal. This effective form of skirted male military and heroic costume will be found again in the male dancing choruses encounter later in Baroque Europe, where its effectiveness in displaying prowess, choreography, and movement will capacitate its wearers not only physically but also socially and politically. The emphatic designs of the textiles and the shapes adopted in many of the examples Wyles presents add performative presence that invite movement and embodiment. They are also in opposition to the perceived idea of Greek costume as draped white sheets. From the sharp patterns of the oriental characters—geometric shapes such as lozenges and zig-zags—to the large figurative designs woven into draped garments (see the Pronomos Vase, detail, Figure 2.2); from the fitted sleeves and leggings, worn with tunics, to the use of flowing draped costumes, secured to the body with belts; from animal skins, tails, and heads, to the range of different headdresses and wigs; from decorated boots to deathshrouds and including actual metal cuirasses borrowed from real battles, they articulate a sophisticated language of garments. The translation from the quotidian to the stage could be minimal, as in the case of the muscle cuirass (Figure 2.3), which, beaten out of metal, would have traveled effortlessly between the two worlds (Wyles 2011: 24). The picture that emerges is one of a specially constructed, performancebased dress, sharing much with the everyday, though extending into a mythical dimension, thus rendering the costumes both immediate and archaic. Playing such a crucial role in the making and the reception of the performance, costume required a high level of material investment, consequently including in the yearly theatre-making process of the Dionysia, the experts of various textile crafts. Richly varied materials would be part of the construction of the costumes, including woven, fringed, and patterned fabric, such as wool, linen, and silk, as well as non-wovens, metal, leather, felts, furs, and

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Figure 2.2 Performers holding their masks. Their costumes could be identified by the audience as those of Heracles and Papposilenos, through Heracles’ breastplate and his lion headdress-topped mask. The turfed surface of the Papposilenos costumes associates him to the satyrs, and the older, bearded face of the mask defines his seniority. Detail, Pronomos Vase, c.400BC . Reproduced by permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività culturali e del Turismo—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

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Figure 2.3 Bronze muscle cuirass, fourth century BC , Classical Greek style, Ruvo, Italy © British Museum.

jewelry. Separated in groups of differently mixed dyes, the colors define a wide-ranging pallet; “black/ brown/grey/dark blue, red/purple/violet, red/orange/yellow (saffron), lighter blue/green/grey, frog green” (Wyles 2011: 37). In her important study, Wyles not only gathers archaeological research on colors, on types of textiles, and weave, but also exposes through detailed semiotic analysis the complex meanings inherent to the use of a range of tragedy costumes. These may have been more easily readable to an Ancient Greek audience than to a contemporary one; however, given that the costumes were experienced in daylight, the forms, surfaces, textures, and colors that she describes would be affective at a sensory and experiential level, alongside with the movement, weight, volume, and cut, in their interaction with the performers’ bodies. The material and visual spectacle of multiple costumed, dancing, and singing bodies

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on stage contributed to the engagement of the audience with the tragedies; the pleasure principle, as defined by Cixous in the previous chapter in relation to Les Atrides, rendered accessible—through the sensory and embodied qualities of costume—the violent and excessively painful mythical stories being staged in a way that could make them comprehensible, and even enlightening.

Neo-Platonism, and the costuming of heaven on earth In the Republic Plato presents music as an allegory, embedded in the structure of the cosmos, through the sounds of eight concentrically revolving spheres, each balancing an individually pitched siren. With the three Fates sounding and moving separately, this harmonious universe is “an extraordinary piece of orchestration and choreography” (Peponi 2013: 20). When Plato wrote that harmony imparted grace, his idea of the music of the spheres was intended to educate. As a concept adopted by Italian Renaissance artists and musicians, it fueled the development of the first operas in a spectacle of celestial choruses of singers and dancers. These heavenly scenes, however, reflected the self-contained, self-serving universe of the European courts, presenting it as being in harmony with itself. Roy Strong in Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1610 (1984) is not alone in identifying the role of costume and scenery in translating myth from classical antiquity into allegorical stagings, as a shoring up of the court’s power during celebrations that marked marriages, funerals and births in ruling families across Europe (1984: 43). Through music, song, dance, costume, and scenography, the Italian intermedi, the English masques, and the French court fêtes enacted the rulers’ legitimacy, declaring their virtue by association with a pantheon of celestial beings in a highly accomplished display of mastery and invention on stage. In the Teatro Mediceo, where La Pellegrina intermedi were staged in 1589, all the lines of the single point scenographic perspective met where the Medici rulers sat. The literal alignment between the staged harmonious cosmos and the seat of earthly power in the auditorium can be explained in Nina Treadwell’s terms as a “mystification that paralleled the emergent trend toward mystical monarchy” (2007: 37). Although the Medici intermedi preceded the full articulation of the divine right of kingship of Louis XIV ’s ballet de cour, Treadwell, in her study of the La Pellegrina, suggests that nascent theories of a godlike ruler were implied in the conception of these Medici intermedi. Singing, dancing, and costumed choruses were part of the efficacious scenic bedazzlement. However it is notable that while drawing from classical myths, such spectacle was in fact antithetical to the educational and mimetic choral practices upheld by Plato and Aristotle. The La Pellegrina Intermedi, Treadwell writes, appear to have been intended to “discombobulate,” to produce “wonder and stupefaction . . . not enlightenment or edification” (2007: 35), adding to the mystique around the ruler. Via a number of contemporary accounts, written by eyewitnesses astonished by the spectacle, Treadwell suggests that the visual and aural were combined to evoke the wondrous (2007: 45), in choral practices that are considered antecedent to both ballet and opera. Presented in Florence in 1589 as part of the month-long celebrations for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine de Lorraine, the six intermedi of Girolamo Bargagli’s La Pellegrina (Figures  2.4, 2.5, and 2.6) were obsessively documented, disseminating through prints the Medici spectacle in the years that followed. Drawings and descriptions of La Pellegrina circulated throughout Europe influencing, among others, Inigo Jones and the Stuart masques of the following century. James Saslow’s The Medici Wedding of 1589 (1996) offers a detailed analysis into the making of performances which, as Tim Carter notes, “led to the emergence of opera in the next decade” (1994: 8). The six

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Figure 2.4 The first intermedio, designed by Bernardo Buontalenti in 1589, of Girolamo Bargagli’s La Pellegrina, depicting the harmony of the spheres, with parting clouds revealing mythical, celestial choruses © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

intermedi of La Pellegrina involved “at least . . . sixty singers as well as twenty seven dancers” (Nevile 2008: 28), and were more than a year in development. In a performance that proclaimed Ferdinando I as ushering in a new golden age, theatre designer, architect, and engineer Bernardo Buontalenti and his extensive team of collaborators invented, for the first intermedio, new ways for clouds to part while revealing celestial choirs of sirens, fates and planets lit by moving lanterns that could change color (Figure 2.4). The following intermedio saw mountains rise from the ground producing choruses of hamadryads (wood nymphs), muses, and flawed mortals (who were then turned into magpies played by children); in the third one, suffering Delphians, persecuted by fire-breathing dragon (Figure 2.5), were rescued by Apollo (as an allegory for the groom, Ferdinando); in the fourth intermedio the floor opened to reveal Hell, where a chorus of redundant devils lamented the moral perfection ushered in by the happy couple; in the fifth, Amphitrite, in a mother-of-pearl shell pulled by dolphins through wave machines and accompanied by tritons and nereids, wished the happy couple a brilliant progeny, while mutinous sailors attempted to drown the poet Arion, who was saved by a school of dolphins that had been charmed by his song. In the final intermedio we are back among the floating clouds of the first; however, now the celestial choirs descend from heaven, restoring cosmic harmony to

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Figure 2.5 The fire-breathing dragon was vanquished by Apollo, allegory for the Medici ruler, thus saving the inhabitants of Delphi in the third intermedio of La Pellegrina. Costume design for female characters by Buontalenti, 1589 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

the mortals in Florentine costume for the dance of the grand finale. By the end of the show, the Medici would be identified with the celestial choirs, gifting music and dance to the people, in a “vision of renewed prosperity under the newly installed grand duke” (Treadwell 2007: 73). With the invisible stage crew and concealed scenic machinery that magically reconfigured the space, the self-contained universe framed by the proscenium arch was so effective that it gave unstoppable impetus to illusionistic scenic arrangements. These went on to shape the designs of opera houses across Europe for centuries to come. The choruses on stage were subsumed into a movable painting: in flowing, classical costumes they appeared, like angels, held magically on clouds, coalescing into a grand, theatrical illusion.

The fabrication of wonder through costume Invisible to the audience were also the workers who produced the costumes of the miraculously floating choruses. Their presence is recorded in the financial records analyzed by Saslow. Given the number of

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performers changing costume several times, and the level of skilled labor required, those designing and making the 286 costumes, 320 headdresses, 43 individual masks and 150 pairs of shoes (Saslow 1996: 64–5) for La Pellegrina intermedi worked in the real world of materials and of expert knowledge. Over 4,800 meters of various types of fabrics were sourced from Tuscany and beyond. So complex and expensive were some of the singing chorus costumes that there is evidence of their taking precedence over the casting of the performer: on those occasions, the performer was selected to fit the costume (1996: 50). The staging required a codification of fabrics3 with abundant amounts of flowing textiles used: 700 meters of gauze alone were ordered for veils, headdresses, and costumes for the Sirens, expected to be “transparent like diamond” and for the hamadryads “swelling . . . with each puff of breeze,” as noted in contemporary reports (Saslow 1996: 61). Heavier fabrics were draped in large quantities over the bodies of the gods combined with fitted flesh-colored silk to simulate classical nudity. Velvets, stenciled or printed, and silk taffeta were used for the divine characters, with heavy lawn and linen as linings to give structure to garments that revealed a combination of contemporary tailoring and draping techniques devised from Ancient Greek costume. Buontalenti and his team were informed by archaeology-based sources that had been extensively studied and reinterpreted into the allegorical forms of the Renaissance. Later, forms such as these were gathered into manuals, for instance the Iconologia by Cesare Ripa (1593; see Ripa 1971), given that the complexity of allegories required viewers to be inducted in its decoding, ensuring the inclusion of only the initiated in the reading of the emblematic costumed constructs. The Iconologia was disseminated among artists and applied to bodies depicted as allegories in appropriate draping and accessorizing, through which they were endowed with specific characteristics or values.4 Other allusions were more accessible: pearls, shells, and corals for characters from the sea, jewels and precious metals for celestial personifications such as Harmony, or through animalistic associations, devils in leather or animal skins could create Hell, while the Sirens in the clouds wore feathers. The intricacy of the costumes is revealed in the amount and range of trims purchased such as fringing, sequins, rosettes, lion-heads, bells, lace, buttons, tinsels, and ribbons. Some of the costumes were further worked in the scene-painting workshop, thus being integrated fully in the pictorial scenography framed by the proscenium. Most of the performers were men, frequently required to wear female classical nudity, by donning sculpted “chests with [female] breasts” (Saslow 1996: 55). Layered with veils—which sometimes also “hid” fashionable beards—the worn chest-plates would signal the classical female form through simulated nudity (Figure 2.6). Like the sculpted lion’s heads of Prince Henry’s Oberon costume in Chapter 1, these “chests with breasts” were made out of papier-mâché or molded cardboard. The few female soloists in La Pellegina intermedi would also be provided with papier-mâché breasts, a necessary costume element considering that courtesans’ professional attire in everyday life could consist of uncorseted alla ninfale style, of little more than a full, gauzy, and gathered white chemise reminiscent of classical draping. As noted by Cathy Santore (2008), dress associated with nymph-hood and classical female nudity signaled a loss of respectability for the female wearer. These papier-mâché breasts are part of the established stage convention through which gender was articulated on the stage via costume, of which more in Chapter  3. Here it also provided legitimacy to the few individual female singers, whose voices were critical in the construct of Arcadia, as much as the attendant simulated classical nudity. Within the illusionistic world of the newly invented proscenium arch stage, the papier-mâché decorated, glittering, and veiled chorus completed a picture intended to blind the viewers with sensuality and splendor, while also affirming the hierarchy of erudition and power in the ability to decipher the signs inscribed in the allegorical bodies and their staging.

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Figure 2.6 Costume designs for two female characters, most likely to be played by male performers. Costume drawing by Bernardo Buontalenti, c.1589 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Dance, costume, order, and the court Unlike the proscenium-framed singing choruses of La Pellegrina, the Intermedio della veglia della liberatione di tirreno, 1616, staged in the same theatre, placed a dancing chorus, uniformly dressed, at the center of the U-shaped auditorium (Figure 2.7). In an early manifestation of ballet, the symmetrically arranged bodies are rendered upright and extended by plumed headdresses, in a display of controlled elegance that was Figure 2.7 Early court dance, in which the “noble” male dancers’ costumes and headdresses invited an upright stance. Jacques Callot’s print of the first Intermedio della veglia della liberatione di tirreno staged in the Teatro Mediceo in 1616 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 2.8 Phasma Dionysiacum Pragense, a court dance at Prague Castle in 1617, in which the deciphering of meanings inscribed in the choreography of geometric symbols necessitated identically shaped costumes © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

to become typical of the danse noble. They wear a fantastical rendition of the panoply of Ancient Greek heroic warriors, the decorated cuirass, and full-skirted tunic displaying the movement of the legs. The choreographing of numerous synchronized bodies demonstrated authority in the ordering of identical and luxuriously dressed multiples, whose legs were free to display the mastery of the dance. In moving patterns of geometrical forms, they mark out symbols and letters, similarly to the Phasma Dionysiacum Pragense, 1617, the first court Intermedio ever staged in Prague Castle (Figure 2.8). Reading into astrologer Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Jennifer Nevile detects meanings encoded in the choreography, in which, not unlike the allegories discussed earlier and decipherable only by those in the know, the geometrical sequences communicated a secret formula for “cosmic harmony to operate on earth” (2012: 31). The rare examples of female court ballet reveal a similarly structured approach to choreography, exemplified in Catherine de’ Medici’s dance recorded in Jean Dorat’s Magnificentissimi Spectaculi in 15735 analyzed, through costume, by dress historian Janet Arnold (1993). Led by Marguerite de Valois, two sets of identically costumed female courtiers danced for a whole hour in geometrical formations designed as a riddle, intended to be deciphered by the audience, in a specially erected hall in the Tuileries Palace gardens. Their uniform round gowns were in line with the normal dress of the court, only slightly shorter, shaping their bodies into the normative feminine form of the times. While incorporating changes in fashion, the female dance costume would remain more restrictive than that of the male counterparts for more than two hundred years. To gain influence courtiers were expected to be dexterous dancers to perform aristocratic

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Figure 2.9a Ballet de cour costume for male dancer, from Meleto Castle c.1750, and b detail © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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pedigree, and the denial of appropriate garments for dancing therefore reflected the lack of access to the structures of power at court. Women’s hooped, layered, padded, decorated, and corseted attires exposed their lower status in the dance for power. Ballet emerged, during the ancien régime, as the choreographic embodiment of court hierarchy, etiquette, and order, largely through the male bodies of the danse noble. Sharing some movements and positions with fencing, choral aspects of the ballet de cour of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could be perceived as danced military displays. Steps had developed into ballet positions by the time Louis XIV ’s starred in his own court spectaculars, surrounded by a retinue of ostentatiously costumed courtiers. His costume for Apollo, designed by Henri de Gissey for the Ballet de la Nuit in 1653, was a synthesis of the symbolism of Roman emperors and stylized sunrays that, emanating from his body, were encrusted with jewelry. This costume, which gained him the epithet of Roi de Soleil, proclaimed victory through its design and performance. As the rising sun, he had triumphed over the darkness of the insurrections of La Fronde in which the aristocracy had threatened the king’s absolute power (Prest 2008: 234). The courtiers accompanying him in the dance enacted acquiescence to his godlike rule in front of the rest of the court. No longer filtered through the exclusive riddles of allegory, the costumed body of the king, center stage, extended its power through his dancing chorus, becoming the personification of national unity in a decidedly unambiguous performance. This collective dance was “a form that brought nobles into submission, playing out in the ballet the orders of the monarch” (McGowan 2008: 110). In this shift from knowledge being communicated in an embodied way to the refraction of undiluted power from the stage, male danseur noble costume becomes what Ravelhofer calls “a lighting machine,” expanding the body by refracting light through a material construction encrusted with “mirrors, stones, pearls, paillettes, and metallic thread” (2006: 145). Among the earliest surviving performance costumes is the ballet de cour dancer from Meleto Castle, dated c.1750 (Figure 2.9), which, with its upright, back-fastening body, characterizes the danseur noble of the earlier intermedi from early seventeenth century. The bold, raised, metallic embroidery suggests the shape of a cuirass, set against the crimson furnishing velvet, extending into the peplum and the skirt to emphasize movement and structure. As the directional changes in the embroidery stitching would have captured and refracted the candlelight of the theatre, the fringed braids around its edges would flicker and magnify movement. The Meleto Castle costume maintains the spatially and historically sited performative effectiveness that shaped it. This had been honed over centuries, from its appearance in the Neoplatonic staging during the Renaissance, which, with fitted and skirted torsos, echoed the choruses of warriors of Ancient Greece. Within a few decades, costumes such as this would become entirely redundant.

Ballet blanc, ethereal bodies of tulle In the second half of the eighteenth century, the ballet de cour male costume reached extremes of decoration and sideways expansion in the tonnelet skirts with rigid panniers (Figure  2.10), mirroring women’s skirts. Skirtless, their costuming may have exaggerated other decorative elements of fashionable dress, such as powdered wigs and heeled shoes. These accoutrements became associated with the corruption of the ancien régime and its dissonance with the people. The male dancers who wore them, and the privilege they represented, were all but swept aside by the French Revolution, to be replaced by pared-down neoclassical female bodies, wigless, in flat shoes, and dressed in plain white cotton, which, although differently from the Renaissance celestial costumes, also referred to Ancient Greece (Figure 2.11). Groups of women dressed in this manner had appeared spontaneously in public demonstrations in 1789, and were adopted by the

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Figure 2.10 Gaétan Vestris in Jason et Médée Ballet Tragique, 1781, which satirized tragic poses. His costume appears to parody the exaggerations of tonnelet skirts, combining the panniers with draping © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 2.11 Two dancers in the classically inspired high waists and flat shoes, characteristic of post-revolutionary dance as much as of fashion. When compared with images of dancers from the preceding decades, they appear to have stripped away an entire layer of clothing. Two Sisters, by Adam Buck, 1796 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David and the choreographer Pierre Gardel for staging of revolutionary performances and events from 1790 to 1794.6 Their presence, emblematic of “the people” of France, “mirrors the role played by women in the Revolution” (Macintosh 2013: 316). Displaying a shared consciousness in silence, their physical and visual presence was embedded in the popular imagination and was channeled later into the ballets blancs. Male dancers, however, holding onto the noble persona of the despised ancien régime through their tonnelet costumes went “from being paragons of their art to pariahs chased from the stage” (Homans 2010: 122), leaving female dancers to play male roles en travesti for decades to come. Not for the last time, neoclassical dress, freeing movement through the empire line, was a catalyst for the development of new dance forms led by women.7 Even when boned bodices were reintroduced, the upper body of the dancer was not rendered solid by the stomachers of the previous century, nor was their leg movement routinely restricted into hoops. The costuming of future generations of ballerinas was crystallized in 1832 by La Sylphide, an otherworldly, unattainable creature who leads men astray. Originally designed by Eugène Lami for Marie Taglioni, the bell-shaped tutu of eight layers of tarlatan reaching to just below the knee, with a décolleté bodice and satin slippers, became a uniform that allowed the corps of the ballet blanc to share a professional status through costume and collective performance (fig. 2.12).

Figure 2.12 Marie Taglioni as the Sylph in La Sylphide by Alfred Edwards Chalon, printed in 1845 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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The Romantic tutu silhouette marked a new-found acceptability for groups of women to perform professionally together, that although emerging from the French Revolution, did not prevent the dancers’ offstage existence from being characterized by social disadvantage, precariousness, and sexual exploitation (Figure 2.13). Hungry and poor, they sought protection and financial support from wealthy patrons, encouraged by theatre managements. The resulting association of ballet with victimhood and prostitution, however, runs counter to the onstage character of early Romantic ballerinas’ principal and choral roles. Lithe and nearly airborne, they were unattainable, dissolving into the scenic space. Not only did the pointe shoes endow supernatural qualities expressing a desire for flight, but they appeared dressed in light as their skirts glowed, caught in the newly invented gas side-lighting, and, as a group, created a landscape that hauntingly articulated Romanticism from the stage. The ballet scene from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable, first performed in 1831 and much revived during the nineteenth-century, was painted by Edgar Degas (Figure  2.14), who captured the fusion of costume, light, and space. In the ballet the fallen nuns are brought back from the dead by the devil, to damn Robert by seducing him. Their enveloping religious habits are shed, to reveal the ethereal dancers, who, I

Figure 2.13 Ballet class, 1850s, probably at the Paris Opera, to which rich patrons were allowed access. Notice the threatening stick held by the dance master © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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suggest, might have been conceived initially as wearing the underskirts of the early 1830s, a version of which were to become the ballerina costume. Degas painted the side-lit dancers in the process of disrobing in the gloomy cloisters. Giselle’s Wilis, first performed in 1841, no longer required the nuns’ habits. The Wilis, ballerinas in Romantic tutus, their ballet blanc uniforms, reflected a now-accepted contemporary déshabillé, in which to rise from the grave to avenge their betrayal—having been jilted at the altar—on any passing male stranger, whom they danced to death. For both the nuns and the Wilis, these early scenarios proposed an assertive and unforgiving femininity, permitted only to already dead and fallen women, sublimating female desire, which was mitigated by the scenic, ethereal, and entrancingly lit costumes, intended to also stimulate male desire.

Figure 2.14 Painting by Edgar Degas capturing the fusion of light and costume in the final act of the Romantic opera Robert le Diable, when deceased nuns come back to life to seduce the central character © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Although male dancers were largely excluded from the ballet in the nineteenth century because, in Ramsay Burt’s words, they “got in the way of erotic appreciation of feminine display” (1995: 27), for the first time groups of women were able to show a collective intent that drove the action, one that, in a different costume, would have been entirely unacceptable. Far from being the confectionary that ballerinas later became, the early Romantic corps de ballet of La Sylphide, Giselle, and the ballet of the nuns from Robert le diable became “a locus of both power and desire, which is conveniently sited deep in the past or resited within the realms of the imagination” (Macintosh 2013: 324). Fiona Macintosh draws parallels between these early ballerinas and the furies from Greek tragedy. It was only later, after the middle of the nineteenth century, that ballet became infantilized into the “realm of fairy tales and/or bawdy banality” (2013: 324) as we shall see in Chapter 4. En pointe and seemingly airborne, highly skilled Romantic corps de ballet dancers created a nebulous, gauzy space which they reconfigured dynamically through sculptural, extended bodies, and formalized, highly coordinated movement (Figure 2.15). Their dance and their costumes became an anathema to modernism. Nonetheless Romantic ballet remains an ever-present and oppositional force against which many dance artists and designers continue to define themselves.

Figure 2.15 Les Sylphides, Michel Fokine’s tribute to the Romantic ballet, devised for the Ballets Russes in 1909 and much revived since, including in this mid-twentieth century version at the Royal Opera House © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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The serially produced female body The physical, aesthetic, and choreographic virtuosity that had rendered Romantic ballet successful also demonstrated the profitability of female bodies serially produced through costume and performance. In Paris, for example, the Folies Bergère has, since 1869, offered titillation via lines of cancan dancers, lifting their petticoats to reveal insides covered by flounces, while performing energetic high kicks in frilled drawers with a slit gusset, in what could be interpreted and experienced, even in pre-Freudian times, as rows of magnified vulvas recreated in textile. Exaggerating froufrou undergarments, this dance objectified, and made disposable through multiplication, female sexuality for the male gaze. The cancan dancers’ spectacular flamboyance and shimmering materiality anticipate the extended bodies of the Erté-inspired showgirls—to become endemic in Las Vegas while also available globally—who no longer needed to wear skirts to lift (Figure 2.16). Moving unhurriedly on high stilettos, with only a few jewelry-like costume elements8 seemingly suspended in strategic positions, their costumes extend a frothy halo of constructed desire and unattainability around near-naked bodies elongated by feather headdresses and other

Figure 2.16 Black and white backstage photograph of The Talk of the Town by Houston Rogers, 1960 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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ostentatiously seductive attachments such as gigantic fans and boas. The extensions, which made extravagant use of diamantes, feathers, or frilled materials, framed the glittering flesh of the dancers into an unapproachable yet highly desirable proposition. As a design formula, in the pursuit of novelty, it could successfully absorb references from anywhere, such as colorful stereotypes from a generalized South America, as in Figure  2.17, or it could even reduce Shakespearean characters to mocking symbols, magically suspended on the pubis of the dancers, as identified by Kate Dorney (2015) in her analysis of Eve Nightclub cabaret costumes of the 1960s and 1970s. The emergence of identically costumed dancers in the chorus line of showgirls from the late nineteenth century onward, is significant, however, in its controlling and directing of groups of female bodies on stage, which project a version of femininity produced serially, mechanized, and even militarized. The Mass Ornament written in 1927 by Siegfried Kracauer discusses the Tiller Girls’ performances choreographed with military precision by John Tiller (1854–1925), with tightly packed lines of dancers in geometrical formations, which were admired by many, including the Third Reich’s Minister of Propaganda,

Figure 2.17 South American routine from a floorshow at The Talk of the Town, 1962, London Hippodrome. Photograph by Anthony Crickmay © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Joseph Goebbels. Tiller’s military precision extended to the requirements of the costumes that, while segmenting their bodies, highlighted the stocking-covered legs moving in unison. The spectacle of the group on stage conveys a fragmentation of the individual bodies, as their legs appear to became part of a unified and automatically synchronized movement machine. Rolling off the production line of John Tiller’s school, these female dancers were cogs in a machine, a performing ornament that had mass appeal. If “the hands in the factory corresponded to the legs of the Tiller Girls” (Kracauer 1995: 79), then the factory-line workers in the audience and the chorus line on stage faced one another implicitly recognizing in each other similarly anonymous, uniformed workers. Kira Reilly concludes, however, that the rigor and discipline that produced the docile bodies of the Tiller Girls gave also many working-class girls the first opportunity to enter the workforce during the early decades of the twentieth century. They were “both mass ornament and key players in the emerging image of the liberated ‘modern girl’ ” (2013: 130). Crucially the absorption into the costumed performance machine was devoid of the offstage sexual exploitation characterizing the ballerinas and the cancan dancers of the preceding century. In fact, this collective practice could create camaraderie among its female workforce through developing a professionalism also reflected in the production of costumes.

Figure 2.18 Tiller Girls, c.1960, in identical costumes and with very similar physical shapes © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Costume and community crisis: The Rite of Spring The rejection of the objectification of female bodies and of the mass production of dancers through dress and choreography was led by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with the highly trained female and male dancers from the Imperial Ballet of Tsarist Russia, and through the use of design, music composition, and choreography. Diaghilev’s first season in Paris (1909) engaged its audiences with the reassuring Les Sylphides, a fantasy ballet blanc in costumes based on Lami’s 1830s Romantic tutus (Figure 2.15), and Le Pavillon d’Armide which, with the tonnelet skirts of the danseurs nobles gestured back to the ancien régime. However, for the third production of the season, the Polovtsian Dances in Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, Russian painter Nicholas Roerich produced designs that were antithetical to both tutus and tonnelets. The dancers, men and women, wore boots, or gaiters, and tunics, and their costumes, sourced from the traditionally handcrafted dress and textiles of central Asia nomadic tribes,9 were made of ikat fabrics, woven in vibrant colors (Figure 2.19). This performance introduced an approach to dress and the body that was to have a profound impact on fashion as well as on dance. Similarly to Matisse and Picasso, who were countering the dominant reactionary bourgeois visual culture by absorbing the immediacy of African masks into their work, Roerich’s focus was on preindustrial, handwoven textiles from Asia that are vividly present while also embodying an evoked “elsewhere.” By 1913, Les Ballets Russes’ demonstration of the “decisive role of theatre in the aesthetics of the times” (Bellow 2013: 69), appeared to also show prescience in its focus on human sacrifice in The Rite of Spring, which opened in Paris the year before the start of World War I.10 Its radical musical composition and choreography famously caused riots at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as two tribes

Figure 2.19 Costume for the Chief Polovtsian Warrior in Fokine’s ballet Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, Diaghilev Ballet, 1909, designed by Nicholas Roerich © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 2.20 The women in The Rite of Spring, 1913, in costumes by Nicholas Roerich © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

in the auditorium raged against each other: the bourgeoisie, shocked by its decidedly un-balletic form, versus the avant-garde, who craved more of the revolutionary aesthetics that the dance embodied. Stravinsky’s music, which experimented with rhythm, dissonance, and percussive impulse was channeled by Vaslav Nijinsky into the dancers’ experimental and expressive movement. The scenario represents a tribal community and the sacrifice of a female Chosen One, made to dance herself to death in order to usher in a good harvest and save the community. A keen ethnographer of pagan Russia, whose work militated against industrialization, Nicholas Roerich’s representation of Slavic Russian costumes referenced traditional peasant dress, which actually dated back to no earlier than the eighteenth century (Bowlt 2013a: 375). Worn with long, braided wigs, garters, and sandals, the belted linen tunics were decorated with the enlarged patterns of folk embroidery, in red and golden colors on a white base (Figure 2.20). Unlike the rawness of the music, these designs could be perceived as displaying Roerich’s fascination with an imagined Slavic arcadia, rather than a place of real struggle, which depends on human sacrifice for its survival. Their colorfulness, however, may have mitigated against some of the cultural unacceptability of the music and choreography, with the movement being mediated by the straight cut T-shapes, reaching to the knees for the men and the calves for the women. As experimental dance costumes depicting communal chorality inspired by the textile crafts of traditional, rural societies, they challenged classical ballet conventions, potentially as much as the choreography, while also softening its impact. By striving to portray a “primitive” community, they did more than shedding tutus.

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Roerich’s painted costumes drew attention to the significance of dress in ensemble, choral dance as a method for the construction of social environments and their interior conflicts, permitting the depiction of community crisis partly through costume. The Rite of Spring remains the most frequently staged modernist dance of the twentieth century, having engaged some of its most important designers and choreographers. Kenneth MacMillan’s production at the Royal Opera House, first staged in 1962 though still in repertoire, designed by Sidney Nolan, made clear reference to aboriginal art, thus re-considering The Rite of Spring in a specific cultural context (Figure  2.21). Nolan, an Australian artist, had traveled to the Northern Territories in the late 1940s, coming into close contact over a number of years with aboriginal communities, which, he had come to believe, held a cultural identity superior to any other (Wilson 2007: 4), thus challenging the basis of colonialist appropriation of land justified through Western self-appointed cultural supremacy11 (Poignant 2004: 57). Referencing the similarities between indigenous people’s body markings and rock paintings made with arms and hands, Nolan’s costumes embodied a communal ritual of a physical belonging to the land. On the prehistoric cave walls of the Carnarvon Range mountains, which influenced his designs, the stencil imprints of hands and arms of individual members of the Indigenous population had been used to create a permanent pattern of interlinked human bodies in a composite artwork created collectively by the community over several generations (Dobrez, 2013 and 2014). On Nolan’s full-body leotards, white hands, surrounded by orange and ochre earth colors, bind the onstage

Figure 2.21 Sidney Nolan and Kenneth MacMillan’s The Rite of Spring, in repertoire at the Royal Opera House, first staged in 1962, photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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community together. The immediacy of the brush-free earth marks draws attention to the outstretched hands of the dancers as a focus of their movements, while both the dancers’ movement and the stencil imprints on their costumes perform human interdependence. The significance of the cave paintings in the Carnarvon Ranges is culturally, socially, and geographically specific to its community. Yet when “borrowed” with integrity by a socially conscious designer/artist, their performative application to The Rite of Spring bodies transforms them into dynamic and corporeally understood gestures, that are both physical and visual and express the interconnectedness of individual, earth, and community. And one that, by declaring its connection to a pre-colonized land, exposes Nolan’s and MacMillan’s values, while raising awareness of sophisticated meanings of colonized aboriginal culture and art, alongside their fragility. If Nolan brought to the stage the cultural Other (Wilson 2007: 3) of aboriginal silenced and marginalized communities in the early 1960s, Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring, 1975, revived regularly by Tanztheater Wuppertal, highlights the violence of gender tribalism and the victimization of women (Figure 2.22). Here the human sacrifice is materially embodied in the red voile shift dress, which, initially identifiable with desire, gradually spreads dread among the women as it becomes clear that victimhood is to be forced upon the one to wear it. Rolf Borzik’s minimal gender-archetypal costumes distinguish between women and men by exposing nakedness differently. The muscular power of the bare torsos and arms of the male dancers is more prominent when with black trousers, presenting, en masse, a brooding, threatening, and monolithic masculinity. The women’s nude, skin-colored, semitransparent,

Figure 2.22 Pina Bausch and Rolf Borzik’s Rite of Spring, first staged in 1975. Photograph © by Zerrin AydinHerwegh.

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Figure 2.23a The Rite of Spring performed by The Fabulous Beast Dance Company in collaboration with the English National Opera, 2009, reproduced by permission of Michael Keegan-Dolan, choreographer, and Rae Smith, designer. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

and calf-length shifts, integral to their movement, render them unsettling in the vulnerability of the bodies being exposed through them. As they dance to evident exhaustion, the dirt covering the floor is absorbed into their costumes, mixing with sweat, in movements seemingly driven by irrational compulsion. Through the corporeal materiality of the body/costumes in the elemental muddy space, a palpable performance can be sensed by the audience, witnessing the heavily breathing, sweating bodies materially and physically transform. During the sacrificial dance, the movement driving the Chosen One causes her breast to become exposed as her gender renders her the victim of a male ritualized violence, which is sanctioned by the entire onstage community who watch, immobile. The vicarious “chorus” in the auditorium is, judging by the reviews over the last few decades, left almost inevitably affected. The audience may also question the inevitability of the gendered outcome of this ritual, relating it to that of many other female bodies habitually sacrificed in other onstage scenarios, and how such widespread female victimhood reflects on the patriarchy inscribed within it. Irish choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan reverses the inevitability of female victimhood by leaving the Chosen One standing center stage in his Rite, in her underwear, surrounded by a male chorus in floral dresses collapsed around her. Designed by Rea Smith and first staged in 2009, its stable narrative is challenged in a production sited, by its costumes, within an Irish rural context, and produced by Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre (Figures 2.23a and 2.23b). In Aoife McGrath’s words productions such as this, which reinscribe new meaning, agency, and emancipation in individuals and groups, “affects all future experiences

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Figure 2.23b The Rite of Spring, 2009, reproduced by permission of Michael Keegan-Dolan, choreographer, and Rae Smith, designer. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

of the narratives in question, linking the possibility of agency with situations of oppression” (2011: 170). Keegan-Dolan, quoted in McGrath, reveals the lasting presence in his memory of fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett who died in 1984 at the foot of the statue of the Madonna in Granard, County Longford, having just given birth to a baby. She had been unable to seek help, as a result of the taboos surrounding pregnancy outside marriage that existed in Ireland. In her article, McGrath makes a powerful indictment of the silence of the church and the state around Ann Lovett’s death. Michael Keegan-Dolan, a contemporary of Lovett, still lives in a nearby community. His retelling of ballet scenarios—including Giselle—from a perspective of reinscribing relevant, contemporary meanings have toured internationally and been widely praised. Keegan-Dolan equates Lovett to the Chosen One while recasting her as survivor, in a production that brings to bear on the community at large the ongoing oppression of women through law and religion. Gender definition and conflict is at the center of Keegan-Dolan’s interpretation. At the start of the dance the clothing is stereotypically gendered, with women in similar floral tea dresses, and men in a range of dark farming clothing (Figure  2.24). They carry cardboard boxes which contain oversized, naturalistic masks, of menacing hound dogs for the men and startled hares for the women, further polarizing the sexes while engaging with an animalistic urge found by Keegan-Dolan in the Rite. The victims of the pack are stripped to their underwear after a terrifying chase. At the crucial moment of the communal ceremony, the Chosen One brings in a long colorful twisted rope, which unravels in the space into several floral dresses. Each of the men takes one, strips naked, and having folded his clothes into a neat pile, wears it. In the concluding scene with only the Chosen One left standing, the entire colorfully

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dressed cast is left lying supine around her, filling the entire stage floor, and “the ground seems to be strewn with flowers” a conclusion that, in Keegan-Dolan’s words, is “innately optimistic” (quoted in McGrath 2011: 163). Shifting gender en masse through costumes, the rite here becomes about the acknowledgment, by the community on stage as well as the wider one, of the fallacy of monolithic, fixed notions of gender and of sexuality, which, set in a cycle of control and oppression, inevitably create victims of the Ann Lovetts of this world and of their babies. Like the choruses of Ancient Greece, through which social and political issues could be debated, the dancers of The Rite of Spring have exposed cultural, societal, and political anxieties via choreography and costume, in a dance initially conceived as Europe was edging toward World War I. Its productions have revealed the tensions brought about by industrialization and loss of community (Roerich/Nijinsky), colonialism, loss of connection to the land and of cultural traditions (Nolan/MacMillan) as well as the oppression of women inscribed in a binarily-gendered community in its negation of equality, in both Bausch/Borzik’s and Keegan-Dolan/Smith’s productions. The latter places on the stage a community that is recognizably Keegan-Dolan’s own—or that could be our own—in a Rite that enlightens us on the complex nature of gender, while bringing attention to the role of fear, particularly via the hounds’ masks and the chase, in controlling and repressing. The work of these dance companies is in line with both the Aristotelean and the Platonic versions of the chorus, as the groups on stage are both a character and an agent of community building, with costume clarifying and reinforcing the alliance between the world on stage and the one in the auditorium.

Figure 2.24 Rae Smith’s costume designs for The Rite of Spring, 2009 © Rae Smith.

3 THE GROTESQUE COSTUME: THE COMICAL AND CONFLICTED “OTHER” BODY Which “other”? Costume is viewed in this chapter through the frame of “the other,” the part of the self that is ordinarily suppressed or ignored, focusing on how the conspicuous layering of the self of the performer and “the other” of the costume engages comedy in order to embody a political position. The way costume is able to expose a complex and conflicted human nature through performance is elucidated specifically via Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque. Bakhtin’s philosophy draws from early modern popular forms, termed collectively as carnivalesque. Since its publication in 1965 (translated into English in 1984), Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World has provided a reading of performance that is predominantly bodycentered and that links carnivalesque laughter to a process of discursive, and sometimes subversive, regeneration. Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, constructed around the writing of François Rabelais (1494–1553), finds its origins in the public spaces of medieval Europe, from where some of the performances that exemplify the grotesque costume in this chapter are drawn. Emblematic of the carnivalesque is the particolored fool and his crestfallen crown, loudly and visibly declaring his presence in the town square. Carnivalesque forms emerged, Bakhtin claims, as regenerative expressions of popular culture, intended to empower the oppressed, rebalancing, at least temporarily, the preeminence of church and state by the upending of social hierarchies and the challenging of normative aesthetics. Carnival created a “world upside down,” uncrowning kings and crowning fools, utilizing the grotesque costumed body to provoke antiauthoritarian laughter. The mechanisms of comedic upending that enact the carnivalesque through costumes are detectable in Daniel Rabel’s designs, done not for the carnival but, paradoxically, for the exclusive court of Louis XIII for the Ballet du Sérieux et du Grotesque (1627). By the seventeenth century the street carnivalesque had been assimilated into the ballets de cour, in the danse grotesque that was the antidote to the danse noble discussed in the previous chapter. Rabel’s designs explain the efficacy of the grotesque costume in exposing human flaws by distorting the body and applying the visual eloquence devised for the outdoor performances of the feasts of fools and other popular carnivalesque iterations from the preceding halfmillennium. The Ballet du Sérieux et du Grotesque was danced not in the royal residence of the Louvre but, only for the second time in the history of the French ballet de cour, at l’Hôtel de Ville.1 Here members of the bourgeoisie, who were among the invited audience, were presented with mocking versions of themselves, enacted by courtiers and by some professional performers. The tall-hatted Le Sérieux and his entourage, 59

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Figure 3.1 Costumes designed by Daniel Rabel for Ballet du Sérieux et du Grotesque, 1627, court of Louis XIII , l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris: (a) design for the character Le Sérieux; (b) drummer; (c) Guard of the clown Grotesque; and (d) Gigantic head and hat on legs. All © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 3.2 Daniel Rabel’s costume design for a Headless Character in the Ballet Royal du Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, 1626, court of Louis XIII , l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris © Victoria and Albert Museum.

for example, engaged in disputes over social precedence with the Bourgeoises de Paris group of characters and, while sporting starched and neatly composed costumes (Figure  3.1a), Le Sérieux’ “serious countenance” was “enhanced by a large, drooping moustache” (McGowan 2001: 115). The musicians, deformed by padded humps and bellies, and seemingly mutating into their instruments (Figure 3.1b), were also mocked by their costumes. McGowan explains how the guard of the clown Grotesque, wrapped head-to-foot in bandages, had been rendered immobile by the carnival (Figure 3.1c) thus depicting the popular festival as incapacitating, while at the same time efficaciously using carnival’s own costume methods to ridicule it. The guard’s martial inadequacy is amply demonstrated by his redundant sword slung over the shoulders and the plumed helmet, borrowed from the danse noble, perched on his head. If not immobilized by their costumes, the performers’ grotesque attire could have guided movement and dominated the space around them. A gigantic head on little legs would have staggered in wearing the starched collar and tall hat of the professional classes (Figure 3.1d), and a “headless doublet” (Figure 3.2)

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may have hobbled behind, possibly negotiating doors and chandeliers. Both costume caricatures are traditional “folk jokes” from contemporary and earlier street carnivals (Astington 2001: 101) which, when applied to the Ballet du Sérieux et du Grotesque, mock the bigheadedness and fashion obsession projected by the court on the bourgeoisie, by enlarging through costume their perceived faults in order to belittle them. These vernacular carnival costumes delighted in their own artificiality, and were the opposite of the erudite and mystifying allegories discussed in the previous chapter. Rather than excluding its presumed inferiors the court could, through borrowed costume caricatures, denigrate them openly. Rabel’s drawings for the Ballet du Sérieux et du Grotesque expose the methods of the carnivalesque costume. And yet, from a Bakhtinian perspective, grotesque comedic forms came into existence as the response of the oppressed to their powerlessness; so how can we interpret their use by the court to parody the middle classes? Emptied of their antiestablishment impetus, these costume forms appeared to be reassigned to reassure the nobility of its superior standing.2 Their adoption may also hint at suppressed anxieties related to the disproportionate political power held by the elite. The court may be making light of its own fears concerning the perceived threat of an expanding middle class whose presence is marked by the use, albeit augmented and satirized, of everyday townspeople’s clothing in a court performance. The expression of anxieties through comedy is a feature of the grotesque, and its ability to renew by confronting them and even by wearing them. As comedic “others,” the costumes assembled in this chapter have enabled, in different contexts, the surfacing of fears that may otherwise have remained sealed in the state of unconsciousness. This translates into a play between layers, of hiding and revealing, in a relationship between body and costume that exposes “theatre as theatre.” Showing its mechanics and materialized through costume, the comedic grotesque presents the performance of the conflicted self. In Bakhtinian terms, this conflict becomes apparent through the slippages, leakages, swellings, protrusions, fissures, and distortions between the layers of meaning via the more literal layers of the material costume in relation to the body of the performer (Granata 2013). Together and in dissonance within themselves, grotesque bodies expose one another in comedic revelations. The first essential reference in an exploration of the comedic grotesque through costume has to be the Old Comedy of Aristophanes (c.446BC –c.386BC ) with its distorting paddings and masks, added breasts, and removable genitalia. They lead to a consideration of the Wildmen of Europe who emerged from the forests of prehistory into the calendar of fertility celebrations of the farming cycles. Shaped by Christianity into the pelts-and-leather wearing devils, they become the “others” of the liturgical miracle plays. In the late sixteenth century early versions of the commedia dell’arte stock character of Arlecchino assimilated the physicality of the medieval devils while two centuries later Joseph Grimaldi’s Joey displaced Arlecchino as the center of the Harlequinade and through new costume layers established the archetype of the Victorian clown. Finally, we consider the twentieth century, with the globally affective image of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, discussed here alongside Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. The latter, anticipating the Theatre of the Absurd, caused riots on its opening in 1896, and informed Theatre NO 99’s productions of King Ubu. The absurd, futuristic costumes of this production, sited within a newly liberated Estonia, and touched by the mercurial nature of the original Arlecchino, rendered bodies riotously anarchic. This reading of the grotesque costume will inevitably expose the porosity between stage and street and, by extension, between performer and audience. If, paraphrasing Bakhtin, the individual dissolves into a communal performance as part of the experience of renewal offered by carnival through a change of costume (1984: 255), then a performance conveyed

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through a grotesque costume and through laughter presents a temporary regenerative act to its viewers, as they identify with the expansive humanity of the character.

Greek comedy and the grotesque costume The Old Comedy of fifth century BC Athens scripted the actions of flawed humans who, from the moment they appeared on stage in their indispensable comedic costume, proposed the opposite of the aesthetic ideals of classical beauty. As demystifications, these comedy costumes embodied the “brimming-over abundance” (Bakhtin 1984: 19) of the grotesque, in exaggerated masks, distorted bodies, and the preoccupation with the lower strata of the body. Unlike the heroes of the tragedies, who seldom changed costumes, comedic performers were not sealed, metaphorically and literally, into a costume. In the layered costume of the ever-changing comedy actor, the wearer was in a perpetual process of becoming, with the possibility of slippages between the layers threatening exposure of what was expected to be kept hidden. The fictional nudity of the basic costume, the padded second body, could be layered with gendered body parts, with other costumes and with disguises and performers would swap masks for character changes. Helen Foley describes how comedy performers borrowed the body and behavior of those they considered social inferiors, granting themselves a licentious freedom of expression, “with the aim of mocking the political and intellectual elite” (2000: 278). The body-conscious male citizen-actors were transformed into parodies of themselves, of the gods, or of marginalized individuals such as the elderly, resident aliens, or slaves. Everyone on stage was allowed to be ugly and anyone offstage, dead or alive, was fair game, including political figures, philosophers, and playwrights, with oversized masks enabling the audience to identify public figures. Through sagging thighs, bellies, and buttocks, the basic comedy costume rendered the performer initially genderless, re-gendering him into either a female or a male character through breasts or phalluses, or sometimes both at the same time. Foley (2000: 291–3) draws attention to actors wearing women’s padded breasts and fake phalli on vases and terracotta statuettes (Figure 3.3), suggesting lack of time for quick changes from female into male character. The coexistence of both anatomies on the same body may also be read as commenting on the unequal gender relationships, which excluded women from the stage and indeed from most public life. More consciously created gender ambiguity was generated in scenes scripted to involve male characters in female disguises where the large costume phalluses were visible under female robes or popped out unexpectedly. These ambiguous bodies, committed to text and painted on vases, performed a layering of sexual identities through costume, and may be illustrating an anxiety around the monolithic phallocentricity at the core of Hellenic political life. The awareness and satire of political systems based solely on masculine power is evident in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, when the women go on a sex strike to stop the men fighting as “decisions on peace are determined by the phallus’ needs” (Varakis 2010: 27). Written and performed by men for men, Greek comedy drew attention to the possibility of inadequacy through the oversized leather phallus worn by male characters, dangling (unlike the satyrs’), and evident under the ill-fitting, short chitons stretched over padded bellies. Violence and voyeurism in Aristophanes’ comedies can also be read as symptomatic of a dominant masculinity that revealed its own crisis, while group entitlement was safeguarded in the shared laughter at a “conventional and comforting display of masculine power and of the sadistic gaze” scripted into acts of humiliation against women and other marginalized groups (Ruffell 2013: 271). Often, however, the either malfunctioning or out-of-control worn phallus, puppeteered by the actor, exposed underlying anxieties. Endlessly threatening both penetration and humiliation, the costume phalluses also

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Figure 3.3a Calyx-krater with theatrical scene, showing a comedy actor performing wearing both female breasts and male phallus c.400BC –390BC ; Apulian terracotta. Courtesy The MET, www.metmuseum.org.

Figure 3.3b Comic actor, late fifth / early fourth century BC from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rogers Fund, 1913. Courtesy The MET, www.metmuseum.org.

rendered their wearers powerlessly at the mercy of desire. Through them, ill-placed and disproportionate power could be performed and parodied. Other costume strategies satirizing relationships between characters, and involving dressing-downs, dressing up, and disguising, emerge from an analysis the Aristophanes’ texts by Ian Ruffell (2013), Alan Sommerstein (2013), and Gwendolyn Compton-Engle (2003). Disguise was deployed by the comedy actors to parody the performance of serious tragedians, through characters that could not live up to the expectations of their tragic costumes, thus inviting the ridiculing of bad acting. A character may have adopted a particular disguise to, narcissistically, “imbue himself with the persuasive power of the original wearer” (Sommerstein 2013: 1), while revealing his own insecurities. Changes of costume in comedy could turn beggars into gods or render humans into animals. Moreover, the onstage costume changes drew

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attention not only to the transformation, but to who is being transformed by whom, and why. Power relationships were satirized by scoring points through humiliation and deception, in the words of Gwendolyn Compton-Engle “to demonstrate one’s own mastery and the subjugation of one’s opponent” (2003: 507). The padded costumes provided plenty of opportunities to inflict beatings, be manhandled, suddenly denuded, unmasked, or even endure a forced sex change in full view of the audience. It was the costume that was being victimized, as in the character of the Relative3 whose conflicted self is dramatized through costume in Aristophanes’ The Women of the Thesmophoria (411BC ). Compton-Engle describes how this character “possesses only the barest minimum of control over his circumstances, a characteristic that is most manifest in matters of costume” (2003: 516). Fearing for his life, the character of Euripides sends his father-in-law, the oversexed and elderly Relative, in female disguise, to spy on the women who are raging against the misogyny in Euripides’ plays. The onstage male-into-female gender reassignment procedure to which the Relative is subjected is intended to be excruciating, involving the plucking of the beard, and the singeing of pubic hair, ahead of being dressed in a saffron robe, an eye-catching female garment. Referring to the use of the padded simulated nudity of the comedy costume, Compton-Engle notes that “it is not just items of clothing but also parts of the Relative’s body—the comic actor’s costume—that elude his control” (2003: 518). This is not the only time that his body is aggressively manipulated: when the women discover that he is a man transgressing into a sacred, female ritual, and, worse, Euripides’ spy, a protracted routine of manhandling and further humiliation ensues. The Relative not only loses control of his female disguise and of his phallus, but also of his freedom, finally tied to a plank while Euripides, costumed as a succession of characters from his own plays, attempts to free him. As the Relative blames the costume for his powerlessness, exclaiming “[s]affron robe, what things you have done!” (Aristophanes,4 quoted in Compton-Engle 2003: 519), he affirms the role of costume in the comedy. Absorbing the character’s internal conflicts, here around the Relative’s fascination/disavowal of a suppressed feminine side, his grotesque costume contains its own dynamics of performance and gives shape to a conflicted human nature via a worn otherness.

Bodies of mixed parts In his comedies, Aristophanes demonstrated how laughter can be generated through a grotesque costume that indemnifies its wearer. The complexity of the characters, their journey through the play and relationship with other characters was partly regulated by costumes that reassembled gender, identity, and social status. In François Rabelais’ bawdy folk tale of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel, published in five volumes between c.1532 and c.1564, the dismemberment and reassembly of bodies proved an effective technique to fictionalize the trauma of existence in early modern times. The cruelty against the body in Rabelais’ carnivalesque laughter, analyzed by Bakhtin, is described by decapitated characters whose heads are sewn back on, or by the thousands drowned in the giant’s urine to the amusement of the survivors. This dark, popular humor was emblematic of the capacity to survive and, as Bakhtin suggests, be renewed by catastrophes such as the plague or the unsparing wars of the period. In this carnivalesque fictional world in which body parts were sewn back together, costume and body held equal value. A revealing example of this is found in the tale of the dismembering of Friar Tappecoue, in Rabelais’ Fourth Book (1552). The Friar’s refusal to lend a religious costume, a cope and stole, to the old peasant playing God in the mystery play, hinders the essential upending of hierarchies central to the carnival. In response, the mystery players, dressed as devils, ambush Friar Tappecoue, causing his filly to bolt in fright and to drag him, hanging from a stirrup, until his body parts are scattered around the countryside. The

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devils made a “horrific racket,” loudly howling, accompanied by fireworks and cymbals, in costumes that were assembled from the parts of wild and domestic animals (Figures  3.4, 3.5 and 3.6), as well as everyday and farming objects: “His devils were all caparisoned in wolf-skins, calfskins and ram-skins, spiced with sheep’s heads, ox-horns, and great kitchen hooks; girt with great leather belts from which hung big cowbells and mule-jangles that made a horrific racket” (Rabelais [1552] 1991: 465–6). The devils of miracle and mystery plays had been the church’s way to control an illiterate population through fear of hell and damnation. Having absconded from the stage into the street, wearing costumes assembled from objects in the way that the carnivalesque body “can outgrow itself and be fused with other objects” (Bakhtin 1984: 308), they caused the dismembering of the Friar. This othering of body parts through misused or recast objects is typical of the creative renewal of carnival. In a similar way, utensils can become musical instruments, garments worn inside out or the wrong way around, and broken, old things be given new life, regenerating into new forms. Bakhtin suggests that Rabelais’ devils were “excellent and jovial fellows” who expressed “the unofficial point of view” in his carnivalesque comedies (1984: 41). Having emerged from the “mouth of hell,” merrily roasting the disassembled bodies of sinners (Figure 3.4) in scenes designed to provoke both laughter

Figure 3.4 Engraving depicting Hell, c.1470, based in Francesco Triani’s fresco in Pisa, in which a three-headed Satan simultaneously eats and gives birth to sinners, surrounded by rows of devils tormenting souls © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 3.5 In this scene the depiction of the skin covering of some of the devils is formalized into regular rows of triangles, pictorially anticipating the costume of Arlecchino, a few centuries later, while also connecting to the satyr (see Figure 2.2, Chapter 2). The Last Judgment (f.38) in The Winchester Psalter, mid-twelfth century to the second half of the thirteenth century, British Library.

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Figure 3.6 A sartorial analysis of this early version of Satan’s Temptations of Christ, in the Winchester Psalter, mid-twelfth century to the second half of the thirteenth century, reveals a mixture of contemporaneous clothing, such a front-lacing female gown with knotted hanging sleeves and train, and a short, maybe monastic, hooded cape, layered with pelts and the attributes of various animals. The Three Temptations (f.18) in The Winchester Psalter, British Library.

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and the fear of damnation, these devils demonstrate the power of the carnivalesque to counter the narrow-mindedness of Tappecoue. Their antiauthoritarianism operated outside of the sphere of control of church and state as, crossing from the stage into the quotidian street in their half-animal costumes, they belonged to neither the everyday, nor to the hegemony of power.

Arlecchino’s journey from demon to valet Rabelais’ devils may share a streak of violent humor with Aristophanes’ comedians, and yet their wearing of animal horns connects them also to the hybridity, and liminality, of the satyrs discussed in the first chapter. The latter, having acquired by Roman times horned goat-likeness via the influence of the god Pan (Shaw 2014: 4), may have fed into the images of the medieval devils of early Christian Europe (Figures  3.5 and 3.6) alongside pre-Christian anthropomorphic, wild creatures of Northern European pagan myths, which were incorporated into folklore and Christian traditions (Figure 3.7). The latter could be perceived in a continuum with the Wildmen, demonstrations of which are still in existence in preLenten Carnivals, including the Sardinian Mamuthones (Figure 3.8), one among several manifestations of costumed characters photographed by Charles Fréger in rural parts of mountainous Europe (2012). Much like the satyrs and medieval devils, the Wildmen adopt hybrid bestiality through a hair-like covering. Unlike the sparsely clothed, bloated nakedness of the Athenian basic comedy costume, which parodied being human, the Wildmen costumed characters may be connected to the mythical beings believed to inhabit the wilderness during pagan times. Christianity recast them as the demonic antecedents of the mercurial and multicolored commedia dell’arte character of Arlecchino (Lima 2005: 49–57), while limiting their transgressive, pagan appearances to the carnival,5 which ultimately adopted their costumed forms. In a synergy of movement and “hairy” surfaces, the yearly appearance of these animalesque characters embodied grotesque, Bakhtinian renewal through a dynamic transformation of the civic townscape. The process could be equally affective for the wearer of the costume. Discussing her experience of wearing processional carnivalesque costumes for the Horse and Bamboo Theatre Company in the 1970s, Melissa Trimingham remarks that she felt, “powerful, mischievous, hot, sweaty, subversive when wearing built-up costume and masks in street theatre.”6 When not using fur, the Wildmen costumes captured in Fréger’s photographs were made out of textiles fabricated into hairy textures. These could be assembled with materials of different colors and types, shredded, tufted, layered, frayed, or made-up by looped ribbon and rows of fringing fixed onto surfaces that extended movement, reverberating with the rhythm of the bodies they hid. From a material perspective, the conclusion that, through costume, the fabricated Wildmen costumes can be considered antecedents of early versions of Arlecchino’s patchwork of tatters, is highly plausible. Richard Bernheimer proposes that when Arlecchino’s predecessors relocated from the pre-Lenten Carnival to the stage, his fabricated “hairy” costume may have become “befringed and shaggy” by the repeated use in performance, which ultimately may have revealed “a close fitting garment with glued-on tufts imitating animal fur” (Bernheimer, cited in Lima 2005: 63). The resulting colorful and carnivalesque surface textile of his costume—which was to become by the eighteenth century the showy repeats of interlocking polychromatic triangles—defined Arlecchino’s mercurial character, also highlighting the audacious acrobatics of his physical improvisations. The mask further endowed this multifaceted costume with a demonic as well as carnivalesque quality, retaining the bold expressiveness of the Wildmen. His black leather half-mask, with the characteristic single wart on the forehead, a remnant of the devil’s horns, is recognizable in an early example collected

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Figure 3.7 Spoon enameled on the bowl with an anthropomorphic ape riding a stag through a forest, believed to have been made in the Netherlands, c.1430 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

by the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris (Figure 3.9). The lopsided features are edged by coarse bristle, a remnant of Arlecchino’s animal antecedents. Encountering this mask Thelma Niklaus found animality in, “the pin-sized eye holes of Arlecchino’s early mask: . . . the sly brutish features, the two flamboyant warts, the animal hair and this dark leather face . . . It was a shock to meet . . . the feral ancestor of the shining Harlequin” (1956: 14). Sartori and Lecoq’s research into commedia masks, as we shall see later, studied original masks such as this as part of the process that led to the regeneration of postwar theatre. In time, Arlecchino’s mask lost

Figure 3.8 Mamuthones, Mamoiada, Sardinia, Italy, 2010. Photographed by Charles Fréger/Wilder Mann.

Figure 3.9 Harlequin mask, sixteenth century, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris.

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Figure 3.10a Harlequin and Zany. The latter’s costume has been linked by Katrizky to the working clothes of farm workers and sailors. The Zanys preceded and paralleled the development of stock commedia characters. Harlequin wears his tattered costume, from the Recueil Fossard (1570–80), Nationalmuseum Sweden, photograph © Nationalmuseum.

one of its horn-warts and its facial hair. The costume also underwent transformation. One of the earliest representations of the French Harlequin, dated to the mid-1580s (Katritzky 2006: 108), is by an unknown artist whose work is collected in the Recueil Fossard, and henceforth will be called, here, the Fossard Harlequin (Figures 3.10a and 3.10b). The fragmented costume brings attention to the character’s corporeality. As if wearing a pair of long johns mended with patches, the Fossard Harlequin’s costume

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Figure 3.10b Harlequin with Zany, Recueil Fossard (1570–80), Nationalmuseum Sweden, photograph © Nationalmuseum.

invites somersaults and constant movement while the plasticity of his black mask appears to galvanize his stage presence. The Fossard Harlequin, seemingly shorn of a textile “fur,” which has left behind a rough composition of colorful patches as in Bernheimer’s analysis discussed above, reveals his connection with the Wildmen of Europe. Arlecchino’s colorful patches and his mask became ubiquitous in town squares across Europe, transcending linguistic barriers through the language of body and costume. His ambiguous identity, achieved through the carnivalesque pattern of his costume and the liminality of his mask, enabled the character to adapt and survive beyond the late Renaissance, continuing to be employed in theatres and at court. Like Arlecchino, all commedia stock characters became canonized via their costumes, masks, movement, and roles. This enabled comedy to emerge from interaction devised around skeleton plots, encouraging audience participation and responsive improvisation, from characters defined by preexistent and widely known costumes (Katritzky 2006: 31). By the end of the seventeenth century commedia had become subsumed into the entertainment of the elite. The “peculiar folk humour” of the carnivalesque that “has never merged with the official culture

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Figure 3.11 Statuette of Arlecchino, mask-free, taking his hat off. The surface of his costume is tidied into neat triangles and theatricalized elements of livery appear on his body, c.1740 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

of the ruling classes” (Bakhtin 1984: 474) was, in the case of commedia, assimilated and transformed by it, as visibly evidenced by changes in Arlecchino’s costume and character. As part of this process the anarchic patchwork of rag-ends of the Fossard Harlequin became rationalized into compositions of vividly colored geometrical shapes in neat rows (Figure 3.11). Now reminiscent of a servant’s tailored livery, his costume lost the softness of his earlier, colorful second skin. Absorbed into Carlo Goldoni’s comedies of manners, the first of which was Servants of Two Masters (1746), the now scripted character

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Figure 3.12 Jacques Callot, engravings of dwarfs: Varie figure gobbi, early seventeenth century © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

functioned within a reformed, less physical commedia. Duchartre writes that commedia dell’arte masks directed the moving body of the performer, a body that “must become a supplement to the mask” (1966: 42), yet this defining element of Arlecchino’s character was also eventually abandoned. The mask’s detractors, steeped in counterreformation zeal, had redefined it as duplicitous: moralist Pio Rossi wrote in 1639 that “by wearing someone else’s face, one loses one’s own” (quoted in Lollini 1995: 250).7 Masking came to be considered synonymous with deceit, rather than revealing the complexity of the human soul, as the grotesque costume had intended, it was now perceived to conceal it entirely. The loss of its privileged status through scripted performance-making was accompanied by the establishment of the social incognito mask, the Venetian Bauta, worn to entirely conceal the wearer’s identity (Ribeiro 2017: 206), in eighteenthcentury Venice when, symptomatic of the city’s decadence, carnival debauchery lasted up to six months. Touring the squares of Europe, like the commedia troupes, were the extraordinary Florentine Gobbi performers. Drawn by Jacques Callot between 1616 and 1622 (Figure  3.12), the grotesque dwarf entertainers displayed a physicality, which, reminiscent of that created by Hellenic Comedy costumes, was diametrically opposed to ideals of classical beauty embraced by Renaissance art. The Gobbi’s unusual proportions and excessive roundness, emphasized by tight-fitting costumes, throw into sharp relief the scrawniness of the street performers found in a later set of etchings entitled Balli di Sfessania also by Callot, 1622. The expressive gestures of the Balli performers become enlarged by their baggy costumes (Figure  3.13), while others echo the Fossard Harlequin’s skin-tightness. Their oversized trousers and tunics, unstructured, belted, and sagging as if stuffing has been removed from their insides, brings to mind the legendary hunger of Pulcinella, forever portrayed devouring platefuls of spaghetti (Chilton 2002: 223) (Figure 3.14). In the English puppet version of Pulcinella, the voracious and violent Mr. Punch will lose the white commedia costume in favor of a livery-based one, which he will fill to capacity in a padded peasecod belly balanced by an equally bulging hump (Figure 3.15). The Balli street performers and the Gobbi group use costume to exaggerate emaciation, excessive corpulence, or physical difference, in old and undecorated outfits that highlight the presence of the body within them. Derived from humble working clothes,8 they enabled the parodying of the body’s basic physical needs; nourishment, sexual desire, and protection. They specifically privilege the lower stratum

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Figure 3.13 Balli di Sfessania, street performers, by Jacques Callot c.1622 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 3.14 Four Punchinellos cooking, 1751, etching based on Tiepolo’s drawings © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 3.15 Victorian doorstop in the shape of Punch snoozing © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

of the body, the site of Bakhtin’s regeneration, drawing attention to bellies, bottoms, and suggestively dangling ends of belts (Figure 3.13). Their dance is earthy and often explicitly bawdy, with stage swords and clubs reminiscent of aggressive phalli. The Balli masked performers are free in movement and unrestricted by moral codes. In some of the drawings the fabric appears to be melting into the body in a way that suggests bare skin. Their costumes stand in opposition to those for the elaborate danse noble, which rendered upright and decorated the dancers Callot represents in the Medici theatre intermezzi, in 1617 (see Chapter 2). Ill-fitting and slipping off the body, The Balli performers’ costumes explode out of belts in rough folds, or deflate, capturing the restless force of physical renewal and the irrepressible energy of the carnival. In combination with their half-masks, tightly fitting to the face as necessitated by the energetic movement, they appear to produce eloquent and hard-working bodies, in the process of perpetual renewal.

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The reinvention of the English clown While not hidden by a mask, the transformation of the face through makeup was crucial to the impact of Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837), the superstar of the late Georgian pantomime. Grimaldi reshaped physical comedy through costume by weaving together various costume traditions (Barbieri 2013). From his Italian father, who played commedia’s old, rich, and greedy Pantaloon in the Harlequinade scenes of the pantomime, he inherited the physical expressiveness and the efficacy of costume. He married this with the English stage clown, who, derived from the Fool, stands both inside and outside the action, commenting on it directly to the audience. The English stage clown surfaced in the late medieval morality plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the character of Vice, the antagonist to the hero (Happé 1964: 191). Vice was often costumed in the Fool’s motley—the multicolored coat, coxcombs, and bells (Figure 3.16)—but could also be found wearing coarse farm working garments, identifying him with the powerless laborer. These two types of costume, the tattered rustic outsider, engaging through his

Figure 3.16 Fool placing his hand on a grotesque old woman’s breast, in a woodcarving which was once a towel-holder, c.1520–5. He is wearing the canonical particolored motley © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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vulnerability, and the canonical fool, who stands outside of social hierarchies in his colorful costume, offered different ways of relating to the audience. By Elizabethan times, unless playing the character of the medieval Fool, the stage clown no longer wore the motley and addressed the audience primarily using vulgar language and the “familiarising gesture of the street” (Weimann 1978: 650). In a peasant-like attire, Richard Tarlton (d. 1588) was the first Shakespearian clown who, according to Wiles, “projected rustic stupidity both through his face and through costume,” wearing “gigantic slops” as storehouses for props and, indemnified by his powerless outsider costume, his comedy could freely comment on topical issues (Wiles 2005: 17) (Figure 3.17).

Figure 3.17 Engraving of Richard Tarlton (d. 1588), Shakespearean fool, in a rustic costume © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Over two hundred years later Joseph Grimaldi found himself rejecting a similar costuming canon, that of the “rustic booby with red hair” (Findlater 1955: 147), exemplified by Mr. Follett in 1797 in outdated servant’s clothes (Figure 3.18). Joey, Grimaldi’s new clown, instead, was the “whimsical, practical satirist of the Regency City” (Moody 2007: 14), intent on inflicting political retribution from the Sadler’s Wells Theatre stage (Figure 3.19). The characters Joey constructed assembled bodies based on exaggeration and ironically recast objects. These would parody the gentleman class in absurd costumes through

Figure 3.18 “Mr. Follett as the clown in the pantomime of Harlequin and Oberon” showing a clown as represented on the English stage in 1797 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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which amorality, greed, and pomp could be satirized, alongside the fashion excesses of high society (Figures 3.20 and 3.21). His staged vignettes of political satire, captured in prints, were disseminated widely leading him to acquire celebrity status. By the late eighteenth century, when theatre licensing meant that only Drury Lane and the Haymarket were classed as “legitimate” establishments, permitted to stage scripted texts, a profusion of popular and physical theatre forms, including circus, song, and dance were produced as “illegitimate”

Figure 3.19 Joseph Grimaldi in a version of his clown persona, Joey, in Harlequin & Friar Bacon, early nineteenth century © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 3.20 Grimaldi as Bold Dragoon in the pantomime of The Red Dwarf, recasting objects such as the coal scuttles which satirize the Hussar boots of high-ranking officers’ uniforms © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 3.21 Joseph Grimaldi, portrayed in character as he performs the song “All the World’s in Paris,” published early nineteenth century © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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entertainment (Moody 2007: 10). In Grimaldi’s “illegitimate” theatre, the skillful and satirical reconfiguration of the body through costume was critical. Andrew McConnell Stott describes the invention of the Joey’s flexible archetype, as Grimaldi hid away over a number of weeks to “experiment with costume and makeup, commissioning Mrs Lewis to provide a series of prototype outfits. . . . Tatty country liveries were ousted in favour of bold patterns, vivid colours and kaleidoscopic medley of circles, stripes and hoops, the dilapidated old servant’s clothes discarded in favour of the costume of a ‘great lubberly loutish boy’ ” (McConnell Stott 2009: 117). With every element of dress and of surface decoration being hand-sewn, this process would have taken weeks. In collaboration with Mrs. Lewis, altering and distorting the proportions, fit, and combinations of elements, his costumes focused physical comedy and expressive movement. Like the mercurial Harlequin, whom he displaced as the central character of the Harlequinade, Joey’s vibrant costume was engineered to produce comical presence. The white-base makeup emphasized the elongated red mouth, the triangular red cheeks and the arched eyebrows exaggerated his every facial expression, while tufted, sculptural wigs extended every movement. Food and drink were extracted from his pockets, and the livestock that could emerge from the capacious breeches would then be chased around the stage. Grimaldi reconfigured each impersonation of character through costume while retaining an essential Joey quality and developing a second body so effective that it became a lasting blueprint for generations of future clowns (Figure 3.23). His image was rendered ubiquitous through the Victorian Circus and the clowns’ entrés in which formations of tumbling Joeys would fill the arena. This commodification and

Figure 3.22 Leap Frog in the comic pantomime of The Golden Fish, 1812, by which time Grimaldi’s Joey’s clown persona was well established © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 3.23 Victorian clown Charlie Keith, 1878 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

reproducibility through the costume of the Victorian clown was however ultimately responsible for its own demise as the clown’s grotesque makeup came to hide too much of the performer’s individuality. This may explain why by the twenty-first century a degraded, smudged Joey makeup, long emptied of its creator, haunts cinema audiences as the Joker’s face in Batman. The scary clown of cinematic nightmares, whom we dare not laugh at, is the reverse of the carnivalesque and topical clowns that preceded him, an uncanny costumed creation that has produced its own phobia, rather than offering, through grotesque laughter, a way to manage powerlessness and fear.

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Figure 3.24 Charlie Chaplin, in his tramp clown persona, first developed in 1914 for the film Mable’s Strange Predicament, as related in his autobiography. Accreditation: Ronald Grant Archive for Tramp Picture.

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Figure 3.25a Charlie Chaplin as The Great Dictator, Charles Chaplin Productions (for Great Dictator) Accreditation: Ronald Grant Archive for Tramp Picture.

Figure 3.25b Charlie Chaplin lies on a gigantic gear in a scene from Modern Times, 1936. Photo by United Artists/Getty Images. Getty/162995478.

The existential clown Among the Victorian and Edwardian clown outfits collected by the Victorian and Albert Museum is the patched, distressed costume worn by the Maurice & May cycling clown act (Barbieri 2012b), which is dated circa 1905. Created out of ripped-up and reassembled men’s suits, it conveys a constant mending

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and patching, reminiscent of Arlecchino’s first costume. The tramp clown embodies, while also parodying, human vulnerability. Readable through the grotesque, he transforms the pinstripe suit, a symbol of upstanding male propriety, into its opposite in a spectacle of carnivalesque degradation. It also provides a story around the body in performance: has the costume shredded through constant tumbling from inept cycle riding? Charlie Chaplin, with his roots in the physical and visual performance of the music hall and of vaudeville, subverted in 1914 the Edwardian suit, assembling it by preexisting mismatched elements, constructing tensions he could play with in performance: the far-too-tight, diminutive cutaway jacket is opposed by gigantic trousers, a too-long waistcoat, and shoes sizes bigger than his feet. The slipping, ill-fitting bowler hat is at odds with the tidy moustache and precise vaudeville makeup of contrasting white base and dark features, topped by unruly, though sculpted, black hair (Figure 3.24). He created a physical performance bound through costume to his own comedic persona, defined by laughter through pathos. Having established the global phenomenon of his tramp clown in early silent movies, Chaplin was able to later critique the inhumanity of factory work in Modern Times (1936) and then tackle absolute power in The Great Dictator (1940) where costume was used to parody Nazi uniform (Figure 3.25a). Empathy for the downtrodden factory worker is conveyed in Modern Times by the shabby ensemble of dirty overalls, the embodiment of the human cog in the industrial machine. It is through both comedy and costume that Chaplin communicated to a global audience a topical message of resistance against abuse of power and social injustice (Figure 3.25b). The existential tramp is deployed to lasting effect by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot, groundbreaking when first performed in 1953 for focusing on character and situation rather than plot. The 2013 production of En Attendant Godot by French company Théâtre NoNo, designed by Serge Noyelle and directed by

Figure 3.26 En Attendant Godot by French company Théâtre NoNo, November 2013, with costume design by Serge Noyelle, photographed by Cordula Treml © Cordula Treml.

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Marion Coutris, similarly to Chaplin owes much to physical and popular performance; to circus, commedia, and vaudeville. Their disassembling and reassembling of the body through costume presents existence as incomplete, missing layers: shirtless in vests under tatty evening jackets, in trousers held up with string, an old nightdress worn over long johns, missing trousers under coats, or wearing old female thermal underwear (Figure 3.26). This worn-through, mixed up humanity is heightened in each character by elements of past splendor, like the two-tone pointed dandy shoes, the satin dress-waistcoat shredded with wear, shirtless stiffened wing collars or an embroidered brocade waistcoat. Explaining their incongruity via tramp clown conventions, all four characters wear bowler hats, their faces are smudged with white makeup and red noses, and an old circus lion-tamer coat makes an appearance with exaggerated fringed epaulettes.

Carnivalesque in Les Ballets Russes While Chaplin was conveying his tramp clown persona, costume was being deployed in the advancement of radical agendas by groundbreaking visual artists who used it to embody their rebellion against the status quo—more on this in Chapter  5. Among them, artist and theatre designer Mikhail Larionov,

Figure 3.27a Design for the costume of the Chief Clown: The Buffoon in the ballet Chout by Mikhail Larionov, 1915 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS , London 2016.

Figure 3.27b Costume for a Soldier in Larionov and Slavinsky’s ballet Chout designed by Mikhail Larionov, Diaghilev Ballet, 1921 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS , London 2016.

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emerging out of revolutionary Russia, was one of many rejecting the cultural and social hierarchies of the nineteenth century, engaging instead in the upending of distinctions between high and low culture through bold imagery from circus clowns, commedia dell’arte, and folk art. Larionov’s designs for the Ballets Russes’ Chout (1921) referenced Russian peasant dress, exaggerating its forms via a cubist neoprimitivism approach. Although Larionov may have been drawing from similar sources to Roerich, the resulting costumes were very different from The Rite of Spring’s channeling of idealized ethnography discussed in Chapter  2. Serge Prokofiev’s music for the Slavic folktale scenario of Chout, scoring slapstick comedy, is “colourful, boisterous” (Press 2006: 58), and tells of a Buffoon who tricks seven of his colleagues into killing their wives (Figure  3.27a). Carnivalesque is deployed not only through exaggeration and coloring, but also in the poverty of materials and the rawness of construction using canvas stiffened with buckram and edged with wire or cane.9 The soldiers (Figure  3.27b) appear in parodies of military uniforms. Comprising sliding layers, lopsided and excessive “with their discuscrowned hats and free flying epaulettes” (Press 2006: 51), they were disliked by their wearers, who were threatened with fines should they alter them. Enveloping the ballet dancers into the scenic totality of the richly painted scenography, the costumes’ limiting of conventional dance movement curtailed Thadée Slavinsky’s choreography. Larionov ultimately took over, leading Serge Diaghilev to conclude, in an interview with The Observer, that “a new principle has been introduced here, that of giving to the decorative artist the direction of the plastic movement” (quoted in Press 2006: 50). If grotesque form often defines movement, here a worn cubist painting, colliding with the moving body, determined the choreography.

A body rediscovered through the mask Larionov’s buckram costumes for Chout had established a “new principle” by proposing a costume-led choreography. In the second half of the twentieth century the rediscovered leather commedia mask (Figure  3.9) became a crucial element in reinstating the expressive moving body as the focus of theatre-making. John Rudlin notes that “[l]eather [in mask making] had not been used since the 1700s” (1994: 43), when leather masks had disappeared alongside the gradual dissipation of physical, semi-improvised commedia dell’arte performance. The stock characters of commedia were however written into ballets where their masks were made with papier-mâché and decorated with ornate fabrics. In the early 1950s a drive for renewal in postwar, post-fascism Italy led three theatre pioneers; sculptor and mask-maker Amleto Sartori, movement expert Jacques Lecoq, and experimental director Giorgio Strehler, to engage in movement research into commedia (Wright 2002: 74–5). The three collaborated in the seminal production of Arlecchino, Servitore di Due Padroni (Servant of Two Masters) at the Piccolo Teatro, Milan, in 1952. Lecoq’s recentering of the moving body, in opposition to the text, as “the starting and the finishing point of all live performance” (Murray 2003: 5), was given impetus and direction by Sartori’s reinvention of forgotten mask-making processes through reviving Renaissance leather bookbinding techniques. The resulting dynamic and molded leather masks enabled the muscular movement of physical commedia to reemerge in performance. Crucially for Strehler this production forged “the idea of costume as the foundation for characterisation” (Malia 2013: 33) at an early point of his directorial career, while Lecoq’s discovery of the connection between mask and movement was embedded in his physical theatre pedagogy, eventually revolutionizing the way contemporary

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theatre considers the body (Barbieri 2006 and 2007). His findings went to the core of the meaning of existence as expressed through the body. Interviewed by John Hiley in 1988, he states: “I don’t bury myself in historical references. I try to rediscover the spirit of these forms. Commedia has nothing to do with those little Italian troupes who export precious entertainment. It’s about misery, a world where life is a luxury” (quoted in Murray 2003: 11). For Lecoq the rediscovery of the body implied exposing it as vulnerable while at the same time freeing it from a high-art Cartesian privileging of the intellect, as “the body knows things about which the mind is ignorant” (Lecoq 2009: 8). Following the catastrophic loss of life in World War II , theatre found renewed corporeal energy via this reinvention of the medieval mask. A rebellion against the aesthetics of precious entertainment and elitism inspired a return to the grotesquely costumed body.

Costume and resistance The identification of a crisis in culture via the representation of the body on stage in subversive performance finds an antecedent in symbolist anarchist Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, in 1896. Famously banned after the first performance, it was subsequently only performed as a puppet show during the author’s lifetime. Inspiring other revolutionaries of theatre including Antonin Artaud, the characters were written to be absurd and cartoon-like. They set themselves against bourgeois propriety through abstracted language and obscenities from the very first line, “Merdre!” (Jarry 2011: 18) pronounced by a bloated Ubu in a grotesque cardboard mask, on his first entrance at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris (Fell 2010: 82). Uncompromisingly artificial, the expressionistic bodies on stage confronted head-on the reactionary affectation of the late nineteenth century. Brutally individualistic, obsessed with glory, greed, food, feces, and violence, these characters and their scatological comedy were an affront to civilized society. Seemingly rewriting the fool/king role reversal of the medieval Feast of Fools, in which power is rooted in lunacy and cruelty, Ubu Roi and its carnivalesque remain relevant. As the first production of the play staged in the recently independent Estonia in 2006, twelve years after the Russian army left the country, it was performed by Theatre NO 99 in military hangars abandoned by the withdrawing troops.10 The musical reinterpretation of the play was directed by Tiit Ojasoo, co-directed/designed by Ene-Liis Semper, and was a site-responsive production that included projections on gigantic screens. The largest of these suddenly opened to reveal the space to groups of spectators staring at each other in a moment of startled recognition, having previously been drawn into a frenzied cabaret of high-energy, physical theatre, led by folk-meets-punk music, by characters whose faces were covered by various versions of balaclava masks (Figure  3.28). Like puppets, absorbed completely into their absurd costumes, their stylized movement included crazed, high-energy somersaults and goose-stepping that appeared to be driven by forces outside themselves. Their bodies were further rendered grotesque by arms doubled in length through extensions, pointed heads, hands transformed into shoes (Figure  3.29), and heads growing out of loins (Figure 3.30). The latter acted as reminders of the absurdity of masculine power driven by the phallus, reminiscent of Aristophanes’ comedy costumes. Harlequin patterns and other commedia references (Figure 3.31) were re-devised with contemporary elements of dress, creating, for example, four-footed city gents in bowler hats, clad in pin-striped suits as if mutating into gigantic mosquitos (Figure  3.32). These grotesque bodies, suspended between past and future, constructed a dystopian and out-of-control humanity, deranged by excessive power. Far from being purely a means of costuming through historical commedia archetypes, Semper here demonstrated the extent to

Figure 3.28 All characters’ heads in King Ubu were covered by a skintight balaclava designed by Ene-Liis Semper in 2006, © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

Figure 3.29 The world is upside down in the shoe-hands designed by Ene-Liis Semper for King Ubu in 2006, © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99. 91

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Figure 3.30 Groin heads, for King Ubu © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

Figure 3.31 Contemporary Arlecchinos, for King Ubu © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

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Figure 3.32 King Ubu, designed by Ene-Liis Semper in 2006, co-directed by Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper © Ene-Liis Semper, Theatre NO 99.

which grotesque costume could resonate beyond its own community of origin, rearticulating the body so dynamically and meaningfully that it could enlighten beyond national traumas. While the grotesque costume remains efficacious in a process of renewal through performance, it is also an expression of protest in the face of real or perceived oppression and a means through which anxieties can be shared and understood.

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4 THE FLIGHT OFF THE PEDESTAL: A SUBLIME SECOND SKIN The pedestals on which female bodies have been immobilized by the enduring principles of Western classical art are the launching points for our discussion on how performers have enacted, initially through theatrical flight, different and empowering femininities. In the second half of the nineteenth century, skintight “fleshings” and flying harnesses shaped like Victorian corsets, which elevated the body into the theatrical space, led to the first tentative flights off the pedestal deploying new technologies of theatrical flight. While in dynamic motion, on the stage floor, ancient and exotic forms of dress, such as the soft drapings of neoclassical art or the veils borrowed from colonized cultures also conspired toward an unrestricted female performance. A recurring theme will be costume as a second skin that eventually provides a site of self-display, selfknowledge, and expression, in which skin color and cultural power imbalances are also implicated. The troubling new femininities that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century eventually led to a relationship between costume and performer that will be explained here through the female sublime. Differently from the othering through costume of a suppressed interior part of the self, enacted by the grotesque bodies in Chapter 3, in the feminine sublime aspects of the self are recovered through an external extending through costume and movement that can be spatial and dynamic as much as historical and cultural. Interdisciplinary thinking around the female sublime, has, since the late 1980s, expanded and challenged the established discourse around the traditional sublime. It lends here notions of transcendence, where seemingly insurmountable, physical and sociocultural obstacles might be overcome by the female performer’s embracing of them through performance and the material costume. These performers subverted the version of femininity that had placed “beautiful” and passive women on pedestals under the gaze of active and “sublime” men. I argue that the journey from staged docility to the devising of own performances through costume can be understood through recent reframings of the sublime as feminine, which have engaged a multiplicity of scholarly voices from a feminist and post-colonial perspective.

Reclaiming the sublime as feminine As a defining cultural concept, the traditional notion of the sublime, which causes transcendental, overwhelming, and endless wonder in its viewers, can hold negative connotations, as the power it articulates is “so great that the perceiving subject has the sense of being annihilated through the very encounter” (Wawrzinek 2008: 13). This idea originates in Ancient Greece, via Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime, in which art exists to provoke powerfully overwhelming emotions in its audience. Disseminated initially via the French translation by Boileau in 1674, Longinus’ interpretation was extended and rendered influential by philosophers Edmund Burke in England, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Ideas of The 95

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Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) and by Immanuel Kant in Germany, in Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764). Both were written at a time, in the mid-eighteenth century, when, as Russo notes, “the association of misogyny and aesthetics” was normalized (1995: 6). Mary Russo here is referring to Naomi Schor’s 1987 seminal study on femininity, art, and literature, and the embedded masculinist aesthetics of the sublime, which she exemplifies via Joshua Reynolds’ writing and paintings. Looking at classical and mythological themes in paintings and verse from the eighteenth century, Marcia Pointon concludes that they are “symptomatic of the cultural dialectic in which woman’s body is—via mythology—apprehended, made visible and thereby controlled” (1997: 82). We shall see how this applies to the bodies apprehended, made visible and controlled in mid-air, on the nineteenth-century stage. In The Feminine Sublime, Barbara Claire Freeman proposes that the reason that a woman would be “always associated with the beautiful, and never with the sublime, is that her subjugation is its very precondition” (1995: 72). This is further complicated as the Burkean and Kantian sublime appears to have also delivered hierarchies and exclusion zones that were not just about the subjugation of women. Kathleen Wilson goes so far as to suggest that the foregrounded, elevated, and heroic European male genius who transcends and ultimately dominates, became the cultural justification for colonialism. In The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2003), Wilson exposes the instrumentality of the idealization of women as symbols of national virtue, for example via the emblem of Britannia. This idealization, she argues, was a moral stance that countered the cruelty of the slave trade and warmongering of Empire-building. In this construct, by upholding morality, sophistication, sensibility, and propriety, female virtue was put to use in the colonial project, validating systems that depended “upon the myth of white women’s superiority and inviolability compared to the allegedly debased femininities and sexualities of the enslaved” (2003: 21). Wilson argues that if the emphasis on pristine and domestic female virtue was essential to the construct of racial superiority, then the manly patriotism that bolstered “a militaristic, masculinist version of the national identity” also benefited from “excluding a range of effeminate others” who threatened gender and social order (2003: 37). Wilson’s ideas highlight the complexity surrounding the traditional notion of sublime and women, particularly in relation to colonialism. In The Feminine Sublime, Freeman reinterprets the sublime away from its confrontational basis, challenging Burke and Kant’s framings of the concept. Longinus’ original treatise, On the Sublime, exemplifies the overwhelming astonishment and wonder that the artwork causes its audience via a poem by Sappho. Freeman reasons that if “ravishment” remains at the core of the sublime’s agency, what inevitably follows is a reading of transcendence as a struggle for control between opposing forces. Instead, Freeman asserts, the tension between and the ability to contain extreme opposites, such as terror and pleasure, life and death, infinity and finality, is at the core of what she terms the “feminine sublime.” Questioning Longinus’ initial reading of Sappho’s poem, which she reinterprets as the loss of the self into unlimited boundlessness, Freeman rejects conflict and domination as the basis for the sublime. The power of the new feminine sublime, she suggests, is not just “dominance, in which one identity subjugates one other, but a merger in which usually separate identities conjoin” (1995: 19). Freeman presents the potential “dispersal” of the self as “site of self-empowerment” (1995: 19). A reconciling of opposites in which a dispersal of the ego into selflessness can provide empowerment acquires an ethical position of “respect in response to incalculable otherness” (1995: 11). The advances produced by the costumed pioneers discussed below can be read from this ethical position, rather than from one of domination and annihilation. With boundless flight posing an initial metaphor of liberation beyond the moment of the performance, the female sublime allows a coming to terms with the finite body and its vulnerability, alongside a newly discovered potential for real and imagined flight.

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Freeman is not alone in making a claim for the sublime as a feminist concept with long, unspoken roots. Ziarek, via Virginia Woolf among others, suggests how modernism made it possible for women to reclaim the role of reason in the sublime, arguing that Kantian transcendence was unsustainable, relying on the “domination of masculine reason and genius” (2013: 408). Battersby, in The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (2007), articulates the anti-female, anti-fleshiness of the eighteenth century sublime. She also builds on Yaeger’s essay “Towards a Female Sublime” (1989) in questioning the future of the traditional sublime with its bias on universality, which precludes respect for difference. She and Wawrzinek (2008) agree that the eighteenth century “continues to haunt contemporary debates of the sublime aesthetics,” while challenging this with examples of contemporary artists’ and writers’ work. Nineteenth century theatre exposes how, through gendered hierarchies aligned to racial exclusion zones, the sublime can be linked with the ideologies of supremacy that arose as an apologia for colonialism, and how the costumed body played an instrumental role in reinforcing this. Mabilat (2008), writing on the representation of the Orient in popular culture in nineteenth-century Britain, explores the creation of onstage worlds that were, in Edward Said’s Orientalist terms ([1978] 2003), a generalized fiction, solely about Europe, devised through the appropriation and assembling of random aspects of non-European cultural manifestations, which “othered” Western, white female bodies through Orientalizing costumes. Proving “a potent antidote to the orthodoxy of bourgeois Christian morality” (Uhlirova 2013: 23), the interdependence between the presentation of the immoral and immodest veiled Oriental “Other”, and notions of white supremacy, was ensured in a representation in which Oriental costume worn by white female performers was crucial. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, veiled or draped costumes, by having implicated the fleshy body, became a critical strategy for female self-assertion. From the “aerial sublime,” which was enabled through the sheer physical strength detected by Mary Russo (1995) and Peta Tait (2005) in female Victorian aerialists, to the “natural” body perceived through the engulfing veils of Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan at turn of the twentieth century, to the later reinterpretation by Martha Graham of the veil as an expansive second skin in Lamentation (1930), costume becomes a spatial, dynamic, and material conductor for the articulation of new femininities. These three are some of the performers discussed in this chapter which mark a series of milestones from the 1870s to the 1930s in the journey towards emancipation that had been brewing since the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. This investigation will suggest how female circus performers and dancers found ways to assert their unique spatial presence in symbiosis with their costumes, challenging engrained notions of female inferiority. Enduring gender inequality is exposed through the contemporary examples provided at the end of the chapter, which demonstrate, through the use of costume, a reconciliation of opposites that is typical of the female sublime, even when portraying female victimhood. I shall begin from the idea of an invisible pedestal for the “beautiful” female body, which I shall describe as “internalized” through performance and costume. As the Elysian and semi-naked female body is finally “lifted from the classical pedestal to fly or at least dangle in the heavens” (Russo 1995: 43), the distinction between active flight and a mere “dangling” is crucial for the discussion of the female sublime through costume.

Flying technology, the beautiful pedestal, and costume The 1907 Rhinemaidens simulate flight while dangling from stage machinery controlled by the male backstage crew gleefully turning the handles of mechanical hoists (Figure  4.1). Seemingly being puppeteered, they are illusionistically intended to be swimming at the bottom of the Rhine, holding

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Figure 4.1 The Rhinemaidens, 1907, in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, in a newspaper article that illustrates the mechanics of stage flight © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

themselves in the right silhouette while singing the intricate Wagnerian parts.1 Their “flight,” as portrayed here, is emblematic of the relationship between the female performer, the male-dominated theatrical establishment and the largely male audiences on the other side of the proscenium arch. To our eyes, it may appear to present an ironic rendition of both the mythical creatures of Wagner’s operas and of the widespread theatre flight of harnessed female performers. A contrived pose of outstretched arms, as if anticipating a fall, and legs held together to hide the bifurcation in the fishtail costumes, define the vertical scenic space by bodies held up in mid-air. The fitted shape of their upper bodies, and the lines that keep

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Figure 4.2 Flying harness in the form of a contemporary corset made, however, with scenic materials such as heavy canvas, buckles, and leather straps. It was developed by George Kirby in 1904 at the time of the first production of Peter Pan © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

them in place, suggest the presence of a corset-harness not unlike the one made for Peter Pan in 1904 by stage carpenter George Kirby (Figure 4.2). Wearing earlier versions of this harness, airborne dancers became ubiquitous in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Figure 4.3). Hidden inside their confectionary costumes were metal wires and leather fastenings (Figure  4.2), concealed under gauzy and colorful wings and shimmering tutus, while their pointe ballet shoes appeared to intend to complete the romantic ballet blanc’s evoked flight discussed in Chapter 2. The latter had emerged in Romantic scenarios, and depicted an ecstatic illusion of fleshless bodies in ethereal tulle (Austin 1998). I suggest, however, that these flying female dancers could be read in terms of an objectification of the female body rendered powerless by its hoisting. Kirby had previously worked with the German Grigolatis troupe of aerialists. The latter were observed in rehearsal

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Figure 4.3 Harnessed aerialist and corps de ballet for “The Snow Ballet” in the comic opera A Trip To The Moon by Offenbach, 1883 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

and in performance by New York theatre critic Gustav Kobbé, causing him to write “[f]asten a corset of wood and iron around a bird’s body and see if it can fly” (Kobbé 1902).2 Having equated female aerialists to birds rendered passive by the wooden harnesses, Kobbé goes on to credit the precision of their movement to the male operatives’ “skilful manipulation” of the ropes, landing the compliant “birds” with “geometrical perfection” to the predetermined spot. Crucially “all the manipulators of the ropes are men who have served in the German army and are accustomed to work under military discipline of the severest kind.” Thus, in Kobbé’s terms, military and male prowess is the real agent of female aerial spectacle, not the trained bodies of its aerialists he had watched rehearsing. In the same article Kobbé goes on to preview Mr. Bluebeard, which was a “fairy spectacle” involving the Grigolatis aerialist troupe as well as hundreds of dancers, actors, and singers, touring the United States in 1902 from London’s Drury Lane Theatre. It opened with the lines “[c]ome and buy our luscious fruits, oriental slaves are we” (Seltzer 2013: 18), sung by the female chorus and set in a Baghdad slave market. From the late eighteenth century, Charles Perrault’s serial wife-killer had acquired, in Britain, an Oriental countenance, thus transferring his brutality on to the colonized “Other.” His wife, here named Fatima, whose crime was not multiple wife killings like her husband, but female curiosity (Hermansson 2009: 51), was the real focus of the performance. Her inquisitiveness was signified in scenes of fairies making fans to hide behind when spying, gigantic versions of which also provided a spectacular scenic focus. Aerial displays of birds and insects ensued, performed by the Grigolatis, followed by a series of exotic locations from across the British Empire, in which dozens of dancers, changing several times, represented various geographical locations through costumes by Attilio Comelli (Figures 4.4 and 4.5). The numerous gauzy and glittering costumes, some reported to be worth $800, appeared to focus the critics’ attention, creating an overwhelming sensory spectacle in which the individual performers became, as reported by the New York

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Figure 4.4a Tea Table Lady by prolific costume designer Attilio Comelli (1858–1925), for the Drury Lane Theatre, exemplifying the way in which female bodies would be put to use for scenic effect © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Figure 4.4b Costume design for a Green Orchid Girl in an unidentified production, probably for The Land of the Orchids, designed by Attilio Comelli, c.1900 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Times in 1903, a mass of “[b]right cheeks, flashing eyes and twinkling fleshings.” Fleshings, early versions of flesh-colored tights that could extend to the whole body simulating nudity, covered the bare skin with a layer of decorum. The review describes the show as “entrancing, bewildering, blinding, annihilating in its burst of splendor.”3 The combination of the numerous flying female bodies, and the dozens of earthbound ones, rendered spectacular by their costumes, created an experiential overabundance, seemingly “annihilating” the reviewer in an affective, sublime experience. However, this is no “female sublime” on which the “flight off the pedestal” may be predicated. The pedestal here is very much in place, internalized in the costumed performance in which female bodies are passive displays of costume’s virtuosity and of their own twinkling fleshings. Holding their bodies into the appropriate shapes, these ensembles move as they have been choreographed, into picturesque scenes. In this sense the women were themselves annihilated in the scenic “entrancing” construct into which they fitted.

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Figure 4.5 Orchid Ballet, January 1898, Drury Lane Theatre, was set in the “Land of Orchids” and featured a flying ballet by the Grigolatis aerial troupe, with Madame Grigolatis as Queen Humming Bird © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Whether flying or earthbound, the bodies that produced such an overwhelming effect were structured into normative femininity by fashionably shaped corsets, enabling a range of scenic decorative material to be layered onto them for the sake of spectacle (Figures 4.4a, 4.4b, and 4.5). As Leigh Summers has argued, “corsetry was a powerful coercive apparatus in the control of Victorian women” and its endurance into the twentieth century was, “instrumental, indeed crucial, in the maintenance of Victorian hetero-patriarchal dominance” (2001: 8). On the stage it also became an anchoring device on which to attach scenic material. At the same time, however, the reassuring shape of the corset-harness and its flying technology granted Nina Boucicault, the first ever Peter Pan, the opportunity to play an active hero role as the prepubescent and eternal boy in 1904. If Peter Pan, as Marjorie B. Garber has theorized, is “a kind of Wendy Unbound . . . a re-gendered, not-quite-de-gendered alternative persona who can have all the adventures” (2008: 168), then arguably this is contingent to her being bound, under her tunic, into a harness shaped as a normative Edwardian corset, and to her leggings being on display. The visibility of female legs in the playing of male characters was a well-established tradition on the pantomime stage particularly in relation to the principal boy, who was never entirely intended to be re-gendered from female actress to male character (Figure 4.6a). For example Nellie Farren (Figure 4.6b), seen here as Ganem, son of Ali Baba, in The Forty Thieves (1880), in an elegant turban, sleeveless bolero jacket, and tightly cut short breeches edged with fringing, signals vaguely toward the Orient while making no attempt to actually resemble physically the character she plays, remaining

Figure 4.6a Nellie Farren in the title role of Little Robin Hood at the Gaiety Theatre, 1882 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 4.6b Ganem, son of Ali Baba, played by Nellie Farren, in The Forty Thieves at the Gaiety Theatre, 1880 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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rather like a skirtless well-known actress. Farren’s costume was based on the tightly squeezed waist of the heavily boned Victorian corset that conveyed, in Summers’ terms, the dominance of the patriarchy. This was unlike some earlier female performers, and in particular Madame Vestris (1797–1856), whose subversive female transvestism became critical to her empowerment as an artist and as a female theatre manager. Jane Moody notes how transvestism had brought Vestris fortune, which she had channeled into her own productions, “[f]or the rise of women managers was made financially possible by the capital of theatrical transvestitism” (1999: 113). Vestris played a succession of action heroes and her first notable role, in 1820, was Don Giovanni in the comic extravaganza Giovanni in London, or The Libertine Reclaimed, by William Moncrieff, who “seduces women, fights duels, and at the end of the comic afterpiece, marries happily” (Powell 1997: 30). Her re-gendering into the Libertine was noted by one outraged reviewer, who described interventions through costume as seeming “to have swathed her slender form in rolls and bandages to fill out the garb of the character” (The Theatrical Inquisitor, quoted in Powell 1997: 31). A contemporaneous drawing of the character (Figure  4.7), however, demonstrates that the 1820 lightly corseted empire line may have permitted the coexistence of both genders through costume, conveying a boyish androgyny that Vestris may have borrowed from the character of Joan of Arc, whom she played at several points in her career. The night she took over the management of the Olympic Theatre, in the prologue she described herself in verse as “A warrior woman, that in strife embarks, The first of all dramatic Joan of Arcs.” She had become, as she said, the first woman “ ‘that ever led a company’—a distinction that she recognized as dividing her from ordinary women” (Powell 1997: 70). Vestris reconciled opposites of male and female, dressed to resemble a man on stage in a way that enabled her to extend herself, both in life and on the stage, beyond what was permissible to ordinary women. She anticipated therefore not the ubiquitous principal boys, but rather the corset-refusal later enacted by ground-breakers such as Ellen Terry, whom we shall meet in Chapter 6, or by the female performers who found their escape from the pedestal through the veils of the East, discussed later in this chapter. First however we will consider Orientalist constructs of the “internalized” pedestal. In the cultural construction of the exotic East on the nineteenth-century stage, the presentation of titillating bodies was informed by a sense of entitlement that justified colonialism, resulting in overtly racist attitudes toward colonized races and cultures (Mabilat 2008; Said 1978). Exotic spectacles on stage were commercially successful not only via the allure of female bodies in gauzy veils, but also because Orientalism provided “a negative parallel to the West” (Everett 2007: 278), a constructed world of colonial “Others” onto whom moral inequity could be projected, while upholding the presumed superiority of its audience. Emerging from the Islamic Golden Age, the Ali Baba story, part of the Arabian Nights tales, which according to Husain Haddawy “divert, cure, redeem, and save lives” (1990: 10), could be translated instead by Western theatre-makers as a pretext for spectacle, with reassuring storylines of intrigue and treachery that would appeal to their audiences’ sense of moral superiority. An early photograph, a record of the finale of the Alhambra staging of Ali Baba in 1894, which included the Grigolatis Flying Troupe (Figure 4.8), captures the spectacular impact of Orientalist female aesthetics on the Victorian stage. Draped in vaguely Eastern-looking veils, under which s-bend corsets and fleshings can be detected, the female dancers in the front row hold up a cornucopia of offerings from their upright kneeling position. Loose hair, which in conventional Victorian society was intended to signify sexual availability, is here moderated in styles reminiscent of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The spectacle is one of European white bodies, luxuriously dressed in a mixture of invented Eastern costumes of diaphanous veils, posed in chivalrous poses, complete with standard bearers, feathery insignias, and flag-like drapes, in a concoction of contemporary, Eastern, medieval, and classical referencing. The Grigolatis aerialists in

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Figure 4.7 Madame Vestris, performer and theatre manager, as Don Giovanni in Giovanni in London, or The Libertine Reclaimed, 1820, unknown artist © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

a circle over the chorus’s heads, their corset-harnesses resembling cuirasses, suspend a kind of triumphant laurel of white drapery between them, in a scenic celebratory image of victory. They could be a conquering army, in a scenography referencing the Orientalist paintings of distant lands, of slave markets and harems, in which women were portrayed as “available and willing, passive victims of Asiatic power and lust” (Smith 1996: 168). The various odalisques painted by Delacroix, Ingres, and many others throughout the

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Figure 4.8 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, with the Grigolatis Flying Troupe. The Finale of Tableau 5, 1894, Alhambra Theatre. Costumes designed by Howell Russell © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 4.9 The Houris, in the musical Chu Chin Chow, which ran from 1916 to 1921. Costume designed by Percy Anderson © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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nineteenth century, if dressed at all, wore luxurious, silky draped fabrics embroidered with gold and silver, harem pants, and veils, presenting the female body as a colonial treasure-trove, waiting to be possessed. The popularity of the Ali Baba story was exploited further during World War I, by the layering of Chinese stereotypes onto Arab ones, when adapted in the spectacular musical Chu Chin Chow, which ran for an unprecedented five years between 1916 and 1921 in the West End of London. Typically, as Orientals, its male characters were motivated by greed, lust, and violence, while the women were often slaves. The characters of the Houris (Figure 4.9), pure maidens and trophy women awaiting Muslim men in paradise, were very popular with the soldiers on leave from World War I, as they implicitly represented an idea of femininity that mitigated the possibly of martyrdom in battle. While “Orientalism provided a safe haven for musical theatre creators to offer thinly veiled depictions of Englishness” (Everett 2007: 283), the amorality being transferred to performers “othered” by their characters and their costumes, was ostensibly suppressed in everyday life. Respectable British soldiers in the audience were permitted fantasies of greed and possession, identifying with Abu Hasan, the menacing robbers’ chieftain, played by West End star Oscar Asche (Figure 4.10a) whose real-life wife, Lily Brayton, performed the bejeweled, veiled slave lead (Figure 4.10b). The success of Chu Chin Chow in reinforcing racial and gender prejudices mirrored its theatrical blockbuster status.

Figure 4.10a Oscar Asche who plays the menacing male lead Abu Hasan in Chu Chin Chow © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 4.10b Lily Brayton as the female lead Zahrat al-Kulub in Chu Chin Chow © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 4.11 Sketch by Léon Bakst, for a bacchante in Narcisse, 1912 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Photographed in their costumes for Tatler in 1917 (Figure 4.9), the dancers playing the Houris wear no corsets or boned bodices. Within an Orientalist dance context, corsets had been shed by 1906 by Maud Allan in her Vision of Salomé and Ruth St. Denis’s Radha, as we shall see later. Even earlier, by the end of the previous century, Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan were performing corset-free, and the latter had influenced Léon Bakst’s designs for the Ballets Russes’ Narcisse (1911) (Figure 4.11). Unlike the Narcisse drawing, in which the dancer expands through movement and costume across the space of the page, these triumphant compositions appear to be embalming the wearer into an upright pose, rendering them oddly inaccessible, while remaining “on display.” Padded and wired veils, referring to a mixture of Arab, Indian, and Egyptian influences, extend spatially around the body, remaining separate from it. Albeit corset-free, the Houris’ costumes perform the role of the “pedestal,” spatially separating the body while framing its revealed fleshiness and denying it any ability for action. While the women’s suffrage movement was finally reaching its goals, the Houris dancers remind us how easily a female body on stage can be produced as a passive, beautiful object to be looked at, entrancingly and reassuringly packaged through costume. The presentation of men as powerful and women as beautiful in the traditional sublime may be ironically exemplified through the juxtaposition of Abu Hasan and the decorative Houris.

Costume as a technology for flight The nineteenth-century circus, peripatetic, self-contained, and often family-based, sat outside society and channeled transgression through the carnivalesque. Sharing commedia dell’arte performers’ street-theatre origins, the touring acrobatic troupes, that included female performers, could be assigned to Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque by being considered “freaks” in the ambiguity of their powerful bodies (Russo 1995: 171). These performers, however, challenged the societal restrictions placed on their bodies, embodying a physical freedom not presumed possible for Victorian women, who were expected to be decorous and fragile, and to keep their feet firmly on the ground, well hidden under layers of frilled petticoats. The popular images of unharnessed female trapeze aerialists, may have contributed to the spread of skirtless female bodies on the theatre stage in the second half of the nineteenth century, as aerialists demanded garments fitted closely to the contour of the body for safety and agility. Their performances can be seen as containing the conciliation of opposites defined by Freeman. Female lightness and poise were matched by physical strength and temerity, traditionally considered male traits. While transcending the body’s, and society’s, limitation through training and muscular power, they faced potential fatality, as an accidental fall from the height of the circus rig would be unbroken by a safety net. In The Female Grotesque (1995) Mary Russo places the grotesque and the sublime in relation to one another, through her definition of the aerial sublime, which she describes as both a historical concept and an imaginative one. By the 1860s, female circus aerialists who had previously been tightrope walkers or other types of acrobats were beginning to adopt the multiple trapeze system invented by Jules Léotard in 1859 (Tait 2005: 9). It enabled the performance of human flight between trapezes and, due to their physiques, female aerialists excelled at it. The physical alignment to their male counterparts eventually led to the possibility of women and men looking almost indistinguishable, as shown by the image of the Freire Troupe of acrobats (Figure 4.12) at a time when men and women’s everyday appearance was diametrically opposed.

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Figure 4.12 Freire Troupe, early 1900s. Author’s own collection.

The two female performers, the young girl at the front and the woman at the center back are distinguishable from their male companions mainly by their hairstyles and lack of facial hair. They appear to be wearing identical costumes, differentiated only through decoration between the younger and the older members of the group. They are wearing aerialists’ matching outfits that convey an equality that challenged the perceived inferiority of women. As Peta Tait has noted (2005: 53), women aerialists could in fact receive more attention and financial rewards than their male counterparts. In addition to the trapeze, Jules Léotard had also, in the mid-nineteenth century, invented the leotard (Figure 4.13), the base layer of the Freire Troupe’s aerialist costumes. Initially a knitted one-piece garment

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Figure 4.13 Photograph of Jules Léotard wearing the maillot invented by him and which took his name, the leotard © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

covering the torso, it was called maillot, referring to its knitwear origin which lent it stretch and tight fit. Disseminated from the 1860s through the influential medium of the circus, its impact was profound. By streamlining the body, it later encouraged the engagement of men in a range of different sports, ultimately being appropriated by women as the basic one-piece knitted swimsuit of the 1920s, it was eventually utilized by Coco Chanel in her costume designs for Le Train Bleu, discussed in Chapter 6. A compelling fashionable garment, it became instrumental in the transformation of women away from being shaped by

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corsets into bodies built through exercise. Crucially the leotard became the garment worn by both men and women in modern and contemporary dance, posing no obstacles to movement and unifying the body into an uninterrupted and dynamic whole. In the early twentieth century, a notable number of female dancers, some of whom we shall encounter later, have asserted the ownership of their own bodies in performance through the symbiosis with their costumes aided by basic leotards and freed from corsets. I argue that the stretch dance leotard, shaped by the flesh it contained, contributed to the affirmation of female dancers’ equality. The transcending of social and physical limitations in the bid for flight is characterized by the literal wearing out of the leotard through exertion, and very few have survived. Instead representations of the acrobat’s body, streamlined in this second skin, endured, symbolic of the aspiration for freedom and “flight,” through performance, literature, and art. If the leotard as second skin can be said to be instrumental to the emancipation of female performance beyond the trapeze, the Victorian circus also provided the female iron-jaw act as an embodiment of an oppositional metaphor to the presumed passivity of the harnessed aerialist. While Kirby’s invention gripped the aerialist, bringing to bear the theatre machinery’s hold over the female body via the harnesscorset, the iron-jaw aerial act, in which the performer clamped her teeth tightly onto a strip of leather, reversed the relationship. Depicted by Edgar Degas in 1879 (Figure 4.14), Miss La La’s body, via the teeth gripping to the leather, appears to extend its interior strength through the circus rig to the architecture of the theatre, as she seemingly soars upward. In the painting that emerged from this sketch, titled Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, and housed by the National Gallery in London, her spine and muscular tautness reach upward, in a continuum with the rig, through the leather strap that becomes molded to the shape of her palate, as seen in Pansy Chinery’s example for a similar act (Figure 4.15). Her body is the conduit of extraordinary strength. In another act performed while hanging upside down from a trapeze, she held, via the two-inch leather strap between her teeth, a second trapeze on which other aerialists performed, first a child, then a woman, a man, and finally three men. In a reversal of the harnessed Rhinemaidens (Figure 4.1) hoisted by stage crews turning strategically placed handles, her cannon-woman act is an “undeniably phallic” feat of strength (Brown 2007: 744). In it, the cannon suspended from her clenched teeth via a small rig, when fired, reverberated through her body and her acrobat’s rig. In the context of the circus that destabilized hierarchies and exclusion zones, Miss La La thrived not only as a female act, demonstrating herself to be stronger than male aerialists, but also as a mixed-race performer. Marilyn R. Brown exposes the complexity of Degas’s painting, in which she finds traces of the contemporaneous lynching of Black Americans and of scientific, cultural, and social racism. She points out how La La’s mixed-race identity provoked anxieties about the possible elimination of racial distinctions on which the edifice of colonization had been constructed and how racism and the fear and desire of the “Other” are implicit in Degas’s painting. Notwithstanding these bourgeois projections about race and gender, Brown reveals an “African Princess” very much in charge of business, “with a busy schedule,” while she “received independent billing as the leader of her act and who . . . had her own agent in Paris” (2007: 745). The management of her own image through costume was crucial to the assertion of her position. Beyond Degas’s painting her portrayals in posters and photographs are in the style of the “homogenising Western norm” (2007: 747) of a body produced by a Victorian corset, even when wearing a leotard over it (Figure 4.16). In other images included in Brown’s article, the muscular and potentially subversive body is rendered more acceptable by ruffles or polka-dots that cover her normative acrobat’s sleeveless all-in-ones with tassels, fichus, and floral appliqué edging the costumes while highlighting movement. These costumes countered with decorous femininity the potential projection of a sexually available and “threateningly lascivious black woman” (Brown 2007: 749), a persistent

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Figure 4.14 Miss La La at the Fernando Circus, 1879, Edgar Degas sketch © The J. Paul Getty Museum; digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

misogynist and racist fantasy produced on stage and in paintings of the time. Miss La La presented herself in the normative femininity of her era, which she simultaneously undermined through her performance and muscular strength. In the iron-jaw act, the leather strip gripped in Miss La La’s teeth became a ligament which allowed her moving body to extend through the theatre space via the rig. While transcending the limitations imposed upon her sex, she retained just enough fragments of the everyday to ensure her connection to the audience.

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Figure 4.15 Steel hook and leather strap used by Pansy Chinery (1879–1969) in her trapeze and teeth-spinning act © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 4.16 Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (c.1880), albumen silver print on paper. Unidentified photographer, collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. Museum Purchase 1999.0187. Modern photograph of the image by Jack Abraham.

Bare feet and naked skin: orientalist and neoclassical costumes As noted earlier, white Western female bodies were selectively disrobed into vaguely Orientalist others, to construct an exoticized sensuality. The performances of Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) and Maud Allan (1873–1956) in the first decade of the twentieth century also adopted an invented Oriental persona, clad

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primarily with jewelry and transparent veils, that highlighted the presence of their own flesh. As autonomous performers, their display was, according to Toni Bentley, a reappropriation of their bodies through selfobjectification while channeling fantasies of Oriental femmes fatales (2002: 34). Maud Allan, originally a concert pianist from the United States, relocated to Europe, where she found fame in 1906 with her solo performance, Vision of Salomé, danced to the severed head of John the Baptist. The performance had been devised around Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, the latter, written in 1891, was initially censored and took five years to be staged. In the following years it become the focus of multiple interpretations in operas, films and dance, with Salome’s empowerment through the seven veils dance, her disrobing and her murderous lust, revealing complex—and modern—sexual perversions, and power relationships that challenged ingrained gender ideology. Unveiling her body to reveal breasts and hips covered by strategically placed jewelry and dripping with strings of pearls, Allan was barefooted, wearing only purple or brown sheer veils flowing from her hips (Schweitzer 2014: 42) (Figure 4.17). In the United States, Ruth St. Denis, already an

Figure 4.17 Maud Allan (1873–1956) in costume as Salomé for her solo dance Vision of Salomé, c.1910 Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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athletically trained vaudeville skirt-dancer, deviated into Orientalism after engaging with Eastern mysticism. Her first influential Orient-inspired performance was Radha in 1906 (Figure 4.18), adapted from the Hindu deity Krishna’s story, in a gauzy skirt, naked waist, and jewelry. Staining her skin brown, she produced a style of Eastern-inspired dance in which “there was no attempt to make authentic ethnic dance movements” (Thomas 1995: 73). Helen Thomas notes that both Allan and St. Denis’s costumes liberated the midriff that “dress reformers sought to free from the tyranny of the corset” (1995: 97). As inspired respectively by the Bible and Hinduism, Salomé and Radha were Western projections of mysterious temptresses, and bastardizing cultural iterations, these dances built on ideas of an Eastern female “Other.” Nonetheless the physical expression found by Allen and St. Denis through inhabiting their bodies meant that they could contribute to women’s self-assertion through dance. And their

Figure 4.18 Ruth St. Denis as Radha © Alamy.

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contribution to the development of modern dance would eventually feed into an art form that could transcend hierarchies of gender and race. With naked skin no longer rendered decorous through fleshings in both of these dancers’ acts, the real or fabricated connection between body and Eastern spirituality in St. Denis’s disrobing may have provided sufficient protection against the moral abjection that engulfed Allan’s Salomé dance. St. Denis’s lengthy career stretched into her commitment to dance education, through which she influenced a number of key pioneers of modern dance, most notably Martha Graham. Allan’s Salomé costume materialized sensuous and murderous empowerment (Figure 4.17). The double circlet around her wig, reminiscent of Greek warriors, is made of strings of pearls. Her breasts are also encrusted with pearls, concealing the nipples with conspicuous red jewels. With strings of pearls suspended like a low-slung belt, elegantly garnishing the pubic area, the costume entirely avoids the normative female waistline, habitually emphasized by the corset, while focusing on the hips as the site of sexual power. Both male and female sexualities are projected in this femme fatale costumed persona of bare flesh adorned with the contents of an Oriental treasure-trove. It describes a determination to kill through allure, a dance in light-reflective jewels, in which deadly desire is weaponized through costume. The portrayal of such female power eventually turned against Allen. In 1918, while organizing a restaging of Vision of Salomé, she was accused in the press and then in court, of practicing sexual perversion,

Figure 4.19 Helena in Troas (1886), an influential production designed by architect and dress reformist Edward W. Godwin, who based his designs on the material knowledge recently acquired through archaeological research © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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including the necrophilia suggested by Salomé’s kiss of John the Baptist’s severed head. Despite Allan’s association with royalty, the conservatism carefully articulated in her publishing, and a sophisticated, buttoned-up offstage persona, she lost the libel trial, cementing the end of Vision of Salomé. She had also failed to counter accusations of being a German spy, while the sexually motivated murders committed by her brother, who had been executed in California twenty years earlier, were dredged up, bolstering the charges of perversion. The groundbreaking performance of Salomé, so effectively executed through her

Figure 4.20 Henrietta Hodson as Endymion, Ellen Terry as Cupid, and Kate Terry as Diana in Endymion at the Theatre Royal, Bristol (1862). Knee length classical draping, while hiding a corset, is worn here over fleshings and satin character shoes. These draped costumes preceded Isadora Duncan’s later corset-less and barefooted dances © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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costume, became paradoxically an imagined threat that destroyed her career. At the same time submissive, veiled slave girls and the warrior-trophy Houris of Chu Chin Chow were delivering record box-office figures. Maud Allan had been influenced by new readings of classical sources promoted since the 1880s (Figure  4.19) by scholars including feminist Jane Ellen Harrison, who had herself been involved in neoclassical performance while a student at Cambridge (Beard 2000; Stone Peters 2008). Neoclassical performance and tableaux-vivants displayed female draped bodies throughout the nineteenth century

Figure 4.21 Isadora Duncan dancing with a scarf, c.1918. Anonymous artist. Photograph by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

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(Figure 4.20) and played a role in the Rational Dress Reform movement which aligned the uncorseted female form with ideals of classical beauty (Challis 2012). It laid the foundation of Modernist dance through the Natural Movement, which, by the 1920s taught lyrical, physical expression, proposing dance as spontaneous movement (Carter and Fenshaw 2011: 28). Its costumes liberated the nineteenthcentury body from everyday restriction in much the same way as the veiled, Oriental costume, engendering movement that emerged from within the body outward. Unlike the coded uprightness of the pointe shoes and boned bodices of ballet, dancers wore soft, minimalist draping over the body, which was often dynamically extended through scarves billowing across the performance space.

Figure 4.22 Isadora Duncan, 1905, in a photo lithograph by Edward Gordon Craig © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) was highly influential in the development of movement and natural expression using her body and costume. As Helen Thomas (1995: 61) writes, she danced “in loose draperies, barefoot, barelegged, bare-armed and often with her hair flowing . . . which made her appear nude” (Figures 4.21 and 4.22). Anne Daly (2002: 109) extrapolates the existence of a minimal leotard-like fine silk jersey garment, which, although leaving the breasts unbound, offered modesty as well as anchorage, through ribbon hoops, to the floating drapes. When Isadora Duncan left New York for Europe in 1898 she had already been experimenting with making dance inspired by Botticelli’s La Primavera,

Figure 4.23 Josephine Baker in “Danse des Bananas” for La Folie du Jour at the Folies Bergère, 1926. Author’s own collection.

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focusing in particular on the character of Flora. In the Italian Renaissance painting, Flora wears a high-waisted, gauzy Hellenic-inspired gown, held under the breasts by intertwining roses, while her head and neck are decorated with flowers. Duncan’s dance derived from the Botticelli painting offered an opportunity to explore the natural movement of the whole, uninterrupted body, while seeking to place dance in the remit of high art. Performing classical culture was about embodying an avant-garde liberation of the freed body. As such it became inspirational to many contemporary visual artists as it “seemed to materialize her spectators’ inner longings and impulses” (Daly 2002: 15) by overturning the starchiness of Edwardian demeanor and dress. This transgressiveness was reflected in Duncan’s committed socialism and, unlike Allan, she was openly a feminist. Her autonomy as an artist and her disavowal of social and physical strictures imposed on women went hand in hand with her near-naked free dancing. Both Duncan’s costumes and, later, the Natural Movement dancers’ floaty and fluid attire which in motion fused costume into the body, extending it gesturally through the space, can be understood as a representation of the feminine sublime via the use of costume. Classical culture is, as we have noted, fundamentally misogynist, while also being at the roots of much of Western civilization. As I have noted in the introduction to this chapter, Freeman’s definition of the feminine sublime is “a merger in which usually separate identities conjoin” (1995: 199), a meeting of opposites, through which transcendence can be achieved. Duncan’s dance embodied female liberation by embracing the cultural roots of its subordination, from inside classically costumed nudity. Duncan’s natural dance, however, entirely excluded primitivism or movement that might suggest exaggerated or out-of-control sexuality. For Josephine Baker (1906–75), undressing to parody the savage perceived to be projected by her skin color, was the means through which she transcended the limitation placed upon her as a female black dancer from segregated St. Louis, Missouri (Figure 4.23). Following her compatriots to Europe in the 1920s, she achieved huge success initially in Paris, where she danced routinely to large audiences. In a self-objectification as a near-nude black body wearing “her trademark tutu of stylized bananas” that were also “parodic phallic signifiers” (Scheper 2007: 78–9), she demonstrated, and mocked, stereotypical attributes of primitivity and sexual perversion presumed by her female blackness, while also exploiting them, via a sophisticated understanding of performance. Unlike Miss La La’s avoidance of association with the primitivity of bare feet and her display of a Victorian femininity from the height of her aerial rig, Baker’s self-parody and adorned naked body, mocked the “genetic superiority that whites were so quick to assume for themselves” (Borshuk 2001: 50). Reflecting back to the audience a racist construct around fear of black sexuality, the phallic bananas were rendered even more audacious when studded with diamonds as she layered luxuriant Orientalist codes of undress over a parody of sexual savagery. Baker’s adorned near-nakedness created a context in which “the exaggeration of her monkey walk and savage dance” were “overwrought dramatizations of how blacks were believed to behave” (Borshuk 2001: 50), and were made spectacularly absurd through her costume. “La Danse des Bananas” was first performed in Paris in 1925, where she became an icon of the Jazz age for this and a range of other performances. Since then, Baker’s multiple talents, which included acting and singing, ensured her ongoing, often exquisitely costumed, presence on stage and screen for decades to come. Crucially she channeled her self-assured public persona in influential campaigns for race equality in the United States. Baker’s self-conscious exposure in an invented exotic identity born out of opposition to racism ensured that her performance was sufficiently layered and nuanced to engage its audience well beyond the nakedness of her body, and the experience of the performance.

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Costume, a second skin that engulfs space Trapezes and leotards facilitated skirt-free aerialists, Orientalism dissolved skirts into diaphanous veils, and neoclassical dancers wore billowing draperies while Josephine Baker made a skirt out of bananas. These female performers’ claim to an autonomous space on the stage had entailed a rejection of the skirts, frames and petticoats that imprisoned the legs of Victorian and Edwardian women. For skirtdancers, however, petticoats became the means through which they could take center stage. From the 1870s, practicing a classier version of the cancan, skirt-dancers subverted and extended the cumbersome Victorian skirts, a physicalization of the restrictions placed on women, into a dynamic, spatial phenomenon of swirling fabric. By the turn of the twentieth century it had become a craze. Often included in “plays, musical comedies, pantomimes, skits and burlesques” (Hindson 2008: 48), skirtdance “interruptions” were bemoaned by George Bernard Shaw as “waves of the inevitable petticoats” (Shaw, cited in Hindson 2008: 48). Through ease of movement, concealment of the legs, and reproducibility, these extended ordinary skirts ensured that the dance was imitable in social and recreational dance. The movement of the legs was filtered through layers of petticoats below the longer, unstructured top layer, which, manipulated by the dancer, undulated and rippled all around her body and into which she could disappear. This expanded skirt, made of up to twelve meters of fabric, enabled the performance of a new, dexterous femininity, with Letty Lind (1861–1923) devising solos based on the interplay between upper-body movement and flying skirts (Figure 4.24).

Figure 4.24 Letty Lind’s skirt-dance, 1889 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Transmitted to Loie Fuller’s (1862–1928) development of the circular, expanded costumes for the Serpentine Dances were not only skirt-dances, but also the sensuous dynamism of Oriental veiled dances and the extending of gesture through floating fabrics in neoclassical performance (Figure 4.25). The physical exertion, implicit in the performance of Fuller’s gigantic costumes, required, in a similar way to her compatriots Duncan, Allan, and St. Denis, the shedding of the corset. Like them, she had been influenced by the movement pedagogy of François Delsarte (1811–71) who had promoted physical expression from inside the body outward, eschewing external artifice and formalism in performance practice. As Helen Thomas has noted, American Delsartism was, through its female disciples, aligned to the liberation of women not just on the stage but in society at large, promoting health, hygiene, and comfort via robust and expressive exercise that necessitated the rejection of cumbersome and restrictive petticoats and corsets (Thomas 1995: 51). In all-enveloping costumes, Fuller’s upper-body movement was amplified via prosthetic wands sewn into the circular gowns, extending her arms. Absorbed into the generous fluidity of the fabric, the dancer’s energy directed cascading sculptures of white silk, transforming her into “shapes span partly out of centrifugal force” (Garelick 2007: 40). In 1895, the Dance of the Lily for example, dissolved in 450 meters of white silk, Fuller

Figure 4.25 Loie Fuller © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 4.26 Peggy Lyman Hayes in Lamentation, choreographed by Martha Graham, photograph by Martha Swope. Courtesy of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc.

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performed an eight-meter-high ever-changing flower. In the play between body, costume, and space, Fuller, in Rhonda Garelick’s words, enacted the “transferring of bodiliness and physical force—a displacement of erotic kineticism—onto her costume” (2007: 170) in a spectacular femaleness evocative of reproductive organs. Plunged in complete darkness, up-lit from underfloor lighting and projected upon, she could transform into gigantic labial flowers or into a winged, mythical goddess, be engulfed by flames or encompass the whole of the cosmos on stage (Hindson 2013), dissolving the body, through fabric, into a mutable physical force. Her assertion of a place on stage as a woman, who lived openly as a lesbian, stood in opposition to the display of immobilized bodies on pedestals, and was rather about harnessing its internal power through movement, costume, space, and technology, to project a corporeal, expanded femaleness. Through this she engaged the imagination of Art Nouveau visual artists. Their capturing of the merging of fabric and body made her an icon, becoming materialized in hundreds of sculptures, paintings, and illustrations. The extended, outer membrane in Loie Fuller’s corporeal performance was the fabric of her costume. By absorbing the body within, it created a new, external theatrical body which dissected the space in sword-like movement. Led by her elongated arms, the white silk in constant centrifugal motion engulfed the space outside it. Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham’s Lamentation (1930; Figure 4.26), performed to music by Zoltán Kodály, exposed the void created inside the merging of body and costume, contorted in an embodiment of grief. Integrating the stretch quality of the aerialist leotard and Fuller’s all-enveloping costume, Graham’s tube of purple stretch jersey was rendered taut by her limbs pushing against it. A shroud-like obstacle to her every move, her costume left uncovered only feet, hands, and head. The movement, unlike Fuller’s, is both inwardly and outwardly directed, as if the body is lacerating its own skin, trapped in the hollowness of its form, created in a costume/body interplay. Helen Thomas notes how this is achieved through “contraction and release” of movement (Thomas 1995: 111) which the twisting and stretching of the abstract costume amplifies. In the choreography of mourning and grief, Graham found the means of expression through costume. As she folds into herself, she materializes unbearable sorrow, which expressed through dynamic plasticity is reminiscent of a Henry Moore sculpture. States of being are enacted in the merging of exterior and interior in “a radical expression of a female bodily nature being trapped in the abstraction of her representation” (Nadal-Melsió 1996). The photographs and films of the performance capture a milestone moment in the development of modern dance, in which the dancer’s body presented itself as the artwork. In this canonization of dance as high art, the costume was fundamental. Graham is quoted affirming that “the costume has to be designed around the physical aspect of dance” (Nadal-Melsió 1996). Here it is possible to assume that the choreography would have been developed through the use of costume from the very beginning. Costume has facilitated women performers in their jumping off the immobilizing pedestal and, by Martha Graham’s time, they had taken over the stage as well as the art gallery, not through confrontation, but by inventing entirely new forms of performance through a merging of body and costume.

Contemporary female costume, through the lens of feminine sublime Although Pina Bausch did not discuss the feminism that commentators have read into her choreography, her dancers’ representation of gender relationship has constantly enlightened the inequality between men and women and the violence perpetuated against women. In 1986 Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Company premiered Viktor, a performance that reflected their experience of living and working in Rome

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where the dance was devised. The title, Viktor, could refer to the sublimity of an ancient Imperial Rome in ruins, cherished by the Romantic poets. On the contrary it mocks it, referring instead to the monumental neoclassical architectural pastiche built for King Victor Emanuel II , whose statue is perched on top of a Corinthian column, sited at the center of the city. The men in Viktor, inhabiting a set reminiscent of an archaeological dig, display a self-assured control over the women whose vulnerability transpires behind the social decorum of their delicate summer dresses, which designer Marion Cito borrowed from an unspecified period between the 1930s and the time of her designing of the production. Cito’s men’s tailored debonair suits render the women, uniformly in high heels, back-seamed stockings, and fine silk floral costumes, peculiarly exposed, particularly when skirts are hitched into underwear (Figure 4.27). Displaying more legs below awkwardly uneven hems, the dancers are lined up, upright, standing on chairs, as if being auctioned at a fair. The internalized pedestal is performed here, as the objectification of their bodies appears to be acquiesced by the women themselves. Gabrielle Cody highlights how Bausch’s dancers “expose the tacit rules of a representational economy which regards femininity as a compulsory public service” (Cody 2013: 200). As real women and men, dancers are implicated in this representation, not just through dress and undress, but also through repeated and unconnected everyday gestures, which they have fed into the devising process, and, during the performance, by addressing the audience directly, while invading their space. In this proximity the exposure of relationships between physical existence, gender, power and

Figure 4.27 Female dancers on lined-up chairs wearing heels, seamed stockings, and floral dresses, standing upright as if ready for examination, in Pina Bausch’s Viktor, Tanztheater Wuppertal, designed by Marion Cito. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 4.28 A female dancer in Pia Bausch’s Viktor spouts water from her mouth while two men wash their hands and feet, with costumes by Marion Cito. Photograph by Graham Brandon © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

suffering is heightened in absurd and violent encounters: a lifeless couple are married, a woman is ritualistically rolled up in a carpet, while others are hauled around like mannequins, or are manhandled and maltreated. A seated female dancer becomes a fountain, spouting water from her mouth so that men can wash their feet and hands (Figure  4.28). These moments appear lived, habitual, in a language of the body that allows Bausch to critique the oppositional artificiality of ballet: a dancer places slices of raw veal in a pair of satin ballet shoes before dancing en pointe for seven minutes. Showing discomfort openly, this is “an overt allusion to the pain and disfigurement a classical dancer must suffer for the beauty of her art” (Weir 2014: 23). I suggest that Bausch foregrounds the flaws in the construct of the “beautiful” female dancer and, via the male dancers, of the “sublime” romantics for whom an Imperial Rome in ruins, ironically continues to construct an ideal male superiority. The feminine sublime in Viktor, however, can be found in the ecstatic and spectacular exhilaration the female dancers who, lifted onto circus rings, project their bodies across the stage, taking over the space with physical strength and the flowing tulle of their full-length ball-gowns (Figure 4.29). In a spatial gesture that places them out of reach of the men for a moment of incongruous joy, they complete the failed flight of the frustrated and long-suffering earthbound ballerina, whose pointe shoe promises, but never delivers, real flight. In director Thomas de Mallet Burgess and theatre designer Jamie Vartan’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata (Malmo, 2008), sublime, feminine flight is defined through its dreaded failure, death. The opera’s central character is Violetta, whose escape from the pedestal turns her into the “fallen woman” who, by

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Figure 4.29 A moment of release through circus rings flight and ball gowns in Pina Bausch’s Viktor, designed by Marion Cito. Photograph by Graham Brandon© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

the end of the opera, joins the list of female heroines succumbing to death by cruel fate or self-sacrifice in nineteenth-century opera. Inspired by the work of video artist Bill Viola and as the overture is played by the orchestra, a film is projected in slow motion on a vast screen. In it a 1950s ballgown-clad Violetta drops from high above, her tulle petticoats capturing the light, reshaping around her (Figure 4.30). When she finally hits the dark pool of water, as she sinks, the air caught in her skirts is released into the countless bubbles of a glass of champagne, her costume seemingly dissolving (Figure 4.31). Vartan connects this to the way tuberculosis, Violetta’s illness, has been romanticized, and “is said to produce feelings of euphoria

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Figure 4.30 Violetta from La Traviata at Malmo Opera, directed by Thomas de Mallet Burgess and designed by Jamie Vartan, 2008, falls in slow motion in a prerecorded film projected during the overture. Excerpts from the slowed-down filmed movement were shown at various points during the performance. Still from the overture film for La Traviata at Malmo Opera, Cosamia Stage & Film Production (Cesare Righetti).

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and bursts of energy [. . .] as the sufferer is drowned from within, water filling their lungs.” He concludes, “her floating party dress described her character as much as her own body did” (quoted in Bailey and Crawley 2012: 32). The gradual descent of her aerated dressed body is returned to just before the final scene when she hits the bottom of the pool (Figure 4.31). If the gestural and spatial extension of her body

Figure 4.31 As the “fallen woman” Violetta hits the water, her presence is magnified by the bubbles that leave her skirt, like a disappearing trail that ends when she reaches the bottom of the pool. La Traviata, Malmo Opera, 2008. Cosamia Stage & Film Production (Cesare Righetti).

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and costume through slowed time in the filmed fall reflects aspects of the feminine sublime discussed in this chapter, then so does the reconciling of opposites of childhood innocence and of “fallen” adulthood. In the opening scene, lingering bubbles are projected onto a child Violetta, in a smock and carrying a doll, as she walks past her grown-up self, in the glittering net 1950s ball-gown of the filmed overture (Figure 4.32). Childhood and womanhood are overlaid as time, that had been slowed down, is now compressed, exposing the trajectory of a social role for women defined within the margins of the dominant patriarchy by connecting the opposites of the child and her doll and the frothily dressed trophy lover, a different type

Figure 4.32 A child Violetta and her grown-up self wander past each other. Like the slowed-down film of the fall, the child returns at various points in the opera. La Traviata, 2008, Malmo Opera, directed by Thomas de Mallet Burgess and designed by Jamie Vartan, photographer: Malin Arnesson.

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of doll. And yet her red hair sets her apart, by perhaps signaling the social transgression as self-determined, no matter how inadmissible this might be in a female character of a nineteenth-century opera. Director Richard Jones and costume designer Nicky Gillibrand’s 2002 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company—also discussed in Chapter 6—was set in a nightmarish dream-world, inside an inky, dangerous, black box populated by fairies who, wearing various black textures, could appear and disappear into darkness. Titania’s dress (Figures 4.33) was intended by the designer to be “a piece of night sky,”4 connecting her to a distant elsewhere outside the sinister space. Gillibrand’s design for Titania countered any notion of “simpering womanhood,” refusing to dress her in the “posh frock” of traditional femininity. The actress had masculine short hair and Gillibrand’s halter-neck costume hung off her shoulders like a sinuous second skin she might be shedding, trailing lightly behind her, a “coincidence, something she happened to have on” and she was able to be naked underneath it. Like Maud Allan’s Salomé, bypassing the normative feminine waistline, the emphasis was on the masculine hips, creating a present and ambiguous sexuality. The power of the costume, therefore, resided in the interplay with the body underneath. Similarly to Salomé’s, this costume refracted light from the diamante, jet-black jewelry and beading encrusted onto layers of gauzy, inky fabrics, which, cut into tiny panels, were overlocked and left unfinished, and “looked like they had just been drawn on.” Gillibrand created a costume that exceeded its boundaries through the poetical infinity of the night sky and in an empowered, overtly

Figure 4.33 Nicky Gillibrand costume design for Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2001 © Nicky Gillibrand.

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sexual ambiguity, containing both female and male qualities. As a conciliation of opposites, this synthesis, typical of the female sublime, offered layered perspectives to the performer and to the audience. Becoming like a piece of night sky, the brief Gillibrand set herself is akin to Vartan’s dissolving of Violetta’s tulle petticoats into her own drowning illness. Both use costumes to indicate a merging of the characters into a space greater than themselves, in embodying, through gesture and material, insights into the characters’ humanity. In this the feminine is sublime: in the way that the fabric extends the eloquence of their performance, leaving traces of bubbles or shimmers of jet, and going beyond the boundaries of an acceptable feminine role to expose, gesturally, the transgression against traditional masculine dominance, even when the result of the flight off the pedestal is death, as in the Vartan and de Mallet Burgess’s La Traviata. As Elizabeth Battersby writes in The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, by the end of the twentieth century Jean-François Lyotard was theorizing that “the delights of the sublime involve a surrender or the displacement of the ego” (Battersby 2007: 1). For these female characters the ego is displaced or surrendered into clouds of fabrics, and night skies slipped on by accident.

5 AGENCY AND EMPATHY: ARTISTS TOUCH THE BODY Melissa Trimingham At the heart of this chapter lies an ethical issue. Costume has agency, and nowhere more so than when it transforms the human body visually, physically, in motion and in the charged context of a shared performance. Artists who have deliberately wrought, sculpted, and wrestled with materials and material form upon or, rather, with the body realize that agency, and use that ability to change the wearer and the witness in a powerful experienced affective moment. Costume in performance—a socially situated, communal act, time limited, deliberate, and discrete—connects the body with the material world as no other stage “object.” Costume always rests close upon the skin, tightly or loosely, comfortably or uncomfortably, yielding or resistant, bulky or light. Sculpted costume is even more insistent. This chapter will explore how the physical effect of costume, felt above all when the costume is prominent (e.g. heavy, probably visually startling, built up) and the body wearing it is in motion, produces meaning. It will draw on what has been called the “kinesthetic” or “kinetic” empathy of the audience (Reynolds and Reason 2012). Such empathy is not emotional sympathy, nor is it identification with a performer, but it is much more visceral and physical—and largely sensed below the level of conscious thought. Neuroscience research (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Clark 1997; Damasio 2000; Gallagher 2005) into cognitive affect extends and develops ideas that originated in phenomenology in the twentieth century particularly in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment.1 It is also true that scientists much earlier than the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of this century also understood that the body shaped the way we think: notably James Gibson writing in the 1950s and 1960s (Gibson 1950, 1966, 1979); and Paul Schilder writing even earlier (Schilder [1923] 1950). Gibson gives us an accessible and straightforward way into understanding costume in its most obvious cognitive “affects.” Gibson, an “ecological psychologist” (his own description), defined the “haptic sense” as the whole body sense of touch. To sense a mountain haptically was to climb it not look at it (Bloomer and Moore 1977: 34). “The haptic system, then, is an apparatus by which the individual gets information about both the environment and his body. He feels an object relative to his body and the body relative to an object. It is the perceptual system by which animals are literally in touch with the environment” (Gibson 1966: 97 italics in the original). In his recasting of the ancient Greek model of the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) into a new paradigm model that includes orientation and the haptic sense (as well as sight, hearing, taste/smell) Gibson gives us a theoretical framework to understand costume in performance. Both the sense of orientation (our sense of being upright, our sense of front and back, sideways, above, and below2) and the haptic sense (not just the surface of our skin as in “touch,” but our three-dimensional 137

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sense of our bodies, including the sense of body motion “detecting movement of joints and muscles through your entire bodyscape” (Bloomer and Moore 1977: 35) relate directly to the body moving in space, which costume of course accentuates. Gibson describes the senses as perceptual systems that work together at the point of reception to filter information that crowds in. In other words, sensory information does not all arrive in the brain to be then sorted out rationally. In Gibson’s words: “the inputs available for perception may not be the same as the inputs available for sensation” (Gibson 1966: 97). Importantly for audiences perceiving costume in performance, cognitive scientists extend Gibson’s idea of active perception through somatic movement and continual contact with the environment into the perception of a (“passive”) onlooker witnessing people, things, movement in the environment, and into remembrance of the same (Gallagher 2001; Damasio 2000: 182–3). Alva Noë describes seeing as “much more like touching than it is like depicting” (Noë 2004: 72–3). Gallese and Lakoff describe how the somatic areas of the brain are activated when we see movement and it is only because certain connections are inhibited that we do not actually move as we watch (Gallese and Lakoff 2007: 456). Gibson asserts how fundamental the haptic system is for looking at/perceiving anything: “It is so obviously involved in the control of performance that we are introspectively not aware of its capacity to yield perception; we allow the visual system to dominate our consciousness” (Gibson 1966: 134). Damasio, like Gallese and Lakoff, would insist that looking at perceiving either a mountain or a costume empathically draws upon our body memory of our own somatic encounters and our own kinetic empathy. The records we hold of the objects and events that we once perceived include the motor adjustments we made to obtain the perception in the first place and also include the emotional reactions we had then. They are all coregistered in memory . . . You simply cannot escape the affectation of your organism, motor and emotional most of all, that is part and parcel of having a mind Damasio 2000: 1483 This chapter claims costume in performance is powerful in these processual, organic, unfolding ways that implicate both performer and viewer. It works as a lived affective experience and does not work when it is merely a symbolic demonstration of an idea. The kinetic empathy of a performer wearing a costume on stage echoes with the kinetic empathy in the audience. It is a lived process in time, a shared community, a felt experience. The built-up and sculpted costumes that form the heart of this chapter shape and are shaped by the cultures and communities that nurture them. Costumes, attached to and felt by the unruly moving body, offer ripples and folds in the logical constructs that attempt to codify and manage the complex ideas that touch us in this chapter, ideas subsumed under labels such as Constructivism, Expressionism, Cubism, Postmodernism. Costume refuses thought and returns us always to the body in motion and its cognitive “affect” upon us. At the heart of this chapter is the sense that past and present performers and artists instinctively use sculpted costume in an ethically sound and empowering way, a richly empathic tool, somatic and semiotic in its communication, transforming the body, affecting the “mind” that wears and the mind that watches. Neither is this story of sculptural costume an account that begins at the “beginning” and ends in our own contemporary stages. The synchronic story here centers on the body, nuanced meanings emerging from a variety of practitioners and performances. There are clear themes that unite them, but equally their costumes are individual and idiosyncratic, while embedded in the context of their time. I have chosen to cluster ideas around case studies but for each one discussed there could be many alternative artists

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chosen, and each one I discuss reaches out to others, named or unnamed, contemporary or otherwise. I have chosen to center it, but not exclusively, in early twentieth century Modernism, furthermore starting in Russia, in the first thirty years or so of the last century. Theatre then emerged for the first time as a serious art form, whereas before no one had considered any performance, even classical dance (ballet), as having anything like the high seriousness of painting, sculpture, or music. Costume accordingly gained in significance as the stage grew in respect and recognition. Moreover costume, traditionally sewn by women, was in this period seized and shaped and frequently “performed” by women. Self-devised dance work in Europe, taken out of the hands of male choreographers, theatre managers, and impresarios, enhanced the power and autonomy of female artists, especially dancers (no longer merely “artistes”) giving them agency as never before. The names of women dancers in this early Modernist period in Vienna and elsewhere have been largely forgotten but some of the extraordinary and striking costumes they wore, including those worn by Gertrud Bodenwieser, Hilde Holger, and Lavinia Schulz, are recalled and retrieved in this chapter. Russia in the 1910s also gave some women an opportunity to work as artists and designers in theatre, a situation that the revolution briefly consolidated in the 1920s. These “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” (Bowlt and Drutt 2000) form another vital thread of the story. They seized the lead given by the experimental costumes of the male-dominated Russian Futurists (such as those responsible for Victory Over the Sun, 1913) and helped to delineate the bounds of “Constructivism” itself as they explored and tested their stagecraft. Working alongside or at a distance (literally and metaphorically) from these imaginative and committed Russian designers and performers were the groundbreaking artists of the West European avant-garde, many of whom worked with costume. Oskar Schlemmer, teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany, stands out in this regard as a practitioner who made and moved in his own costumes, rather than designing them on paper and losing touch with them when they reached the body of the performer. We shall look at his esoteric and extraordinarily beautiful Das Triadische Ballet (henceforward The Triadic Ballet) costumes in performance, concentrating not so much on his complex theories of costume but asking about the effect of these costumes on wearer and watcher, sourcing their power and their beauty. Much of our discussion on Schlemmer and his contemporaries centers on the notion of “the abstract” which morphs and transforms on the performing body. “Abstraction” manifested itself much less problematically in painting and sculpture than on the stage, where costume, impossibly, oddly, experimentally but often triumphantly, had to square the circle of idea and fleshly actuality. The difficulty encountered with abstraction and the body is that abstraction notionally tried to realize the “essential” or most basic perceptual forms such as shape (often, but not always, geometrical) and color. It dominated much early Modernist art in the first twenty to thirty years of the twentieth century beginning with the Cubists in France, and the abstract painting of Wassily Kandinsky in Russia, around 1910. The paintings consisted of purely formal experiments with color and shape. We shall look in this chapter at the impact of the moving body on these notions of abstract purity. If visual artists seek their “essences” on canvas and in color and form, what is the “essential” quality that only the moving body reveals? Moving out of Modernism into the postmodern era, we will witness how Robert Wilson, sensitive to costume’s unique closeness to the body, uses it to enhance and magnify the presence of the performer’s body on stage, finely augmenting his careful spatial placement and measured motion in performance. The Black Rider here provides our case study. The tools of the sculptor are those of the maker of costume: except that added to volume, form, texture, weight, light, and color are the unpredictable elements of space, time, and motion: and above all, the body. In Russia during the 1910s, artists, severally and together, discovered these intoxicating elements of their art. It was an artistic milieu that created a lively cutting-edge theatre in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

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In addition to Stanislavski and Meyerhold, Taïrov was producing respected experimental productions in his Moscow Chamber Theatre.4 In his theatre, stage designers attempted to harmonize the set and costume within what Strutinskaia describes as the “rhythmic plastic construction” of the stage (Strutinskaia 2014: 81). The new Cubo-Futurist stage spaces presaged the full-blown Constructivist stages of Meyerhold, as in the iconic Magnanimous Cuckold (Figure  5.1) which gave the audience a “real” space: there were no naturalistic elements in the design, only a structure, a form: Painting and decor have to leave the stage. They are to be replaced by objects which can provide the same kind of real space and objectiveness as the performing actor does: [like] architecture and sculpture . . . theatre is aware of the need not for the illusion of space, but for real space, not for the picturesque imagining of objects, but for their real substance. Efros quoted in Strutinskaia 2014: 875 This “real space” of the stage in which the “real” actor moves is the space of Russian Constructivism. In such a space, costume lost both its illusory and its naturalistic functions. The space is “objective” and

Figure 5.1 Fernand Crommelynk’s The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922, design by Liubov Popova © Bakhrushin Museum, Moscow, General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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(so-called) “real” (i.e., there is no attempt at illusion, only wooden machinery for acting on) and costumes similarly become tools for performing in, as wonderfully versatile as the wooden structures the actors leap on and off. Popular theatre forms such as circus often inspired the Modernist avant-garde, and Constructivist costume is no exception. In some cases, such as in Vladimir Tatlin’s designs for Zangesi (1923) the result is a quite brilliant mix of Constructivist abstract influences and slapstick humor. These costumes reveal Tatlin’s Constructivist interest in using form but here he explores form by exaggerating the living body’s contours: unusually, perhaps, the slightly geometric costumes and masks manage to combine humor with formal properties. In Grief, the lean and stick-like body is exaggerated by the angular somewhat two-dimensional dress, the face is reduced to geometric shapes—a triangle (a mask?), little round black glasses (as if she were blind?) and a black covering headdress of half circles. Here Constructivist (geometric) form is made fleshy and human, vulnerable, and shrinking. Laughter’s costume is Falstaff-like in its proportions and again harnesses geometric (essential) form to create a fully living and breathing character, bursting with life and energy. The cartoon-like creatures that he depicts are irresistibly funny and empathic, so that the unreal touches us more keenly than the “real.” Khlebnikov’s Zangesi echoes the production of Victory Over the Sun which was partly written by Khlebnikov and designed by Kazimir Malevich ten years previously. Both were products of Russian Futurism, so-called, a movement that has much more in common with visionary German Expressionism

Figure 5.2 Vladimir Tatlin’s design for Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangesi, 1923 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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Figure 5.3 Vladimir Tatlin’s costume design Grief for Valimir Khlebnikov’s Zangesi 1923 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

than it has with either Italian Futurism or Russian Constructivism. The Russian Futurists, like the rest of the Russian avant-garde visual artists, abstracted their art from reality, and particularly experimented with poetic and incomprehensible “sound language”(s), but they were more driven by a mystical desire to touch a harmonic and revelatory “essence of being” than by the Constructivists’ down to earth, systematic, even scientific, understanding of aesthetics. It is hard to know if the costume designs for the 1913 production of Victory Over the Sun were realized as the drawings indicate. Given the disorganization

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Figure 5.4 Vladimir Tatlin’s costume design for Laughter, Zangesi, 1923 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

and lack of funds for the rest of the production, it seems unlikely. These costumes are of interest, however, as very early examples of attempts to abstract the human form by built-up costume, synthesizing the costume with the angular abstract spatial designs on the back cloths hanging behind each scene. They reveal the human face of Russian Futurism which tempers the scientific abstraction of later Constructivism, does not share Italian Futurism’s iconoclastic methods, and which helps us to read the costume designs as stage costumes. I suggest they have more in common with Tatlin’s humorous and

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warmly human approach than is usually recognized. While the costumes connect visually to the set, they can be linked to the various characters such as “Costume Design for the Enemy” which is all jagged lines (like a walking fir tree?), and also seems to wear a faceless, blank green mask; and there may be a joke concealed in “Design for a New Man” whose costume is all geometric shapes, highly padded, and rendering the performer it would seem, helplessly static. “The Mugger” (Figure 5.5) sports a sinister cowl and built-up convex chest, like an executioner. Perhaps costume is the hidden key to the tone of this extraordinary production with its cartoon-like characters that appeal to our sense of caricature and deepseated sense of absurdity.

Figure 5.5 Kazimir Malevich’s costume design “The Mugger” for Valimir Khlebnikov’s Victory Over the Sun, 1913 © St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

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Designers like Tatlin and Malevich appear to work with sympathetic forms that have eternal appeal to (Western) audiences. Drawing on old jokes, they sidestep the high seriousness of the Constructivist avant-garde and trust to audience affect, laughter, and empathy. There are also clear parallels between Khlebnikov and the Russian Futurists, and Dada, probably via Kandinsky who traveled between Russia and Germany (Melzer [1976] 1980: 16–17). Hugo Ball was instrumental in starting the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 in Zurich; he developed, with his collaborators and co-performers, a non-narrative, phonic, and highly visual form of performance using masks and costumes. Ball was driven by current mystical Expressionist ideas which he had developed in Munich (city of cabaret and Frank Wedekind) in the company of Wassily Kandinsky and others, around the same date as Victory Over the Sun (1913). Again one can easily underestimate the sense of fun alongside Ball’s high seriousness which must have permeated the anarchic stage at the Cabaret Voltaire, which in its brief season in 1916 displayed some extraordinary performances. There is insufficient space here to explore the full richness of Dada dance and its use of mask and costume.6 However, it would seem that costume somewhat freed Dada women from usual expectations. Ruth Hemus describes the sexual gaze in which female dancers were often held and the resistance offered by loose costumed and masked dancers such as Sophie Taeuber. Taeuber reminds us of what she calls the “physical embodied aspect” of Dada (Hemus 2007: 95). Costume in Dada “is somewhere between body and machine, agent and puppet, nature and technology” (95). Dancers were often concealed behind Marcel Janco’s masks, or encased in stiff cardboard outfits. The costume that Hugo Ball made to perform his sound poem Karawane necessitated him being carried, probably sideways, onto the stage and sideways off again. The text he recited (“gadji beri bimba glandridi . . .”) reminds us of Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangesi for which Tatlin designed Grief and Laughter. Unlike Tatlin however, Ball was not a skilled costume designer. Nor had he experience of performing. Ball’s virtuoso performance that still resonates through the years was probably both accidental and a direct result of his restrictive costume. He describes his debut in his Dada diary Flight Out of Time (Ball 1974: 70–1). The costume was highly colorful and visually startling and initially no doubt had the impact on the audience Ball desired. We should not underestimate the physical effect of this costume however on Ball’s (self) body image and ability to perform. To Ball, the hat—“a high, blue and white striped witch doctor’s hat” (Goldberg [1979] 2001: 51)—would have at first made him feel taller and grander, and it would also make his head feel larger and more prominent: but I suspect it also made him cautious in his head movements lest it fall off, causing him great tension. It probably had the effect of a full-head mask, whereby the performer has to turn the whole head, perforce more slowly than would be natural, in order to see to the sides: and he had to do this to read his poem on the three music stands placed around him, as he apparently did not know it off by heart. The desperation of needing to see it would add to the stress. As to the body costume, he encased his legs in shiny blue cardboard tubes “which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk” (Ball 1974: 70). These tubes would have stopped him walking because he could not bend his legs. In fact if we look at the photograph (Figure 5.6) it looks like his immobility was compounded by a cardboard tunic which encased his body to his knees. Finally the richly colored cardboard cape “scarlet inside and gold outside” (70) secured at the neck, which Ball optimistically claims made a wing-like movement by raising and lowering his elbows (70), I suggest probably gave very little movement at all, perhaps opening and shutting the cape slightly and with enormous effort. He says he flapped his wings “energetically,” no doubt squeezing the maximum movement out of them but with minimal results. In front he held his two arms rigidly bent at an angle apparently also constrained by cardboard tubes; his hands are gloved by long cardboard fingers with little or no articulation. This

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Figure 5.6 Hugo Ball, Karawane, 1916 © Maike Steinkamp/ Arp Museum.

costume from hell pushed Ball to his limits. As his performance progressed he cranked up his mode of delivery into “the pomp of lamentation” and “liturgical singing” (71) to match the “pomp of my staging.” (70). Perhaps (and this is pure speculation) it was so hard to move and see his words that he even gave up reading the script and had to improvise (and Ball was not a professional performer, unlike his girlfriend Emmy Hennings), singing his vowel sequences “like a recitative” (71). The forced effort Ball put into his performance and voice is painful to imagine and probably caused him to hyperventilate before finally he was carted off stage. A mystical experience indeed. Oskar Schlemmer identified a dilemma when artists design costumes for the human body. He describes it (Schlemmer [1925] 1996: 22–3) as the choice between “changing” abstract space in deference the human form and the result is naturalism (“nature or the imitation of nature”): or the human form is recast or built-up/transformed to fit the geometric “mold” of abstract space, as in Ball’s

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anti-naturalistic costume. In the right hands this sort of abstraction in connection with costume and the body can touch the very heights of beauty, humor, and human empathy, but it can have a dangerous dehumanizing effect. Working with Taïrov at the Chamber Theatre in Moscow, Alexandra Exter produced designs for Salomé (1917) and Romeo and Juliet (1921), where I suggest (like Tatlin in Zangesi) she managed to achieve a synthesis neither subjecting the space to the naturalism of the human actor nor transforming the actor into the rigid abstract lines, angles, planes, and curves of space. She believed that free movement was a “fundamental element of the theatrical art” and “only architectonic constructions created by the application of volumetrical forms can fuse with the harmonious plastic whole and its freely moving figures” (Exter in Misler 2014: 55). The set of Salomé illustrates the emphasis on volume and color as expressive elements; and her costumes sensitively pick up this volumatic language and rich colors (green, orange, and blue) in Romeo and Juliet (Figure 5.7).

Figure 5.7 Alexandra Exter’s costume design for Three Slaves, Romeo and Juliet, 1921 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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This synthesis is a characteristic feature of Exter’s staging/costumes with stunning effect. Evidence of the performative power of Exter’s costumes largely rests upon the film Aelita (1924) in which we can witness the designs in action. Her design for Aelita, the Queen of the Martians, shows an ability, unusual in non-performers, to design a built-up costume on paper that actually works as both a sculptural and a character costume when worn and in motion. Aelita’s costume in the film (Figure 5.8) seems flexible and relatively unrestricting for the actress: indeed it may have (as all the best costumes do) helped her performance by its haptic properties demanding poise and dignity, and a certain alienation or unnaturalness as befits the queen of another planet. Amazingly it never loses its complex sculptural form in the wearing of it: its three breast plates and the spiral skirts worthy of Tatlin’s tower in their dynamic off-center spin, consistently retain or return to their shape, and the delicate multifold double-spiked headdress that spreads out from her head crowns her as queen without ever losing shape or kinetic and visual power. The costume and those of the other “Martian” characters in the film seem to grow out of the settings themselves—levels, angles, passageways, and planes along which figures move continually. The result is a unified concept realized as an event: the 3-D “new” space scintillates with visual, haptic, and human presence.

Figure 5.8 Alexandra Exter’s costume design for Aelita, the Queen of the Martians, Aelita, 1924 © St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

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Exter was typical of her peers in that she designed her costumes to harmonize visually and sculpturally with the set. Varvara Stepanova in The Death of Tarelkin did the same (Figures 5.9 and 5.10). The original designs tend to lose their impact in the canonical and much-duplicated black and white photographs commonly reproduced, prompting us mistakenly to conclude that the “overalls” or “boilersuits” (as they appear) were not designed so much for visual synergies with the set, but rather driven by ideological concerns of finding a suitable flexible “worksuit” for theatre. This is wrong. It is practically designed for use/work but is also carefully visually designed. This unfortunate utilitarian association is just as strong in Liubov Popova’s designs for The Magnanimous Cuckold (Figure 5.1). The setting in which the costumes operate is utilitarian, abstract, and nonrepresentational, unduly influencing our judgment of the worn clothing: and the costumes are not at all clear in the photographs. In fact the costumes were visually strong, subtly shaped, used color, and were individually distinctive. Both Stepanova and Popova indeed designed their stage costumes as loose-fitting garments or acting “worksuits,” which were perhaps inflected by the easily worn loose-fitting clothes of the clown in circus, but they were as carefully constructed as any stage element in this production. They “harmonized” with the space, but also allowed the body to move freely in accordance with Meyerhold’s biomechanical principles of acting that demanded strongly physical acting with flexibility of movement.

Figure 5.9 Varvara Stepanova’s costume design for Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin’s play The Death of Tarelkin, 1922 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

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Figure 5.10 Varvara Stepanova’s costume design for the Doctor, The Death of Tarelkin, 1922 © Bakhrushin Museum Moscow; General Director Dmitry Rodionov.

The beginning of the twentieth century marked the emergence of “new” stage spaces in Western Europe just as it did in Russia. The rethinking of stage space and the establishing of scenography as an artistic practice brought a new sensitivity to costume. Costume was an important component of the new scenographic art, contextualized by the new spatial dynamics and complementary to them. This generation of new stage architects headed by Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, recast the theatre stage (as the Constructivists did in Russia) as a 3-D non-representative/non-naturalistic space, i.e., a more “abstract” space even though it represented real places. They used volumatic structures to build the space, and wanted “volumatic” bodies performing in them. Using new materials such as iron and synthetics, 3-D structures replaced backcloths, and lighting molded the space more sculpturally. The problem in early Modernist performance always was how to make the organic body speak the language of abstraction and form and yet inspire the empathy and affective power that theatre—and dance—conjures.7 One answer—and perhaps the only viable answer—was the costumed body. The development and use of sculptural costume in these years is intimately connected to this aesthetic problem. Purely abstract stages of kinetic form, shape, and color, and kinetic lightshows, both of which appeared frequently on Futurist stages and at the Bauhaus in Germany, ultimately had limited appeal. They were like abstract sculptures in motion lacking the engaging human element of the performer. Giacomo Balla’s Fireworks, a five-minute piece, performed at the Teatro Costanzi, Rome, in 1917, was

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(to use the words of the online catalogue of the V&A, n.d.) a “ballet without dancers in which brightly colored geometric shapes were lit from without and within, the lighting responding to Stravinsky’s musical score.” Similarly I suggest the performing body in Kurt Schmidt’s Das Mechanisches Ballett (henceforward The Mechanical Ballet) at the Bauhaus had no haptic connection with the large abstract shapes wooden figures they carried across the stage. These less successful Modernist instances of abstracting the human body and turning it into a moving sculpture without haptic connection remind us that it is kinetic empathy that affects and moves us. Expressionist dancers working in Germany and Vienna in the first thirty years of the last century wanted to express and show visibly what they thought were the fundamental elements of being, and these elements were not squares and circles and lines. It was a secular yet mystical movement. Ideas of the so-called “primal” and “primitive” (and so “uncontaminated” or “essential”) permeated their dancing as it did the paintings of many Expressionist artists of the time. Many of the leading women dancers in Germany and Vienna testify how dancing became their life and in some sense their religion. It freed them from male control, gave them a livelihood through performance and teaching (more or less, and however precarious), and in many cases, as persecuted Jewish women, gave them a stability and reason to live amid horror, displacement, and loss. The desire to extend, exaggerate, enlarge, and empower (especially the female) body, especially the female body, runs through Expressionist dance, beginning with Loie Fuller as discussed in connection with the female sublime in Chapter 4. Expressionist dancers in this period, who were mainly women, fully utilized sculptural costume to push the dance to new limits. Lavinia Schulz in Germany, a visual artist and performer, created the most extraordinary built-up costumes (Figure 5.11).8

Figure 5.11 Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt’s costume design “Die Toboggan Frau,” 1923 © Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.

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In Vienna, classically trained Gertrud Bodenwieser created her own dance method, a descendent of the free dance first seen in Vienna with Loie Fuller in 1898 and Isadora Duncan in 1902. This “free dance” reversed the strict rules of classical ballet technique and freed the body to move without corsets and pointe shoes.9 By the 1920s Bodenwieser had her own school and pupils, and one of these was Hilde Holger. Both Bodenwieser and Holger have been little acknowledged for their contribution to somatic knowledge and practice in contemporary dance. They were victims of the Nazi persecution of Jews and they remind us of the incalculable destruction that regime wrought throughout Europe in every sphere of life—personal, familial, cultural, aesthetic. On June 6, 193910 Holger left all her family behind in Vienna and never saw them again, fleeing alone first to India and then to England. Pupils still acknowledge today the influence of these women who developed their own intense and committed forms of dance.11 Hilde Holger maintained that without dance she would, quite literally, have lost her sanity. Because we lack contemporaneous commentary, we must access Holger’s work in other ways. In the posed photo (Figure 5.12) taken by Anton Josef Trcˇka of the young Hilde Holger in her Das Mechanisches Ballett (henceforward Mechanical Ballet) (1926) costume, Holger kneels in a geometric pose and looks up toward stage right. She is encased in a costume that stiffly covers each arm and leg, but her torso appears to be unrestricted, in a leotard. She is not wearing the accompanying helmet, which would have drastically restricted her vision and head movements. Although the photo gives little idea of the vibrant colors of the original, the costume drawing design by Artur Berger (Figure 5.13) does so, and the surface patterns can just be seen on the black and white photograph. The title Mechanical Ballet might suggest an exploration of the idea of the machine and the possible dangers it poses to

Figure 5.12 Hilde Holger in the costume designed by Anton Josef Trcˇka for Mechanical Ballet, 1926. Digital photograph courtesy of Thomas Kampe.

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Figure 5.13 Costume drawing for Mechanical Ballet, 1926, by Artur Berger. Courtesy Primavera Boman, Hilde Holger private collection.

humankind’s well-being. This was a favorite topic during this period. The film of Metropolis (1927) explores this, and is fairly pessimistic as indeed is Gertrud Bodenwieser’s own piece on this topic, Dämon Maschine (henceforward Demon Machine), 1924; Figure 5.14). Holger herself danced in this many times. In it, the costumes allow free movement so that the mechanical movements gradually take over and the machine is victorious. Relatively recently, in 1992, Holger worked with her pupil and well-known contemporary dancer Liz Aggiss to reconstruct the Mechanical Ballet. Aggiss herself stresses the peculiar nature of reconstruction (Aggiss and Cowie 2006: 153): she felt she infused a contemporary currency into the timelessness of Holger’s work (80–1). She also hints of her awareness (backed by the observations of Claudia Kappenberg) that her own uncompromising directness added an individual touch to the reconstructions—not least a touch of humor (81).12 Aggiss describes the costume as difficult—the nose cone on the helmet was especially uncomfortable. Aggiss perceived the Mechanical Ballet as a dance that shifts from position to position but gives little

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Figure 5.14 Gertrud Bodenwieser-Gruppe in Dämon Maschine (Demon Machine), 1924 © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung, ÖNB/Wien/205141-D.

in the way of transitions between poses to the dancer, a dance of precise “arrival points” where the dancer has to find the transitions then settle into a succession of poses.13 It is likely that Holger demanded no less of herself than she demanded from her pupil Aggiss. Expressive of outer form and structure, it is a “salon” piece typical of the time, that is, a short study of huge intensity, “explosive,” to use Aggiss’s words. Holger, at that time in her eighties, would shout at her “Shape! Shape!” and “You are not swastika enough!” as she settled into each position of this exhaustingly difficult dance.14 In the Mechanical Ballet,

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the figure moves from profile dissolving the swastika form and faces audience front as in the photo of Hilde, sliding the knees apart then together and finally lowering the torso with arms wide stretched out in prostration to slide the body down lower finally arriving to the floor in a pose of death. Ironically, or is it tragically, all four reconstructions end in death15 Aggiss 2014, private communication The Mechanical Ballet forces the dancer to work with the costume. The original collaboration in Vienna with Berger16 as costume designer, a prominent film architect, is witness to the interdisciplinary nature of the artistic milieu in Vienna at this time. Dancers were in contact with and mutually influenced by visual artists, designers, and musicians; and in Holger’s case, although she professed to not to know much about visual art17 she was clearly fired by the possibilities of working with visual artists and designers. “I wanted to achieve something and everything interested me. Art, painting, literature, sculpture, film, simply everything. I looked the large Russian groups, Meyerhold, Tairow (sic) and the films of Eisenstein” (Hirschbach and Takvorian 1990: 17). Like other Modernists Holger was further influenced by puppets, in her case Richard Teschner’s Figurenspiegel; Teschner was generous enough to acknowledge that Holger had in turn influenced him.18 Crucially in Holger’s dances material artifice works in conjunction with the body. Berger’s puppet-like drawing suggests a quite angular and playful mobile body. The relationship between design image and actual costume is a complex one. It is likely that work with the costume resulted in a dance that Berger’s drawing does not anticipate, one which draws on dynamic impulses into several held shapes prompted by the actual wearing and bearing of the costume. Her dance Mechanical Ballet was, I suggest, more optimistic than that of her peers and quite different from the machine dance of Bodenwieser. Instead of experimenting with mechanical movements made by the body as in Demon Machine, where the costumes allowed free movement, she submitted to the mechanics of a haptically rich costume and moved from precise shape to precise shape. She discovered what was possible for the artificially extended/enhanced organic body by the way of minimal movement in between the shapes. The swastika she assumed kneeling sideways is impossible to make without the hand extensions of the costume. I also suggest that her dance is closely allied (though we cannot know the extent of her knowledge of it) to Schlemmer’s The Triadic Ballet (1922) not only in its colorful beauty but in its attempt to show a more sophisticated idea of the mechanized and the artificial, namely the machine, than many of her contemporaries, that is, a mutual interaction of organicism and artifice, stressing human agency and beauty. Holger wrote an article in 1947 for the Bombay News using words that could have been written by Schlemmer himself: “Modern dance is of unique importance in education as it develops three important aspects of a personality: expression of the body, the spirt and the soul” (my italics) (Hirschbach and Takvorian 1990: 72).19 Artists including Holger added the vital element of the material world to the Expressionistic body, spirit, and soul. They anticipate in action the ideas of the later embodied philosopher Merleau-Ponty: “Instead of a mechanistic deterministic relationship of causality, we have an organic relation of motivation between subject and the world, such that the body possess the world in a certain way while gearing itself into that world” (Langer 1989: 82). Aggiss also reconstructed Holger’s The Golem (1937), Le Martyre de Saint Sébastian (1923), and Die Forelle [The Trout] (1923), under Holger’s direction. We recall Aggiss’s comment quoted earlier that “Ironically, or is it tragically, all four reconstructions end in death.” Kathe Berl designed a mask for Holger to wear in her dance The Golem and like Holger, Berl lost all her family in the war. This heavily costumed dance choreographed so close in time to the near destruction of their lives prefigures their singular tragedies. A golem, in Jewish tradition, is a body without a soul, a creature made from clay who has had

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Figure 5.15 Mask for The Golem. Courtesy Primavera Boman, Hilde Holger Private Collection, photograph by Donatella Barbieri.

life breathed into it. The Golem was performed in a large costume bodysuit like a huge ill-fitting loose skin hanging off the body, round mittens that fully enclose the unarticulated hands, and a full-head mask that when revealed halfway through the dance stares blindly, as if it does not see, cannot see, will never see. Holger demanded that Aggiss (in the reconstruction) inhabit the creature totally and embody it. “You have to become it” said Holger: “I am Golem.” The heavy “blind” motions of the Golem creature as reconstructed by Aggiss reveal expression “without” of the feeling within, working in conjunction with the somewhat formless bodysuit and blinding mask. Litz Pisk was a pupil and colleague of Holger’s from this period, and later, like Holger, made her home in England and taught in London. She said:

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You inhabit your body by your presence in it and by your awareness of it. You do not watch it from the outside, arrange yourself in front of the mirror, stand or walk next to yourself, observe and analyse but connect yourself with your body and feel for an inner rightness. Awareness extends from the nakedness of your existence, devoid of any adopted attitudes. It starts with your breath, your pulsation and your feeling for your sap from the bones to the skin. Pisk [1975] 1982: 10 And, we might add, from the skin to the costume. “The Golem had a densely weighted, solid physicality demanding an enormous presence alongside a refined use of a mask which rendered me blind” (Aggiss in Aggiss and Cowie 2006: 82). Hilde Holger admired the painter and dancer/choreographer Oskar Schlemmer who was working concurrently in the Bauhaus art and design school in Weimar and Dessau. It seems likely they shared the same intellectual approach to the machine, one that believed in the agency of humankind and the ability to harness the artificial to higher purposes and not be merely defeated by the mechanical. They were both down to earth, practical. Art should be efficacious not effete. Holger said “you have to have good technique . . . and be a good person . . . you cannot be an artist without first being a decent human being” (Hirschbach and Takvorian 1990: 35). Throughout his time at the Bauhaus, Schlemmer tried to promote the stage and performance as a living laboratory to test, question, and “ground” in the body the high-flown theoretical ideas that permeated the institution, some of which he considered quite dangerous in their dogmatism and abstraction from life20—and costume became his most vital tool for offsetting this tendency. Kandinsky’s ideas on, for example, universally “true” color correspondences were activated and embodied and we might say “tested” on the Bauhaus stage. For example, Kandinsky insisted that blue was always a calm and “circular” color, red an active “square” color, and yellow was “triangular” and the most active color of all. Schlemmer accordingly created a “Space Dance” in 1926 that dressed three performers in blue, red, and yellow waistcoats respectively. Under the waistcoats were costumed bodies that visually and haptically realized Schlemmer’s idea of a universal “essence,” in his case, not the isolated Bauhaus circles, squares, lines, and geometric form, nor any single color (or three) but the human body.21 Full-body heavy padded costumes and neutral full-head masks (Figure 5.16) smoothed out the body shape into this analogue of perfection, concealing individual traits while they simultaneously heightened the haptic sensitivity of each performer. He then activated the so-called “corresponding” “blue,” “red,” and “yellow” movements of slow striding, walking, and “tripping.” Schlemmer never came up with dogmatic answers and may even have had a wry sense of humor lurking under such a dance, in natural antipathy to Kandinsky’s “science of art.” The central section of Schlemmer’s 1925 essay “Man and Art Figure” conflates the puppet and dancer into the costumed “Art Figure.” It remains one of the most complex essays on costume ever written and refers directly to the sculpted costumes of his 1922 The Triadic Ballet. It is here that he argues for the human body, which he saw as a complex gestalt, a perfection of shape that constantly changes and transforms itself through the joints and swivels of its daily motion, to be recast and transformed through costume in performance. The transformation of the body via artificial forms as he did in The Triadic Ballet is driven by intellectual “Gestalt” ideas that are complex, originate in early Romanticism and stretch back into German intellectual history.22 Das Triadische Ballet (The Triadic Ballet) costumes combine, and set in motion and in time, geometric forms extending the perfect mathematic or geometry of the body gestalt, which was in Schlemmer’s

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Figure 5.16 Oskar Schlemmer’s costume designs for The Bauhaus Dances: Form Dance © Consemüller. Image courtesy Bauhaus Dessau.

philosophy a perfect example of a gestalt form. However, The Triadic Ballet also carries an immediate visceral impact and shock, a fascination and originality that are clear even from photographs, and felt yet more keenly in performance. If we simply enjoy the kinesthetic empathy these costumes evoke, we move much closer to what Raymond Williams calls “real mobile bodies engaged in tangible practice” (Counsell 2004: 155). This goes some way to explaining our own strong reactions to them. This enhanced hapticity coupled with the visual transfiguration of the human “Ur-form” intrigues the imagination as we move through Schlemmer’s threefold shimmering worlds in this his major work with corresponding music.23 Schlemmer was a dancer himself, though he was self-trained and not a classical ballet dancer by any means: in fact the novelty and individuality at that time of being “self-trained” as a professional dancer is hard to appreciate today. His sense of the body as the perfect gestalt came from his own proprioreception, his inner experience of his own body moving through space, and not solely through visual analysis. He performed in many of these costumes himself and was aware of their effect upon the body image24 of the wearer. He was perhaps the first visual artist to turn his attention seriously to the experience of the performer in a search for artistic integrity, a sensibility which later became the staple of the performance artist, along with creating an equally affective experience for the audience.

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Figure 5.17 Disc skirt, dancer: Marta Navarrete Villalba, The Triadic Ballet, version by Gerhard Bohner, Bavarian State Ballet II © Wilfried Hösl 2014.

Figure 5.18 Spiral, dancer: Nagisa Hatano, The Triadic Ballet, version by Gerhard Bohner, Bavarian State Ballet II © Wilfried Hösl 2015.

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Our final case study is Robert Wilson, whose love of order as well as beauty makes him a natural heir to Schlemmer. I have explored the links between the work of Schlemmer and that of Robert Wilson elsewhere (Trimingham 2011: 58, 69, 121) but here I focus on Wilson’s equally affective—and effective—use of costume. The lens I have chosen is The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets revived for the Barbican in 2004, with Marianne Faithfull in the leading role of Pegleg, and music by Tom Waits. The story is an old Romantic German tale of selling one’s soul to the devil for twelve magic bullets, reworked by William Burroughs (Barbican Centre 2004: 20). Appropriately enough the 2004 production is steeped in German Gothic and Expressionist imagery, strongly reminiscent visually of the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). In this film, as in The Black Rider, angular frames continually push our sense of balance and order off-center (Figure 5.19) and a highly non-naturalistic world peopled by heavily made-up actors in extraordinary costumes is presented to us. Once a naturalistic picture “postcard” (Schlemmer 1927: 68) representation of the world is abandoned, we enter a newly and differently structured world that assaults our senses with shock and pleasure. Robert Wilson is a lover of structure and form as much as Oskar Schlemmer. We are also reminded of the women Expressionist dancers who refused to merely “feel” something but insisted on showing. “And do let’s use the French term for “show” [un spectacle]— such a better way of putting it—since it emphasizes both beauty and accessibility, two elements very important to Bob” says his costume designer, Jacques Renaud (Wainwright 2011: 252). When dance sits partly in the costume, the material wisdom of the costume is able to shape what the dancer says, rather than relying on an interior sense of psychological naturalism. The mix of the material world of stage and costumed body together with intellectual planning, precision, and thoughtful structuring is a thread that runs through Expressionist dance, Oskar Schlemmer’s stage work, and Robert Wilson’s operas.

Figure 5.19 Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican Centre, London 2004, performers Monika Tahal, Janet Henfrey, Matt McGrath, Gabriela Santinelli. Costumes designed by Frida Parmeggiani. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

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Highly structured artifice is lovingly shaped in Wilson’s The Black Rider. Within the deliberately supporting outline frame of the stage opening (used by Schlemmer too), The Black Rider in both setting and costumes plays with angle and line, horizontals and verticals, up and down, space and surfaces, squares, rectangles, and trapezoids, scale, shrinking and extending, light and darkness, and color: red, white, and black continually interchanging, vibrant blue and orange adding richness to the limited and controlled stage palette (Figure 5.19). Costume, designed by Frida Parmeggiani, in this piece harks back to Exter: the aesthetic of space and costumed body is perfectly complementary. “[T]he role of costume design in a Robert Wilson production is equal to all the other elements” (Reynaud 2011: 248). Wilson insists that the costumes are present from the moment the lighting rehearsals start and it is clear from Birgit Mögenburg and Ralf Brinkhoff’s rehearsal photographs that costume was present in the 2004 production of The Black Rider rehearsal room. They are essential within his so-called abstract spaces, a key part in rehearsal of the evolving “orchestra” of elements: In terms of work, the first thing to go is what’s expected of the mortal body, and like the creation of a refined instrument, the actor’s gangly arms and legs slowly change through hard labor and concentration, transforming into strings and pedals in order to project the physics of light and harmony. In the end, a group of players, writers musicians and technicians becomes one great big orchestra, or actually something even bigger than that: another planet, somewhat like our own but definitely

Figure 5.20 Rehearsal photograph for Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican Centre, London, 2004, performers (left to right) Sonˇ a Cˇerviná, Janet Henfrey, Dean Robinson, Gabriela Santinelli, Jake Thornton, Mary Margaret O’Hara, unknown, Jack Willis, Matt McGrath, Nigel Richards, Marianne Faithfull. Costumes designed by Frida Parmeggiani. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

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much better dressed, where very element is intimately related and the loss of a piece makes the puzzle worthless. Wainwright 2011: 252 The multidisciplinary “orchestra” of The Black Rider also included the Gothic songs, distorted voices, talking, shrieking, barking, giving a stylized layer of sound reminiscent of early Dada performed poetry, that perfectly complimented the Expressionist design elements.25 While natural line and volume in the design are thrown off-center, Wilson always balances one form with another with precision that makes for a rich intellectual satisfaction as well as sensory delight in this “better dressed” world. Pegleg (Marianne Faithfull)’s outfit appears as black in scene one and then red in a later scene, precise in every detail yet utterly changed because of color. The other main characters such as the bride and her lover similarly change from black to white to red. The costumes themselves use high collars, geometric shape, gowns with huge sculpted trains on bodies that move in harmony with the visual aesthetics of the space. In one scene Pegleg is lowered from above and it is her long thin coattails that first appear dangling into the space, a beautiful sculpted image as she descends. It is clear from rehearsal shots that the costume aids the performer in embodying their performance as well as executing the precise sculptural choreography of movement, stillness, and group poses.

Figure 5.21 Rehearsal photograph for Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican Centre London 2004, performers (left to right) Jack Willis, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Matt McGrath. Costumes designed by Frida Parmeggiani. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

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Figure 5.22 Rehearsal photograph for Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican Centre London 2004, performer (left) Mary Margaret O’Hara, with Associate Director Ann-Christin Rommen. Costume designed by Frida Parmeggiani. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

Wilson would never expect actors freely to “play” in rehearsal with the physicality of the costume and its haptic effect (or restrictions) to “discover” their own performance, but I suggest that their final performance is no less structured by their costume, a precision tool predesigned (he seldom uses padding to distort the body shape26) to help them step and stand and lie with the bodily exactness Wilson requires. He uses workshops to begin with, and might show videos that get at the essence of what he wants (Huppert 2011: 80). He gives formal structures and boundaries to the work such as costume, but also for example approaches text through its “musicality” of rhythm and tone (78) and relies on the understanding of the actor to tune into his stage language (Huppert 2011: 85; Kurt 2011: 281). The costume designer has the same freedom, as long as s/he sticks to the rule of clear lines and shapes and no patterned fabric (Reynaud 2011: 245–6). Reynaud points out that although he (Reynaud) is involved with designing the costume from the earliest rehearsals, he knows that “the light will be a surprise” (248) so he tends to stick to a “cold scale of colour” or strong clear colors such as “white, red, deep purple” so that the light and costumes will work together. “The look is given not by the costumes themselves . . . but by the light that Bob puts on them” (249). Actor, costume, space, and light finally coalesce, often in hours of on stage rehearsal, into precise structures on the stage (Figure 5.19). In the words of Barbieri: “Wilson has transferred something from the object to the body which makes the body more meaningful.”27

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Figure 5.23 Rehearsal photograph for Robert Wilson, The Black Rider, Barbican London 2004, performers (left to right) Nigel Richards, Jack Willis. Photograph by Ralf Brinkhoff and Birgit Mögenburg © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.

In Empire of Ecstasy, Toepfer points out that in the twentieth century, “Prevailing attitudes towards the body did not create a unified version of human identity but instead spawned contradictory strands of perception” (Toepfer 1997: 5). There is no unifying view of the body that is “Modernist”: “bodies are modern because they create significant instabilities of perception”(5). The principles underlying costume in performance apply across the boundaries of Constructivism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, postmodernism: in simple terms, meaning emerges from contact of body and material form. “Masks and costumes . . . serve as communication regulators. On the symbolic level, these correspond with the membranes on a metabolic level” (Krausse 2014: 42). Krausse’s word “membranes” reminds us of the fragility of the flesh and ultimately the fragility of the costume. Ironically in material archives, only the unsuccessful productions’ costumes tend to survive (Bowlt 2013b: 52). Costumes are pulverized on stage, sweated into, mended, reworn, adapted, and

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Figure 5.24 Alexandra Exter, costume design for the costume of a Russian Soldier in the comedy The Death of Tarelkin, c.1921. © Rodchenko & Stepanova Archive, DACS , RAO .

finally thrown away as rags. Few survive the years. Often we are left with the black and white, often slightly fuzzy or faded, iconic photographs, much reprinted; and if we are very fortunate we may have a costume drawing that can reveal more to the sensitive eye. The inked lines and carefully placed colors of a costume designer are not those of a painter. Every contour of the body speaks, every fold of cloth is eloquent (Figure 5.24). An effort of the kinetic imagination reveals whether visually stunning costumes of the past (the extraordinary Cubist costumes of Parade or the fantastical Futurist costumes spring to mind) remained a purely visual spectacle, however startling, that nevertheless failed, and I suggest often still fail, to touch a visceral nerve within us. Designers and practitioners infuse costume with its agency through their kinetic empathy: and, as the costume designer knows deep in their bones, through the reciprocal kinetic empathy of the watcher and witness in live performance.

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6 A DIFFERENT PERFORMATIVITY: SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND HISTORY ON STAGE Between the stage and the everyday Focused on the costume’s complex relationship with history and fashion, this final chapter concludes an exploration of the cultural, societal, and creative agency of the costumed performing body by exploring how it represents reality through observation and imitation. Unlike the costumes in Chapter 5, those debated here exist, or are intended to appear to exist, either in the present, or in a constructed past that is defined through them. By engaging directly with the costume as a representation of clothing, the focus will be on the question that initially inspired this research, namely, how does the costumed performance differ from the dressed “performance” in the quotidian,1 and, more crucially, how does the designer negotiate the relationship between the two? A visit to most text-based theatre or opera performance will involve an encounter with performers whose costumes are conceived within contemporary and/or historical interpretations of everyday dress. How then does a projected “authenticity” of the character reside in the clothes the performer wears on stage? And how can authenticity be defined when, as we have seen in previous chapters, costume is a dialogic element of performance with its own, often complex and constructed meanings? In other words, how does costume, with its implicit or explicit artificiality, square up to ideas of theatrical “truth” in the context of the prevailing naturalism of contemporary Western theatre? The relationship between stage, fashion, and historical sources will be critical to our understanding, addressing these questions through selected examples from the nineteenth century when notions of historical antiquarianism became prevalent in the theatre, being eventually countered by the couture costumes of the “fashion plays.” Costume’s conflation with couture-influenced theatre-making can be said to have lasted up to World War II . In the decades that followed, contemporary practice has consistently challenged the definition of non-contemporary costume as based primarily on historical correctness. The contemporary productions included in this chapter will find costume utilized not only to enlighten us about the characters, but also, through a reframing in the here-and-now of the performance, the role of theatre in society, and the way the dressed body generates meaning on stage. Certain examples of costume that are examined here refer to two existing research projects on the subject. The Encounters in the Archives research project2 (2010 and ongoing) has generated research from the analysis of selected archived costumes from the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Archives, which were “encountered” by scholars and practitioners belonging to a number of different disciplines (Barbieri 2012a, 2012b and 2013). The Designs for the Performer3 research project (2002–5) 167

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initiated conversations with costume designers whose work provides insights via selected productions in the concluding section of this chapter. These conversations are reprised in light of the historical and thematic explorations undertaken in this and previous chapters. Fashion historian and curator Amy de la Haye’s reading of a “different performativity” in costume, in response to Lydia Sokolova’s costume for La Perlouse in Sergei Diaghilev’s Le Train Bleu, which opened in Paris in 1924, provide the initial frame for this chapter. Designed by Coco Chanel and held in the V&A Archive of Theatre and Performance (Figures 6.1), de la Haye first viewed this costume when she took part in the Encounters in the Archive research project in 2010. She had written extensively about Chanel’s work, and yet her encounter with the La Perlouse costume, which she knew from photographs, was revelatory. The vibrancy of the rose pink, the artisanal quality of the knitting, the diminished length of the garment and its being “mended all over,” led her to conclude that a “different kind of performativity from everyday fashion” was at work in this costume, given how distinctive it was from the swimsuits designed by Chanel for her clients (de la Haye, quoted in Barbieri 2012a). Neither through color nor texture did the equivalent machine-knitted swimwear, worn by Chanel’s customers, possess the stage presence of Sokolova’s costume, which, with its reduced coverage of the body, made the dancer feel “very daring” (Sokolova, quoted in de la Haye 2011: 49). The partial nakedness of the modernist young woman

Figure 6.1 Swimsuit designed by Coco Chanel for Lydia Sokolova as La Perlouse in Le Train Bleu, Ballets Russes, 1924. Courtesy of Chanel, Paris. Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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defined on stage by a costume of newly invented sportswear was already radical, having assimilated the leotard of the circus acrobats discussed in Chapter 4. The character of La Perlouse, stylish in her leisurely milieu, complete with skull cap and rubber shoes, may not have wished to be seen in a mended swimsuit. Indeed, while the mending exposes the personal relationship between the dancer and her costume, it also highlights the forgiving nature of distance and theatre lights, in which, conversely, the enlarged and irregular hand knitting in vibrant colors thrives through its vivid richness and presence as do her large, single pearl earrings. The accelerated wearing-out of the knitting demonstrates how the merging of costume and a body that exceeds its boundaries through its own physical exertion in performance presents another pragmatic distinction from the everyday. Chanel, known for observing the performers from the auditorium and for financing some of Diaghilev’s shows, understood the difference between costume and fashion, and had cleverly highlighted Sokolova’s physical presence through the artisanal quality of the knit that captured light, through color and detail. Authenticity in the production of a fashionable swimsuit-wearing character was dependent upon its presence being rendered eloquent on the stage. Costume is intertwined with the theatre space, where it negotiates light, movement, spatial relationships, other bodies, and the scenography. The tone of the performance had been established by Pablo Picasso’s design for the front cloth, an enormous painting filled with two muscular giantesses, holding hands and dashing across the proscenium arch, set against a vibrant ultramarine background. Like their affecting bodies on the canvas, dress on stage filtered through theatrical dynamics becomes by necessity a more emphatic version of itself in order to become costume. The relationship between everyday dress and the stage in the 1920s is further illuminated by the Parisian fashion trend inspired by Sokolova when her La Perlouse costume was completed in the final fitting with a skullcap and large pearl earrings, improvised through experimentation with materials. Through this instinctive response to body and materials, and her understanding of theatrical scale and proportion, inadvertently Chanel shaped an image of the modernist, feminine head that, disseminated from the stage, became adopted by the fashion world. The promotion of fashion through theatre was not new: Parisian Charles Fredrick Worth (1825–95), responsible since the 1850s for transforming dressmaking for the elite into an international haute-couture industry, was the first couturier to design theatre costumes as well as everyday dress and ball gowns for famous actresses. Amongst the latter, Lillie Langtry (1853–1929) may have engaged in an exchange with Worth that was creatively and commercially mutually beneficial. In her visit to the V&A archive, de la Haye compared Langtry’s cartes-de-visite to the shots of Worth’s gowns worn by anonymous and passive “house models.”4 When worn by the actress the couture gowns would be performed in (Figure 6.2), drawing out “character” while potentially advancing new possibilities for her performance. De la Haye and Mendes confirm how “Jean Worth, son of the founder, realized that ‘an actress of elegance can contribute to an ordinary idea something upon which its originator has not counted’” (2014: 125). The focus on fashionable dress added to the growing importance of female performers across Europe and North America, and brought female audiences into the theatre. Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Letty Lind, and Lillie Langtry asserted their central place on stage with unprecedented popular and critical acclaim, all having worn Charles Worth’s costumes at some point in their careers. By the end of the century Vogue5 noted how “[c]ritics at first night performances of a play give close attention to details of costume. A famous actress is famous for her dresses as well as for her acting” (de la Haye and Mendes 2014: 125).6 If at the turn of the twentieth century, the dance-based performers discussed in Chapter 4—Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Maud Allan, and, later, Josephine Baker—had established their place in history partly through freeing themselves of corsets and petticoats, these female theatre performers used

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Figure 6.2 Carte-de-visite featuring Lillie Langtry in couture, late nineteenth century © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

dress and undress and its relation to the audience to help them conquer the stage. “The radical new possibilities the theatre presented for elaborating new forms of female identity” (Glenn 2000: 10) can again be seen at work in the performer’s exploitation of fashion in their performance. Up until World War II the stage provided a platform for the development and dissemination of new fashions, a role eventually that was transferred to cinematic costume. This could undoubtedly be beneficial for performers: Sokolova felt more radical in a knitted costume than in a tutu, and the specialist expertise of the couturier gave access to a performativity of dress that was made to highest standard and with the best materials. By the mid-1930s actress Gertrude Lawrence was giving advice to female readers of in the Daily Sketch7 as an authority on glamour and lifestyle. In Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1930)

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(Figure 6.3), designed by Gladys Calthrop, Lawrence’s costumes were instead by couturier Edward Molyneux. They included a bias-cut white satin evening dress, which came to represent the epitome of her elegance, reproduced in Play Pictorial8 and in several national newspapers as Lawrence and her contemporaries starred in the influential social comedies that dominated the London stage. Set in the contemporary sophistication of high society, refined characters in silk-satin costumes, often supplied with the sinuous, full-body bias-cut developed initially by Madeleine Vionnet, performed with seemingly effortless elegance. Vionnet was the first to free the female shape through dresses that appeared to slide on and off the body unobstructed by fastenings, as couture was now more about dressing the female form than structuring a dress onto it (Ewing 1986: 102).

Figure 6.3 Photo of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in the play Private Lives, 1930 © Photograph by GAB Archive/Redferns. Getty/104484298.

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Through these examples we begin to identify characteristics of the exchange between fashion and costume. Chanel’s engagement with the stage was through a collaborative artistic practice, acting as producer as much as designer. Worth had already established a proficient commercial transaction between the stage and the fashion house in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Lawrence, by the 1930s, was able to maintain a public persona as expert of feminine elegance in the media, by conflating her everyday and her onstage identities through costume as fashion, and fashion as costume.

Couture costume The pact that theatre made with fashion could, however, be a Faustian one on both sides. The trendsetting social comedies of Noël Coward and contemporaries became unfashionable in the years following World War II , when a generation of new writers challenged what they considered the elitist escapism of prewar plays, writing instead realist and socially conscious drama at London’s Royal Court Theatre. While Coward’s wit continues to be meaningful to this day, many of the thinly written “fashion plays” of the 1890s, in which leading ladies had few lines but “wore six to seven new dresses by a noted couturier” (Evans 2013: 58), have disappeared without trace. At that time theatre in London “was not merely reflecting but anticipating and creating fashion” (Kaplan and Stowell 1995: 10) and costumiers and couturiers were often one and the same. In fin de siècle Paris, as Nancy Troy writes, theatres were full of wealthy women “because it satisfied their desire to see the latest styles modelled in a spectacular, and therefore compelling, context” (Troy 2002: 83). On Broadway in 1908 riotous scenes followed the premier of Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow when costumier and couturier Lucile introduced to New York the fashionable wide-brimmed hat named after the eponymous lead of play (Schweitzer 2009: 1–4). The Merry Widow hat crossed the footlights to become a promotional gift, instantly causing “freebie rage” among the elegant female playgoers, who queue-jumped and wrestled for the coveted hat-boxes. The Merry Widow had opened in London the previous year, where with the help of fashion and society columnists it had sparked a craze for wide brims and bird-of-paradise plumes. At a time when theatre managers were not immune to hiring a different couture house for each act of a four-act play, this widespread commercial exploitation of theatre was ridiculed by George Bernard Shaw as “a tailor’s advertisement making sentimental remarks to a milliner’s advertisement in the middle of an upholsterer and a decorator’s advertisement” (1932: 58). Interestingly some of these society dramas espoused cynicism toward women, with titles such as The Masqueraders (1894) and The Liars (1897). Their author Henry Arthur Jones’s anti-women bias is on display in his declaration, published as part of a preface to one of his plays, that “as women cannot retaliate openly, they may retaliate secretly— and lie” (Jones 1982: 107). Lucile, whose gowns may well have been worn by some of the spectators visiting the Criterion Theatre, costumed The Liars female leads. The division between the worlds residing on either side of the proscenium arch would have been eroded not only by the mirroring of fashionable dress and costume, but also by the refitting of the auditorium done by the same interior designers responsible for the The Liars’ scenography. As much as the characters on stage, the occupiers of the stalls and boxes would be intent on performing their superior social status through dress and demeanor (Figure 6.4). Henry Arthur Jones’s reductive views of women were embodied by Lucile’s designs. Lucile was known for composing fashionable, trailing evening gowns with layers of hazy silks for her clients. Her costumes for The Liars of frilled lace, decorated chiffon, and sequins reflected this risqué composition,

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Figure 6.4 George Alexander as Lord Windermere, Ben Webster as Mr. Cecil Graham, A. Vane-Tempest as Mr. Dumby, J. Nutcombe Gould as Lord Darlington and H. H. Vincent as Lord Augustus Lorton in Lady Windermere’s Fan, St James’s Theatre, London, 1892. The onstage world and the audience mirrored one another, and Oscar Wilde made use of this in his costume dramaturgy © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

alluringly drawing attention to the bodies beneath through layering of semitransparent fabrics. The lead Lady Jessica could, through her dress, perform seduction and deceit, and was rendered “vain, empty headed” as noted by the review in The Telegraph.9 Peculiarly, however, the different character of Lady Jessica’s sister, Lady Rosamund (Figure 6.5), was given a similar treatment, rendering the two characters indistinguishable. As noted by a the review in The Lady, all female characters were “rather alike in style and effect.”10 Lucile’s costumes, rather than defining characters, simply called attention to themselves through repetition. More crucially, by narrowly and generically representing femininity on stage as primarily seductive, she evaded the articulation of a more complex humanity through costume. Eventually Lucile built a mini-theatre in her fashion house, presented her gowns in thematic settings and was the first to give her ensembles names and personalities of their own (Mendes and de la Haye 2009: 20). The alliance between theatre and fashion proved extremely profitable for Lucile’s fashion label. She however appeared to have missed the opportunity of presenting theatricality as a dialogic engagement of oppositional values, demonstrating through dress a wider range of perspectives.

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Figure 6.5 Irene Vanbrugh as Lady Rosamund in The Liars by Henry Arthur Jones at the Criterion Theatre, 1894 designed by Lucile, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The restrictions and paradoxes placed upon Victorian high society and particularly on women were central to the plays of self-made insider Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). His characters appear to be caught in a juxtaposition of comical awkwardness and impending tragedy. While social standing was enacted in a display of wealth through dress, the potentially devastating effects of the collapse of appearances called into question the morality of the social construct that they reflected. If, in Wilde’s words, truth could be perceived as “a matter of style” (Wilde 1905: 29), the characters created on stage would have to negotiate truthfulness through their stylish costumes. Wilde’s own experimentation with dress as a

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dandy, and his writing on fashion and costume that had preceded his playwriting, laid the ground for some insightful costume dramaturgy. His characters were recognizable by their audience through a balancing of uncomfortable social critique and detailed, closely-observed, stylistic constructs that held a mirror up to them (Eltis 1996: 125). The resulting ambiguities articulated relationships between characters as they adopted demeanors that had been gleaned knowingly from the luxurious surface reality of the social elite. Crucially Wilde chose to collaborate with producers, directors, and the performers of his plays by regularly redrafting the dialogues of his characters in response to his involvement with the rehearsal room, as the close examination of draft manuscripts and typescripts of the plays undertaken by Sos Eltis (1996), reveals. For example the portrayal of Mrs. Erlynne, the fallen woman in his first comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), who enters “very beautifully dressed and very dignified” (Wilde 2008: 25) and addresses her estranged daughter with grace, would have confounded the expectations of the audience. Eltis explains that the character had started life as “a full blown harlot” in an earlier draft, a depiction far closer to the audience’s expectation of a fallen woman (1996: 65). Marion Terry’s five costumes worn as Mrs. Erlynne, designed by couturiers Savage and Purdue, concealed her adulterous character under social acceptability through decorous high-quality dresses (Figures 6.6a and 6.6c). Subtle elements, such as the snake-like iridescence of her white satin ball gown and the floor-length cloak, hint at an underlying ambiguity (Kaplan and Stowell 1995: 17). As the “adventuress” however she would traditionally be mirrored by the “good woman,” Lady Windermere, the daughter she secretly abandoned as a child, and who paradoxically finds herself drawn toward infidelity, further challenging Victorian orthodoxy. Ultimately, as crisis is averted, all secrets remain well hidden under the starched collars and neck frills. No repentance is needed because, in Mrs. Erlynne’s words, “if a woman really repents, she has to go to a bad dressmaker, otherwise no one believes her” (Wilde 2008: 54). Seemingly a flippant quip, this remark hides the subversion enacted by Mrs. Erlynne who refutes the conventional sartorial humiliation of the repentant Victorian fallen women (as highlighted in examples of contemporary literature analyzed by Eltis 1996: 67–9) a response that often appears to lead to their death. As Eltis explains: “Mrs Erlynne breaks every rule, for she scorns repentance, rejects motherhood as demanding too great a sacrifice of self, and yet, in spite of all this, ends the play triumphantly in possession of a husband” (Eltis 1996: 80). The use of costume in Wilde’s later plays includes tribal alliances displayed through dress, characters whose sternness could be mitigated by a lavish wardrobe, or whose designs could be remarkable for their sobriety when set against social groups exhibiting a showy amorality. This sophisticated costume dramaturgy emerged from a profound understanding of his contemporaries as expressed through clothing, in addition to the collaboration with performers in rehearsal, both of which benefited his writing in a way that fascinated audiences. The couturier-designed costumes produced for each of the four plays that Wilde set in the present rendered the social critique not only acceptable, but also highly engaging to audiences smitten with themselves. Through their success Wilde reinforced his high society status until the Marquess of Queensberry, barred from entering the theatre to throw a bouquet of rotten vegetables on stage during The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), escalated a quarrel about Wilde’s relationship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. The feud ultimately resulted in Wilde’s disgrace, social ostracism, prison, exile, and an early grave. Ironically, this was the very state that had been feared by his female characters, a reversal of fortunes resulting from the Victorian moral codes which Wilde had queried in his plays. These included, implicitly, the illegal status of homosexuality. Wilde’s plays award his life and personal values a legacy that, among much else, demonstrates the intimately layered moral connection between the body in the everyday and the body on stage as expressed through contemporary dress.

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Figure 6.6a Marion Terry and George Alexander as Mrs. Erlynne and Lord Windermere in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, St. James’s Theatre, 1892, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 6.6b Winifred Emery and George Alexander as Lady and Lord Windermere in Lady Windermere’s Fan, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 6.6c Marion Terry and George Alexander in Lady Windermere’s Fan, photograph by Alfred Ellis © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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National identity and historical authenticity in costume Although Wilde was a supporter of “antiquarian” Shakespeare (1885), the popularity of his plays, which referenced his contemporaries and their dress, may have emerged as a reaction to the pursuit of historical correctness in productions of Shakespeare’s plays. The latter had been endemic through much of the nineteenth century, in “carefully constructed illusions of landscape and historical pageant” (Baugh 2013: 5). In scenes illustrated by costume and scenery, Christopher Baugh argues, “scenography and its technologies became leading protagonists in the theatre” (2013: 5). A scenic, pictorial illusionism also went hand in hand with the intensification of nationalist movements across Europe which had begun in the late eighteenth century (Anderson 2006: 12). In Italy and Germany patriotism allied itself to opera as composers such as Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner strove to build national identities for countries that had not yet come into existence. Attempting to circumvent censorship they displaced narratives of their projected national identities and of their struggle for independence onto reimagined historical, mythological, and Biblical stories. According to Richard Taruskin, by fueling revolutionary fervor “[o]pera could now not only mirror but actually make the history of nations. In extreme cases it could even help make the nation” (2009: 212).11 Britain’s status as dominant colonial power of the nineteenth century was anointed in expressions of national identity that consolidated the longevity of its history. These included interpretations of Shakespeare’s English history plays, each titled after a monarch in a lineage dating back to King John in the thirteenth century. Productions were reimagined as pictorial documentation of the real sovereigns, and their design was informed by the study of medieval effigies. Alicia Finkel (1996) has demonstrated that the articulation of the perceived historical authenticity of the costumes was a fundamental part of an educative, design-led Romantic reinvention of history, which lasted to least to the end of the nineteenth century. A great deal of research and focus was invested in canonizing the historical veracity of productions under “the assumption that the truth of both theatre and drama is the truth of history” (Orgel 2007: 78). Antiquarian and author James Robinson Planché was among the first in Britain to establish scholarship in historical costume through the study of original archaeological references, and to apply this consistently to the costume of Shakespeare’s history plays. His findings were collected in a number of influential publications. In 1823 Planché designed the costumes for Shakespeare’s King John, which during the Napoleonic Wars had been staged in openly propagandistic and xenophobic productions (Moody 2007: 118–19). Collaborating with actor-manager Charles Kemble, and utilizing thirteenth-century primary sources, Planché’s costumes enabled the marketing of the production with an emphasis on the “neverseen-before” rigorously researched from archaeological sources. These sources were listed in the playbill: “King John’s Effigy in Worcester Cathedral, and his great seal. Queen Elinor’s Effigy in the Abbey of Fontevraud. Effigy of the Earl of Salisbury in Salisbury Cathedral, Effigy of the Earl of Pembroke, in the Temple Church, London, King John’s Silver Cup . . . Illuminated MSS in the British Museum, Bodleian, and Bennet College Libraries” (quoted in Schoch 1998: 76). These historical monuments and documents conveyed their authoritative presence through actors transformed by their costumes into historical bodies, revealing not for the last time the unique ability of costume to provide the spectacle of a worn and “performed in” history. Planché describes the actors’ costumes in his Recollections and Reflections (1823): “King John dressed as his effigy appears in Worcester Cathedral, surrounded by his barons sheathed in mail, with cylindrical helmets and correct armorial shields, and his courtiers in long tunics and mantles of the thirteenth century” (quoted in Schoch 1998: 75).

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Notwithstanding its near-universal adoption in the nineteenth century and beyond, the sole dependence on historical sources for the design of Shakespeare’s history plays may have ultimately proved detrimental to the experiencing of the performance. Schoch, reviewing contemporaneous commentators, notes that spectators responding to Planché’s costume designs might have been left with the impression that rather than his costumes intending to be “worthy” (as Planché insisted) of Shakespeare’s writing, “the text must be worthy of its costumes” (1998: 78), exposing both the impact of historical dress in performance and its threat to the play. The preoccupation with antiquarianism as a method of design can be plausibly explained in terms of it reinforcing audience identification with a reinvented national history as portrayed on stage. The historical King John is associated with Magna Carta, the founding text of English parliamentary monarchy, via the cultural iconicity of Shakespeare. In monumentalizing the bodies on stage, the antiquarian costumes of King John may have performed a national history, reiterating the legitimacy of monarchy and empire, but Shakespeare may, in that process, have become purely a conduit for a re-created past rather than the producer of texts that continue to be meaningful beyond English national borders. In his prolific oeuvre Planché proposes correct designs for entire sets of characters “for which he selected appropriate, if arbitrary historical eras” (Orgel 2007: 78). Historical authenticity taken to its logical conclusion renders plays as stable, fixed texts, pre-prescribing designs that may become normative character uniforms, a historical “dress code” for the stage that may preclude the expression of the actual Shakespearean characters. The dressed body is critical to the writing of character, as we have noted via the embodied knowledge in Wilde’s plays, and, in Chapters 1 and 2, via the authors of Ancient Greek drama and their relationship to costumes. The understanding of the original relationships between body, clothing, time, place, and playwriting can then be put to the service of the translating of costumed characters into new and differing cultural and performance contexts. Drawing from the rich social, cultural, and political context of the sixteenth century, and with little actual evidence of the specific material costume choices on the Shakespearean stage, scholars have theorized around the relationship between everyday dress and stage costume. In her analysis of the possible versions of blackness and masculinity that might have been deployed to define Othello on the Shakespearean stage, Bella Mirabella refers to Erasmus’s definition of clothing as the “‘body’s body’ from which one can ‘infer the state of a man’s character’” (quoted in Mirabella 2015: 111), summing up the notion that dress and appearances were understood as exposing an interior disposition externally. She goes on to analyze Henry Peacham’s 1614 drawing which is believed to be a rare depiction of a Shakespearean scene, probably from Titus Andronicus, identifying the different types of costumes on stage that “seem to be from a melange of different styles and periods,” with two figures “wearing contemporary English dress” while others are in Roman armor (2015: 111). Although Titus Andronicus is not a history play, the drawing does demonstrate a deliberate, selective anachronism in a complex layering of readable references from different historical periods, with the intent to express and communicate the relationships between the characters at as well as their interior disposition. If Planché’s unified historical authenticity was intended as a costume style derived from Shakespeare’s own times, then this drawing may evidence a divergent costume methodology. We are reminded here instead of the carnivalesque discussed in Chapter  3, where the mystery-play devils were assembled from heterogeneous elements. These street theatre techniques, preceding and contemporaneous to Shakespeare, may have combined with the sophisticated meanings communicated by sixteenth-century dress to provide a diverse costume pallet through which the complexity of Shakespeare’s characters could be expressed. The persistence of Planché’s costume canons, however, in which unified sets of characters created a picturesque whole, is evidenced by the similarity between his Richard III from 1830 (Figure 6.7), later

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Figure 6.7 Illustrations from Twelve Designs for The Costume of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, 1830, by J. R. Planché: (a) Richard, Duke of Gloucester, (b) Archer, (c) Richard as King, (d) Nobleman, (e) Richard in ducal robe, and (f) Earl Rivers, all © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

versions by Barry Sullivan in 1876 (Figures 6.8a), Henry Irving in 1888 (Figure 6.8b), and Richard Mansfield in 1889 (Figure  6.8c). High boots or leggings, tunics with mock sleeves, ermine capes, light armor, plumed helmets, and heraldic decoration are part of the costume panoply that seems to mitigate the physical defects expressed in the lines of the eponymous character. Enduring in Lawrence Olivier’s 1944 interpretation of the ensemble, whose mock-sleeved tunic is archived by the V&A, they also informed Anthony Sher’s acclaimed version in 1984. Exaggerating Richards III ’s physical defects into a full-blown, crutches-dependent disability, Sher displaced the character’s sinister brutality on a hunchback and the crutches onto which he shifted the entire weight of his upper body. William Dudley’s costume enabled Sher to embody the “bottled spider, whose deadly web ensnareth thee” (Richard III , I.iii.241–2; Shakespeare 2000) by means of inky, trailing hanging over-sleeves, matching fitted under-sleeves, gloves

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Figure 6.8 Three interpretations of Richard III : (a) Barry Sullivan in Richard III , 1876, at Drury Lane, photographed by London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company

Figure 6.8 (b) carte-de-visite depicting Henry Irving as Richard III , 1888, originally published by Virtue & Co Ltd

Figure 6.8 (c) photograph by London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company of Richard Mansfield as Richard III , 1889, at the Globe Theatre, all © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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extended by the crutches, and black tights. Suggesting the possession of two extra pairs of legs, Sher dominated the stage with the physical dexterity of a gigantic insect, his crutches, the “bottled spider” front legs, accelerating a diabolical movement. The dangerous power derived from the animalesque outward expression of a corrupt inner-self was materialized into the interpretation of the recognizable historically costumed character, imbuing it with the affective efficacy that made Sher’s performance memorable. Shakespeare’s identification of disability with a contemptible character has since been recognized as a “limiting literary depiction” connected with “dehumanising social attitudes toward disabled people” (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 18). Costume, if solely focused on reproducing the original conditions of performance in readings that consider the historical text as fixed, may also reproduce attitudes that are outdated, here in relation to disability, but elsewhere to race and gender. In addition, modern historians have long determined that Shakespeare’s play was not unbiased, acting as propaganda for the victorious Tudors in the demonizing of Richard III (Richards 1983: 19). Ian McKellen had initially resisted playing Richard III , considering it irrelevant, as “modern psychology had questioned the cruel assumptions of Shakespeare’s contemporaries that physical deformity was an outward expression of inner moral turpitude. Studying the play reveals an opposite proposition—that Richard’s wickedness is an outcome of other people’s disaffection with his physique” (McKellen quoted in Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 116). In the event, McKellen’s Richard III (1990) adopted a 1930s dictator persona that enabled his character and disability to emerge from relationships contextualized through costumes embodying recognizable sociocultural and political identities from recent history. Directed by Richard Eyre and designed by Bob Crowley for the National Theatre, the play opened depicting an idyllic 1930s England of white ties and dress uniforms which comes to be ruled by a Oswald Mosley-like Richard, and his blackshirts. Mosley founded, in 1932, of the British Union of Fascists. As Richard III and his blackshirt entourage gain control, swastika-like Saint George’s red and white insignia begin to appear on banners and armbands. Here the deformation of the Richard III tyrant is reflected in the context that creates and feeds off it, through “populist thuggery” which had overthrown the “atrophied aristocracy” (Holland 1997: 50) of interwar Britain. If national identity may be refracted from images of past heroes, such as Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, then it may also define itself against the embodiment of the abject, internal “other.” Barbara Hodgdon writes how “killing the king disrupts established temporal relationships” (2015: 18). And in this production the final battle scenes at Bosworth Field are played out in medieval armor, thus collapsing reimagined recent history with the Wars of the Roses. The use of “pseudo-historical time” (Hodgdon 2015: 18) that reflected the English internal conflict in a “what if” perturbing moment of extreme nationalism, demonstrated how, taken to its troubling conclusion, medieval villainy could conflate into the present of the performance, via World War II . Mark Rylance’s much applauded Richard III (2012), directed by Tim Carroll, intended, through its meticulously reproduced historical costumes and its entirely male cast, to present Shakespeare’s play as it would originally have been staged. It was produced for the reconstructed Elizabethan Globe, where costume designer Jenny Tiramani had established an “original practices” approach to costume. Her extensive study of Elizabethan dress, primarily from extant garments,12 informs the construction of costumes that can also be effortlessly displayed in the Globe’s educational exhibition center. In a production context that would be difficult to sustain elsewhere,13 Tiramani and Rylance demonstrated the popularity of historical reconstruction that had previously been exploited by Planché and Kemble. Although the notion that the Shakespearean stage was populated solely by actors in contemporaneous dress has been challenged in the analysis of Henry Peacham’s drawing of Shakespeare’s Titus

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Andronicus, Rylance is clear about the contribution Tiramani’s costumes make to his performance as they “match the detail and beauty of the language . . . [they] inspire me to believe I am a real person rather than just a character presented in a play” (Selvedge 2014: 16). By associating the construction of the reality of the person on stage with reconstructed Elizabethan dress, Rylance seems to suggest, perhaps oddly, that “the truth of the stage is the truth of history” (Orgel 2007: 78). Nevertheless Rylance’s comments assert, from the actor’s perspective, the significance of costume when it is foregrounded in the conception of the performance, and as we have seen, this is certainly not limited to the context of “original practices.” In all the previous chapters we have noted how costume has been as eloquent as language, standing in for it and before it, and established its efficacy, via embodiment, in expanding presence and informing movement. Similarly to that of Sher, Rylance’s historical costume appears to be a methodological tool through which he grounds his virtuoso performance. As costumes, neither Sher nor Rylance’s interpretations of Richard III are overburdened with the overt expression of issues around national identity that are exposed in the analysis of the Kemble and Planché’s King John and Eyre and Crowley’s Richard III . These two productions instead connect to the discussion in Chapter 2, where the bodies on stage together acquire social and political significance. Their respective audiences looked at the historicized bodies for an appraisal of their present concerns, either accounting for national ascendency in the monumentalizing of distant English history in King John, or considering, through a layering of the social, military, and totalitarian uniforms of recent European history, a foreboding image of English nationalism out of control in Richard III.

Collaborative and material synthesis through history and fashion in costume In line with the nineteenth-century drive to assimilate the past, fashion was not immune to a fascination with its own history. Charles Fredrick Worth drew extensively from historical references studied in galleries and museums, informing his exquisite craft in an actual, material, layering of historical references with contemporaneous form. Examination of one of his day gowns dating from 1890–3 (Figure 6.9a and b) reveals the disguising of the present into the 1780s, in a recalling of the absolute monarchy that had preceded the French Revolution, and which, for the couturier and his clients, would have reflected a nostalgic glance back to a time of unquestioned power and splendor for the elite. The tailored, striped jacket draws from a late eighteenth century redingote, and is seemingly worn over a soft robe en chemise from the same period, with frill and fichu cascading over the wide-lapelled collar. It may have been referring to one of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s paintings of Marie Antoinette but is in fact internally structured along the firm corset lines of the 1890s, whale-boned and shaped into panels converging into a small waist. Its solidity anchors the large decorative buttons, with the mock “chemise” outer layer hiding the contemporaneous inner shape, that would have been familiar to the wearer. With the redingote and chemise as decorative top layers, this was a late nineteenth century gown masquerading as 1780s fashion. Similarly we can imagine how theatre costume might have presented, in the hands of this master couturier, historical “authenticity” while maintaining itself solidly on present ground. The French Revolution is also referenced in Jules Marre’s 1860s design for the House of Worth (Figure 6.10), presumed to be a gown to be worn at one of the several extravagant masked balls held at the court of Napoleon III in the 1860s. The fashionable female silhouette is evident in the crinoline which offered a semispherical canvas for a three-dimensional painting. From a hem of stormy seas, high waves

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tower over ships that are sinking on rocky crags, while cupid heads blow wind from around the wearer’s hips. A stormy black cloak of tulle, like a threatening cloud, floats over her shoulders. Her windswept wild hair and pose mimic Liberty Leading the People (1830), the Delacroix depiction of the French Revolution, in this case holding up broken sail rigging rather than the French flag. While on her skirt the horror of a disaster at sea, a recurring theme in Romantic painting, is in action, the drawing invites the wearer, presumably a guest at court, to enact the subversion of the revolution. The range of costume drawings for masked balls by Jules Marre14 held in the House of Worth collection reveals a design imagination stretched by the imperial etiquette which determined that guests be banned for wearing the same disguise twice (De Marly 1980: 54). It is tempting to imagine that the wearer, invited to a highly regulated court masked ball, would be distinguished and upright, and entirely at odds with the character suggested in Marre’s drawing. The two examples from the Worth archive demonstrate different methods at work in the integration of the past and present, the contemporary corset smuggled inside its historical outer shell, while the shipwreck ball gown layers a romantic representation of history onto the fashionable dome-shaped, steel crinoline form. What is proposed, in the dialogue between dress and history, is a creative exchange

Figure 6.9 Silk boned bodice by C. F. Worth, 1890-3: (a) view of lining and (b) front view, both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 6.10 Design created by Jules Marre for the House of Worth, 1860 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

beyond reproduction, projecting the past onto the present, so that the past might qualify the present, even if it is only to expose nostalgia for what never was. In addition, as Jules Marre’s design predicates, however much an abstract idea such as the force of nature that wrecks ships might be illustrated on the surface of the dress, it is only in symbiosis with the performing body that it can be fully enacted. Charles Worth clients, the internationally renown female performers of the nineteenth century—Ellen Terry, Eleonora Duse, and Sarah Bernhardt—excelled professionally and in fact received more acclaim than the majority of their male colleagues. The condition under which these female stars could obtain such recognition in a male-dominated nineteenth-century was, as Kelly Powell has argued, that they

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were not considered real women. Contemporary language, “reconstructed the performing woman as more than an actress—as a renegade female, one fundamentally different from normative wives and daughters, marginally ‘feminine’ if feminine at all, quite possibly inhuman” (Powell 1997: 3). Their success in creating a female self, other than the passive Victorian version of femininity, implicated their onstage presentation, to which the design and manufacturing of costumes contributed substantially. In broad terms, male actors’ wardrobes, unless involved in pantomime, vaudeville and music hall, were largely restricted to either mirroring the men in the audience (Figure 6.4), or to the historically “correct” uniform of tunics and tights of antiquarian Shakespearean theatre. Celebrity female performers could interpret historical dress in a negotiation with the contemporary, as noted in Worth’s redingote bodice, enabling the embodiment of past eras on their own terms and, occasionally, embodying male historical characters. Onstage female-to-male transvestism has existed at least since Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and demonstrated its empowering agency via actor/manager Madame Vestris, as discussed in Chapter 4. It thrived during the nineteenth century in the burlesque display of the “ ‘shapely’ limbs,” absent, as critic William Archer bemoaned, from an 1894 cross-dressed production of As You Like It, “for jack-boots were the only wear in the Forest of Arden” (quoted in Powell 1997: 28). Cross-dressing that reconfigured women into believable male bodies, wearing jackboots and not displaying shapely limbs unnecessarily, contributed a disquieting challenge to the battlements of male privilege in the refusal of the limitations placed on the female sex and in the presentation of alternative female identities. For Sarah Bernhardt, playing male characters such as Hamlet (Figure 6.11a), whom she considered a female part because of his indecisive nature (Garber 2008: 38), or L’Aiglon (Figure 6.11b), could have informed the extension of her cross-dressed offstage persona (Figure 6.12a). Equally, her empowerment into a leading, autonomous artist could have been extended through this dress-based bodily practice. Not only could she display her prowess in acting a major male Shakespearean role, but she could inscribe characteristics she identified as male, such as decisiveness, into her everyday life, which included a separate career as visual artist. The exchange between on- and offstage persona through costume would also have been crucial to establishing the relationship with audiences. The Italian Duse and the French Bernhardt successfully performed in their native tongues when touring to English speaking countries, and although the transcending of language barriers was ultimately down to their acting, I suggest that costume would have enabled the embodied communication that is shaped through textiles and the body in cutting and fitting rooms. The House of Worth was a favorite of both Duse and Bernhardt. The latter, who was adept in exploiting “techniques and institutions of mass culture” (Glenn 2000: 11), was reported in newspapers to have caused chaos during her visits to Worth: “The house that costumes her humbly obeys her behests. When she goes there it is a big event, a fête which turns the whole establishment topsy turvy from roof to basement. She is truly the queen, the fairy that commands and transforms, as if by magic, silk and velvet into ideal costumes”15 (quoted in de la Haye and Mendes 2014: 125). Fueling a perception of a nonhuman semidivinity, this newspaper report suggests that fabrics miraculously draped themselves over Bernhardt’s celebrity body at her behest, magically transforming into an “ideal” couture gown, untouched by human hands (Figure 6.12b). A less overbearing and more affable Ellen Terry is revealed in a letter sent by her in 1895 to Mrs. Nettleship, her costumier, which begins “[w]ould you have a little dress run up for tonight’s wear for Miss Gibson in the Corsicans?” (Hardie 1999: 110). The letter goes on to suggest fabric types and colors and informs Sweet Nellie, as she addresses the recipient, that it is to be trimmed and festooned with tarlatan (not net, she specifies) on the bust and around the hem. Ann Hardie, who discovered Terry’s

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Figure 6.11 Sarah Bernhardt playing male characters (a) as Hamlet, which she first performed in 1899

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Figure 6.11 (b) as L’Aiglon c.1900, photograph by C. Boyer, both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

letter in the V&A archive, is herself a costume designer and maker, familiar with last-minute requests for “running up” little dresses. She describes the task faced by Mrs. Nettleship on receiving this letter. Having availed herself of the performer’s measurements she would have to source the right fabric, followed by mental calculation of the distance to the theatre and time of the show in order to deliver the finished costume within a few hours, “having cut, mounted, tacked, sewn, boned, hemmed, pressed and applied fastenings” (1999: 112), as well as festooned tarlatan on the little dress. Hardie’s questioning reveals her expert knowledge of the complexity of costume construction, which retains its kinship to couture in garments created as one-offs, made to performer’s measurements. The Lady Macbeth costume for Terry, also made by Mrs. Nettleship, would certainly have taken longer than a day to produce, with one thousand beetle wings handstitched on its surface. Designed by Alice Comyns-Carr in 1888, it toured internationally over many years. A chain armor knitted out of wool and tinsel hug her corset-free sinuous shape, with a covering of scale-like beetles’ wings recalling the skin of a serpent. Here the reading of the character is translated into materials and form, which, by refracting light through its iridescent surface, mesmerized its audience. Its shape was drawn from Planché texts and historical references as demonstrated by Veronica Isaac (2012: 101), and yet the gigantic, shimmering funnel sleeves, draping from her shoulders to the floor, were far more engaging and performative than

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Figure 6.12 Sarah Bernhardt (a) in her studio, cross-dressed and (b) photographed by Sarony in a couture gown, 1880, both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

those portrayed in the medieval engravings on which the costume was based. The effect of Terry and her costume was memorable. John Singer Sargent, having attended the first night, painted almost immediately the famous representation of her Act I soliloquy (Figure 6.13). The triangulation between three collaborators: Terry, the performer, Comyns-Carr, the designer, and Nettleship, the maker, produced one of the most famous costumes of the nineteenth century, immortalized in Sargent’s painting. The rest of the cast did not receive the same treatment. Oscar Wilde noted the difference between the Comyns-Carr costumes for Terry and the other costumes (Figure 6.14) designed by painter of historical subjects Charles Cattermole: “Lady Macbeth seems to be an economical housekeeper and evidently patronizes local industries for her husband’s clothes and servant’s liveries, but she takes care to do all her own shopping in Byzantium” (Wilde quoted in Jackson 2015: 16). Although his quip was probably intended ironically, Wilde’s keen eye for costume dramaturgy sought a logic that might originate within the world of the play in relation to the everyday via shopping as its source, inscribing in this reading the naturalism of his own contemporary characters. The distinction of Lady Macbeth’s costume from the unified, more historically correct world of the play demonstrates that even naturalistic approaches to theatre-making can sustain costume metaphors and can be a

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Figure 6.13 John Singer Sargent portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889, in a costume by Alice Comyns-Carr, made by Ada Nettleship, Tate Modern © Getty Images Hulton Fine Art Collection.

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Figure 6.14 Portrait of Henry Irving as Macbeth, c.1880 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

collaborative nexus where art and craft meet with performing body. Ellen Terry intended to produce herself on the stage as a work of art with the help of costume and material experimentation. Her autobiography describes the insight gained at the age of fifteen when, working with Edward William Godwin on her costume for Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1863), she obtained the crushed, tight fabric pleating popularized four decades later by Mariano Fortuny through fashion (Figure 6.15). Terry learnt, “how to damp it and ‘wring’ it while it was wet, tying up the material as the Orientals do in their ‘tie and dry’ process, so that when it was dry and untied, it was all crinkled and clinging. This was the first lovely dress that I ever wore, and I learned a great deal from it” (Terry 1908: 51–2).

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Figure 6.15 Mariano Fortuny dresses of dark pleated silk c.1920 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Like the later Delphos dress by Fortuny, this fabric treatment demands to be worn without a boned bodice, offering a physical freedom that Terry was keen to maintain throughout her career. Images of her in costume often demonstrate this, while her photographs in aesthetic16 everyday dress date from as early as 1875. In an interview with Isaac, Zenzie Tinker, the dress conservator for Terry’s Lady Macbeth costume describes how corset-free wear might have been achieved in a climate of disapproval by using internal layers of “knitted silk jersey lining with a soft crocheted overlay” (Isaac 2012: 109). Historical costumes for Ellaline (Figure  6.16a), Lady Macbeth, and Titania reimagine knitwear and crochet techniques via Orientalist pleated fabrics. They and the cross-dressing of her famous interpretation of

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Figure 6.16 Ellen Terry as (a) Ellaline in The Amber Heart, Lyceum Theatre, 1887, and (b) Portia in The Merchant of Venice at the Prince of Wales Theatre, designed by Godwin, photograph by Charles Watkins, both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Portia (Figure 6.16b) facilitated the corset-shedding that Terry, as a standard bearer for aesthetic dress and dress reform, advocated openly. Her dressed body, onstage and off, was a testament to the creative autonomy of women (Figure 6.17). It displayed political commitment, entrenching and disseminating “[t]he connection between Terry and an idealised bohemian sensibility” projected in the public sphere (Wahl 2013: 110). Through public speaking and performance, her persona became synonymous with the democratization of dress reform, intended to benefit society in general and women’s lives in particular. In private, in her relationships with collaborators, notwithstanding being the highest-paid British woman of her generation, a respectful mutuality can be detected. Terry’s autobiography relates, for example, how she was encouraged through her struggle with a heavy jewel-encrusted cape, in King Arthur, by Nettleship and Comyns-Carr, resulting in the “splendid” image created by her wearing it (Terry 1908). A long-lasting and supportive working relationship between the three women made it possible that, if the odd “little dress” needed to be “run up” at the last minute, good will may have been found and costume miracles accomplished. Oscar Wilde and Ellen Terry demonstrated, in different ways and with lasting influence, not only the workings of theatre as collaborative practice, but also the value of artistic integrity that drives engaged

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Figure 6.17 Ellen Terry in an everyday kimono, 1875 by S. W. Walker © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

theatre artists in their taking of a position beyond the commercial value of their work. The thought given by both artists to the dressed body forecasts the work of “our contemporaries” in the next section, in the way that authenticity is understood from a position of an ethical methodological intent that precedes the work itself.

Costume designers as our contemporaries The body on stage is personally and politically intertwined with the here-and-now through the way it is costumed. As such its performance can choose to reject an automatic acquiescence to dominant ideologies, as noted in relation to Ellen Terry’s engagement with the emancipation of women, via her professional and public persona through costume and dress. Equally, Oscar Wilde’s society plays used glamorous fashion as both a decoy and a revelatory mirror to draw attention to the paradoxes of Victorian moral codes. The interrelatedness of theatre with the here-and-now has been articulated in the wake of World War II by Jan

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Kott (1914–2001), building on ground laid by Bertolt Brecht. Kott’s writing has given impetus to a reaffirming of theatre as artistic and performance practice with social consciousness at its heart, engrained in the present and thus potentially impactful on the future. As a Polish political activist, Kott experienced some of the darkest times of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust and the Cold War, which informed his reading of the classical texts. His seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) had a transformative effect on the production of Shakespeare’s work, demonstrating the plays’ relevance in his here-and-now, by considering the worlds narrated as precursors of our own, in an awareness that great drama “transcends the limitation of any given political epoch” (Chen 2009: 358). Kott claimed that a contemporaneously understood Shakespeare demonstrates “the extent to which people are involved in history” (1964: 16). In his phenomenological reading of Kott’s text, Mao Chen concludes that it “acknowledges the existential kinship of human beings who live in diverse times and places” (2009: 363). Simultaneously offering insights into personal and public realities, the recasting of Shakespeare’s plays as global stories that transcend a specifically set place and time “testify to shared engagement with the world at large” (363). This shared engagement extends also to Ancient Greek tragedy and was crucial to Le Théâtre du Soleil’s Les Atrides, discussed in the first chapter, recontextualized through Asian performance practices and costumes. Similarly Ong Keng Sen and Yukio Ninagawa have exemplified the global currency of Shakespeare’s plays within a transcultural perspective. Using recontextualization to make sense of the classical play, these practitioners acknowledge the distance between the time of its writing and the here-and-now in order to seek an authenticity that transcends historical “truth.” The following examples will examine productions of classical and remote stories through costumes that make use of both history and the here-and-now, so that characters are not entirely unconnected from the audience in a newly defined time and space on stage. Costume becomes a crucial condition that allows the “existential kinship of human beings” to be negotiated in fleshly reality, by translating the characters’ humanity into material and shape, into a worn onstage world of garments. To the personal engagement of designers, directors, and performers with the story, epitomized by Kott and his followers, we owe a now taken-for-granted expectation of theatre, dance, and opera classics that are explored in wildly differing costumes and scenographies, as the following first three designers, all referring to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, indicate. I will also identify some of the creative methodologies that the designers have established in their construction of an onstage authenticity and, concluding this exploration of costume, highlight links to discussions in previous chapters. The following is a summary of a long discussion with Sally Jacobs held in July 2015. It focused primarily on her costumes for Peter Brook’s seminal production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) (Figures 6.18, 6.19, and 6.20), for which she also designed the much-imitated white box. Jacobs was drawn into theatre via the new writing produced at the Royal Court in the 1950s. She then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company when pioneering designer John Bury was opposing what she calls “fancy dress Shakespeare,” developing a theatrical reality of materials which, she felt, communicated authentic emotions, and in which costumes, whether historical or contemporary, were intended as real clothes. Her own collaboration with Peter Brook on A Midsummer Night’s Dream took place at a time when the nature of theatre and art was being questioned, a few years after the publication of Brook’s The Empty Space (1968). Jacobs was then living in California and she mentions the brilliance of the light and the up-beat, radical nature of the art scene as influences. With the play being “a dream,” Jacobs and Brook chose to ignore all literality around the space and the costumes, and in particular the darkness into which the nighttime forest scenes had been plunged. The resulting white box wiped out centuries of preconceived ideas about the play (Figure  6.18). An expectant space for play and the imagination, it

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Figure 6.18 Photograph of the model for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970, designed by Sally Jacobs and directed by Peter Brook © Sally Jacobs.

threw the bodies into relief, allowing Jacobs to boldly challenge predetermined notions of Shakespearean costume. Lovers, courtiers, and fairies refused naturalistic semiotic associations, entering the space as newly born, yet fully formed, characters. Jacobs’ method was to find the most appropriate essentialized form, fabric, and color for individuals and groups, so that relationships could be understood, and the physicality required by the white box, accessible both vertically and horizontally, could be exposed. An interior logic of eloquent forms and colors became an organizing principle for the costumes, offering shifting physical shape to scenes. Crucially this approach was intended to strip the performance to its bare bones—exposing every word and, more importantly, every gesture as the production made use of physical theatre, as much as of the text, to tell the story. Oberon, in purple, mirrored in shape a green Titania as the sharply colored lead couple of the fairy world, both in full-length, sleeved silk shifts, wearing unifying and concealing costume forms (Figure 6.19a). They may have been read, through costume, as exposing their feuding in the denying of their bodies to one another. A yellow Puck in a similar all-in-one, was rendered more mobile by his costume being bifurcated, supporting his dexterous stilts action. The fairies’ androgynous light grey silk, square-cut uniforms provided a minimal, elegant movement-based solution. All wore shirt sleeves that were full and gathered at the wrist, enabling movement while emphasizing gesture. The lovers projected refinement and kinship to one another in white clean-cut clothes, the Helena and Hermia in fitted and floor-length dresses, Demetrius and Lysander in elegantly

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Figure 6.19a Costume design by Sally Jacobs for (a) Sara Kestelman as Titania and (b) Ben Kinsley as Demetrius for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970, both © Sally Jacobs. Images courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

loose trousers (Figure 6.19b). Like an abstract painting, the men’s shirts and the women’s dresses were differently marked by colors and patterns, bled on the white base, obtained through selective dip dyeing. Sally Jacobs is pragmatic on the initial purpose of the markings: The main reason for the coloured splashes on the lovers’ white costumes was so that they could be easily identified right from scene one. How would you know which one was Helena at the start, before the story got you familiar with the goings on? It’s always the same with Shakespeare—a whole stage full of unfamiliar characters until it gets going. So my practical solution was simply to give the quartet of lovers each a colour of their own. JACOBS 2015 The mechanics offered concessions to a working-man naturalism, wearing belted or braced trousers which were not always completed by a shirt (Figure  6.20). Famously a male fairy thrust his arm and clenched fist between Bottom’s legs while he was being carried to Titania’s bower, manifesting the excitement ahead. Bottom had been made into an ass through found objects: a black rubber nose and a turn-up cap, on which ears were added, and the heavy wooden clogs strapped to his feet by the fairies. If, as Brook has said,17 the intention was to construct timelessness on stage, the result of Jacobs’ aesthetics may have delivered also a sense of proximity to the characters. The clarity of the shapes and colors helped to collapse the distance from the audience, as if the invented costume world might be

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Figure 6.20 Costume design by Sally Jacobs for the Mechanicals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970 © Sally Jacobs. Image courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

projecting into the future from the present, while performing an old Shakespearean comedy. In this context the fears and violence in the Dream could also be explained by the foregrounded physical presence of bodies in costumes that held no secrets and no past. Brook, who wrote the introduction to the English translation of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, shared his rejection of the distancing of the Dream in what Kott had noted was, “[t]heatrical tradition . . . with tunic clad lovers and marble stairs in the background. . . . For a long time theatres have been content to present the Dream as a Brothers Grimm fable, completely obliterating the pungency of the dialogue and the brutality of the situations” (Kott 1964: 175).

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Lez Brotherston,18 one of Jacobs’ theatre design students at Central School of Art and Design, included Grecian columns in “Athens House,” the English country mansion for the Midsummer Night’s Dream he designed at the Albery Theatre in 2001, directed by Matthew Francis, and which was set during World War II (Figures 6.21, 6.22, and 6.23). Later a forest of magical naturalism, with real trees, moss, a pond, and mirrors communicates a spatial endlessness reminiscent of nineteenth-century illusionistic spectacle. Brotherston’s intention was to broaden the play’s appeal to an audience who may have not seen it before. Having recently worked with television star comedian Dawn French, he was instrumental in facilitating her casting as Bottom, capitalizing on the trust that can develop between costume designers and performers, as encountered earlier in Ellen Terry’s relationship with Alice ComynsCarr and Mrs. Nettleship. French’s talent for slapstick was put to work in the wartime context to foreground the play’s comedic angle. The nuances of English class-based humor could inform the recasting of the lovers as middle class, an upper-class court, set against the Mechanicals, who were the amateur dramatic society of the wartime Women’s Voluntary Services. Building on a long tradition of female cross-dressing on the English stage, as discussed above, the casting of Dawn French as Bottom ensured that the production was centered on the group of female Mechanicals. The amateur dramatics’ dressing-up-box approach to the play-within-the-play, enabled moments such as Dawn French’s disappearance into the papier-mâché bombastic breastplate (Figure 6.21) when playing Pyramus, having

Figure 6.21 Costume drawing for Pyramus, by Lez Brotherston for Dawn French’s interpretation of Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Lez Brotherston.

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Figure 6.22 Lez Brotherston’s costume designs for (a) Puck and (b) Philostrate, for London’s West End production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Lez Brotherston.

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Figure 6.23 Hermia design drawing by Lez Brotherston, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Lez Brotherston.

earlier, as Bottom, worn a furry male appendage, tail, hairy legs, donkey’s ears, and chest hair poking out of the red polka-dot frilly blouse. Elizabeth Klett proposes how this production, having initially presented nostalgia, subverts it through the Brotherston’s Bottom-as-Ass costume and through French’s acting. This costumed image provided a hybrid, “simultaneously citing femininity, masculinity and animality” (Klett 2009: 132), through which French was able to parody both her female character and the male enacted by the ass’s apparatus in the encounter with Titania. Extraneous male appendages have been discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to the comedic grotesque costume, into which a critique of gendered power and understandings of gender instability could be read. It is possible to consider, therefore, that this inclusive production may have accidentally smuggled in, through casting, costume and comedy, transgressive ideas about gender. The fairies’ degraded and broken-down tutus, matched with Dr. Martens boots, school satchels, gas masks, and unraveling Fair Isle sweaters, may have nodded to a subversion of tutued fairies, while Puck and Oberon reprised, through their shredded net breeches (Figure  6.22a), Brotherston’s redrafting of masculinity in Swan Lake (see Chapter  1). While downplaying the darkness inscribed in the piece, the contemporaneity of this performance drew from popular culture and fashion. Recognizable characters, with echoes of contemporary TV comedy shows also set in World War II , such as Dad’s Army and ’Allo ’Allo, fulfilled Brotherston’s aim to communicate to audiences drawn into the theatre via Dawn French rather than Shakespeare. With the play being centered around the female leader of the Rude Mechanicals, in a

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Figure 6.24 Nicky Gillibrand’s costume design for Tree, Royal Shakespeare Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001, directed by Richard Jones © Nicky Gillibrand.

Figure 6.25 Costume design for Puck, by Nicky Gillibrand for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Nicky Gillibrand.

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Figure 6.26 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2002 directed by Richard Jones. The photograph by Manuel Harlan shows Bottom (Darrell D’Silva) and Titania (Yolanda Vazquez). Costume design by Nicky Gillibrand © Royal Shakespeare Company.

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Figure 6.27 Nicky Gillibrand’s costume design for First Fairy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2001 © Nicky Gillibrand.

world not too remote from the audience, he achieved a contemporary restaging addressing gender imbalances that Kott may have appreciated. The production became richly communicative, layering onto itself an ancient, comical theatricality, and potentially advancing a shared consciousness of the instability of the binary gender construct. Jan Kott’s notion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a nightmare belonging to the sphere of a sort of bestiality, was detectable the following year in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production. Directed by Richard Jones and with costumes by Nicky Gillibrand (Figures  6.24 to 6.27), it was an iconoclastic production that led to “a series of critical attacks on the artistic policy of the company.”19 Gillibrand and Jones may have agreed in their interpretation with Stephen Greenblatt, who highlighted

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the “emotional violence and masochism, the betrayal of friendship, the radical fickleness of desire” (Greenblatt, 2008: 844) evident, for example, in the brutal exchanges between the lovers. The interchanging couples of this Dream appear to lose control over their clothing, becoming increasingly disheveled and ultimately almost naked. In the nightmarish darkness of the black box set, where gigantic, projected insects fester, Titania is threatened by the sinister anthropomorphic tree (Figure 6.24), and by a makeup-smudged Puck (Figure 6.25). Bottom’s latex “fright mask,”20 with mule ears, lent a devilish quality to his bestiality and was inspired by the work of artist Paul McCarthy (Figure  6.26). Titania’s empowered sexuality is expressed through her dress, which, concluding Chapter 4, has offered our final example of the physical relationship between body, costume, and space in relation to the feminine sublime. Gillibrand, who has illustrated fashion for Vogue and studied textiles at art college, articulated through a language of dress the nuances of the four-hundred-year-old play in the here-and-now, in textile and form, which she defines as a “coming out of the darkness.” In practical terms countless decisions were to be made, such how to use the felt being dyed for the coat of the First Fairy, as each side took the dye differently. The more textured surface would “show on stage,” a tactile/visual communication that brings to mind performativity as defined earlier through the La Perlouse costume. Evident in Gillibrand’s interview in 2002, reprised in 2015, is also the extent to which the whole production thrived implicitly on the invention generated within collaborative exchanges between the designer, performers, and makers. She observed how “fantastically” Karen Crichton made Michele Wade’s First Fairy coat (Figure 6.27), which was worn like overalls rather than the sculptural fashion garment it might have alluded to, as she was the fairy that never grew up. “We made some beautiful wings out of old tights” which the First Fairy would pull out of her bag, something, Gillibrand noted, Wade “would be able to carry off.” Expressive artifice found application in the costumes designed by Marie-Jeanne Lecca21 for the comic opera The Adventures of Mr. Broucˇek, written in 1920 by Leoš Janácˇek, and directed by David Pountney in the 1992 production (Figures  6.28, 6.29, and 6.30). Lecca and Pountney were working during the English National Opera powerhouse years of the 1980s and early 1990s, when highly visual productions were consistently experimenting with space and the body in large-scale opera productions. Originally from Bucharest, Lecca studied at the Beaux Arts Institute, within an Eastern European paradigm of theatre perceived as a visual and artistic practice, which, from behind the Iron Curtain, had retained the bold experimental dynamics of the early twentieth century avant-garde. As discussed in Chapter 5, the visual was inevitably articulated through the costumed body on stage. Lecca speaks of her influences as ranging from early silent movies to Malevich’s paintings. Mr. Broucˇek’s excursions provided, similarly to the hallucinations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a space for the costume imagination which was here interpreted via the advanced state of intoxication of the central character. Traveling first to the moon and then back in time—the fifteenth century—the characters Broucˇek meets, although in different costumes, are versions of the ones encountered in the earthly present of the opening scene. This re-presentation through re-costuming offers a multifaceted approach to character building, the opposite of the essential and internal “truth” sought by naturalism; here a character is always in the process of being created through its reworkings. As externally reshapable, contingent to the context of their siting, these costumed characters are formed through their relationships to one another. The opera exposes the existential angst of Mr. Broucˇek, a Czech “everyman,” and his philistine incomprehension of art and of history, which, in his drunken state, he projects respectively as a colony of artists on the moon and battle-ready, heroic Prague of the fifteenth century. In Lecca’s drawings, Broucˇek’s trip to the moon, intended to be “the future,” was identified as the present of the production

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Figure 6.28 Costume design by Marie-Jeanne Lecca for The Adventures of Mr. Broucˇek, 1992, at the English National Opera. The scene is set on the moon in a future defined by the clothing that the characters wear, which in this production parodies the present of the production © Marie-Jeanne Lecca, costume designer.

itself, the late 1980s and early 1990s, expressed as a parody of the commercialization of artistic practice (Figure 6.28). This is evident in the augmented sharp tailoring of the late 1980s; the primary colors and high contrast worn by the child prodigy singer; his businesslike mother; the dominating patron; and the three identical composers, appearing to satirize opera itself. In the scene representing “the past,” the fifteenth century towers over the mediocre and cowardly Mr. Broucˇek with gigantic, cape-wearing knights on stilts, covered in obsessive calligraphy, printed on extended gowns made of red and gold velvet (Figure  6.29). Through the tapestry-like image Lecca intended to present the chorus as a scenic ensemble, made focal through the lined-up shields that together configure Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. The opening scene of the opera is, however, “the present,” set in 1920s Prague, when the opera was first staged, in a black and white landscape which is in sharp contrast to the moonscape of the future. Geometrically abstract patterns which define the characters, appear to acknowledge a black and white debt to constructivist artist Sonia Delaunay (Figure  6.30). Lecca’s composite drawings—a triptych of the present earth, the future moon, and the glorious past—make evident a mapping of boldly presented bodies and costume as a mechanism for the staging of the play. A dynamic of dress is at work in the juxtaposition of characters and scenes, in the construct within each drawing, and the plasticity of the space the costumed bodies create between them. Beyond the representation of the characters,

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Figure 6.29 The historical past set in fifteenth-century Prague, where the time-traveling Mr Broucˇek finds himself © Marie-Jeanne Lecca, costume designer.

Figure 6.30 The present of this production was set in Prague at the time of the opera’s first production, 1920, and was perceived through the filter of Mr Broucˇek’s inebriation © MarieJeanne Lecca, costume designer.

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Lecca’s designs summarize through costume the spatial, temporal, and musical dimensions of the production, thus explaining the concept for a rarely staged opera which transferred to the Bavarian State Opera three years after opening at the ENO . If Mr. Broucˇek’s costumes express the workings of the opera through their exterior forms, then the interior psychology of the characters may also be externalized through costume, demonstrating how “human beings might be shaped by inner psychical conflicts,” as Janice Miller concludes in her analysis of the relationship between clothing and Freud’s psychoanalysis (2016: 48). The costumes designed by

Figure 6.31 The maids, designed by Brigitte Reiffenstuel for Richard Strauss’s Elektra, at the Royal Opera House, directed by Charles Edwards, in 2002 © Brigitte Reiffenstuel.

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Brigitte Reiffenstuel for Strauss’s Elektra, written in 1909, with set, lighting, and direction by Charles Edwards, in 2002, at the Royal Opera House, illustrate how inner and outer conflicts have shaped characters drawn from Sophocles’ play dating to the fifth century BC . Brigitte Reiffenstuel, originally from Munich, studied costume at London College of Fashion and Central St. Martins, while Charles Edwards graduated in theatre design from the Central School of Art. They have collaborated on several productions over many years. Elektra was revived by ROH in 2013 and Edwards, having been engaged to restage the opera, answered my questions on costumes, building on the original interview with Reiffenstuel in 2002. As a director and designer, Edwards believes that it is partly through design that the “the director can make an impact on the stage.”22 In Edwards’ and Reiffenstuel’s Elektra, the maids of the first scene (Figure  6.31), drawn from the trümmerfrauen, German women rubble-clearing after World War II , are in a bomb site overshadowed by a glass-fronted building. The bomb site represents the palace of the murdered ruler Agamemnon, whom Elektra, his daughter, intends to avenge, while mother Klytämnestra and lover Aegisth, the murderers, inhabit the glassy facade. In a set that is a metaphor for the catastrophic persistence of trauma, the maids sweep rubble in 1940s house-dresses and aprons. Elektra (Figure 6.32), intending to perpetrate matricide out of love for her murdered father, is physically shaped by grief as she appears in his coat, the wearing of which, in Edwards’s words, is “almost a sexual experience for her.” The coat, Edwards adds, covers the dress she has not taken off since her father’s funeral, and that will be finally shed on brother Orest’s arrival. While her black veil looked simultaneously back to the mourning of her father and to what is to

Figure 6.32 Elektra, in a photograph by Peter West. Costume design Brigitte Reiffenstuel, direction, set, and lighting design, Charles Edwards © Peter West, Donnington Arts.

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come, the change out of her funeral dress marked the passage into a new stage in the ritual of revenge, a liminal moment reminiscent of our discussion in Chapter  1. Her broken-down military coat signals simultaneously her abjection from society and a determination for revenge that separates Elektra from the more conventionally feminine characters. Her sister Chrysothemis (Figure 6.33) is ready for a different ritual, a “party waiting to happen,” in Edwards’ words, the wedding she fantasizes about and which is evidenced in the white skirt, flaring out into a fishtail shape from under the fitted dress form, decorated in black veil fabric. She is a “passive and ineffective” figure, says Edwards, her costume demonstrates “a

Figure 6.33 Costume design by Brigitte Reiffenstuel for Chrysothemis, layering mourning veils over a nuptial white skirt © Brigitte Reiffenstuel.

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superficial identification with a romanticized ideal of Ancient Greece.” Their mother Klytämnestra (Figure 6.34), who lives in fear of her children’s revenge, exposes her inner conflict through a sumptuous dress that appears infested by the jewels encrusted onto it. Reiffenstuel made use of a fabric especially made for the production, with the intention, Edwards recalls, “to appear to be irritating to her skin. The sumptuousness of it is meant to be gaudy and tasteless. It makes reference to the more lurid visual world of the Secession in the late nineteenth century, it connects with the extreme and sexually loaded interpretation of dreams and fantasies which were being explored at the time” (Edwards 2015).

Figure 6.34 The costume designed by Brigitte Reiffenstuel for Klytämnestra represented the character’s inner conflicts © Brigitte Reiffenstuel.

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In a re-writing of a thousands-years-old myth, composed at a time in the early 1900s when female characters were “playing havoc with the traditional and moral standards of women” (Scott 2005: 12), the matricidal heroine discussed by Jill Scott in Elektra After Freud: Myth and Culture, exposes “the intersections of history and the feminine” (2005: 4). As such she brings to mind Maud Allan, her Salome’ performance, as well as all the other female performers of the early twentieth century who, assembled in Chapter 4, have advanced the movement toward equality through performance and costume. Elektra extends its pertinence in this production, via psychology externalized in costumes as embodiment of conflicts in history as much as in the characters’ minds. Its references are polarized between the 1890s and the 1940s, a period encompassing two World Wars, themselves linked in a cycle of revenge from which we, the audience, may never entirely escape: at the curtain call the stage fills with the entire cast, their costumes now stained by blood. Seen en masse, they present a moment of sobering, flood-lit awareness. If catharsis is the gaining of a shared insight, here the bloodied costumes contribute a warning about the inescapable, indiscriminate brutality of war, even for those entirely exterior to its motives such as the maids, or us, the community of the audience staring at the onstage community.

Conclusion: costume as a negotiation of proximity and distance Via Brecht and Kott, the stripping away of the superfluous and the decorative in Sally Jacobs’ radical white box endowed eloquence to the performing body and the minimalist costumes intended to be timeless, which ensured that gesture, whether lewd or magical, was foregrounded. Thus freed from precedents, the body on stage became a catalyst for communication. The “sacred” words of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which had been dressed for centuries in romantically draped deference, could now subvert exclusivity through the mocking of class distinctions. In the comedic popular culture of Lez Brotherston’s Home Front, a feminist version of the Dream emerged, through costume inventiveness, smuggling gender transgression into a production intended to reach a wide-ranging audience. Conversely, the nightmarish quality of the play and its dangerous sexuality expressed in violent exchanges, was evidenced in Nicky Gillibrand’s oscillation between dress and nakedness, body and art, human and animal, darkness and light, challenging notions of what a Royal Shakespeare Company Midsummer Night’s Dream ought to look like. In the discomfort its revelatory bodies provoked in the cultural establishment—Adrian Noble, the then RSC artistic director, had to defend the production on Newsnight23—the underlying power of the story is revealed, through a visceral engagement with its spectators. In these three A Midsummer Night’s Dream productions, costume negotiates the proximity of the Shakespearean performer to the audience though the body, material culture, form, and artistic concept. Evident in the rarely performed The Adventures of Mr. Broucˇek’s costume designs, by Marie-Jeanne Lecca, are the spatial and dynamic relationships which expose costumes’ ability to function as an organizing principle. With no intention of ever appearing entirely real, they draw from periods centuries apart, transformed into new narrative forms to expose the comedy in the opera. The performance mechanics show on the outside of the voluminous bodies, placed in relation to one another. Finally, Elektra, by being situated in the decades around the two World Wars, extends the proximity of costume to the memory of a traumatic past evidenced in the costumed bodies. The connection with interior and exterior conflict through the psychological specificity of the choices made regarding costume ensures

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that the experience of this opera is not about some “other” of the distant past but refers to a humanity in which we are all implicated. The layered meanings ascribed to the costumed body though its designing and making, communicate viscerally human complexities, releasing their power in the performance. History and fashion, the focus of this chapter, are used pointedly and filtered through the designers’ and the directors’ own ethical and embodied understanding of the costumed body and of performance. Throughout this book, discussion around the body on stage has engaged social, gender, and diversity politics, and the way these are materialized and performed through costume in performance. The designers whose voices conclude this investigation work through extensive research, and intense artistic and collaborative processes, in which their values are foregrounded. The proximity and engagement engendered by their costume work, therefore, is not just conceptual or materially constructed and culturally understood. It is also embodied in their expert artistic practice as makers of performance intent on communicating to the audience with the performer in fleeting, momentary exchanges, transmitted via the specially made and performed in garment that is costume. Indelible memories may be left by certain moments of performance that are perceived through the spectating of the costumed body, as found in the cultural markers, originated from the work of costume in performance, and which have been discussed in this thematic study. Often, individual costumes have been found to be agents in wider culture and in social interactions. Their connecting across frameworks of ideas has enabled the contextualizing and the valuing of contemporaries’ work, as recurrent forms that have echoed across centuries, geographical locations and the present, and have occasionally also been prescient of the future. The material costume has defied its own disappearing act to offer an opportunity for a wide ranging discussion reflecting on human experience as presented materially in performance. What becomes apparent is the richness of the subject, its liveness, even when working with archived costume, defined by the intimate connection costume creates between maker, performer and audience, and by its instrumentality in the creation of live performance. If questions such as “what does costume do?”, “how is it different from everyday clothing?” and “how does it make sense of the performance?” have been guiding this inquiry, they have by no means been exhaustingly answered. This study has nonetheless engaged with the process of defining the complexity of this multifaceted and under explored subject, while also giving shape to the critical forms of some of its most salient manifestations. It is hoped that it may provoke further questions and reflections, as well as encourage and inspire future articulations of costume as an active and sophisticated agent in the making of the performance.

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NOTES

Introduction 1

1

As the chapters that follow reveal, enlightening references emerge from a wide range of sources and include in-depth historical studies on specific time-frames, among them Rosie Wyles (2011), Barbara Ravelhofer (2006), James Saslow (1996), Gwendolyn Compton-Engle (2003), Donatella Barbieri (2013), Melissa Trimingham (2011), John Bowlt and Lobanov-Rostovsky (2013), Kaplan and Stowell (1994), and Lennox and Mirabella (2015). Other recent investigations on the subject of costume include Aoife Monks (2010) and Maclaurin and Monks (2015). For an approach to semiotics and costume, see Analyzing Performance (Pavis 2003). The knowledge generated by costume exhibitions has, in certain cases, been extended through concurrent publications, for example Pritchard and Marsh edited essays on Diaghilev (2010). Research journal editions emerging from exhibitions and conferences on key moments in theatre history, for instance the Studies in Theatre and Performance issue on Avant-garde Russian Theatre, edited by Kate Dorney, have included essays centred on costume, such as Trimigham and Barbieri (2016). The Canadian Theatre Review has dedicated an entire issue to costume design, see Rewa (2012a), which has been followed by a double issue of Scene, see Hann and Bech (2014), gathering articles from the first Critical Costume conference. The first edition of Studies in Costume and Performance, SCP, was launched soon after, edited by Sofia Pantouvaki (2016). SCP is edited biannually by Barbieri, Pantouvaki and Dorney, and is the first research journal to focus entirely on costume for performance (Barbieri and Pantouvaki, 2016).

The first costume: Ritual and reinvention

1

Victor Turner collaborated with Richard Schechner in research linking ritual and theatre. David Wiles writes “there is no clear dividing line between theatre and ritual” (2000: 29). However Oliver Taplin in Greek Tragedy in Action (2005: 118–19) and J. Michael Walton in The Greek Sense of Theatre (2013: 23) emphatically refute that the theatre was a ritual in itself in Ancient Greece.

2

Rosie Wyles finds evidence of the potential for material and conceptual exchange, via costume, between ritual and theatre performance (2007: 46–56), and David Wiles, noting to what extent ritual “helped breed the theatrical imagination,” concludes that “it was not the content that constituted the Dionysiac ritual, but the act of masked impersonation” (2007: 30).

3

See Shamans of Prehistory by Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams (1998) and The Splendour of Lascaux by Norbert Aujoulat (2005).

4

Numerous lamps carved out of stone with traces of animal fat have been found in the Lascaux Caves (Ruspoli 1987).

5

Costume-wearing in sacred rituals that preceded and coexisted with the development of staged drama is discussed alongside its equivalent in the performance of tragedy by Rosie Wyles (2007: 46–51).

6

This is evident for example in Aristophanes’ The Women of the Thesmophoria (411BC ; see Sommerstein 1994), in which a series of the character Euripides’ entrances on stage are in disguise, as characters from his plays. 213

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NOTES

Similarly, the character of Agathon, also a playwright, when visited at home is able to lend a costume. See more on this in Chapter 3. 7

A rectangular piece of cloth, draped into different shapes over the bodies of women and men in Ancient Greece, the chiton was a basic garment worn by most people. It was held in place on the shoulder by brooches and tied around the waist. The resulting shape could vary from knee to ankle length.

8

Email correspondence, October 2015.

9

In 1988 the UK government added to the Local Government Act the controversial Clause 28, which was opposed by various groups across the sociopolitical spectrum, and in particular by the organized protests of the gay rights movement. It prohibited local authorities from investing in educational projects which may have presented homosexuality in family relationships as acceptable. It was repealed by the Scottish Government in 2000 and in the rest of the UK in 2003.

10 In conversation with Alfred Simons about Les Atrides. 11 Mnouchkine has since utilized this approach in other productions.

2

Costuming choruses: Spectacle and the social landscape on stage

1

On theories of the mind, see Meltzoff and Printz (2002) The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution, and Brain Bases. Applied to performance, see Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (eds.), Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, 2006.

2

Jacques Rancière argues in The Emancipated Spectator (2009) for the kind of spectatorship that is about being active participants in a collective performance, rather than passive viewers.

3

Here Saslow refers to dramaturg Leone de’ Sommi from Mantua, whose treatise Four Dialogues on Scenic Representation (Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche) written in the second half of the sixteenth century, offers advice on specific choices around costume fabric and make up, the staging of plays, acting, and design.

4

Renaissance dictionaries of symbols include Iconologia by Cesare Ripa (1593); see also Valeriano (1556), Hieroglyphica, sive, De sacris Aegyptiorvm literis commentarii and Cesare Vecellio, (1590) De gli Habiti antichi et moderni in diverse parti del mondo.

5

See a print of this rare example of groups of women dancing at court in Jean Dorat’s Magnificentissimi spectaculi a regina regum matre in hortis suburbanis editi, in Henrici regis Poloniae invicitissimi nuper renunciati gratulationem, Descriptio. Paris, 1573.

6

Further reading: Jennifer Harris (1981), Fiona Macintosh (2013), and Jennifer Homans (2010).

7

Refer to Chapter 4.

8

The V&A costume collection includes G-strings with no side fastening—from the mid-twentieth century—which were held in place by a curved wire between the dancer’s legs, including Ronald Cobb designs for Eve’s Nightclub. On show girls, see Kate Dorney, “Shakespeare stripped: Costuming prisoners of war entertainments and cabaret” in Lennox and Mirabella’s Shakespeare and Costume (2015).

9

Roerich bought Uzbek fabrics and whole garments in St. Petersburg markets for the Ballets Russes production of Prince Igor (1909). See Woodcock (2010: 143).

10 See M. Eksteins (1989), Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. 11 See Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle by Roslyn Poignant, and particularly p. 57, where she summarizes the underpinning of colonial thought articulated initially by John Locke in 1690.

NOTES

3

215

The grotesque costume: The comical and conflicted “other” body

1

This was the second ballet de cour produced at the Hôtel de Ville. It followed the Ballet Royal du Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, staged there in 1626 (Figure 3.2). For a longer discussion on this ballet and on the relationship between the court and the Parisian bourgeoisie in the first half of the sixteenth century, see Margaret McGowan (2001).

2

See also Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (2015), for a dance-based discussion on Bakhtin and the relationship between the carnivalesque and court ballet.

3

Compton-Engle uses Alan Sommerstein’s 1994 translation of the play, in which the character’s name is “the Relative,” given his relationship to Euripides, the other main character. David Barrett translates his name in 1964 as Mnesilochus, based on ancient scholarship existing around an actual relative of the real Euripides.

4

Translated by Alan Sommerstein, 1994.

5

See Samuel Kinser, “Why Is Carnival So Wild?” in Carnival and the Carnivalesque: The Fool, the Reformer, the Wildman, and Others in Early Modern Theatre, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Wim Hüsken (1999).

6

Noted in manuscripts exchanges, in relation to the first draft of this text, September 2014.

7

Author’s own translation. Full quote from Lollini’s article “Le cose del mondo hanno diversi volti, né facile è il sapere quale sia il vero: tanto l’artifizio sa al vero imitar la natura. Il tollerato abuso del mondo mette la maschera su ‘l volto, perche’ col portar due faccie rimangono gli uomini senza faccia; e sfacciatamente operando, col vestirsi dell’altrui volto perdono il proprio” (1995: 250).

8

Katritzky finds visual and textual evidence of the connection between the working clothes of mid-sixteenth century farm workers and of sailors and the costumes of Zany performers (2006: 191) and of carnival masqueraders (2006: 68). Zany characters preceded and paralleled the development of stock commedia characters costumes.

9

The author’s research project “Encounters in the Archive” enabled a close material analysis of these costumes, which are held in the V&A Theatre and Performance, and are documented in Barbieri (2012a and b).

10 Theatre NO99 exhibited this performance at Prague Quadrennial 2007, in a multi-screen immersive environment, which permitted the audience, including the author of this book, to experience a twenty minutes edited version of the entire three hours performance. See Gener (2007: 59) for details of the exhibition. Also in Rewa, N. (2012b) “The Prague quadrennial: Repositioning design for performance.” Australasian Drama Studies 61: 133-155, and Prague Quadrennial 07 [exhibition catalogue] published by the Theatre Institute, Prague, in 2007. Also see Theatre NO99 company’s website: http://no99.ee/ (accessed January 2017).

4 The Flight off the Pedestal: A Sublime Second Skin 1

I am grateful to designer/director Charles Edwards for drawing my attention to Lilli Lehmann’s memoirs via Thomas Kelly and to the disregard for singers’ comfort in the creation of scenic swimming moments such as this one. Under Wagner’s supervision, Lehmann sang the role of Woglinde—one of the maidens—at Bayreuth in 1876 for the first complete Ring cycle. This was before stage flight was technically sufficiently advanced, and she describes being buckled into a “Rhine-maidens’ swimming apparatus on wheels” in “a sort of cradle on a pole at least twenty feet high.” A tail attached to the cradle transmitted a quivering motion to the singers’ bodies, and they were often waiting in the wings to the released from the apparatus at the end of their scenes. Quoted in Thomas Kelly (2004), First Nights at the Opera, p. 291.

2

Kobbé concludes the article on Mr. Bluebeard referring to the group of female child actors also cast in the show. He suggests that the company’s stage manager might have wished everyone to be “as obedient and

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NOTES

quick as the sweet, willing little girls.” This emphasis on a compliant, obedient, and willing femininity, be it of little girls or female aerial dancers, reflects the dominant discourse of female subordination, at a time when women were increasingly campaigning for equal rights. Kobbé, G. (1902), “Training for the Holiday Pantomime,” Collier’s Illustrated Weekly, New York, 11 October, 30(2): 18–19. 3

I am grateful to local historian Judy Cooke for publishing on line a wealth of information about the Grigolatis troupe and Mr. Bluebeard, including this review from the New York Times, published January 22, 1903, of the show at the Knickerbocker Theatre. “Drury Lane Pantomime at the Knickerbocker Theatre,” http://www. iroquoistheater.com/nyt-1903-mr-bluebeard-review.php (accessed June 16, 2016).

4

All quotes from Nicky Gillibrand’s interview in 2002, part of the Designs for the Performers research project, were reprised in 2015. See also Chapter 6 in this volume.

5

Agency and empathy: artists touch the body

1

See Trimingham (2011: 107–13, but 112–13 on Merleau-Ponty).

2

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate that these basic orientating pivots become part of our body schema (i.e., our idea of ourselves that underneath conscious thought shapes our actions) and originate in the experience of bodily movement from our earliest moments. See Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (1999).

3

This is treated in much more detail in Trimingham “How to Think a Puppet” ([2011] 2014: 122–4).

4

See Posner (2010) for an insight into one such production, Princess Brambilla.

5

A. Efros, “Khudozhnik I stsena,” Kultura Teatra, 1921, 1: 11.

6

See for example Ruth Hemus (2007) and Naima Prevots (1985).

7

Craig ultimately preferred the human performer to be an Über-marionette or “Super Puppet,” i.e., he emphasized the sculptural qualities of the body in performance, an approach that was ill-suited to most of the contemporary actors he had to accommodate in his stage spaces.

8

Little has been written on Schulz who seems to have a short and poverty stricken life, devoted fanatically to her art.

9

In Vienna it was first developed by women, before World War I, such as Grete Wiesenthal and her sisters.

10 This date is the one recorded in Holger’s journal, according to her daughter Primavera Boman. I owe a great deal to Primavera in my researches on her mother; and to Thomas Kampe who generously shared memories, books, and personal insights with me. 11 See for example Carol Browne in Australia, and Thomas Kampe, Lindsay Kemp, and Wolfgang Strange in England. 12 Holger’s daughter Primavera Boman in a private communication with me is clear that in her view Holger would never have countenanced humor in these dances. 13 In a telephone conversation February 2015, when Liz Aggiss was generous enough to share with me her memories of making this dance and many recollections of her teacher Hilde Holger. 14 Although the swastika was at this time a mystical symbol, Holger’s pupil Thomas Kampe thinks this comment referring to the shape as a swastika in 1992 is simply typical of Holger’s sense of humor. I believe, along with Aggiss and Kampe (private communications) that we can be fairly sure that Holger resisted any political connotations both when the dance originated and when it was reconstructed. For example when Aggiss’s agent wanted to make a film of the dance with a background of marching soldiers and Hitler, Aggiss says that Holger refused. 15 Aggiss also reconstructed Holger’s The Golem (1937), Le Martyre de Saint Sébastian (1923), and Die Forelle [The Trout] (1923), under Holger’s direction. See below.

NOTES

217

16 His later name in Russia was Artur Semyonovich Berger. 17 Primavera Boman points out that Holger’s knowledge of the other arts no doubt began with her training under Bodenwieser, as this was a key part of her approach. 18 Primavera Boman said her mother had told her this. 19 I am indebted for noticing this quotation to Liz Aggis and Claudia Kappenberg, who quote and translate this in their chapter “Hilde Holger, spirit and maracas” in Aggiss and Cowie (2006: 76). The Schlemmer parallel leaps out: this trio of body, spirit, soul was fundamental to his philosophy, and derived originally from his readings of Ricarda Huch. See Trimingham (2011: 33, 77). 20 See Schlemmer ([1958] 1972: 188–9). 21 Schlemmer in “Man and Art Figure” says: “Man, its [organic nature’s] chief phenomenon, is both an organism of flesh and blood and at the same time the exponent of number and ‘Measure of All Things’ (the Golden Section),” Schlemmer ([1925] 1996: 22). 22 For a full explanation of Schlemmer’s theory on the body and its relationship to The Triadic Ballet see Trimingham (2011: 84–7). 23 Schlemmer never found satisfactory music for The Triadic Ballet. See Trimingham (2011: 134–6). 24 The idea of “Body Image” originates in Schilder’s writings but has been usefully taken up in more recent cognitive writing, namely by Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), Chapter 1. 25 Hugo Ball was steeped in Expressionist ideas from Munich where he lived before traveling to Zurich and starting the Cabaret Voltaire, where this sort of poetry was first heard. See Trimingham (2011: 187, n 17). 26 In The Black Rider, however, the hideous Lover has a padded outfit, high round neck collar, heavy makeup, and a half head of shiny straight long black hair—all suggestive of a Frankenstein type figure. Mary Shelley was reputedly inspired to create Frankenstein by listening to Gespensterbuch that contained the tale of The Free Shooter upon which Black Rider was based. 27 Private communication, February 2013.

6 1

A different performativity: Society, culture, and history on stage Sociologists have theorized around the role of dress in the everyday. Joanne Entwistle particularly, in her comprehensive The Fashioned Body (2015) exposes the various strands of thought. She draws attention to Irvin Goffman, in his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1990); to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s extensive theorizing around phenomenology; and to historical readings of the performance of the everyday in the work of Richard Sennett, among several others.

2

See www.encountersinthearchive.com (accessed April 20, 2016) and Barbieri (2012a and b).

3

Designs for the Performer was AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) and London College of Fashion funded research project. Aspects of it have been reprised in 2015 by Dr. Greer Crawley’s curation of the UK submission to the international exhibition in Moscow, Costume at the Turn of the Century. Its inclusion in Prague Quadrennial 2003 was instrumental in Nicky Gillibrand, one of the designers included, being awarded the Gold Medal for Costume Design. The conversations with the designers were originally held via a series of interviews and masterclasses at London College of Fashion (2002–3), while their work was selected for exhibition, elements of which toured to Prague Quadrennial (2003) and around the UK , and in the Theatre Museum, London, now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

4

I am indebted to Amy de la Haye for this point which is also made in the section dedicated to her in Re-encounters (Barbieri 2012b). Worth’s “house models” were photographed in profile or frontal poses. Photographic images can be found in The House of Worth’s archive, also held by the V&A.

218

NOTES

5

Vogue was founded in New York in 1892. The first British edition was not until 1916.

6

Vogue, March 18, 1896, pp. iv–v.

7

“Grow up to Glamour with me,” Daily Sketch, July 22, 1936, pp. 20–1.

8

Play Pictorial was a theatre magazine and photographic record of individual productions in London. Each issue included a series of scenes that recorded the actors in costume on set at various points in the production.

9

Daily Telegraph, October 7, 1987: 9–10.

10 October 14, 1897, p. 531. 11 Taruskin refers to the 1830 revolution in Brussels, started during a production of Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici at La Monnaie, in which he claims the bourgeois audience identified with the plight of peasants portrayed on stage. The revolution that ensued created what was to become Belgium. 12 With Susan North, Jenny Tiramani has co-edited Seventeenth Century Women’s Dress Patterns, Book One (2011) and Book Two (2013), V&A Publishing. 13 The funding policies of the Globe as a unique and extremely costly building reconstruction project in London, and how this reflects on costume, have been summarized in Elizabeth Klett’s Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity (2009), and more specifically in her introduction. 14 Other designs by Marre catalogued as “fancy dress costume” include crinolines surface decorated to resemble fire, covered in garlands of flowers, or puffs of tulle to represent clouds. Sea shells decorate a maritime-themed gown, while another appears covered in elongated, stylized bunting flags. His body of work also includes faithful reproductions of late eighteenth century fashion plates, complete with appropriate wigs. 15 Manchester Evening News, March 20, 1895. 16 The Aesthetic Dress Movement, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, promoted light or no corseting and simplicity of design on artistic grounds as well as to promote better health. 17 In “Peter Brook on A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A cook and a concept,” by Peter Brook published in The Guardian, April 15, 2013. 18 As part of the Designs for the Performer research project, interviews with Brotherston took place in 2002. They were reprised in January 2015 during an in-conversation held at London College of Fashion with Jane Pritchard, Senior Curator of Dance, from the V&A. 19 Charlotte Higgins, “Rise of the Demon King,” The Guardian, April 20, 2002. 20 All quotes are from the initial interviews which took place in 2002 as part of the Designs for the Performer research project, reviewed with Nicky Gillibrand in April 2015. 21 As part of the Designs for the Performer research project, initial interviews with Marie-Jeanne Lecca took place in 2002. They were reprised in January 2015, and were followed by email exchanges. 22 All quotations from Charles Edwards, in relation to Elektra, are from a telephone interview in April 2015, and were followed by email exchanges. 23 BBC daily current affairs late evening program, specialized in questioning guests around important news stories. See note 20, Higgins, for further details.

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INDEX

Illustrations are denoted by the use of italics. 3-D spaces 148, 150 Abkarian, Simon 20, 22, 22 aboriginal hand stencil paintings 54, 54 abstraction 128, 139, 146–7, 204 abstract space 146–7, 150, 161–2 acrobat troupes 110–15, 111 Adventures of Mr Broucˇek, The (Janácˇek) 203–4, 205, 210 Aelita (film) 148 aerialists 97–100, 110–16, 114–16, 131, 215n.1 Aeschylus 18 Aesthetic Dress Movement 218n.16 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 21 Aggiss, Liz 153–5, 156, 157 Albery Theatre (London) 198 Alexander, Bobby 2 Alexander, George 173, 176 Alhambra theatre (London) 104, 106 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves 103, 104 Allan, Maud 116–17, 117 allegories 35, 36–8, 41 Amber Heart, The 192 amorality 81, 108, 175 Ancient Greece 3, 5–6, 18, 29–35, 95, 194 Anderson, Percy 107 animal–human hybrids 3, 12 animality 3, 5, 70 anthropomorphic creatures 69, 70, 203 antimasques 8, 10 Appia, Adolphe 150 archaeological sources 34, 119, 177 Archer, William 186 Aristophanes 63, 65, 213n.6 Aristotle 30, 31 Arlecchino (Harlequin) 62, 67, 69–77, 74, 89 Arlecchino, Servitore di Due Padroni (Goldoni) 89 Arnold, Janet 41

Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1610 (Strong) 35 Artaud, Antonin 90 Art Nouveau 128 Asche, Oscar 108, 108 Asia influence on Western performance 18 traditional performance practices 2, 15–18 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 186 audiences and choruses 29, 30 courtly 8 engagement with 35, 58, 114, 124, 200–1 female 169 and Fools 78, 79 “kinetic” empathy of 137, 138 male 98 and performers 19, 90 and scenography 35 staged metaphors 24, 41, 55–6 Austin, J. L. 6 avant-garde 53, 139, 141–2 Baker, Josephine 123, 124–5 Bakhtin, Mikhail 59, 66 Bakst, Léon 12, 13, 108 Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut 61 ballerinas 11, 12, 46, 46 ballet ballets de cour (court ballet) 41–3, 42, 59 early 29 Romantic (19th century) 11, 43–8, 52 shoes 46, 99, 122, 130 ballet blanc 43–8, 52, 99 Ballet de la Nuit (Boësset, Cambefort and Lambert) 43 Ballet du Serieux et du Grotesque 59–62, 60 ballets de cour 42, 43, 59 Ballets Russes 3, 12, 52, 87–8, 146–7, 168 Ball, Hugo 145, 146, 217n.25 229

230

Balli di Sfessania street performers 75–7, 76 Barba, Eugenio 15, 17 Barbican Centre 160, 160 Bargagli, Girolamo 35 Baroque period 8–11, 32 Barrett, David 215n.3 Battersby, Elizabeth 97, 136 battle dress 31–4, 31, 32 Battle of San Romano (Uccello) 204 Baugh, Christopher 177 Bauhaus art/design school 157 Bauhaus Dances: Form Dance, The 158 Bauhaus theatre 151 Bausch, Pina 55, 55, 128–30, 129–31 Bauta, Venetian 75 Beckett, Helen 117, 119–20, 128 Beckett, Samuel 87 Berger, Artur 152, 153, 155 Berl, Kathe 155 Bernard Shaw, George 125, 172 Bernhardt, Sarah 169, 185, 186, 187, 188 bestiality 12, 69, 203 Between Theatre and Anthropology (Schechner) 17 Bharucha, Rustom 23, 28 black performers and costume 16, 113–14, 124, 178 Black Rider, The 139, 160–3, 217n.26 bloodied costumes 210 Bodenwieser-Gruppe, Gertrud 152, 154 bodices, boned 45, 183–4 body disassembling, of 87 drawings of 2, 4, 7 metamorphosis 5, 17, 90–3 transformation of 157 See also individual parts Bohner, Gerhard 159 Boman, Primavera 216n.10, 216n.12, 216n.17–18 Bonfante, Larissa 6 Boric, Dusan 5 Borodin, Alexander 52 Borzik, Rolf 55 bourgeoisie 53, 59–61, 217n.11 Bourne, Matthew 13, 14 Bouvet, Marie-Hélène 18, 21 Brayton, Lily 108, 108 breasts 38, 56, 62, 63, 64, 117 Brecht, Bertolt 15, 194 Breuil, Henri (Abbé) 4 Brinkhoff, Ralf 161, 161–4 Briosco, Andrea 11 Brook, Peter 15, 16, 23, 194, 196, 197 Brotherston, Lez 13, 198–201, 198–200, 210

INDEX

Brown, Marilyn R. 113 Brussels revolution (1830) 217n.11 Bryant-Bertail, S. 23 Buck, Adam 44 Buontalenti, Bernardo 36, 36, 38, 39 Burke, Edmund 95–6 Burroughs, William 160 Burt, Ramsay 11, 14, 48 Bury, John 194 Butoh performance 28 cabaret dancers 49–50, 49–50 Cabaret Voltaire 145 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film) 160 Callot, Jacques 40, 75, 75–6, 77 Calmette, Gaston 12 Calthrop, Gladys 171 Cambodian dancers 28 cancan dancers 49 canonical fool 79 caricatures, costume 59–62, 60–1 Carnarvon Ranges (Australia) 54 Carneiro da Cunha, Juliana 22 carnivalesque costume 59–62, 65, 88, 90, 215n.8 Carroll, Tim 181 Carter, Tim 35 Cattermole, Charles 188 celebrations, court 35 censorship 8, 15, 30, 117 Central School of Art and Design (London) 198, 207 Central St. Martins (London) 207 Chalon, Alfred Edwards 45 Chamber Theatre (Moscow) 140, 147 Chanel, Coco 168–9, 168, 172 changes, costume 62–5, 100, 172 Chaplin, Charlie 62, 85–6, 87 chemises 38, 182 Chen, Mao 194 Chinery, Pansy 115 chitons 32, 63, 213n.7 choral practices 29–30, 35, 46 choruses and audiences 29, 30 Baroque period 32 dithyrambic 30, 31 early operas 35 and tragedies 31–5 Chout (Prokofiev) 87–8, 89 Chu Chin Chow (Asche) 107, 108, 121 cinematic costume 84–7, 170 circus aerialists 110–15 circus clowns 87 Cirque Fernando 116

INDEX

Cito, Marion 128, 129–31 Cixous, Hélène 19, 35 class conflict 51, 53, 59–61, 63, 80–1 Clause 28 15, 214n.9 clothing, Erasmus’s definition of 178 clowns, Victorian 78–87 coats 78, 87, 182, 203, 207 Cohan, Robert 1, 16 colonialism 96, 97, 100, 104, 177, 214n.11 colors 34, 55, 157, 162, 163, 196 comedic grotesque costume 59–62, 64 Comelli, Attilio 100, 101 commedia dell’arte 62, 69, 73–5, 89 community theatre, Ancient Athens 30 composition, musical 52 Compton-Engle, Gwendolyn 64, 65 Comyns-Carr, Alice 187, 188, 189 Consolation of the Rising Moon, The (Cohan) 1, 16 Constructivism 140–1, 142, 204 Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields, The (Ong) 28 Cooper, Adam 13–14 corps de ballet 13, 48 Corsair, The (ballet) 12 corselets 31, 32 corset-harnesses 95, 99–100, 103, 105, 113 corsets 43, 103–4, 103, 120, 183, 183–4 costume dramaturgy 173, 175, 188 Costume in Greek Tragedy (Wyles) 5–6 Coutris, Marion 87 couture costume 172–6 Coward, Noël 170, 171, 172 Craig, Gordon 150, 216n.7 Crichton Karen 203 Criterion Theatre (London) 172, 174 Crommelynk, Fernand 140 cross-dressing 5, 11–12, 35, 38, 45, 63–4, 103, 103, 186, 188, 191, 200 Crowley, Bob 181, 182 Cubism 139 cuirasses (armor) 32, 34, 41, 43, 105 cultural memory 17, 28, 210 Dada 145, 162 Damasio, A. 138 Dance of the Lily (Fuller) 126, 128 danse grotesque 59–62 danse noble 41–3, 52, 77 Das Rheingold (Wagner) 98 David, Jacques-Louis 45 Death of Tarelkin, The (Sukhovo-Kobylin) 149, 149–50, 165 Debussy, Claude 12 Degas, Edgar 46–7, 47, 113, 114

231

de la Haye, Amy 168, 169 Delaunay, Sonia 204 Delphos dress 191 Delsarte, François 126 de Mallet Burgess, Thomas 130, 132, 134 Demon Machine (Bodenwieser) 56, 153, 154 Desargus-Lemière, Madame 12 Designs for the Performer (research project) 167, 217n.3 Desplaces, Henri 12 devils 36, 38, 62, 65–6, 66–7, 69, 70, 178 Diaghilev, Serge 12, 15, 52, 88, 168, 168 Dionysian Satyr 2, 5, 6 disability 181 dismemberment 65–6 dithyrambic choruses 30, 31 Dorat, Jean 41 Dorney, Kate 50 Douglas, Lord Alfred 175 dress reformists 119 Drury Lane Theatre, London 81, 102, 180 D’Silva, Darrell 202 Duchartre, P. L. 75 Dudley, William 179 Dumilâtre, Adèle 12 Duncan, Isadora 97, 110, 123–24, 121, 122 Duse, Eleanora 169, 185, 186 Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, The (Ravelhofer) 8 Edwards, Charles 207, 207, 208, 209, 215 n.1 Efros, Anatoly 140 Elektra (Strauss) 207, 207, 206–7, 208–10 Elizabethan dress 181–2 Eltis, Sos 175 emancipation 97, 113 Emery, Winifred 176 Empire of Ecstasy (Toepfer) 164 Empty Space, The (Brook) 194 Encounters in the Archives (research project) 167–8 Endymion 120 English National Opera (ENO ) 56, 203, 206 ENO see English National Opera (ENO ) en pointe 48, 130 Entwistle, Joanne 217n.1 Equus (Shaffer) 14 Estonia 90 Euripides 18, 19, 22 Expressionism 145, 151, 160, 162 extensions, of costume 6, 49–50, 62–3, 90, 155, 200 Exter, Alexandra 147–9, 147, 161, 165 Eyre, Richard 181

232

Fabulous Beast Dance Company, The 56 Faithfull, Marianne 160, 161 Farmer, Peter 1, 16 Farren, Nellie 103–4, 103 Fascism 181 fashion, and theatre 170–2, 210–11 Fashioned Body, The (Entwistle) 217n.1 “fashion plays” 172, 173 faun 12–13, 13 Feast of Fools 90 female sexuality 46-8, 95–7, 101, 103, 130, 135, 168, 171, 175, 186, 203, 207–11 Feminine Sublime, The (Freeman) 96 fertility 2, 6, 62 festivals, Dionysian 6, 30 Ficino, Marsilio 41 Figurenspiegel (Teschner) 155 Fireworks (Balla) 150–1 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 2, 23 fleshings (tights) 100–1 Flight Out of Time (Ball) 145 flight, theatrical 95, 97–110 Fokine, Michel 48 Foley, Helen 63 Folies Bergère 49, 123 folk art 8, 53, 62, 65, 69, 73, 89 Fool, Shakespearean 79, 79 Fool, the 78–9, 78, 90 Fortuny, Mariano 191 Fossard Harlequin 72–3, 72, 74 Foucault, Michel 29 Four Dialogues on Scenic Representation (Sommi) 214n.3 Fourth Book (Rabelais) 65–6, 69 Francis, Matthew 198 free dance 152, 155 Freeman, Barbara Claire 96 Fréger, Charles 69 Freire Troupe (acrobats) 111, 111 French, Dawn 198, 198, 200 French Revolution 29, 43, 45, 182–3 Freud, Sigmund 206 Fuller, Loie 97, 110, 126, 126, 128 Futurism 139–40, 141–2, 143, 155 futuristic costume 62, 90, 139 Gaiety Theatre (London) 103 Gallese, V. 138 Galster, Amalia 12 Garber, Marjorie B. 103 Gardel, Pierre 45 Garelick, Rhonda 128

INDEX

Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais) 65 gender ambiguity 63, 135–6 conflict 29, 55, 57–8, 63, 108, 113, 128–35, 200 reassignment through costume 5, 38, 63, 65 genitalia 49, 50, 62, 128 Gibson, James 137–8 Gillibrand, Nicky 135–6, 201–2, 202–3, 210, 217n.3 Giovanni in London, or The Libertine Reclaimed (Moncrieff) 104, 105 Giselle 47, 48, 57 Gissey, Henri de 43 Globe Theatre, London 180 Gobbi performers 75, 75 Godwin, Edward William 119, 190 Goebbels, Joseph 51 Goldoni, Carlo 74–5 Golem, The 155–6, 156 Gopal, Ram 15, 16 Gothic imagery 160 gowns, couture 169, 172–3, 182, 188 Graham, Martha 97, 119, 127, 128 Great Dictator, The 86, 87 Greek theatre 5–6, 18, 30, 62–3, 194 Greenblatt, Stephen 203 Green Orchid Girl (Comelli) 101 Grethlein, Jonas 32 grief 128, 141, 142, 207 Grigolatis Flying Troupe 99–100, 102, 104–5, 106 Grimaldi, Joseph 62, 78, 80, 81–2 Grimm’s fairy tales 197 grotesque costume 59–93 Haddawy, Husain 104 hair 65, 69, 104, 123, 135, 183 Hall, Edith 30, 32 Hamai, Koji 27–8, 27 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 24–6, 25, 186, 187 haptic system 137, 138, 148, 163 Hardie, Ann 186–7 Hargreaves, Martin 14 Harlequin & Friar Bacon (Grimaldi) 81 Harlequin masks 70, 71 Harlequins 62, 67, 69–77, 71–4, 80, 81, 83, 89 harnesses, flying 99, 99 Harrison, Jane Ellen 121 Hatano, Nagisa 159 hats 60, 87, 145, 169, 172 haute-couture 167, 169, 170–1, 170 Haymarket Theatre, London 81 headdresses 38–9, 40, 49, 141, 148, 148

INDEX

Helena in Troas (Todhunter) 119 Hell 36, 38, 66, 66 Henfrey, Janet 160, 161 Hennings, Emmy 146 Henrietta Maria, Queen 8 Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales 8, 9 Heracles 33 high culture 87 Hiley, John 90 Hinamatsuri festival (Japan) 24–6, 25–6 historical costume 177–82, 179, 186–8, 191 historical sources 34, 119, 177–8, 182 Hodgdon, Barbara 181 Hodson, Henrietta 120 Holdt, Walter 151 Holger, Hilde 152, 152, 153–7 homosexuality 15, 175, 214n.9 Hôtel de Ville (Paris) 59 House of Worth (couturier) 182–3, 185, 186, 217n.4 Iconologia (Ripa) 38 Ikeda, Carlotta 27, 28 “illegitimate” theatre 81–3 immobility 61, 95, 128, 145–6 Imperial Ballet (Russia) 52 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde) 175 Indian culture 17, 18, 23 indigenous peoples 54 Intermedio della veglia della liberatione di tirreno 39, 40 Iphigenia at Aulis (Euripides) 18, 19, 22 iron-jaw aerialists 113–16, 114–16 Irving, Henry 179, 180, 190 Isaac, Veronica 187 Ishimuraza Theatre 20 Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, The (Wilson) 96 Italy 35, 89 jackets 87, 103, 182 Jacobs, Sally 194–6, 195–7 Janácˇek, Leoš 203, 210 Janco, Marcel 145 Japanese theatre 24–6, 25 Jarry, Alfred 62, 90 Jason et Medee Ballet Tragique 44 jewelry 43, 49, 117, 135, 169 Joan of Arc 104 Joey (Grimaldi) 62, 81, 83 John, King 178 Johnson, Mark 216n.2

233

“Joker” (Batman) 84 Jones, Henry Arthur 172, 174 Jones, Inigo 8, 9, 9, 10 Jones, Richard 135, 201, 202, 202 Jonson, Ben 8, 13 Kabuki theatre 17, 24 Kampe, Thomas 216n.10, 216n.14 Kandinsky, Wassily 139, 145, 157 Kant, Immanuel 96, 97 Karawane (poem) 145, 146 Kathakali performance 17, 18 Katritzky, M. A. 72, 215n.8 Keegan-Dolan, Michael 56–7, 57 Keith, Charlie 84 Kemble, Charles 177, 182 Kestelman, Sara 196 Khan, Akram 23 Khlebnikov, Velimir 141, 141, 142 kimonos 24, 27–8, 193 kinetic empathy 138, 165 King John (Shakespeare) 177, 178, 182 King’s Men (playing company) 8 Kinsley, Ben 196 Kirby, George 99, 99, 113 Klett, Elizabeth 200 knitted costume 168–9, 187 Kobbé, Gustav 100, 215n.2 Kodály, Zoltán 128 Komine, Lily 24 Kott, Jan 194, 202 Kracauer, Siegfried 50, 51 krater vases 31–2, 31, 64 Krausse, J. 164 Kunisada, Utagawa 20 La Danse des Bananas 123, 124 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde) 173, 175, 176 L’Aiglon (Rostand) 186, 187 Lakoff, George 138, 216n.2 Lamentation (Graham) 97, 127, 128 Lami, Eugène 45 Langtry, Lillie 169, 170 La Pellegrina intermed (Bargagli) 35–8, 36, 37 L’Apres-midi d’un faune (Mallarmé) 3, 12–13, 13 La Primavera (Botticelli) 123 Larionov, Mikhail 87–8, 89 Lascaux caves, France 2, 3–5, 4, 213n.4 La Sylphide 45, 45, 48 La Traviata (Verdi) 130–5, 132–4 Lawrence, Gertrude 170–1, 171, 172 Laws (Plato) 30

234

Lecca, Marie-Jeanne 203–4, 205, 213, 214 Lecoq, Jacques 89–90 Lehár, Franz 172 Lehmann, Lilli 215n.1 Léotard, Jules 110, 112 leotards (maillots) 111–13, 112, 152 Le Pavillon d’Armide 52 Les Atrides (Greek tragedy) 18, 194 Les Sylphides (Fokine) 48, 52 Le Train Bleu (Diaghilev) 168, 168 Liars, The (Jones) 172–4, 174 lighting, set 128, 150, 161, 163 liminality 6, 15, 28, 73 Lind, Letty 125, 125, 169 Lion King, The (Taymor) 23 Little Robin Hood 103 London College of Fashion 207 London theatres 172 Longinus 95, 96 Lorraine, Christine de, Grand Duchess of Tuscany 35 Louis XIII , King of France 59 Louis XIV, King of France (Roi de Soleil) 29, 35, 43 Louther, William 1, 16 Lovett, Ann 57 Lucile 172, 173 Lyceum Theatre (London) 192 Lyman Hayes, Peggy 127 Lyotard, Jean-François 136 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 63 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 187–90, 189–90 McCarthy, Paul 203 McConnell Stott, Andrew 83 McGowan, M. M. 61 McGrath, Matt 160, 161–2 Macintosh, Fiona 48 McKellen, Ian 181 MacMillan, Kenneth 54, 55 Madame Vestris 104, 105 maenads 6 Magna Carta 178 Magnanimous Cuckold, The (Crommelynk) 140, 140, 149 Magnificentissimi Spectaculi (Dorat) 41 Mahabharata, The (Brook) 23 maillots (leotards) 111–12, 112 makeup 18, 78, 83, 84, 87, 217n.26 male sexuality 11, 15, 63, 119 Malevich, Kazimir 144 Mallarmé, Stéphane 12 Malmo Opera 132–4 Mamuthones (Sardinia) 69, 71

INDEX

“Man and Art Figure” (Schlemmer) 157, 216n.21 Mansfield, Richard 179, 180 Marie Antoinette, Queen 182 Marre, Jules 182, 183, 185, 218n.14 masculinity 11–15, 55, 63, 90, 135, 178 masks African 52, 52 animal 5, 57, 69–72, 203 balaclava 90, 91 caricature 63 commedia 88–9 The Golem 155–6, 156 Harlequin 70, 71 leather 69, 88–9 oversized 57, 63 satyr 2–3 tragedy 5–6, 33 Venetian 75 masques 8–11, 10, 35 Mass Ornament, The (Kracauer) 50 Maurice & May (Edwardian cycling clown act) 86–7 Mechanical Ballet, The (Schmidt) 151, 152–5, 152–3 Medici, Catherine de’ 41 Medici, Ferdinando I de’ Grand Duke of Tuscany 35, 36–7 Medici Wedding of 1589, The (Saslow) 35 Meineck, Peter 6 Meleto Castle 42, 43 “membranes” (Krausse) 164 memory, cultural 17, 28 Mendes, V. D. 169 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 192, 192 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 137, 155 Merry Widow, The (Lehár) 172 metaphors, staged 24–8 Metropolis (film) 153 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 46 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 149 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 135, 190, 194–203, 195–202, 210 military precision 50–1 Miller, Janice 206 Mirabella, Bella 178 “Miss La La” (iron-jaw aerialist) 113–16, 114, 116, 124 Mnouchkine, Ariane 17–18, 23, 27 Modernism 97, 139, 148–51, 155 modernist costume 137–65 Modern Times (film) 86, 87 Mögenburg, Birgit 161, 161–4 Molyneux, Edward 171 Moncrieff, William 104

INDEX

Moody, Jane 80, 83, 104, 177 morality 30, 75, 78, 96, 104, 175 Morris dancers 8 Mosley, Oswald 181 Motley Fool 78 movement, ease of 32, 43, 45, 125, 147 Mr. Bluebeard (burlesque) 100 “Mr. Follett” (Harlequin and Oberon) 80, 81 “Mrs Lewis” (Grimaldi’s costume designer) 83 music 12, 35, 66, 128, 151, 160, 206 musicality, of text 163 musicals 23, 90, 108 musicians 61, 161 mythical warriors 30–5, 31, 43 Napoleonic Wars 177 Narcisse 109, 110 national identities 177–82 nationalist movement, European 177 National Theatre (London) 181 naturalism 146, 160, 188, 196, 198 Natural Movement 122 Navarrete Villalba, Marta 159 neoclassicism 43, 44, 121, 126 neo-Platonism 35–7 Nettleship, Mrs Ada (costumier) 186–8, 189 neuroscience research 137 Nevile, Jennifer 41 Nijinsky, Vaslav 12–13, 13, 53 Nitayanandan, Nirupama 22, 22 Noble, Adrian 210 Noë, Alva 138 Noh theatre 18, 19 Nolan, Sidney 54–5 Noyelle, Serge 87 nudity 38, 63, 65, 101 “Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art” (Bonfante) 6 Oberon, The Fairy Prince (Jonson) 8–10, 9 objects, recasting 66, 80, 82 Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Kant) 96 odalisques 105, 108 O’Hara, Mary Margaret 161–2, 163 Ohno, Kazuo 28 Ojasoo, Tiit 90 Old Comedy (Greek) 62, 63 Olivier, Lawrence 179 Ong Keng Sen 26–8, 194 On the Sublime 95, 96 opera 29, 35, 37, 132–4, 203–4 orchestra, multidisciplinary 161–2

235

Orchid Ballet 102 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 18 Orientalism 97, 104, 107, 108–10, 116–17, 125 orientation 137 Osborne, Robin 6 Othello (Shakespeare) 178 oversized costume 57, 63, 75 padding 9, 43, 61, 63, 65, 157 paganism 69 panniers 43, 44 pantomime 78, 82–3 paper costumes 27 papier-mâché 38 Papposilenos 33 Parmeggiani, Frida 160–3, 161 parody 80–1 Peacham, Henry 178, 181 pedestals 95, 97, 101 Peponi, Anastasia-Erasmia 30 “Performance as Event–Reception as Transformation” (Fischer-Lichte) 2 Peter Pan (Barrie) 99, 103 petticoats 49, 110, 125, 131, 136 phalluses 6, 10, 63–4, 64, 77, 90, 124 Phasma Dionysiacum Pragense (court dance) 41, 41 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Ideas of The Sublime and the Beautiful (Burke) 95–6 Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson) 216n.2 photographs, rehearsal 161–4 physical effect, of costume 137 Picasso, Pablo 169 Piccolo Teatro (Milan) 89 Pisk, Litz 156–7 Planché, James Robinson 177–8, 179, 182, 187 Plato 30, 35 Play Pictorial (magazine) 171, 217n.8 pleasure, in performance 19–20 Poetics (Aristotle) 2, 30, 31 Poignant, R. 54, 214n.11 Pointon, Marcia 96 political satire 63, 81 Polovtsian Dances (Prince Igor) 52, 52 Popova, Liubov 140, 149 post-revolutionary dance 44 Pountney, David 203 Powell, Kelly 185–6 power, masculine 63, 90, 100 Prague Castle 41, 41 pre-Lenten Carnivals 69 Pre-Raphaelites 104 Prince Igor (Borodin) 52, 214n.9

236

Prince of Wales Theatre (London) 192 Pritchard, Jane 13–14 Private Lives (Coward) 170–1 Prokofiev, Serge 88 Pronomos Vase 6, 7, 32, 33 proscenium arch 37, 38, 98, 172 “pseudo-historical time” 181 Pulcinella (Commedia dell’arte) 75, 76–7 puppets 75, 90, 155, 216n.7 Queensberry, Marquess of 175 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 59 Rabelais, François 59, 65–6, 69 Rabel, Daniel 59, 60–1, 62 Radha (St. Denis) 118, 118 Rational Dress Reform movement 122 Ravelhofer, Barbara 8 reassembly, of bodies 65, 87 Recollections and Reflections (Planché) 177 reconstructions, production 153, 155 Recueil Fossard (Duchartre) 72, 72 redingote (coat) 182, 186 rehearsal photographs 161–4 Reiffenstuel, Brigitte 207, 206–9, 209 Reilly, Kira 51 religion 57, 62, 67–8, 97 Renaissance period 3, 8, 29, 35 Republic (Plato) 35 resistance, and costume 90–3 revenge 18, 207–9, 210 Reynaud, J. 163 Rhinemaidens (Das Rheingold) 97–9, 98, 215n.1 Richard III , King 179 Richard III (Shakespeare) 178–82, 179–80, 182 Richards, Nigel 161 riots 52–3, 62, 172 Ripa, Cesare 38 Rite of Spring,The (Stravinsky) 29, 52–8, 53, 55–7 rituals 2, 3, 17, 24–8, 213n.1–2 Robert le diable (Meyerbeer) 46, 47, 48 Rodin, Auguste 12 Roerich, Nicholas 52, 52–3, 53–4, 214n.9 ROH see Royal Opera House (ROH ) Romantic ballet (19th century) 11, 43–8, 52 Romanticism 29, 177, 183 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 147, 147 Rommen, Ann-Christin 163 Rossi, Pio 75 Rostand, Edmond 186, 187 Royal Court Theatre (London) 172 Royal Opera House (ROH ) 48, 54, 54, 207

INDEX

Royal Shakespeare Company 135, 194, 202, 210 Rudlin, John 89 Ruffell, Ian 64 Russell, Howell 106 Russian Constructivism 140–1, 142 Russian Futurism 139–40, 141–2, 143, 155 Russo, Mary 96, 97 Rylance, Mark 181–2 sacrificial dances 52–8 St. Denis, Ruth 116, 118, 118 St James’s Theatre (London) 173, 176 Salomé (Taïrov) 147 Salomé (Wilde) 117 Santinelli, Gabriela 160, 161 Santore, Cathy 38 Sarabhai, Mallika 15–16 Sarabhai, Mrinalini 15, 17 Sargent, John Singer 188, 189 Sartori, Amleto 89 Saslow, James 35, 37–8, 214n.3 satire, political 63, 81 satyrs 2–3, 6, 8–11, 11, 67, 69 See also fauns scenography 35, 37, 105, 150, 172, 177 Schechner, Richard 17 Schilder, Paul 137 Schlemmer, Oskar 139, 146, 155, 157–8, 158, 216n.19–23 Schmidt, Kurt 151 Schoch, R. W. 178 Schor, Naomi 96 Schulz, Lavinia 151, 151 sculptural costume 20, 83, 126, 138, 148, 150–1 Search: Hamlet (Theatreworks) 26–8 second skin, costume as 95, 97, 99, 113 self-empowerment, female 96 Semper, Ene-Liis 90–3, 91–3 senses (nervous system) 137–8 Serpentine Dances 126 Servants of Two Masters (Goldoni) 74–5 sexual exploitation 46, 51 sexuality female 11–12, 49, 63, 119, 203 male 11, 15, 63, 119 Shaffer, Peter 14 Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Kott) 194, 197 Shakespeare’s Globe (London) 181, 218n.13 Shakespeare, William Fools 79, 79 Japanese theatre 24–6, 25 plays 177

INDEX

relevance to here-and-now 194 Russian theatre 147 Singaporean theatre 26–8 See also individual plays shamans 2, 3–4, 6, 15, 28 Sher, Anthony 179, 181 Shevtsova, Maria 23 shoes 43, 44, 87, 90, 91, 120, 169 Siddons, Sarah 186 silk 38, 126, 126, 128, 183, 191, 195 Skiles, Howard 8 skirt-dancers 125–8 skirts, tonnelet 43, 44 slavery 30, 96, 100, 108, 121, 147 Slavic costumes 53 Smith, Rae 56–8, 58 social conflict 29 society dramas 172 Sokolova, Lydia 168, 168, 169 Sommerstein, Alan 64, 215n.3 Sommi, Leone de’ 214n.3 South America 50, 50 “Space Dance” (Schlemmer) 157 spaces, stage 146, 148, 150, 157, 194–5 stage design 140, 140 Stepanova, Varvara 149, 149–50 Strauss, Richard 207, 207–10, 206–7 Stravinsky, Igor 29, 53, 151 street theatre 69, 75–7, 76, 178 Strehler, Giorgio 89 Strong, Roy 35 Strutinskaia, E. 140 sublime, feminine 95–7, 124, 136, 203 Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, The (Battersby) 97, 136 subversion 104, 113, 175, 183, 200 Sullivan, Barry 179, 180 Summers, Leigh 103 Swan Lake (Bourne) 3, 13, 14–15 swastikas 154–5, 181, 216n.14 swimsuits 168–9, 168 symbolism battle dress 32 hair as 65, 69, 104, 123, 135, 183 mocking 50, 59, 60–1, 61–2, 124, 129, 210 in music 35, 66 phalluses 6, 10, 63–4, 64, 77, 90, 124 recasting objects 66, 80, 82 swastikas 154–5, 181 Taeuber, Sophie 145 Taglioni, Marie 45

237

Tahal, Monika 160 Taïrov, Alexandre 140 Tait, Peta 97, 111 Talk of the Town (London Hippodrome) 50 Tanztheater Wuppertal 55, 128–30 Taplin, Oliver 5 Tarlton, Richard 79, 79 Taruskin, Richard 177 Tatlin, Vladimir 141, 141–3, 143–4 Taymor, Julie 23 Tea Table Lady (Comelli) 101 Teatro Costanzi (Rome) 150 Teatro Mediceo (Florence) 35, 40 Terry, Ellen 120, 185–8, 189, 190–2, 192–3 Terry, Kate 120 Terry, Marion 175, 176 Teschner, Richard 155 text musicality 163 Theatre and Performance Archives (Victoria and Albert Museum) 167–8 theatre, as an art form 139 Théâtre de l’Œuvre (Paris) 90 Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (Paris) 52–3 Théâtre du Soleil (Paris) 18, 194 Theatre NO 99 (Estonia) 62, 90 Théâtre Nono (Marseille) 87 Theatre Royal (Bristol) 120 Theatreworks (Singaporean company) 26–8 Thomas, Nathalie 18, 21 threshold persona, 2 tights 12, 14, 100–1, 181, 186, 203 Tiller Girls 50, 51 Tiller, John 50–1 time-travel 203–4 Tinker, Zenzie 191 Tiramani, Jenny 181–2 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 178, 181 Toepfer, K. 164 tonnelet skirts 43, 44 Topeng dance (Indonesia) 18 Towards a Female Sublime (Yaeger) 97 traditional practices, Asian 2, 15–18 tragedies 5–6, 18, 31–5, 33, 194 Tramp, The 62, 85, 87 transvestism, female 104 trapeze artistes 110 Trcka, Anton Josef 152, 152 Treadwell, Nina 35 Triadic Ballet, The (Schlemmer) 139, 155, 157–8, 159 tribal costumes 52, 52, 175 tribalism 55–6

238

Trimingham, Melissa 69 A Trip To The Moon (Offenbach) 100 Trois-Freres caves (France) 2, 3–5, 4 Troy, Nancy 172 Turner, Victor 2, 17 tutus 11, 29, 45, 45, 124, 200 Two Sisters (Buck) 44 Tynan, Jane 29 Ubu Roi (Jarry) 62, 90 Uccello, Paolo 204 uniform, as a concept 29, 129 Valois, Marguerite de 41 Vanbrugh, Irene 174 Vartan, Jamie 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136 vaudeville makeup 87 Vazquez, Yolanda 202 veils 97, 104, 108, 117, 125–6, 207–8 Verdi, Guiseppe 177 Vestris, Gaétan 44 Vestris, Madame 104, 105 victimhood, female 55–7 Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change (Alexander) 2 Victory Over the Sun 141, 141, 142–3, 144, 144 Vienna 139, 151–2, 155 Vienna Secession 209 Vigee Le Brun, Elisabeth 182 Viktor 128–30, 129–31 Viola, Bill 131 Vionnet, Madeleine 171 Vision of Salomé 117, 117 visual artists 87–8 Vogue (magazine) 169, 203, 217n.5 voile 55, 55

INDEX

Wade, Michele 203 Wagner, Richard 98, 177, 215n.1 Wainwright, Rufus 161–2 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 87 Waits, Tom 160 warriors, mythical 30–5, 31, 43 Western drama, development of 5 white box (Jacob’s set design) 195–6, 195 Wiesenthal, Grete 216n.9 Wilde, Oscar 117, 173, 174–5, 188 Wildmen, of Europe 69 Wiles, David 6, 31, 79, 213n.2 Williams, Raymond 158 Willis, Jack 161–2 Wilson, Kathleen 96 Wilson, Robert 139, 160–3, 160–4 Winchester Psalter, The 67–8 Women of the Thesmophoria, The (Aristophanes) 65, 213n.6 working clothes factory 87 farm 72, 215n.8 Fools and 78 maids and 206 street performers and 75 “worksuit” 149, 149, 197 World War I 108, 155 World War II 90, 181, 198, 207 Worth, Charles Fredrick 169, 172, 182, 183 Worth, Jean 169 Wyles, Rosie 5–6, 31, 32, 213n.2 Yaeger, P. 97 Yukio Ninagawa 24, 194 Zangesi 141, 142–3 Zany (Commedia dell’arte) 72–3, 215n.8