Costume in Performance - Materiality, Culture, and the Body

Winner of Best Performance Design and Scenography Publication Award, Prague Quadrennial 2019

This beautifully illustrated book conveys the centrality of costume to live performance

Finding associations between contemporary practices and historical manifestations, costume is explored in six thematic chapters, examining the transformative ritual of costuming; choruses as reflective of society; the grotesque, transgressive costume; the female sublime as emancipation; costume as sculptural art in motion; and the here-and-now as history

Viewing the material costume as a crucial aspect in the preparation, presentation and reception of live performance, the book brings together costumed performances through history

These range from ancient Greece to modern experimental productions, from medieval theatre to modernist dance, from the 'fashion plays' to contemporary Shakespeare, marking developments in both culture and performance

Revealing the relationship between dress, the body and human existence, and acknowledging a global as well as an Anglo and Eurocentric perspective, this book shows costume's ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary borders

Through it, we come to question the extent to which the material costume actually co-authors the performance itself, speaking of embodied histories, states of being and never-before imagined futures, which come to life in the temporary space of the performance

With a contribution by Melissa Trimingham, University of Kent, UK

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction
1 The First Costume: Ritual and Reinvention
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
5 Agency and Empathy: Artists Touch the Body
6 A Different Performativity: Society, Culture and History on Stage

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index