Performance costume: new perspectives and methods

Costume is an active agent for performance-making; it is a material object that embodies ideas shaped through collaborative creative work. A new focus in recent years on research in the area of costume has connected this practice in vital and new ways with theories of the body and embodiment, design practices, artistic and other forms of collaboration. Costume, like fashion and dress, is now viewed as an area of dynamic social significance and not simply as passive reflector of a pre-conceived social state or practice. This book offers new approaches to the study of costume, as well as fresh insights into the better-understood frames of historical, theoretical, practice-based and archival research into costume for performance. This anthology draws on the experience of a global group of established researchers as well as emerging voices. Below is a list of just some of the things it achieves: 1. Introduces diverse perspectives, innovative new research methods and approaches for researching design and the costumed body in performance. 2. Contributes towards a new understanding of how costume actually 'performs' in time and space. 3. Offers new insights into existing practices, as well as creating a space of connection between practitioners and researchers from design, the humanities and social sciences.

Introduction: Activating Costume: A New Approach to Costume for Performance / Sofia Pantouvaki and Peter McNeil -- Section 1. Interpreting and Curating Costume. 1.1 Real or Virtual?: Studying Historical Costume Drawings and Sketches / Margaret Mitchell ; 1.2 Cooking: Studying Film Costume Design / Drake Stutesman ; 1.3 Displaying Stage Costumes: Exhibitions at the National Centre for Stage Costume, France / Delphine Pinasa ; Snapshots. 1.4. Cross Cultural Costume Research: Beijing Opera Costumes / Alexandra B. Bonds ; 1.5. Reading Maltese Carnival Costumes / Vicki Ann Cremona ; 1.6. Curating Costume: Reflection / Aoife Monks -- Section 2. Personalities in Costume. 2.1. Costume Centre Stage: Re-Membering Ellen Terry (1847-1928) / Veronica Isaac ; 2.2. 'On and Off the Stage': Costume, Dress, and Locating the Actor-Manager's Identity, 1870-1900 / Helen Margaret Walter ; 2.3. Extravagance, Expense and Notoriety in costume: Gaby Deslys and Parisian Modernity on the American stage, 1911-14 / Emily Brayshaw ; Snapshots. 2.4. A Foreign Affair On and Off Screen / Christina M. Johnson ; 2.5. Recording Costume Design in the Theatre and Performance Collections at the V&A: Vivien Leigh and Oli…