Invited talk: Bodily Scenography! 

26 January: Bodily Scenography Symposium at Loughborough University, UK

We simply love this topic. Bodily scenography is definitely at the heart of our scholarly passions. 

This one-day symposium will explore the interplay between stage design and the role and significance of the body. It aims to examine the portrayals and meanings of the body, the ways in which it is performed, and the relationships it builds with other bodies, as crafted through 20th-century scenography, focusing particularly on costume and set design.

https://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/aed/staff-research/bodily-scenography/

Viveka participates with the paper "Indra's Daughter and the Modernist body":

ABSTRACT

Indra's Daughter and the Modernist Body

Employing a fashion perspective I study Swedish scenographer Knut Ström's costume and set design sketches, made ​​in Germany in 1915-18, for his production of August Strindberg's A Dream Play. I focus primarily on the costume sketches for the main character, Indra's daughter. Drawing on Caroline Evans' (2013) definition of the modernistic body, I discuss how fashion and the new view of the female body were linked at that time. The modernist body, with its changed perception of the agency of the female body was about a clothed body in motion, one where clothing, staging, posture and patterns of movement all helped create a new, more streamlined silhouette. This, I argue, leaves an imprint on Knut Ström's visual thinking concerning body and costume in the sketch material where Indra's Daughter is portrayed as a bearer of the modernist body in a straight dress and short hair. Ström's staging of Indra's daughter as a modernist woman anchors her in the process of social change that was underway at the time. His ongoing work with the costume sketches for A Dream Play shows how he understood and harnessed the visual power of fashion, as well as the modernist female body, on the stage.

Viveka Kjellmer