Costume and scenography - inspiration

Day 34. A lot of work on the book introduction today. And useless meeting. And a 40+ ballet class - fun, and I worked hard! Notes on costume, or candy, from my dear colleage:

As discussed by for example Aoife Monks (2010), Rachel Hann (2017) and Donatella Barbieri (2017), costumes are vital parts of performance design.

Rather than just dressing up a body, Monks has shown that the act of costuming means producing a body and making it meaningful as an integral part of an event. She says: "Costume is a body that can be taken off". (Monks 2010, p.11). 

Hann argues that costume is important for performance practice and that the understanding of 'costume' should be separated from the understanding of 'dress'. She defines dress as a daily practice, dependent on a fashion system, whereas costume has, as she calls it, "subversive and othering qualities" (Hann 2017, 8). 

Or, as Rachel Hann & Sidsel Bech put it in their editorial for the critical costume themed issue of Scene:

"Costume is critical. It is critical to making performance, critical to spectatorship, critically overlooked within scholarship, notable when in crisis, and a means of critically interrogating the body. It is therefore critical that we discuss costume" (Hann & Bech 2014, 3)