Sartorial Remembrance: Exploring the Weave Between Costume, Memory, and the Performing Self​

By Prof Rosie Findlay and Natalia Romagosa

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Abstract

We argue in this paper that costume occupies a rich interstitial space between self and performance. Costumes can create extra labour for the performing body or facilitate a more efficacious performance (from the artist’s perspective) due to the ways in which clothing reconfigures the embodied self and makes possible imaginative acts and bodily sensations that affect the performance. The interplay called forth between self and cloth, and how this is enacted during a performance, is our focus here, and will be explored through an approach dubbed sartorial remembrance. This approach involved interviewing three performers—an actor, a dancer (who is also a costume designer), and an opera singer— about their costumes in order to evoke the intangible: the memories enmeshed with moments in which those costumes were worn. In mapping the ways that memory, costume, and a performer’s embodied self interrelate, we outline the ways in which a performer’s material, affective, and perceptual experiences of costume help structure their experience of performing, and to evidence the ways in which costumes work on/with/against the body as a presence that must be incorporated in the presentation of a performing self.

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Published in 2018 in the 16th edition of About Performance, the journal of the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Sydney.