Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture, and the Body

Amazon.com Price: $32.17 (as of 09/11/2019 16:39 PST- Details)

Description

This beautifully illustrated book conveys the centrality of costume to live performance. Finding associations between recent 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 fabric costume as a the most important aspect within the preparation, presentation and reception of live performance, the book brings together costumed performances through history. These range from ancient Greece to brand new experimental productions, from medieval theatre to modernist dance, from the ‘fashion plays’ to recent Shakespeare, marking developments in both culture and performance.

Revealing the connection between dress, the body and human existence, and acknowledging a global in addition to an Anglo and Eurocentric point of view, this book shows costume’s ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary borders. Through it, we come to query the extent to which the fabric costume if truth be told co-authors the performance itself, speaking of embodied histories, states of being and never-before imagined futures, which come to life within the temporary space of the performance.

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

Home » Shop » Books » Specialty Boutique » New, Used and Rental Textbooks » Humanities » Performing Arts » Theater » Miming » Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture, and the Body

Recent Products