Encounters in the Archive: Reflections on costume

Abstract

This paper discusses and reflects upon aspects of the practice-based research project led by the author and titled Encounters in the Archive, which resulted in a 17 minute film depicting artist/researcher interactions with theatre costume and other archived, difficult to access objects in the V&A. The paper highlights the current lack of discourse on theatre costume, which prompted the Encounters in the Archive project and its specific methodological approach. (1) It shows how the camera can be used as a mechanism for enquiry, in this case via the expert filming and editing of film-maker Netia Jones. (2) Finally, it focuses on the responses to particular costumes in the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Collections by three expert participants, and shows how such interactions can help to articulate the performativity of costume, retained in their collected and conserved state as fragments of past performances. Encounters in the Archive will be shown in the Tapestries Court at the V&A in 2012 as part of Transformation and Revelation, a series of displays produced by the Theatre and Performance Department in collaboration with the Society of British Theatre Designers. Funded by a research grant awarded by London College of Fashion, and produced with the support of Theatre and Performance and the Research Departments at the V&A, the project was selected for the V&A after it appeared in an earlier guise in Cardiff at the National Exhibition of Theatre Design 2011. The film has also been screened at the PQ2011, Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space as part of the OISTAT History and Theory Commission.

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