Costume in the dance archive: Towards a records-centred ethics of care

Abstract

Focusing on the archival records of the production and performance of Dance in Trees and Church by the Swedish independent dance group Rubicon, this article conceptualizes a records-oriented costume ethics. Theorizations of costume as a co-creative agent of performance are brought into the dance archive to highlight the productivity of paying attention to costume in the making of performance history. Addressing recent developments within archival studies, a feminist ethics of care and radical empathy is employed, which is the capability to empathically engage with others, even if it can be difficult, as a means of exploring how a records-centred costume ethics can be conceptualized for the dance archive. The exploration resulted in two ethical stances useful for better attending to costume-bodies in the dance archive: (1) caring for costume-body relations in the dance archive means that a conventional, so-called static understanding of records as neutral carriers of facts is replaced by a more inclusive, expanding and infinite process. By moving across time and space, and with a caring attitude finding and exploring fragments from various, sometimes contradictory production processes, one can help scattered and poorly represented dance and costume histories to emerge and contribute to the formation of identity and memory. (2) The use of bodily empathy with records can respectfully bring together the understanding of costume in performance as inseparable from the performer’s body with dance as an art form that explicitly uses the dancing costume-body as an expressive tool. It is argued that bodily empathy with records in the dance archive helps one access bodily holisms that create possibilities for exploring the potential of art to critically expose and render strange ideological systems and normativities.

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