Performativity and the Historical Body: Detecting Performance Through the Archived Costume

This article locates costume, an almost non-existent area of theatre studies scholarship, at the centre of enquiry as a new perspective from which historical performance can be viewed. Focusing on Victorian clown costume, it case studies the jacket worn by Charlie Keith (1836–1895). It proposes that purely text-based historiography overlooks the material costume, shaped by the performance context, and that arguably shapes the performance itself. This article proposes a methodology of enquiry based on analysing costume as a material, performative object, to begin to define the history of its own discipline away from the margins it currently occupies. Its aesthetics materialize through performance within a socio-political, economical and cultural context. Recognizably codified in elements of design, these embodied aesthetics mediate the interface between performer and audience. Through this, the persistence of certain genealogies of ideas embodied in costume is revealed as implicitly instrumental in the survival of specific performance practices.

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