Costumes and Costuming: Defining Current Performance Strategies

Costuming Urban Theatricality ...

As this issue goes to press, the student protest movement in Québec has quickly become a massive manifestation of urban theatricality. In opposition to the Québec government's proposed tuition hikes, demonstrators have made major incursions into civic life. And, in response to Bill 78, which seeks to constrain the right to protest, the demonstrations have become broader based and ever more inventive. One acoustic expression has been the beating of pots and pans, and in the prelude to the weekend of the Formula One Race, costuming was particularly emphasized. On 7 June, marchers chanted "Everyone naked in the street" as they stripped down to their smalls. Red body paint stood in for bits of clothing while self-made additions showed a real flare for minimalist, politicized costuming. The now-iconic red rectangle was drawn on chests, arms, faces, and pregnant bellies. The blueness of the police uniforms topped by bright green emergency vests, and some of the hyped clothing of the race car fans, offered competing costume displays and a vivid testimony to the pervasive importance of costume here and now.

Resituating Costumes ...

This issue of CTR is the first to publish a separate artist's portfolio in full colour. François Barbeau: Research on Materials presents a montage of the designer's investigation of costuming. Barbeau's attention to the performative materiality of costumes is in evidence as he conceives costumes suitable for the acrobats of the Cirque du Soleil. Digital printing and industrial modes of creating new fabrics are integrated with design and construction. These pages offer a generous selection of examples of high-level collaboration and attest to the radical originality of Cirque du Soleil's Research and Development Costume and Props Department (Direction des unités de création costumes et accessoires DUCCA), where Barbeau has been able to realize these astonishing creations. This portfolio asserts the potency of costume design as a dramaturgical syntax of fabric and kineasethetics and so it is featured in this issue as an integral form of designerly scripting.

The portfolio is enhanced by Andrée Lemieux's discussion of curating Costume de scène, Costume extrême, which featured the work of Barbeau as part of the Extreme Costume Project at the Prague Quadrennial 2011. This exhibit was sponsored by L'Association des professionnels des arts de la scène du Québec (APASQ) and offered a close-up and interactive experience of Barbeau's research, without resorting to costumes on mannequins.

The other contributors to this issue also present a rich and varied dialogue about costumes, their design, their manufacture, their performance, and their exhibition. Jill Carter invites readers to consider the crossovers between design for theatre and installation art in the artistic practice of Erika A. Iserhoff. Of Cree and French descent, the artist investigates forms of First Nations expression—the live, as well as that traced through museums and archives—as fundamental to her responsibility of reclamation and reinvention of material culture as she works with theatre companies and individual performing artists.

Jacquey Taucar, in conversation with Thea and Dario Jackson, investigates the sculptural qualities of the Josephine Baker Mas for the Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Festival in 2011. Taucar traces the conception, construction, and complexities of choreography for this carnivalesque reimagining of Baker in Paris of the twenties for a contemporary Canadian ambulant expression. This Queen Mas talks back to the objectification by Parisians and embodying Queen Mas as an instance of female empowerment, as M. NourbeSe Philip observes.

Completing this trio of designer voices is Wes D. Pearce's interview with Bretta Gerecke. This award-winning resident designer of Catalyst Theatre describes her research and work with materials as central to an aesthetic of costumes that transforms everyday objects into wearable art, often riffing on a historical period. Their appeal is to the sense of touch as much as to the visual composition.

Costumes are often a material residue of the ephemeral performance, but their afterlife might productively be considered in terms other than blowing on embers of performance. Jerrard and Diana Smith reflect on their collaboration with...