The costume a dancer wears in performance impacts a viewer's overall impression of a dance work as it invariably shapes how choreographies make meaning. Despite their centrality to performance, however, dance costumes are often undertheorized in academic contexts. Notable exceptions include art historians who have made critical contributions to scholarly examination of Pablo Picasso and Sonia Delaunay's costumes for the Ballets Russes as well as Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet performed at the Bauhaus. Museum exhibitions in recent decades have also provided important interventions in demonstrating methods of using dance costumes to pursue interdisciplinary research. For instance, exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery of Art on the Ballets Russes (mounted in 2010 and 2013, respectively) accentuated how the painter-designed costumes of artists such as Léon Bakst and Natalia Goncharova contributed to the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, that impresario Serge Diaghilev sought in his dance works. Furthermore, the Fashion Institute of Technology has recently presented Fashion & Dance (2014) and Ballerina: Fashion's Modern Muse (Reference Mitra, Schneider, Ross and Manning2020), exhibitions that emphasized stage costume's sweeping influence on couture and ready-to-wear fashion.
What is often missing in these texts and exhibitions, however, is an analysis of the movement dancers performed in these costumes. Scholars working in disciplines outside of performance studies might be less attuned to understanding costumes as major contributors to the overall dance work rather than as static art objects that can be separated from the context in which they were once embodied. Similarly, though exhibitions afford the opportunity to examine historic costumes at close proximity in an intimate setting, the costumes are necessarily displayed as immobile objects on mannequins. In Dance & Costumes: A History of Dressing Movement, Elna Matamoros investigates the reciprocal relation between costume and choreography by focusing her attention on costumes in motion. What distinguishes her text is how she thinks through choreography alongside costume design, rather than prioritizing one over the other. In so doing, Matamoros reveals a category of scholarly inquiry that has the potential to intertwine the disciplines of art history, visual culture, and dance studies.
While trends in scenic design and favored movement aesthetics within the Western concert dance tradition shift from one century to another, costume, Matamoros argues, is always the “one element that had a decisive influence on the work of the choreographer” (10). Beginning with the ballet de cour of Louis XIV and ending with William Forsythe, Matamoros's richly illustrated volume traverses countries, dance styles, and eras in a mostly chronological fashion from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century to discuss a swath of Euro-American concert dance. Her first eight chapters cover the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries and offer consideration of court ballet, ballerinas Marie Sallé and La Camargo, Romantic ballet, ballet master August Bournonville, Spanish bolero, the pointe shoe, and choreographer Marius Petipa. Her last five chapters, rooted in the twentieth century, are principally organized by choreographer; Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Mary Wigman, George Balanchine, and Merce Cunningham are some of the many choreographers mentioned.
Matamoros's methodology reflects numerous challenges inherent in the study of dance costume. Because they function as work wear, historical dance costumes rarely survive in physical form. Matamoros aptly demonstrates how scholars interested in costume must rely on either written descriptions in dance treatises and journalistic reviews, or pictorial representations in contemporaneous painting or photography. For instance, in her second chapter, “The Emancipation of Dance: Costumes, Choreography, and Attitudes,” which focuses on the seventeenth-century ballet de cour and its aftermath in the eighteenth century, Matamoros analyzes a painting by Nicolas Lancret of French ballet dancer La Camargo from 1730. Through close description of the depiction of La Camargo's pale blue costume that featured a bodice with wrist-length sleeves and a wide, pannier skirt with a hem reaching her ankles, Matamoros surmises about the cut, fabrics, and embellishment of La Camargo's actual costume. She then speculates how that costume would have impacted La Camargo's ability to perform choreography, especially her triumphant execution of entrechats––beats of the lower legs in the air––that had previously only been performed by men. Matamoros argues that La Camargo's technical feats are even more impressive given the hefty weight of her costume's layered skirt, which would have impacted her range of movement. While at times Matamoros delves too deeply into hypothesis, particularly when she suggests which specific movements La Camargo would or would not have been able execute in the dress Lancret depicted––the painting, after all, offers a representation of a dance costume rather than objective documentation––her vivid descriptions recreate the costumes in writing, thereby allowing the reader to reflect on the interconnectedness of costume and choreography.
While certain chapters rely more heavily on formal analysis of visual sources, others draw upon textual evidence to make claims about dance costumes. Matamoros's fifth chapter, “Technique and Romantic Aesthetics,” is one of her more conceptually successful chapters because her descriptions of nineteenth-century ballet costumes are securely grounded in a comparative reading of dance treatises: Italian dancer and choreographer Carlo Blasis's Traité élémentaire (1820) and Code of Terpsichore (1828), and Danish ballet master August Bournonville's Etudes Chorégraphiques (1848–1861). Matamoros explains how both Blasis and Bournonville championed new expressive possibilities of the dancer's body. For Blasis, this meant extending the body outward to enlarge a dancer's kinesphere, while Bournonville favored an understated upper body with a more intimate épaulement––placement of the head and shoulders––to contrast with fast leg movements. Matamoros uses these treatises to indicate that one of Romantic ballet choreography's innovations was showcasing the three-dimensionality of the dancer. She notes, however, that these new movement aesthetics would have been hindered by the Romantic ballerina's costume, which would have included a corset that inevitably limited her lateral range of motion of the back and waist. Costume and choreography, Matamoros thus acknowledges, are not always perfectly harmonious.
In addition to examining written and pictorial evidence of dance costumes, Matamoros interviews wardrobe managers working in costume shops in Milan, Zurich, and Russia to add insight to her chapters covering the twentieth century. In highlighting the frequently overlooked labor of the costume shop by including the voices of experts with decades of embodied knowledge, Matamoros shows the conceptual challenges of costuming that extend beyond the artisanal and artistic skills required to make costumes. To further this line of inquiry, oral histories with dancers who performed in these costumes could have added another layer of vibrancy to the text.
Although Matamoros centers her book on choreographers who are already well represented in dance historical literature, she contributes a fascinating addition in her chapter “Dissolved in the Air or Materialized into a Robot,” which analyzes how choreographers working in the early twentieth century responded to modern technology in their dance works. Matamoros devotes a significant portion of this chapter to a discussion of futurism, the art movement spearheaded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which proposed a revolutionary vision of modernity, one based on a dynamic celebration of progress and the modern machine. In a series of manifestos, Marinetti outlined his vision for futurist art, fashion, typography, and dance. The futurist ideal for dance favored gestures that imitated machines and scorned academic dance as well as any choreography that was sentimental, emotional, or sexual in nature. Matamoros argues that French choreographer Valentine de Saint-Point best achieved some of the ideals of dance that Marinetti and the futurists sought through her métachorie, or meta-dances, in which “only the fundamental lines of movement and rhythm would be revealed, in order to prevent the view of the body itself from distracting” (262). De Saint-Point, in contrast to Marinetti's overt machismo, advocated the concept of the woman-warrior in her choreographic works, which Vivian du Mas's costumes bolstered. While grounding this discussion of futurism and dance with more historical context and information on du Mas's costumes would have been beneficial, it is refreshing to learn about de Saint-Point's choreographic output in dialogue with better-known figures like Loie Fuller and Mary Wigman.
Matamoros favors featuring a breadth of choreographers and dance works over more nuanced theoretical engagement with any single work. Indeed, Dance & Costumes avoids fundamental questions that often emerge from scholarly analysis of the body and costume surrounding race, gender, and cultural appropriation, such as in Royona Mitra's chapter “Costuming Brownnesses in British South Asian Dance” in Futures of Dance Studies, which offers one model of how to powerfully engage costume's inherent links to geopolitics and identity. For instance, Matamoros's chapter “The Spanish Bolero School,” which explores Spanish bolero performances in nineteenth-century France, surprisingly neglects to articulate how the costumed Spanish dancing body was exoticized or eroticized for a Parisian audience.
Ultimately, Dance & Costumes offers one history of dressing movement, one that is predominantly centered on white Euro-American concert dance performed by female dancers. The book would have benefitted from an introduction stating why particular choreographers and dancers were selected for analysis over others. The amplitude of Matamoros's volume makes omissions––such as Fernand Léger's Création du monde for the Ballets Suédois, John Pratt's designs for Katherine Dunham, or Yves Saint Laurent's decades-long collaboration with Roland Petit––even more striking. Matamoros's case studies and methodologies highlight the complexity of analyzing dance costumes while simultaneously revealing the potential of what close attention to costumes can contribute to dance scholarship, thus offering a springboard for further theoretical inquiry into the interrelation between dance, costume, and the body.
