Performing “Acts”: The Entwined Lives Of Ballet Costumes And People Through Social Action

Much like a fairy godmother transforming Cinderella for the ball, the role of a ballet costume completes a similar task in dressing a dancer into a character for a spectacle performance. However, there is more to a costume’s “life” than being worn onstage each night in front of an audience. A theatre costume is a vibrant object with animacy that, like humans, can live a long life filled with social interactions on and off the stage with different people throughout time. By analyzing two costumes from the National Ballet of Canada’s production of The Sleeping Beauty (1972), this study uses methodologies such as object-based research and object biography to trace the lives of these costumes to examine the different types of actions that it produces, as well as the human action produced by individuals to the costume itself. From the acts of making, wearing, and repairing costume, to the acts of archiving and researching, each phase of the garment’s life is filled with various types of people and actions that further create memory both in the costume’s materiality and an individual’s life. Working within the scope of new materialism and material culture that centres around the idea that objects and humans give meaning to one another, this paper discusses the entwined biographies of ballet costumes and the people involved throughout its lifetime.