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.

The article combines Critical Archival Studies theory about agency and activism with an empirical exploration of dance history in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. It focuses on Anna Wikström’s Academy for Dance (1930-1965), an education which has not been explored in previous research. A previous member of The Swedish Ballet, Wikström offered her students courses in artistic dance, dance as physical exercise, pedagogy, and social dancing. Thereby, her broad education differed from the narrow, elitist Ballet School at The Stora Teatern. The article accounts for how the collaboration between choreographer and dancer Gun Lund and Astrid von Rosen, scholar at the University of Gothenburg, contributes new knowledge about the local dance culture. It is argued that archival and activist approaches make it possible for more voices, bodies, and functions to take place in dance history. As such, the exploration complements previous postmodern dance historiography (see for example Hammergren 2002; Morris och Nicholas 2017) with a Gothenburg example.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract