Chapter Eight: Stepping into the past

This chapter investigates the role costuming plays in re-staging the past. Many dance companies remain dedicated to preserving choreographic legacies, and contemporary dance artists regularly use performative means to critically engage aspects of dance history. Dance scholars have increasingly turned their attention to these endeavors. However, for reasons that will become clear, costuming has not been sufficiently discussed in the literature, even as a growing body of work in costume studies investigates the performative capacities of costumes, including their unique ability to usher the past into the present (Barbieri 2013, Barbieri and Crawley 2019). Drawing on such work, this chapter investigates the relationship between original designs and copies created to assist in reconstructing or reimagining historical dances. In addition to discussing dance works and scholarship which focus on the phenomenon of versioning, a practice-as-research project that took Cunningham’s Lavish Escapade costume as its starting point is detailed.