Victorian College of the Arts - Theses

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Subject: Dance × Subject: Performance ×

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    Costume as a cultural marker: examining Australian identity through performance costume
    Collett, Emily ( 2022)
    As a nascent field, costume scholarship is yet to explicitly articulate performance costume as an indicator of broader cultural identity. This study positions costume in the context of notions of Australian identity, culture, and the performing arts archive. The project aims to explore if performance costume can be understood as a cultural marker, that is, a nuanced marker (or a sign, or indicator) of the cultural identity of the society which created it (the costume or set of costumes). The research questions how examining historical costume for dance in Australia can illuminate notions of an evolving cultural and national identity and challenge the dominant history. By positioning costume as a cultural marker, the study interrogates how costume can activate multiple histories, realities, truths, and knowledges. In order to achieve this, three exemplar sets of ballet costumes from Australia’s past are examined to construct a more detailed understanding of Australia’s identity at critical points in its history. Through the study of costume as an archived object, the project establishes new methods for understanding human history through costume. The research reframes interactions with costume through material culture, an interpretivist paradigm and constructionist epistemology, using archival research, interviews with industry professionals, and the creation of an experimental exhibition. These research approaches value the specific relationship between researcher and object, and the unique framing of each interaction and interpretation. Significantly, the research demonstrates how costume scholarship has the potential to change current belief systems by activating multiple histories and shifting societies’ relationship between their past and their present.
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    Dailiness, Multimodality, Performance and Meaning
    Dyson, Greg ( 2021)
    This study closely observes, articulates, and expressively renders the intrapersonal dimensions of an artistic practice and the capacity and means by which a practice can reveal itself and meaningfully render the lifeworld and the artist in multimodal form. The methods are those of a primary source heuristic study attending to the experiential interplay and multimodality of an artistic practice and its changing states of assemblage. The practices and performative actions are undertaken and recorded in a wide range of settings. These include walks in suburban streets and parks and in rural forests, spoken annotations amidst everyday life, and occasional assemblages of materials self-witnessed or presented to one or two others. The collected raw data includes sketches, diagrams and drawings, poetic responses, vocal soundings, piano and multi-track audio recordings, photographs, and bodily-recorded movement gestures. A performative assemblage of selected materials was presented to a small audience in December 2018. It included the live performer placed in a range of multi-layered constructions, automated lighting effects, and objects present in the research and emerging performative canvas. The combined outputs of the study comprising the live performance and contextualising writings suggest that artistic practice can be a series of imaginal and physical actions and experiences that occur beyond and without, as well as through more formal studio or instrument-based activity and that an artist can be concurrently forming themselves as a poetic subject in the process of creating an artwork for meaningful reception.