The foundations for a dance costume archive in Malta

Abstract

The world of dance theatre exists partially using costumes. Throughout the years, seamstresses and costume designers have created textile designs fit for dressing dancers, enhancing their natural features in order to portray characters of a specific period or fashion. Sewing textiles into a fashionable narrative for a character to be made memorable is a gift overlooked in dance history in Malta. There are few archives globally dedicated and specially designed towards documenting the history and identity of costumes created for the world of performing arts. One of these archives is found in Malta’s national theatre, the Manoel Theatre, which has restricted access and little to no information on the provenance of the costumes. This puts the value of costumes for dance into question: do they have any character apart from being exhibited in a museum? How can an archive truly capture the identity of a dance performance and its costumes? What legacy can an archive specialised in costumes bestow on a set of dance costumes provided that the correct information is found and applied? The researcher will seek to first identify what makes a costume archivable, which methods of record keeping, standards, and guidelines for the archival description of material related to contemporary dance, particularly to costumes, can be used, and how to build a legacy through the foundation of a specialised archive on costumes. Apart from the archival theory, the costume identity consists of elements ranging from memory, narrative, ethnicity, celebrity, and performativity to more general aspects such as political implications, heritage and legacy. To obtain current feedback about the above matters, the researcher will make a comparison of views through interviews with professionals from France, Malta, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.