The title of Elna Matamoros' book sums up the results of her research perfectly. Her story of dance and its costumes is about the diverse possibilities of enveloping movement, about the interactions between costume and movement. When designing dance costumes, it's about more than just dressing a stage character in such a way that the portrayed figure can be recognized. The process is more complicated, as the dance curator of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, Jane Pritchard, describes in her foreword: “The costume becomes part of the dance”, and “the most interesting costumes are created closely along the movement, the choreographers and Design dancers ”.
The costume has developed so much over the centuries in the direction of greater freedom of movement that the historical narrative reads as a representation of a progressive minimization and reduction.
What begins with leaving out masks, wigs or headdresses, continues with the successive exposure of ankles, calves, knees, and thighs and leads to the leotard, finds its final consequence in Rudolf von Laban's naked men dancing outdoors at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Nudity as an Aesthetic Possibility
When dancing on stage, Matamoros works out that, nudity is more problematic, because with all the freedom that wearinglessness may give, it can also inhibit dancers in their movements in front of the audience, which they confront in the most intimate way possible. The dancer and costume designer Lydia Azzopardi once said that it was much more interesting “to put the dancers on than to take them off”. One of the best examples for this thesis would be Merce Cunningham and Andy Warhol's collaboration on "Rainforest" in 1968. Between helium-filled, silver cushions that took their unpredictable flight paths across the stage, the company danced in skin-colored jerseys with many large holes. Cunningham agreed on these jerseys with Warhol after the latter had initially suggested that the dancers perform naked,which the choreographer refused. In a dance like “Rainforest” the jerseys were a good idea. In order to emphasize the animal quality of the movement, the muscles need to show themselves, but here nudity would overemphasize the characterization as sexual beings.
Elna Matamoros, a classically trained dancer, allows Cunningham to appear elsewhere, but has little to do with the mutual independence in the creation process of costume and dance - because this attitude does not fit her thesis of the mutual influence of dance and costume design.
The author therefore closes the early chapter “Unveiling the Body” without this great example, but very calmly with the thesis that nudity on stage today is “not a surprise or a social achievement, but simply another aesthetic possibility”.
Muse and star of every performance
If you look at photos of the American modern dancers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn - they jointly ran the Denishawn Company at the beginning of the twentieth century - then you can see that with the onset of modernity, the lush, heavy and, how one might think that headgear obstructing movement could return. It's like fashion - everything turns around, easily transformed, again. In addition to a fur blanket that Ted Shawn holds in his hand, he wears an imposing feather headdress for the piece "Xochitl". The more lavish the costumes, the more action, the less fast-paced movement, one might assume - in any case, it's about finding the right balance between these elements.