Relations Between Costume, Character and Dance Styles in the Eighteenth Century

During the eighteenth century, theatre costumes became a highly developed art form with their own set of rules, codes and functions. In professional theatres, especially in France, there were designers and makers who specialized in this field. This presentation will focus on the way costume's materiality shaped the making of the performance and vice versa. In particular, it will examine the relationship between genre and character in dance costume. The different dance styles (serious, demi-caractère, comic) and the various characters, modes of expression and physical techniques called for different types of costume. Through the comparative analysis of costume designs and other visual sources, manuscript inventories, preserved garments and dance treatises from the late seventeenth- and eighteenth century, the specificity and development of costume for stage dance through this period will be examined. How was the dance costume constructed and fastened? Did it contain specific types of garments? What kind of shoes did the performers use and who made them? The source material used for this study comes mainly from French, Swedish and Czech archives. At the end of the talk, a new digital database of eighteenth-century theatrical costume, which the author is currently creating at the Centre for Baroque Music Versailles, will be presented. 

Petra Dotlačilová holds a PhD in Dance Studies from Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (2016) and PhD in Theatre Studies from Stockholm University (2020). In her research, she specializes in European dance history and theatrical costume of the sixteenth to nineteenth century. She participated in research projects Performing Premodernity at SU, and Ritual Design on the Ballet Stage (1650-1760) at the University of Leipzig. Currently, she is leading a research project The Foundation of Performance: Processes and Politics of Costume-Making int he 18th Century, funded by Swedish Research Council (2021-2024), and conducted in collaboration with the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles.