In Smithereens: The Costume Remains of Lea Anderson’s Stage

An artistic material encounter with costumes from the archive of iconic British choreographer Lea Anderson.

In Smithereens offers new strategies to understand performances through their material remnants, suggesting alternative ways in which these arguably haunted costumes can live on as ghosts inside and outside of the archive. What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilized towards representational repair, post-performance?

Located within Lea Anderson’s choreographic archive, this book charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centered on practices of disintegration, preservation, transaction, and display, this book offers provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance, the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theater work, and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.

How might we regard these mercurial items? As precious relics to be protected in museum holdings, ghostly harbingers of residual performance histories, or inconvenient detritus? The book travels from propsmakers’ studios to auction houses and galleries, incorporating filmmaking, artifact handling, and curation along the way, in lively dialogue with perspectives from dance history, material culture, sociology, and performance studies. The choreographic archive is envisioned as repository of the awkward, scattered remains of legacy blown apart into fragments. Smithereens, which can, if we allow them, demand an alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishing inflicted on these costumes and the companies who danced in them.

Mary Kate Connolly is a writer, editor, and curator based in London, UK.