Costume, performance, and society: Engaging in a dialogue

Abstract

Bearing in mind the potential of costume to construct and actively create meanings and to initiate, shape, and define a performance, the paper examines the nature and role of performance costume in projects and performances of several important Croatian artists who are either costume designers or performance artists or both, such as Vlasta Delimar, Ivana Popović, Ksenija Kordić, Tajči Čekada, and Ivana Bakal, and whose work significantly modified the notion and status of costume and costume design(er) in Croatian performing arts at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. Furthermore, it focuses on the strategies of costume design(er) in articulating the relationship between costume, performance, and society with special emphasis on the position of costume design(er) and costume based performance towards producing, interpreting or performing various individual and collective identities, body, ecology, social activism, and the artist's social status.