In Smithereens

What happens to contemporary dance costumeswhen the show is over and their surroundinglegacy slips from view? How might costumes bemobilised towards representational repair, post-performance? Located within Lea Anderson'schoreographic archive, this book charts a series ofhands-on interventions with the fabric remains ofher companies The Cholmondeleys and TheFeatherstonehaughs. Centred on practices ofDisintegration, Preservation, Transaction andDisplay, they offer provocative modes of engagingwith the physical leftovers of performance, thedegrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work, and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside oftraditional museological contexts. How might we regard these mercurial items? Asprecious relics to be protected in museumholdings, ghostly harbingers of residualperformance histories, or inconvenient detritus?The book travels from props-makers' studios toauction houses and galleries, incorporating film-making, artefact handling and curation along theway, in lively dialogue with perspectives fromdance history, material culture, sociology andperformance studies. The choreographic archive isenvisioned as repository of the awkward, scatteredremains of legacy blown apart into fragments.Smithereens, which can, if we allow them, demandan alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishinginflicted on these costumes and the companieswho danced in them.