Reembodying the archive: Creative critical practice in feminist archival recovery

This paper explores how experimental history can recover women’s contributions to the stage through the reconstruction of costume and performance practices. Drawing on the feminist critiques of Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, alongside practice-as-research methodologies from scholars such as Hilary Davidson, Toni Bate, Serena Dyer, and Sarah Bendall, this study examines how recreating costume bridges archival gaps shaped by gendered hierarchies in artistic production. Without such revival, the work of designers, productions, and embodied material knowledge risks being overlooked.

Costume history is particularly vulnerable to archival loss, with garments, fabrics, and textures often surviving only as sketches, photographs, or descriptions. Yet essential qualities such as weight, movement, and tactile experience cannot be fully understood through visual records alone. Experimental history allows practitioner-researchers to reconstruct lost or fragmentary productions, restoring embodied knowledge and illuminating overlooked labour.

This paper applies these methods to a case study of Julia Trevelyan Oman’s costume designs for The Boston Ballet’s 1981 Swan Lake, demonstrating how hands-on reconstruction revives forgotten material knowledge and reveals costume’s role in shaping theatrical legacy. By engaging directly with Oman’s designs through practice, this research restores a fuller understanding of her creative vision and material choices—insights inaccessible through text-based study alone.