What the clothes tell us

As early as 1556, the Italian Leone de’ Sommi wrote that actors should be dressed in such a way that the audience could recognize the character as soon as they entered the stage. The costume should credibly show the character’s status, age and origin. At the same time, norms about what was considered decent limited the possibility of fully dressing the actors in a realistic way. These two principles of early modern theater – realistic aesthetics and social decency – shaped the specific aesthetics of theater costumes.

The talk will present the main characters that appeared on the Gustavian stage, the visual models for their costumes and how these were adapted for the theater. It discusses how costume reflected both the (imagined) dramatic action and the (real) social context, or how costumes for drama, opera and dance differed. The lecture is illustrated with a rich visual material from Italian, French and Swedish archives, paintings capturing costumes on stage and photographs of costumes preserved in the collection of the Royal Armoury.

Petra Dotlačilová is a theatre and dance researcher, specialized in European dance history and theatre costumes (PhD from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and Stockholm University). She participated in the research projects “Performing Premodernity” at Stockholm University and “Ritual Design on the Ballet Stage” at the University of Leipzig. She is currently leading the postdoctoral project “The Fabrication of Performance: Processes and Politics of Costume-Making in the 18th Century”, funded by the Swedish Research Council and conducted in collaboration with the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles.

Admission to the Royal Armoury and the exhibition The Theatre King – Splendor, Power and Theatre Costumes in the time of Gustav III is included in the ticket price (Tickster website).

Place: Livrustkammaren, Slottsbacken, Stockholm
Price: 150 SEK
Date: 22. 10. 2023
Time: 15:00

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