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Theatre costumes, with rare exceptions, are fragile artefacts - often worn out during their lifetime by use and re-use, sometimes by multiple actors or exchanged between one company and another; and they are often adapted, lost or destroyed when they come to the end of their useful life. They do, however, offer tantalising glimpses of the embodied life of theatre history and suggest new ways of responding to the role of archives in the interpretation of historical change.

This interview with Eleo Pomare focuses on his role as the choreographer of mature creative works that intermingle with his formation as a Black artist and activist after he returned from Europe to live and work in New York in the mid-1960s. It begins with discussion of his creative work in the community during the period of the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights. Pomare reflects upon his early training and choreographic experiments as well as describes the construction of some of his best-known performance works. He ends with some thoughts on political advocacy and his influence on dance policy and dance criticism, and throughout the conversation Pomare shares insights about his philosophy as a Black dance artist.

The Viennese modern choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser's black coat leads to an analysis of her choreography in four main phases – the early European career; the rise of Nazism; war's brutality; and postwar attempts at reconciliation. Utilising archival and embodied research, the article focuses on a selection of Bodenwieser costumes that survived her journey from Vienna, or were remade in Australia, and their role in the dramaturgy of works such as Swinging Bells (1926) , The Masks of Lucifer (1936, 1944) , Cain and Abel (1940) and The One and the Many (1946) . In addition to dance history, costume studies provides a distinctive way to engage with the question of what remains of performance, and what survives of the historical conditions and experience of modern dance-drama. Throughout, Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition (1958) provides a critical guide to the acts of reconstruction undertaken by Bodenwieser as an émigré choreographer in the practice of her craft, and its ‘materializing reification’ of creative thought. As a study in affective memory, information regarding Bodenwieser's personal life becomes interwoven with the author's response to the material evidence of costumes, oral histories and documents located in various Australian archives. By resurrecting the ‘dead letters’ of this choreography, the article therefore considers how dance costumes offer the trace of an artistic resistance to totalitarianism.

Using costumes created for the School of Natural Movement led by Madge Atkinson in the early twentieth century, this article focuses particularly on the role of design education and the more informal understandings of design emerging from experimentation in modern dance. It locates artistic collaborations between costumes and choreography in the cultural history of Manchester during the early twentieth century. In particular it discusses the development of unique approaches to design by the designers Walter Grimmond f Lilian Reburn, Stella Mary Pearce and Eleanor (Ella) Slinn, arising from their involvement with Atkinson and her dancers. It also considers the influence of leading design teachers, such as Walter Crane and Lewis Foreman Day, at the Manchester School of Art and Design, who constructed an innovative curriculum shaped by trade, cultural tourism and Asian philosophical perspectives. The combination of the designers' knowledge of pattern, colour, shape and ornament and the dancers' interaction with kinaesthetic image-making produced a set of diverse approaches to costume design and movement expression. This creative application of design principles, supported by the proximity of the Manchester textile industry, helped to construct an artistic milieu in which modern conceptions of design and performance were advanced in Britain.

The inquiry came on the back of an effective shutdown of most work in the creative sector as a result of social distancing restrictions and lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March, and of extensive debate about the Australian Government's reluctance to offer a dedicated financial support package to an industry that, by the government's own estimates, contributed $111.7 billion in 2016/17, or 6.4 per cent of GDP1 The terms of reference for the inquiry appeared accordingly broad: 'The Committee will inquire into Australia's creative and cultural industries and institutions including, but not limited to, Indigenous, regional, rural and community based organisations'. More broadly, the frustrations of lockdown, a newfound capacity to work remotely, loss of income, and the more general reassessment of life choices and lifestyle that COVID-19 provoked all resulted in an unprecedented net population loss in Australia's big cities, with an October 2020 Ipsos poll finding that one in ten Melburnians were considering a move to regional Victoria.3 Meanwhile, among the very limited federal stimulus offered to the arts in the early months of the pandemic was a $27 million 'Targeted Support' package in April, which directed $10 million to the music industry, $7 million to Indigenous arts, and $10 million 'to help regional artists and organisations develop new work and explore new delivery models'.4 In short, while COVID-19 has arguably reconfigured the Australian arts landscape, and the ways in which we understand where arts happens, it also made visible changes that were already occuring, particularly outside major metropolitan centres. Recommendation 1 was that 'the Federal Government increase its investment in building enabling infrastructure to improve connectivity, key services and amenity through coordinated regional plans', while Recommendation 13 anticipated further work on 'the cultivation of social, cultural and community capital'.5 This initiative built in turn on existing trends. Australia's enormous size continues to present major practical challenges when it comes to touring on the one hand, or building and sustaining arts infrastructure on the other. [...]the high-profile shift in the funding narrative over 2020 towards the regions, as well as the obligatory pivot towards the digital environment, has not entirely done away with a metropolitan funding bias, which is most apparent in the fact that the city-based Major Performing Arts organisations receive a disproportionate amount of the federal funding pie.

The radical innovations of African-American artists with artistic form during the 1960s and 1970s, according to black performance theorist Fred Moten, led to a new theorization of the avant-garde. His book, In the Break: The Radical Aesthetics of the Black Tradition, discusses the poetry and jazz music of artists, from Amiri Baraka and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus, and extols their radical experimentation with the structures and conventions of aurality, visuality, literature, and performance dominant in European art and aesthetics. In this essay, I consider the implications of these processes of resignification in relation to the choreographic legacy of the artist, Eleo Pomare, whose work and career during this period was both experimental and radical and, I will suggest, critical to the formation of a transnational, multiracial conception of modern dance.

Jenny Kemp's theatre pays witness to the collision between the inner and outer worlds of the psyche. She engages with the quality of dreams, memories, fantasies and myths as much as the representation of domestic or social reality. In Kemp's theatre, significance lies thus between the social and the asocial; or between language and the emotionally chaotic; or between the symbolic constructions of the stage and the subtle shifts that take place in an audience's imagination. It is in this sense of a theatre that unfolds in two or more realities simultaneously that Kemp's theatre might be called \"mythopoetic.\" Here, Fensham articulates both the notion of a dramatic language being actively re-imagined through the mise en scene--its poetics--and a theatrical world that re-inscribes or re-activates mythic structures in the discourse of contemporary theatre.