Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2018 - Public - 40

Two cotton bras credited to Boy Initiate costume, photographed by the author at NMA repository. Reproduced
courtesy National Museum of Australia.

Elkin sees Aboriginal culture as contributing to a new white Australian identity;
however, it is likely that, as in America,
"the only black people most white folks
ever met were the blackfaced performers
in minstrel shows" (Strausbaugh 2006,
108), Dean and her contemporaries
were the closest most 1950s white Australians would get to Aboriginal people
and culture.
At that time, the Aboriginal people
of Australia were restricted in citizenship status and freedom of movement,
were not counted in the census and, indeed, not considered by many to exist
in modern Australia at all. The notion of
looking to indigenous culture to establish an independent identity, then, came
at the expense of the Aboriginals themselves. By taking ownership of the cultural traditions she witnessed and both
choreographically and visually diluting
them, Dean translated the Aboriginal
corroboree into entertainment-educational in its intentions, but entertainment
nonetheless-echoing a society who "essentially felt compelled to evict black
people from their own skin and then
allow pretenders to take up residency
there" (Dunson 2011, 45). Removed
from its actual purpose and performed

40 |

THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

SPRING 2018

by Dean in blackface, the corroboree
lost its meaning and became pure showmanship for the advancement of its
creators and performers' careers. "Corroboree did indeed make Dean's career,
transforming her from a little-known
musical dancer and choreographer on
American entertainment circuits to a
renowned international expert on indigenous dance" (Haskins 2014, 23).
Dean's career went on to include creating work for television, major arts festivals in Australia and the South Pacific
Islands, and the 1968 Mexico Cultural
Olympics. She also had a long career as
a dance writer and critic for the Sydney
Morning Herald and the American publication Dance Magazine.
So, by studying the costumed body
of Beth Dean, do we find her to be a pioneer, promoting indigenous dance as an
important art form to white audiences,
or a pirate, plundering the riches of a
sacred culture for personal benefit? The
disparity of archival material relating to
the costumes from Dean's Corroboree
certainly made tracing their history
difficult. This was highlighted by the
incorrectly credited images of Dean in
costume published in articles and chapters, as well as errors in the credited

production provenance of certain costume items archived at the NMA, noted
when viewed in the Canberra repository
by the author. Dean's story holds much
interest to researchers, so it would be
useful to address the discrepancies in
archival records to ensure the details
can be reported accurately.
The handcrafted realization of
Dean's costume has proven key to understanding the importance of this production, and would benefit from further
research. In Dean's case, the textural
interpretation is of interest as it indicates that her skillset was inherently
Western, and was significant to the
white Australian audiences' response
to the ballet. She rendered the visceral
intensity of traditional Aboriginal body
markings into hand-craft decoration
that enabled white audiences to safely
negotiate their relationship with Aboriginality from a distance. And yet, she certainly contributed to the advancement
of indigenous arts being recognized by
white Australia. However, in combination with the act of dressing in full body
blackface, or wearing another's skin,
Dean ultimately enabled the colonial
dominance of white Australia to continue. By engaging her audience on an
embodied and intimate level, she enabled them to share in ownership of the
material. Dean set out to be a pioneer,
yet a combination of societal pressure
and her own ambition led her to piracy.
Emily Collett is a set and
costume designer whose
practice includes theatre,
dance, film, television, and
costume research. She has been
recognized professionally with a Green Room
Award nomination for best set and costume
design for Dream Home, as the set and
costume design candidate in Melbourne
Theatre Companies' 2016 Women in Theatre
program with designer Christina Smith as
her mentor, and as the 2017 costume design
candidate in Malthouse's Besen Family Artist
Program, working with designer Zoe
Atkinson on Black Rider. Collett is currently
a PhD candidate at the University of
Melbourne, researching the topic of costume
as a cultural marker-specifically how the
history of Australian costume for performance
intersects with an evolving sense of national
identity.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2018 - Public