Agency and Empathy: Artists Touch the Body

The chapter researches empathy in relation to mainly Modernist costumes using a costume centered and practice orientated methodology. Trimingham ascertains the gestural empathy of costume and the dynamic impulses that are generated by the wearing of costume, all of which were discovered in the early years of the twentieth century by avant-garde performers and visual artists moving into the medium of theatre and performance. Trimingham looks at early twentieth century Russian costume, the Viennese dancers of the 1920s such as Hilde Holger, the Bauhaus and finally Robert Wilson.