A Dance to The Music of Time

05/04/23 • 39 min

This is the tale of how textiles played a central part in one of the great cultural and artistic upheavals of the last century, helping to bring about a change that was to reach deep into many lives, influencing fashion, interior design, illustration, art, and dance.

The Ballet Russe, gathered together by the mercurial figure of Serge Diaghilev in the early part of the twentieth century, was revolutionary in almost everything it did. The dancers, the music, the choreography, the sets, and the costumes astonished audiences – no one had seen anything like it before. The ballets became so popular that the costumes were copied by fashion designers and began to appear on the street.

The Ballet Russe was such a phenomenon that artists like Matisse and Picasso were happy to design for it, joining in-house artists like Bakst and Goncharova. Today, over a hundred years later, very little survives of the incredible performances given across Europe and America by the company, except the glorious music and the wonderful costumes.

These are often battered and bruised by a life on the road – they are far from pristine, stained with sweat and makeup, repaired and remade, but they have extraordinary power and wonderful stories to tell us, of where they were made and how they were used to change our ideas about dance and culture.

For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

Previous Episode

A Sliver of Deep Blue Cloth

Warning: This podcast and the text below uses terms considered offensive and inappropriate today.

An extraordinary sample of indigo cloth has been found in a British record office which is thought to be a rare surviving fragment of fabric used to clothe enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America. The Haptic & Hue team of Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor was alerted to its existence in early January. We travelled to Derbyshire to see it and realised from a note on the back that we were looking at a piece of so-called ‘slave’ cloth, handwoven in Yorkshire in 1783. Millions of yards of this fabric were handmade in Britain and Ireland and sent to the plantations for nearly two hundred years, but until now none was known to have survived.

This episode of Haptic & Hue unravels the story-threads of this tiny piece of cloth which begin on the upland moors of Yorkshire, and takes us to America and the Caribbean, but also involve Wales, the Lake District, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Poland, Russia, and the Baltic. The different light that textiles cast on this history show us how profits from the system of slavery were part of the everyday lives of workers and landowners all over Britain and Europe and didn’t just benefit a few rich plantation owners.

For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

Next Episode

The Tangled Tale of Tartan

Who doesn’t love a good tartan? It is everywhere from high fashion catwalks to shooting parties on winter hillsides, from military uniforms on parade to much-loved old sofas. It is at home in the humblest of cottages and the most splendid of royal palaces. It has a kaleidoscope of different uses and meanings. It is one of the most recognised patterns on earth, a global textile, visible almost everywhere.

But tartan is much more than a pattern, it is a fabric of contradiction and surprise. It holds many meanings, often simultaneously. It can represent the establishment and the power of the state, and at the same time signify rebellion and treachery. It can be an emblem of enslavement and oppression, or it can represent comfort, family, and home. Its meanings are as diverse as its many patterns.

In this episode of Haptic & Hue’s Tales of Textiles, we look at where tartan comes from and how it acquired its many meanings and controversies, and why some people love it and others hate it. Tartan is a textile of duality, able to hold many ideas within its simple grid design. It has a history that has spread out across the world and taken a sense of what it means to be Scottish with it.

But there is more than history to tartan: we also hear from a bespoke kilt-maker, who designs and registers her own tartans. She creates modern tartans able to embrace new definitions of identity and community and expand far beyond the Highland glens they first sprung from.

All of this has been put into context by the first exhibition in living memory about Tartan in Scotland itself, which opened in April 2023 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, which we went to see as part of making this episode.

For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/