Bringing Sonia Delaunay’s Costumes Back to Life

By Mackensie Griffin (MA ’24)

Bard Graduate Center MA student and Broadway costume designer

Sydney Maresca recently resurrected a pair of costumes designed by Sonia Delaunay for the 1923 Dadaist musical, Le coeur à gaz (The Gas Heart) that were ultimately installed in the Sonia Delaunay: Living Art exhibition. Andrew Kircher, director of Public Humanities + Research, inspired the project and supervised Maresca’s independent study, but he said, “Sydney made magic.”

Armed with nothing more than Delaunay’s costume sketches and two black-and-white photographs, Maresca worked with a custom costume construction company to determine possible color schemes and materials and create faithful reproductions. She said, “These costumes are iconic, and they’ve been featured in many publications about Dada theatre or design, but they don’t physically exist. So, when I showed the exhibition curators a version of this thing that we had never seen in real life, it was like being in the room with a celebrity or a ghost. I almost cried because it was so incredible to participate in making this dead thing come back to life.”

Maresca revealed these iconic ghosts to the public at a Wednesdays@BGC event. She shared how she approached the project and walked the audience through her trajectory of research, modeling, and, ultimately, activation. She considered the flattening efect of abstract, modernist graphics, how Delaunay applied it to the human body through her designs, and how the choice of cardboard contributed to that efect.

Activating the recreations of Delaunay’s costumes through restaging excerpts of The Gas Heart was a crucial component of the project. When Maresca told the audience that they would view performers wearing the costumes, a man seated in the front, who turned out to be esteemed performance theorist Richard Schechner, asked if the audience could stage a riot (as the original 1923 production had done). Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, the reenactment did not reach that level of historical accuracy. However, the presentation did culminate in actors promenading down the aisle of the lecture hall in the cardboard creations. They performed text, movements, and a dance inspired by the musical, which demonstrated the limits the costumes imposed on the actors’ movements.

According to Kircher, Maresca’s event “epitomized what BGC has to ofer in the realm of public humanities. She invited a packed room into the craft of object research, and it was at once accessible and rigorous.” Maresca reflected that at BGC, she has built “a new skill set of thinking and talking about and researching objects. I [have] this history of being a maker and a theatre artist, which I sort of put in a box to learn to do this new thing, so it was exciting to … bring my practices together. Sharing this work with the BGC community and the public felt like a moment of self-unification.”

Watch a recording of this event on BGC’s YouTube channel.