The fabric of an art

Because clothes either enhance or obstruct movement, the history of dance costuming in Europe and America is notable less for the picturesque changes of style that can be found in all the performing arts than for radical redefinitions of the dancing body itself.

In 1734, for instance, the French star Marie Salle defied tradition by dancing her ballet “Pygmalion” in London wearing not the usual voluminous gown but a simple muslin tunic and sandals, her hair loose, “in the model of a Greek statue,” according to a contemporary account. Suddenly, dramatic expression mattered more than standardized stage glamour.

Early in the 20th century, pioneer modernist Isadora Duncan also sought inspiration from ancient Greece, rejecting the corseted norms of her day to dance barefoot in flowing garments that dramatized her emphasis on free, natural movement.

And in 1911, the great Vaslav Nijinsky was fired from the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg (now the Kirov) for daring to reveal the line of the male body by dancing “Giselle” without the baggy bloomers customarily worn over tights. If classicism was to reflect a sense of idealized human proportions, why disfigure it out of prudery?

Each of these innovations prompted controversy and sometimes scandal, and you can find a similar sense of entrenched custom, and even morality, on the ropes in an intriguing new costume exhibition that opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Titled (none too gracefully) “Erte/Opera & Ballets Russes/Dance: Theater Costume in LACMA’s Collection,” the show traces links between various stage disciplines, fashion and the indulgences of the rich during the first decades of the 20th century.

Dance, of course, represents only a small part of this picture, but you can see why ballet costuming proved tremendously influential and liberating. For example, Sonia Delaunay’s glittering Orientalist silk gown for the title character in a 1918 revival of Mikhail Fokine’s ballet “Cleopatre” for the Sergei Diaghilev Ballets Russes still looks openly lascivious in its details.

Outlined in metallic braid, the circles under the hips, over the waist and around the breasts heighten and advertise the fatal attractions of a balletic temptress who (contrary to history) demanded death from each of her sex partners -- and was depicted as worth the sacrifice.

Seductive in another way, the blazing oranges in Natalia Goncharova’s stenciled and embroidered cotton robes for court women in Fokine’s staging of the opera-ballet “Le Coq d’Or” (originally for Diaghilev, but here from a 1937 revival) invite a heady immersion in coloristic intensity.

Their extravagance also forms a dramatic contrast with the delicately gilded, chaste leather-lame-and-mesh tunic for the title character. Tiny and arguably marginalized hanging by itself, this costume achieves its intended impact when seen in a 1938 film clip and in a wonderful poster-sized photo featuring the late Tatania Riabouchinska, a.k.a. Tanya Lichine, long a beloved ballet teacher in Los Angeles.

Perhaps the most legendary of LACMA’s ballet acquisitions are Leon Bakst’s elegant silk, satin and velvet suits and gowns for the hunt scene from Diaghilev’s groundbreaking 1921 production of Marius Petipa’s “The Sleeping Beauty” (retitled “The Sleeping Princess”).

A throwback to Imperial Russian style rather than an example of the modernism for which Diaghilev was famed, this staging proved largely misunderstood by critics and audiences. Indeed, it went into the history books not only because it nearly bankrupted Diaghilev but also because it served as the inspiration and even matrix for major British ballet institutions (including what became the Royal Ballet) that were formed after the impresario’s death.

On mannequins, these costumes impress with their cool, aristocratic blues and greens and all their gleaming embellishments: mostly serpentine motifs highlighted by metallic threads, braids, ribbons, cord and lame. In their passive splendor, they are, as LACMA associate curator Kaye Spilker points out, emblematic of a lost tradition: the designer’s attempt “to make a beautiful object,” something as distinctively luxurious when seen close up (despite a few cost-cutting techniques such as gold stenciling) as from a royal box.

In motion, accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s most sumptuous theater score, the costumes would have been dazzling, and a Bakst watercolor sketch for one of them suggests that a kind of energetic, swashbuckling swagger was intended -- something close to Johnny Depp in pirate drag.

Recent touring productions have given local audiences the opportunity to see similar vintage costumes in motion -- and watch them cast their spell along with choreographic expression and, above all, the charismatic dancer presence that no mannequin can convey.

One Joffrey Ballet program of Diaghilev repertory last summer at the Music Center featured costume designs by Bakst, Nicholas Roerich and Pablo Picasso, each historic for a different reason. For starters, Picasso introduced Cubism to the theater in Leonide Massine’s 1917 mock-sideshow “Parade,” using every approach to theatrical costuming from designing huge placard effigies to buying ordinary clothes in a store.

His ornate jacket and pants for the Chinese Conjuror (Massine’s role) required standard design and construction techniques, but the costumes for the two acrobats turned out to be simpler: Picasso painted enormous blue swirls directly on the dancers’ tunics and tights.

The Kirov Ballet’s own Diaghilev program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center included designs by Bakst that had been adapted or modernized to allow the dancers to show more skin in Fokine’s 1910 harem fantasy “Scheherazade” than was permissible when the ballet premiered. (Ironically, the Kirov’s staging of Petipa’s “La Bayadere” a week earlier at the Kodak Theatre went in the opposite direction by using costume designs from a 1900 staging that covered many of the same dancers in flesh-colored net -- though some principals refused to wear them.)

The Kirov’s Diaghilev bill also illustrated how a work’s choreography and original costuming can be intimately wedded; divorce them and the result can look incomplete. The evidence: Fokine’s 1910 “Firebird,” in which the title character danced with turned-in feet in a hyper-exotic Russo-Persian pants suit, a radical redefinition of the ballerina’s dancing body so unlike anything else ever seen on any stage that it turns up in nearly every history book on dance costuming.

However, Diaghilev revived the ballet in 1926 with designs by Goncharova, in a production Fokine disavowed. Here the Firebird was put into a classical feathered tutu a la “Swan Lake.” But turned-in feet look ridiculous below a tutu, so nobody dances it that way and the steps conceived for the role don’t add up anymore.

It’s unlikely that the original costume will ever be restored, though; the “red swan” look has become traditional, and costume traditions die hard in the world of classical ballet. Thus, Giselle will probably continue to be the only woman in her village to wear a blue dress, and the evil Odile will no doubt always be the black swan in “Swan Lake,” though the now-traditional color of her costume dates back not to any 19th century production but rather to a later black-versus-white concept born in England or North America.

Yet if America has made an indelible contribution to costuming that redefines the dancing body, it involves taking dancers off their pedestals and making our street-wear, playwear, exercise-wear their theatrical couture. Here, we can look to the influence of George Balanchine in making the lowly T-shirt not merely acceptable as public attire but a noble garment when worn by a dancer with Apollonian proportions. Even before the founding of New York City Ballet in 1948, Balanchine also adopted ordinary black or white practice clothes as costuming, reconceiving the dancer as an icon of contemporary style.

For Twyla Tharp’s playful modern dance abstraction “Sue’s Leg” in 1975, designer Santo Loquasto gilded the icon, re-creating each cast member’s personal rehearsal clothes in glowing beiges, sepias and bronzes. It was a concept that Isadora Duncan would have loved: dancers unified by choreography but resplendent in their individuality, glorified by everyday garments that an alchemist costumer had changed into the purest gold.

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‘Erte/Opera & Ballets Russes/Dance: Theater Costume in LACMA’s Collection’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

Ends: April 4

Price: Adults, $9; students and seniors, $5; children, free

Contact: (323) 857-6000

Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.