What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilised towards representational repair, post-performance?

Located within Lea Anderson's choreographic archive, In Smithereens charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centred on practices of disintegration, preservation, transaction and display, the book offers provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance, the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work, and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.

The choreographic archive is envisioned as repository of the awkward, scattered remains of legacy blown apart into fragments. Smithereens, which can, if we allow them, demand an alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishing inflicted on these costumes and the companies who danced in them.