Anna Rebecca Menslin

Anna Rebecca Menslin studied Music and Dance Studies at the University of Salzburg and completed her Master’s degree in Performative Music and Dance Studies in 2023. Until 2018 she studied piano at the Mozarteum Salzburg. She worked as a teaching assistant at the University of Salzburg until 2023 and has been teaching courses on movement analysis since 2023. During her academic career, she worked as an assistant at the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives from 2022 to 2023 and worked in the Archive & Dramaturgy Department of the Salzburg Festival in the summer of 2024. Her most recently completed research project “Magazines as Stages for Dance” combines her research interests in dance, fashion, archival practices and body concepts.
Anna Rebecca Menslin is doing her doctorate in the Inter-University Doctoral School “Cultures in Transformation” on the topic of “Dancing Fashion Bodies: Method and Analysis of Vestimentary Constellations in Cultures of Change”. In her research, she investigates how fashion and fashion bodies emerge in performative contexts, when bodies and textiles interact, move, interweave, model and transform in direct exchange. Her research project aims to develop methods for analyzing vestimentary constellations, linking theory and practice, science and art.

Dissertation project:
Dancing fashion bodies
Draping as a method and analysis of vestimentary constellations

First supervisor: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nicole Haitzinger (PLUS)
Second supervisor: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Lisbeth Freiß (MOZ)

Fashion is created when bodies and textiles interact, move, model and transform each other in direct exchange. In order to understand these dynamic transfer processes, my dissertation project aims to develop a method for analysing vestimentary constellations in performative contexts. The project is motivated by a series of questions: How is analysable movement material transferred to textiles and to what extent do material conditions, forms, the feeling of wearing and the socio-cultural and political meanings of vestimental and fashionable practices transfer to movements as well as singular and collective bodies? How is the fashionable body made of fabric and flesh to be understood; where does it begin and where does it end when it is constantly undergoing processes of transformation? How and with which strategies can dancing fashion bodies be analysed? And which practices situated in fashion can be used as strategies for process-orientated research at the interface between science and art?

In order to approach these questions, I am thinking of a transdisciplinary research mode in which theoretically and artistically-practically informed perspectives can meet at the intersections of body, material, movement and space. At first glance, the connection between the above-mentioned points of intersection may seem obvious, but they have received too little attention in the academic field and in dance studies in particular; fashion aspects tend to be dealt with superficially in studies or along the lines of a Eurocentric canon. Elaborate attempts to understand and analyse fashion bodies in motion have yet to be made.

A dance studies prism will therefore be used to develop a method that makes dancing fashion bodies analysable. This can not only serve to expand the methodological canon of cultural studies disciplines, but can also find resonance in artistic practice. Based on already established methods of analysis such as staging, movement and figure analysis (Christopher Balme, Claudia Jeschke, Nicole Haitzinger), the approaches will be elaborated on the basis of discursive and practical formats. This will enable multi-perspective platforms for experimentation and development. Under the common thread of draping – a processual, intuitive and precise procedure in which textiles are brought into a form by folding, unfolding and adjusting – the research project also includes questions about how techniques and practices situated in fashion can be used as strategies for artistic and scientific research.