Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s004055742300011x
As with many in our field, I did not fall in love with theatre through the written word. I became enraptured with theatre—its history, influence, and ephemerality —through performance. As a child, I remember watching actors use their bodies to make an idea, quality, or feeling tangible to the audience. By middle school, I decided to try my hand at creating a performance. I convinced four of my younger sisters and niece to form an acting troupe and perform Anton Chekhov’s one-act comedy The Bear (1888) for our neighborhood. As an eleven-year-old selfappointed producer, director, and company member, I quickly learned that I was in over my head. How can I mount a show with a limited budget of five dollars? How can I persuade my sisters to stay involved in the production even though I can’t make good on my promise of paying them? How can I help my four-year-old niece memorize lines when she could not read? After trying to problem-solve, I realized I had no other choice but to cancel the production and disperse what remained of my acting troupe. I share this silly personal anecdote because, in all seriousness, this early experience creating an amateur production served as a foundation for my knowledge of performance (broadly construed) and its opposition. Performance is messy, ephemeral in nature, and relies heavily on the devotion and commitment of artists and spectators to make vision a reality. Whether investigating antitheatrical tracts of the seventeenth century, early Black women musical performers, the reality in materiality of Sherlock Holmes, or Germany’s agitprop amateur theatre movement of the twentieth century, the articles in this issue engage with the complexities of creating or disavowing live performance, encouraging readers to consider the oppositional forces that both hinder and sustain craft. Joy Palacios considers how the embodied activities of seventeenth-century Catholic priests fostered the growth of antitheatrical sentiments alongside the Grand Siècle, or golden age, of French theatre. In “Antitheatrical Prejudice: From Parish Priests to Diocesan Rituals in Early Modern France,” Palacios argues that in addition to writing, the Catholic church utilized what performance and theatre scholars would consider a “performance repertoire” to circulate theological ideas, values, and arguments to the laity. Paradoxically, the use of performance repertoire—including the bodily comportment of priests and the gestures, ceremonies, and sacraments that made up the liturgy—helped situate actors as “public sinners” and theatre as a site of moral decay. Ultimately, Palacios finds that without ceremonial support to bring life into their argument, antitheatrical texts would have remained nothing more than “dead letters.” By exploring the (often overlooked)
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557423000029
Yizhou Huang
modern culture in Europe and, in doing so, historicize racializing apparatuses that continue to undergird the injustices of our modern world. Ndiaye’s emphasis on the racist scripts of early modern transnational performance and Chakravarty’s analysis of fictions of consent in the bonds that oppress represent something fundamental about premodern critical race studies. They reach beyond the conventional paradigms of academic research because those paradigms were designed to protect and obscure the very apparatuses this research seeks to dismantle. In this way, their scholarly contributions exemplify the interventions of the RaceB4Race initiative, which seeks to nurture a “community of scholars, students, researchers, theater practitioners, curators, librarians, artists, and activists who are looking to the past to imagine different, more inclusive futures” [https://acmrs.asu.edu/ RaceB4Race/Sustaining-Building-Innovating]. These two books are part of an intellectual revolution committed to racial justice: curation that critiques, historicity that matters, and race work that is antiracist.
{"title":"Made-Up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era By Esther Kim Lee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022; pp. xiii + 268, 23 illustrations. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.","authors":"Yizhou Huang","doi":"10.1017/S0040557423000029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557423000029","url":null,"abstract":"modern culture in Europe and, in doing so, historicize racializing apparatuses that continue to undergird the injustices of our modern world. Ndiaye’s emphasis on the racist scripts of early modern transnational performance and Chakravarty’s analysis of fictions of consent in the bonds that oppress represent something fundamental about premodern critical race studies. They reach beyond the conventional paradigms of academic research because those paradigms were designed to protect and obscure the very apparatuses this research seeks to dismantle. In this way, their scholarly contributions exemplify the interventions of the RaceB4Race initiative, which seeks to nurture a “community of scholars, students, researchers, theater practitioners, curators, librarians, artists, and activists who are looking to the past to imagine different, more inclusive futures” [https://acmrs.asu.edu/ RaceB4Race/Sustaining-Building-Innovating]. These two books are part of an intellectual revolution committed to racial justice: curation that critiques, historicity that matters, and race work that is antiracist.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"229 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46344561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557423000133
Caitlin Marshall
Bend your ear to Saturday, 23 July 1853. On that morning, America's first Black concert vocalist and operatic singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, performed at Stafford House, home of prominent English Abolitionist the Duchess of Sutherland, during her UK tour. Born into captivity on a plantation in Mississippi and raised free in Philadelphia, Taylor Greenfield's voice sounded out the fever pitch of America's conflict over slavery. A multioctave singer, she smashed boundaries for race and gender as a Black woman who sang “white” vocal repertoire across registers heard as both female and male. Writing on an early public performance in 1851, one newspaper reviewer summed up the revolutionary threat of Taylor Greenfield's voice by stating “we can assure the public that the Union is in no degree periled by it,” meaning of course, that the Union was. Whether received by pro- or antislavery audiences, Taylor Greenfield's voice was understood to peal out Black emancipation. In his 1855 review of Taylor Greenfield's New York Tabernacle performance, James McCune Smith went as far to compare Taylor Greenfield's voice to the firearms employed by escaped slaves defending their freedom against the Fugitive Slave Act.
{"title":"Ear Training for History: Listening to Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Double-Voiced Aesthetics","authors":"Caitlin Marshall","doi":"10.1017/S0040557423000133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557423000133","url":null,"abstract":"Bend your ear to Saturday, 23 July 1853. On that morning, America's first Black concert vocalist and operatic singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, performed at Stafford House, home of prominent English Abolitionist the Duchess of Sutherland, during her UK tour. Born into captivity on a plantation in Mississippi and raised free in Philadelphia, Taylor Greenfield's voice sounded out the fever pitch of America's conflict over slavery. A multioctave singer, she smashed boundaries for race and gender as a Black woman who sang “white” vocal repertoire across registers heard as both female and male. Writing on an early public performance in 1851, one newspaper reviewer summed up the revolutionary threat of Taylor Greenfield's voice by stating “we can assure the public that the Union is in no degree periled by it,” meaning of course, that the Union was. Whether received by pro- or antislavery audiences, Taylor Greenfield's voice was understood to peal out Black emancipation. In his 1855 review of Taylor Greenfield's New York Tabernacle performance, James McCune Smith went as far to compare Taylor Greenfield's voice to the firearms employed by escaped slaves defending their freedom against the Fugitive Slave Act.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"150 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44073898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557423000145
Isabel Stowell-Kaplan
In 1901, the popular American actor and playwright, William Gillette, arrived in the United Kingdom to tour his new play, Sherlock Holmes. Born in Connecticut in 1853, Gillette was by this time a well-established actor and playwright in his native United States and not unknown to British audiences. Just a few years earlier, he had brought his play Secret Service to London, where his performance as an American Union spy had “created a sensation.” Despite his prior reputation and relative celebrity, there was a seeming belief at the time in a natural accord between Gillette and the character that would go on to define his career. A tale recounted by Harold J. Shepstone in the Strand magazine—already the fictional home of the world's most famous sleuth—underlines the belief in the symbiosis of William Gillette and Sherlock Holmes: When Mr. Gillette arrived on the Celtic in Liverpool, in August last, Mr. Pendleton of the London and North-Western Railway, had a letter to deliver to him. He went on board and asked one of the passengers if he knew Mr. Gillette. The man replied:— “Do you know Sherlock Holmes?” The visitor was rather taken back, and said: “I have read the stories in The Strand Magazine.” “That's all you need know,” said the passenger. “Just look around till you see a man who fits your idea of what Sherlock Holmes ought to be and that's he.” Mr. Pendleton went away, with a laugh. As he was going up the companion-way he collided with a gentleman, and as he looked up to apologize the passenger's advice occurred to him, and he said, “Are you Mr. Gillette?” “I was, before you ran into me,” was the reply. “Here's a letter for you.”
{"title":"William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes, or the “Real” Sherlock Holmes: Seeking Reality in Materiality","authors":"Isabel Stowell-Kaplan","doi":"10.1017/S0040557423000145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557423000145","url":null,"abstract":"In 1901, the popular American actor and playwright, William Gillette, arrived in the United Kingdom to tour his new play, Sherlock Holmes. Born in Connecticut in 1853, Gillette was by this time a well-established actor and playwright in his native United States and not unknown to British audiences. Just a few years earlier, he had brought his play Secret Service to London, where his performance as an American Union spy had “created a sensation.” Despite his prior reputation and relative celebrity, there was a seeming belief at the time in a natural accord between Gillette and the character that would go on to define his career. A tale recounted by Harold J. Shepstone in the Strand magazine—already the fictional home of the world's most famous sleuth—underlines the belief in the symbiosis of William Gillette and Sherlock Holmes: When Mr. Gillette arrived on the Celtic in Liverpool, in August last, Mr. Pendleton of the London and North-Western Railway, had a letter to deliver to him. He went on board and asked one of the passengers if he knew Mr. Gillette. The man replied:— “Do you know Sherlock Holmes?” The visitor was rather taken back, and said: “I have read the stories in The Strand Magazine.” “That's all you need know,” said the passenger. “Just look around till you see a man who fits your idea of what Sherlock Holmes ought to be and that's he.” Mr. Pendleton went away, with a laugh. As he was going up the companion-way he collided with a gentleman, and as he looked up to apologize the passenger's advice occurred to him, and he said, “Are you Mr. Gillette?” “I was, before you ran into me,” was the reply. “Here's a letter for you.”","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"177 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46091433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s0040557423000066
Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari
the political queer stances taken by British postpunk musicians and how these ignited a flame of resistance, passion, and drive in Southern California Latinx queer workingclass communities. Hands across the water, a kiss across an ocean, the lips that touch here in this book are ones devoted to enacting joyful resistance. Tender, wry, delicate, and rich, A Kiss across the Ocean is a love letter to the theatrically potent musical and visual gestures of the artists and bands of the British postpunk scene that made a difference in the mid-1980s and continue to do so today, even when people may have forgotten some of the bands’ names.
{"title":"Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists By Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021, pp. xvi + 237, 5 illustrations. $115 cloth, $39.95 paper, $35.95 e-book.","authors":"Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari","doi":"10.1017/s0040557423000066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557423000066","url":null,"abstract":"the political queer stances taken by British postpunk musicians and how these ignited a flame of resistance, passion, and drive in Southern California Latinx queer workingclass communities. Hands across the water, a kiss across an ocean, the lips that touch here in this book are ones devoted to enacting joyful resistance. Tender, wry, delicate, and rich, A Kiss across the Ocean is a love letter to the theatrically potent musical and visual gestures of the artists and bands of the British postpunk scene that made a difference in the mid-1980s and continue to do so today, even when people may have forgotten some of the bands’ names.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"238 - 240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45313346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557423000157
Jessi Piggott
Germany's amateur agitprop theatre movement produced some of the most popular, pervasive, and politically contentious art in the Weimar Republic, not least because of the way performers inserted themselves into the fabric of working-class life with the unequivocal intention of politicizing audiences. Germany's first agitprop troupes formed within youth clubs affiliated with the Communist Party (KPD) around 1925, but the movement quickly grew beyond established club culture, with troupes sprouting up “like mushrooms,” as one critic of the period put it. By 1929 police estimated there were about two hundred self-proclaimed agitprop troupes spread across Germany, all pursuing a transparently aggressive political agenda: to turn the theatre into a site of revolutionary class struggle. If the Weimar period saw an unprecedented mixing of art and politics, agitprop took this tendency to the extreme by declaring theatre to be a weapon in the hands of the proletariat. As the slogan of the 1931 International Meeting of Agitprop Troupes in Cologne put it: “Workers’ theatre is class struggle.”
{"title":"Playing the Police with the Agitprop Troupes of Weimar Germany","authors":"Jessi Piggott","doi":"10.1017/S0040557423000157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557423000157","url":null,"abstract":"Germany's amateur agitprop theatre movement produced some of the most popular, pervasive, and politically contentious art in the Weimar Republic, not least because of the way performers inserted themselves into the fabric of working-class life with the unequivocal intention of politicizing audiences. Germany's first agitprop troupes formed within youth clubs affiliated with the Communist Party (KPD) around 1925, but the movement quickly grew beyond established club culture, with troupes sprouting up “like mushrooms,” as one critic of the period put it. By 1929 police estimated there were about two hundred self-proclaimed agitprop troupes spread across Germany, all pursuing a transparently aggressive political agenda: to turn the theatre into a site of revolutionary class struggle. If the Weimar period saw an unprecedented mixing of art and politics, agitprop took this tendency to the extreme by declaring theatre to be a weapon in the hands of the proletariat. As the slogan of the 1931 International Meeting of Agitprop Troupes in Cologne put it: “Workers’ theatre is class struggle.”","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"198 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45027655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s0040557423000091
Donna L. Forsgren, T. D. Arendell, Chrystyna M. Dail
{"title":"TSY volume 64 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"Donna L. Forsgren, T. D. Arendell, Chrystyna M. Dail","doi":"10.1017/s0040557423000091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557423000091","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"f1 - f6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46688048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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