Pub Date : 2023-04-19DOI: 10.1017/S004055742300008X
Hong-lin Yang
for private interests at the expense of the public good. Part II comprises two chapters that investigate how the theatre–finance nexus responded to a financial crisis that has since come to define modern ideas of speculative enterprise: the South Sea Bubble (1720–2). Chapter 4 covers Richard Steele’s short-lived periodical The Theatre, which ran for three months in the wake of the bubble in 1720, as well as his play The Conscious Lovers (1722). In a fascinating excavation of Steele’s reflections on the bubble and its aftermath, Burkert shows how his work, like Centlivre’s, ultimately gives “voice to the concern that elites could use new market structures and dynamics to hijack what appeared to be middling-class sentiments” (123). The book concludes by returning to Cibber and a late comedy, The Refusal; or, The Ladies Philosophy (1721), to show how another writer with middling-class sympathies used his position within the theatre to “theoriz[e] the relationship between changing class structures, speculative investment, and public opinion” (156). Burkert ends with a brief coda that discusses the Half-Price Riots of the 1760s, showing how the theatre–finance nexus persisted into the second half of the century. Burkert’s thesis is highly compelling, and I cannot do justice here to the erudition and deftness of her argumentation and analysis. Through her careful contextualization of the plays and other works within the history of financial crises, she overturns long-held critical assumptions about, among other things, sentimental comedy and its relationship to the emergent middling class. This stimulating account shows how the early eighteenth-century theatre responded to the economic crises that so materially determined its own opportunities for success and failure. The book will prove an extremely valuable contribution to scholars working on the theatre history of the period, as well as on cultural representations of, and engagements with, finance and economics in the early eighteenth century.
{"title":"The Theatre of Nuclear Science: Weapons, Power, and the Scientists behind it All By Jeanne Tiehen. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2021; pp. 166. $170.00 cloth, $39.71 e-book.","authors":"Hong-lin Yang","doi":"10.1017/S004055742300008X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S004055742300008X","url":null,"abstract":"for private interests at the expense of the public good. Part II comprises two chapters that investigate how the theatre–finance nexus responded to a financial crisis that has since come to define modern ideas of speculative enterprise: the South Sea Bubble (1720–2). Chapter 4 covers Richard Steele’s short-lived periodical The Theatre, which ran for three months in the wake of the bubble in 1720, as well as his play The Conscious Lovers (1722). In a fascinating excavation of Steele’s reflections on the bubble and its aftermath, Burkert shows how his work, like Centlivre’s, ultimately gives “voice to the concern that elites could use new market structures and dynamics to hijack what appeared to be middling-class sentiments” (123). The book concludes by returning to Cibber and a late comedy, The Refusal; or, The Ladies Philosophy (1721), to show how another writer with middling-class sympathies used his position within the theatre to “theoriz[e] the relationship between changing class structures, speculative investment, and public opinion” (156). Burkert ends with a brief coda that discusses the Half-Price Riots of the 1760s, showing how the theatre–finance nexus persisted into the second half of the century. Burkert’s thesis is highly compelling, and I cannot do justice here to the erudition and deftness of her argumentation and analysis. Through her careful contextualization of the plays and other works within the history of financial crises, she overturns long-held critical assumptions about, among other things, sentimental comedy and its relationship to the emergent middling class. This stimulating account shows how the early eighteenth-century theatre responded to the economic crises that so materially determined its own opportunities for success and failure. The book will prove an extremely valuable contribution to scholars working on the theatre history of the period, as well as on cultural representations of, and engagements with, finance and economics in the early eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"242 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43250188","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 : 2023-04-19DOI: 10.1017/S0040557423000054
Caridad Svich
{"title":"A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk & US Latinidad By Richard T. Rodríguez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022; pp. xv + 264, 28 illustrations. $99.95 cloth, $25.95 paper, $25.95 e-book.","authors":"Caridad Svich","doi":"10.1017/S0040557423000054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557423000054","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"236 - 238"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43371724","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 : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000527
Sunny Stalter-Pace
The New York Hippodrome theatre brought together many different types of performance on its massive stage. Its opening production in 1905, for instance, included circus acts, a ballet, and a fictionalized Civil War battle (Fig. 1). Many of the acts focused on a key feature in the theatrical environment, a water tank beneath the apron of the stage that could be filled to a fourteen-foot depth. High divers plunged into the tank; in shows with an “ice ballet,” its water was frozen into a skating rink; for a production of HMS Pinafore, a replica ship floated in its water with Brooklyn Navy Yard sailors in the rigging. Yet one tank act repeated and was recalled more than any of the others: a phalanx of women in martial costumes who marched solemnly, row after row, into the water and disappeared.
{"title":"Disappearing Mermaids: Staging White Women's Mobility through Aquatic Performance at the New York Hippodrome","authors":"Sunny Stalter-Pace","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000527","url":null,"abstract":"The New York Hippodrome theatre brought together many different types of performance on its massive stage. Its opening production in 1905, for instance, included circus acts, a ballet, and a fictionalized Civil War battle (Fig. 1). Many of the acts focused on a key feature in the theatrical environment, a water tank beneath the apron of the stage that could be filled to a fourteen-foot depth. High divers plunged into the tank; in shows with an “ice ballet,” its water was frozen into a skating rink; for a production of HMS Pinafore, a replica ship floated in its water with Brooklyn Navy Yard sailors in the rigging. Yet one tank act repeated and was recalled more than any of the others: a phalanx of women in martial costumes who marched solemnly, row after row, into the water and disappeared.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"3 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48400686","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 : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s0040557422000497
Mermaids. Clowns. Sign-mime. Experimental theatre. Although the authors within this issue explore a variety of topics within theatre history, each engages with the process of reclaiming the past. Collectively, they ask us to consider fundamental historiographical questions: Where are the gaps and silences within theatre history? Why do these glaring omissions exist and continue to persist? How might computational tools help reveal biases within theatre history scholarship? In answering these questions, the authors invite readers to consider how reclamation of the past can help us better understand our current conditions. In contrast to previous studies that focus on the relationship between femininity and visibility in women’s aquatic performances, Sunny Stalter-Pace’s “Disappearing Mermaids: Staging Women’s Mobility through Aquatic Performance at the New York Hippodrome” takes a deep dive into the Progressive Era—a period marked by political upheaval, technological innovation, and increased immigration and internal migration. Here, Stalter-Pace asks readers to reconsider how the political landscape impacted both aquatic women performers (the titular ‘disappearing mermaids’) and spectators of this important cultural institution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In retracing the legacies of these performers, Stalter-Pace ultimately finds that, “the audience’s ambivalent fascination with the disappearing mermaids stood in for a broader cultural interest in and anxiety over modern [young] white women’s mobility.” In so doing, Stalter-Pace not only “reveal[s] the previously concealed” anxieties of white women’s growing social status of the past but also provides greater understanding of the contested terrain of Black girls’ twenty-first-century mermaid performances. Matthew McMahan and Laurence Senelick’s “Send in the Clowness: The Problematic Origins of Female Circus Clowns” utilizes a variety of sources—from advertisements, to interviews, to human-interest pieces in trade publications—to recover the history of early women clown performers of the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. By unearthing the past, McMahan and Senelick reveal that, “until the latter half of the twentieth century, to be both a woman and a clown was a paradox, one that reveals a host of attitudes related to the very nature of the clown archetype within the circus.” Through detailed firsthand accounts, coupled with exhaustive archival research and a nuanced narrative voice, McMahan and Senelick introduce readers to a rich tradition of women circus clowns that has heretofore been a marginalized chapter within theatre history. In “The Race for Rehabilitation: Sign-Mime, the National Theatre of the Deaf, and Cold War Internationalism” Patrick McKelvey places the National Theatre of the Deaf’s (NTD) development of “sign-mime” and cultural exchange alongside Moscow’s Theatre of Mime and Gesture within the context of the “the cultural Cold War” and the “
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000539
M. McMahan, L. Senelick
Historically, clowns have always been trained “on the job”: one was born or adopted into a circus dynasty or else ran away to join the circus, serving an apprenticeship. Breaking with the long tradition that performers learn on the job, after World War II, national circuses in the Communist bloc created their own academies; they were followed in 1974 by the École nationale de cirque founded in Paris by Annie Fratellini and Pierre Étaix, now the Académie Fratellini, and in 1982 by the Escola Nacional de Circo in Brazil. These examples led to the teaching of circus skills in universities, enabling breaches in the gender barriers between types of circus acts. For example, six years after Ringling Brothers founded a clown college in 1968, Peggy Williams was the first woman to graduate with a contract. At first she felt out of place. In an interview series for the Ringling Museum of Art, she stated that early in her training she had presumed that clowns were gender neutral: “I didn't know there weren't girl clowns. I thought being a clown was being a clown. You could be a man or woman. I had no idea what was heading my way because of gender.” Although she learned under the auspices of great clowns such as Lou Jacobs, she was left to her own devices to craft a clown that reflected her allegedly female nature.
从历史上看，小丑总是在“工作中”接受训练:一个人出生或被一个马戏团王朝收养，或者逃到马戏团去当学徒。第二次世界大战后，共产主义集团的国家马戏团打破了表演者在工作中学习的悠久传统，建立了自己的学院;1974年，安妮·弗拉泰利尼和皮埃尔·Étaix(现为弗拉泰利尼学院)在巴黎成立了École国家马戏团，1982年，巴西国家马戏团也成立了。这些例子促使大学教授马戏技巧，打破了马戏表演类型之间的性别障碍。例如，1968年，林林兄弟(Ringling Brothers)创办了一所小丑学院，六年后，佩吉·威廉姆斯(Peggy Williams)成为第一位获得合同毕业的女性。起初她感到格格不入。在林林艺术博物馆(Ringling Museum of Art)的一系列采访中，她表示，在接受培训的早期，她曾认为小丑是中性的:“我不知道没有女小丑。我以为做小丑就是做小丑。你可以是男人也可以是女人。因为性别的原因，我不知道前方会有什么。”虽然她是在卢·雅各布斯(Lou Jacobs)等伟大小丑的指导下学习的，但她只能靠自己的手段来塑造一个反映她所谓的女性本性的小丑。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000552
Miguel Escobar Varela
The “experimental” playwrights of continental Europe have been experimental not because they have imitated modern literature or poetry, but because they have sought to express themselves in theatrical terms, and the great directors, like Jouvet, Barrault, Viertel, and Brecht have been there to make their plays “exist” on the stage.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.1017/s0040557422000369
Kristina Straub
ture and live theatre. Works interpreted include Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence, a play inspired by 1950s bus boycott images that features a sci-fi plot about a white town amid the major emergency of Black disappearance. Fleming conceptualizes “white impatience” as central to the making of whiteness and Black patience and proposes that the ephemeral, multiperceptual form of theatre “disrupt [s] the racial conventions of visual modernity” (183). Fleming’s Black Patience is a magnificent, much-needed inquiry of civil-rights-era theatrical history. Engaging in depth with scripts, letters, maps, photographs, and newspapers, Fleming rigorously works across fields of theatre history (including African American theatre), performance studies, Black studies, and theatre for social change. Fleming reminds us to center Afro-presentism—onand offstage—to unearth forms that confront Black patience and champion freedom for Black people now.
{"title":"Carrying All before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689–1800 By Chelsea Phillips. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2022; pp. xiv + 287. $120.00 cloth, $34.95 paper, $38.95 e-book.","authors":"Kristina Straub","doi":"10.1017/s0040557422000369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557422000369","url":null,"abstract":"ture and live theatre. Works interpreted include Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence, a play inspired by 1950s bus boycott images that features a sci-fi plot about a white town amid the major emergency of Black disappearance. Fleming conceptualizes “white impatience” as central to the making of whiteness and Black patience and proposes that the ephemeral, multiperceptual form of theatre “disrupt [s] the racial conventions of visual modernity” (183). Fleming’s Black Patience is a magnificent, much-needed inquiry of civil-rights-era theatrical history. Engaging in depth with scripts, letters, maps, photographs, and newspapers, Fleming rigorously works across fields of theatre history (including African American theatre), performance studies, Black studies, and theatre for social change. Fleming reminds us to center Afro-presentism—onand offstage—to unearth forms that confront Black patience and champion freedom for Black people now.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"64 1","pages":"93 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42872125","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 : 2022-12-21DOI: 10.1017/s0040557422000412
Ryan Helterbrand
With the dramatic global resurgence of far-Right politics, it behooves critics to come to terms with the legacies of Fascism and its relationship to cultural production. How did Mussolini attempt to guide or co-opt theatre for his own purposes? Many scholars have followed Walter Benjamin in arguing that Fascism aestheticized politics, that Mussolini himself used the actor’s art to become a character in his own political play, that ultimately “the fascist mode was inherently performative, irrational, and coercive” (7). But, as Patricia Gaborik argues in her carefully argued and impressively documented Mussolini’s Theatre: Fascist Experiments in Art and Politics, this focus on Fascism as an aestheticized political experiment neglects the actual situation of the theatre under Mussolini, acting “as if what was produced on stage doesn’t actually matter—as if, that is, when it comes to fascism, art is not an issue” (12). What if, instead of assuming that all theatrical productions under Mussolini were only—could only be—so many forms of propaganda, we look instead at what was actually produced during the ventennio? Gaborik shows that theatre under Mussolini was more complicated than we’ve imagined. Although some plays produced under Fascism toed the party line, most did not, nor were they punished for it. In fact, a kind of strategic aestheticism reigned: Mussolini consistently demonstrated a commitment to art “that went beyond the tactical” and elevated “spiritual valor over immediate propagandistic efficacy” (19). Why? Because, Gaborik argues, Mussolini approached the theatre in two complementary ways that highlighted his “faith in culture as a revolutionary tool” (45). First, he kept the theatre relatively free to demonstrate the alleged openness of his regime, to demonstrate that artists in Fascist Italy were free to follow their genius. Here he followed a strategy of diplomacy, recognizing that theatre
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