Pub Date : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000106
Katie Knowles
Separated by almost three hundred years and by significant developments in the construction of childhood as an identity distinct from adulthood, the early seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries stand out as periods of intense and popular activity by child actors, and specifically by companies of child actors who played adult roles and deliberately juxtaposed the age categories of performer and character. While much excellent period-specific work has been accomplished during the last twenty years on early modern boy actors and on the ‘infant phenomena’ of the Victorian stage, there has as yet been no attempt to compare children’s professional performance during these two periods. This article contrasts the repertoire of the boy companies of Jacobean London with that of the children’s opera companies who toured the UK and Ireland throughout the 1880s performing comic operas such as H.M.S. Pinafore and Les Cloches de Corneville. It also explores what it meant for children to perform as adults during these two periods, and what the latter reveals about the historical construction and policing of age categories.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000118
Stephen Ridgwell
In the 1830s and 1840s, the female management of London theatres, conducted singly or in partnership, was surprisingly common. Charismatic actress-managers such as Madame Vestris and Mrs Keeley have long been familiar to students of British theatre, as too the establishments they managed. Much less well known is the City of London Theatre in Norton Folgate, one of several minor playhouses then active in the East End. Opened in the year that Victoria came to the throne (1837), during its first decade the City was unrivalled as a home for the so-called ‘wo-manager’. Although largely forgotten today, Lucy Honey, Eliza Vincent, Harriett Lacy, and Maria Honner added much to the cultural vibrancy of an important theatre district at a moment of significant social change. Stephen Ridgwell here explores an under-researched world of theatre enterprise, and argues that the marginality subsequently conferred upon these women in no way reflects their contemporary visibility and standing. The article also highlights the importance of Eliza Vincent’s collaborations with George Dibdin Pitt, a dramatist of growing interest to scholars across a range of fields, and proposes that further consideration of this partnership might usefully be undertaken.
在19世纪30年代和40年代,女性单独或合伙管理伦敦剧院的现象非常普遍。像Vestris夫人和Keeley夫人这样有魅力的女演员经纪人,对英国戏剧的学生来说是很熟悉的,他们所管理的机构也是如此。诺顿福尔盖特的伦敦城剧院(City of London Theatre)就不那么知名了,它是当时活跃在伦敦东区的几家小剧院之一。在维多利亚即位的那一年(1837年)开业,在它的第一个十年里,作为所谓的“女经理”的家,伦敦城是无与伦比的。露西·霍尼、伊丽莎·文森特、哈里特·莱西和玛丽亚·霍纳在社会发生重大变化的时刻,为一个重要的剧院区增添了许多文化活力,尽管如今这些人基本上被遗忘了。斯蒂芬·里奇威尔在这里探索了一个尚未被充分研究的戏剧企业世界,并认为随后赋予这些女性的边缘地位绝不能反映她们在当代的知名度和地位。这篇文章还强调了伊丽莎·文森特与乔治·迪布丁·皮特(George Dibdin Pitt)合作的重要性,皮特是一位越来越受到各个领域学者兴趣的剧作家,并建议进一步考虑这种合作关系可能会有所帮助。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000167
L. Senelick
The academic interest in popular entertainment was long retarded by a class attitude that regarded it as a cultural phenomenon of inferior quality. Those who researched it were collectors and enthusiasts rather than professional scholars. The disdain of the Frankfurt School was also a factor. In the 1960s, with the rise of leisure studies and a Marxist-inflected interest in working-class culture, this began to change. The study of popular forms is now an accepted, even dominant part of the humanities curriculum, though still occasionally tinged with apology.
{"title":"From Sideshow to Centre Ring: The Historiography of Popular Entertainment","authors":"L. Senelick","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000167","url":null,"abstract":"The academic interest in popular entertainment was long retarded by a class attitude that regarded it as a cultural phenomenon of inferior quality. Those who researched it were collectors and enthusiasts rather than professional scholars. The disdain of the Frankfurt School was also a factor. In the 1960s, with the rise of leisure studies and a Marxist-inflected interest in working-class culture, this began to change. The study of popular forms is now an accepted, even dominant part of the humanities curriculum, though still occasionally tinged with apology.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47671757","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 : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000131
Naphtaly Shem-Tov
Shimella (‘stork’ in Amharic) is an Israeli community theatre of Ethiopian Jews residing in Netanya and directed by Chen Elia. Shimella was founded in 2010, and has produced four different performances focusing on the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Ethiopian Jews suffer from racism and discrimination in all areas of life, including housing, employment, education, and healthcare. These issues surfaced in Shimella’s performances, and the political aspect of Shimella’s performances therefore ranges from performing critical protest against the attitudes of the Israeli state and society toward Ethiopians, to a utopian performative moment, which emotionally and physically dramatizes the community’s desired future.
{"title":"Shimella Community Theatre of Israeli-Ethiopian Jews","authors":"Naphtaly Shem-Tov","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000131","url":null,"abstract":"Shimella (‘stork’ in Amharic) is an Israeli community theatre of Ethiopian Jews residing in Netanya and directed by Chen Elia. Shimella was founded in 2010, and has produced four different performances focusing on the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Ethiopian Jews suffer from racism and discrimination in all areas of life, including housing, employment, education, and healthcare. These issues surfaced in Shimella’s performances, and the political aspect of Shimella’s performances therefore ranges from performing critical protest against the attitudes of the Israeli state and society toward Ethiopians, to a utopian performative moment, which emotionally and physically dramatizes the community’s desired future.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43252349","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 : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X2300012X
Tomasz Kubikowski
Disabled for the last nine years of his life, Konstantin Stanislavsky struggled to verbalize his artistic experience and record it in writing. This experience mostly concerned acting, itself extremely hard to conceptualize and explain, and, to his mind, the core of human existence. Stanislavsky looked for the proper literary vehicle to contain this abundance. Initially, he hoped he had found adequate means in the form of the educational novel – the Bildungsroman. However, in the course of his writing, he gradually abandoned this form, as well as any literary aspirations he may have had. What we can find in An Actor’s Work are only remnants of the original concept. Nevertheless, they are still present. Looking closer at these ruins can bring interesting insights into the aura and mood of Stanislavsky’s theorizing about art.
{"title":"Stanislavsky’s Failed Bildungsroman","authors":"Tomasz Kubikowski","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X2300012X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X2300012X","url":null,"abstract":"Disabled for the last nine years of his life, Konstantin Stanislavsky struggled to verbalize his artistic experience and record it in writing. This experience mostly concerned acting, itself extremely hard to conceptualize and explain, and, to his mind, the core of human existence. Stanislavsky looked for the proper literary vehicle to contain this abundance. Initially, he hoped he had found adequate means in the form of the educational novel – the Bildungsroman. However, in the course of his writing, he gradually abandoned this form, as well as any literary aspirations he may have had. What we can find in An Actor’s Work are only remnants of the original concept. Nevertheless, they are still present. Looking closer at these ruins can bring interesting insights into the aura and mood of Stanislavsky’s theorizing about art.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49265329","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 : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000155
Sam Haddow
This article examines Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and through the Ancient Greek term stasis, which describes a civil war between domestic and public spaces. Once initiated, it was believed that this conflict would spread from household to household like a contagion; city states thus implemented draconian measures in the name of preventing stasis. Giorgio Agamben argues that such measures were embedded in subsequent theories of the state, fuelling ever more oppressive policies throughout history. Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ energizes a force comparable to this stasis, both in terms of its latency and its contagiousness, activating dormant conflicts in the individual that are expressed through networks of infection and create frontiers of shared resistance to institutional authority. ‘Theatre and the Plague’, read through the lens of stasis, can thus offer valuable contributions to current debates around biopolitics, particularly those seeking collective forms of agency during and beyond the current pandemic.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000180
Daniel Nield
Edward and Farrier’s second edited volume turns attentions to historical drag with a collection of examples ranging from nineteenth-century Japan via Barbados to the ‘FunPubs’ofNorthernEngland and panto in Belfast. Reflecting the first volume’s desire to investigate lesser-known drag practices, these fifteen chapters act to illuminate and preserve the historical and cultural multiplicity of drag. Despite the range of examples, overarching themes do emerge. Jacob Bloomfield’s investigation of ex-service men performing drag after the Second World War counterpoints Isabelle CoyDibley’s detailed examination of the Japanese allfemale Takarazuka Revue. While they stand at the opposing ends of queening and kinging practice (to say nothing of stylistic and cultural differences), both cases are set against heavily patriarchal societies but can promote themselves as ‘family fun’ due their heavily staged nature. This acceptability, though, only highlights the limitations of drag, as the Japanese women are encouraged to renounce their masculine roles to be dutiful wives and mothers once again. The importance of staging is foreshadowed in Penny Arcade’s foreword when she recalls the impact of Billy Hansen. Billy was a young man who won the tri-state drag competition in Hartford, Connecticut, by eschewing the fashionable impressions of Hollywood stars and embracing his ability to pass as a woman without makeup and go shopping, complete with lady wallet. Hansen’s victory indicated a shift in the dragworld from entertainment, as seen in Bloomfield andCoyDibley’s chapters, to also embrace a more selfaware and political drag. As with the first volume, this collection has sought to represent many facets of drag. Farrier’s own chapter on the importance of kinging is an important one that, along with Isabelle CoyDibley’s, points to the different challenges faced by kings when performing drag within a patriarchal system. While drag has developed a subgenre of lifelike imitation, in the art of kinging a difficult and politically charged tightrope is being walked where imitation often tellingly stops short of a lifelike imitation of the hegemonic male. Complicating drag further is Nando Messias’s powerful narrative, which explores the intersections of drag, race, and cultural variations of gender expression from a first-person perspective. Nick Ishmael-Perkins follows by peeling away the layers of Mother Sally, the ‘undersexed and hypersexual’ character of Barbadian carnival, revealing her to be a contested character that negotiates with the competing interests of folklore tradition, carnival, colonialism, Christianity, tourism, and shifting social attitudes to the LGBTQ movement. Meanwhile Simon Dodi’s chapter on camp as a culturally contested and evolving phenomenon that traces four approaches, from Sontag’s aesthetic reading to Meyer’s camp as strategic performance, is a particular highlight of the volume. This chapter is arguably a key by which to unlock the po
{"title":"Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier, eds. Drag Histories, Herstories, and Hairstories: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2 London: Methuen Drama, 2021. 215 p. £67.50. ISBN: 978-1-350-10436-5.","authors":"Daniel Nield","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000180","url":null,"abstract":"Edward and Farrier’s second edited volume turns attentions to historical drag with a collection of examples ranging from nineteenth-century Japan via Barbados to the ‘FunPubs’ofNorthernEngland and panto in Belfast. Reflecting the first volume’s desire to investigate lesser-known drag practices, these fifteen chapters act to illuminate and preserve the historical and cultural multiplicity of drag. Despite the range of examples, overarching themes do emerge. Jacob Bloomfield’s investigation of ex-service men performing drag after the Second World War counterpoints Isabelle CoyDibley’s detailed examination of the Japanese allfemale Takarazuka Revue. While they stand at the opposing ends of queening and kinging practice (to say nothing of stylistic and cultural differences), both cases are set against heavily patriarchal societies but can promote themselves as ‘family fun’ due their heavily staged nature. This acceptability, though, only highlights the limitations of drag, as the Japanese women are encouraged to renounce their masculine roles to be dutiful wives and mothers once again. The importance of staging is foreshadowed in Penny Arcade’s foreword when she recalls the impact of Billy Hansen. Billy was a young man who won the tri-state drag competition in Hartford, Connecticut, by eschewing the fashionable impressions of Hollywood stars and embracing his ability to pass as a woman without makeup and go shopping, complete with lady wallet. Hansen’s victory indicated a shift in the dragworld from entertainment, as seen in Bloomfield andCoyDibley’s chapters, to also embrace a more selfaware and political drag. As with the first volume, this collection has sought to represent many facets of drag. Farrier’s own chapter on the importance of kinging is an important one that, along with Isabelle CoyDibley’s, points to the different challenges faced by kings when performing drag within a patriarchal system. While drag has developed a subgenre of lifelike imitation, in the art of kinging a difficult and politically charged tightrope is being walked where imitation often tellingly stops short of a lifelike imitation of the hegemonic male. Complicating drag further is Nando Messias’s powerful narrative, which explores the intersections of drag, race, and cultural variations of gender expression from a first-person perspective. Nick Ishmael-Perkins follows by peeling away the layers of Mother Sally, the ‘undersexed and hypersexual’ character of Barbadian carnival, revealing her to be a contested character that negotiates with the competing interests of folklore tradition, carnival, colonialism, Christianity, tourism, and shifting social attitudes to the LGBTQ movement. Meanwhile Simon Dodi’s chapter on camp as a culturally contested and evolving phenomenon that traces four approaches, from Sontag’s aesthetic reading to Meyer’s camp as strategic performance, is a particular highlight of the volume. This chapter is arguably a key by which to unlock the po","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46922868","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/S0266464X23000064
M. Nicholls
This article focuses on the last moments of Le Sacre du printemps, which opened in Paris on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Concentrating on the discourse of the creative practice that brought these moments into being, it seeks to add to our understanding of Le Sacre from the evidence of those most intimately involved with this first production. Analysis of Le Sacre demonstrates the equal viability of a great variety of readings of the work. Such readings are enabled by analysis, which regards any aspect of a creative work and its best interpretation as happily unfixed and unstable. It has sometimes been accepted that the job of critics and theorists is to fix interpretations of creative works and to demonstrate conveniently closed theses about them. Creative artists are not always willing to join their critical colleagues. This was certainly the case with Le Sacre. By reading the final seven seconds of its Danse sacrale through the accounts of the work’s primary creators – composer Igor Stravinsky, designer Nicholas Roerich, and their creative intimates – this article highlights an engrossing instability of intention and interpretation. It questions the idea that Le Sacre is a sacrificial ritual in the light of how Stravinsky himself considered his work in terms of coronation and consecration.
这篇文章的重点是Le Sacre du printemps的最后时刻,它于1913年5月29日在巴黎的th tre des Champs-Élysées开业。它专注于创作实践的话语,这些话语使这些时刻成为现实,它试图从那些与这第一次生产最密切相关的证据中增加我们对Le Sacre的理解。对Le Sacre的分析表明,对该作品的各种阅读都具有同样的可行性。这种解读是通过分析来实现的,这种分析认为,创造性作品的任何方面及其最佳诠释都是不固定和不稳定的。人们有时认为,批评家和理论家的工作是固定对创造性作品的解释,并证明关于它们的方便的封闭论点。有创造力的艺术家并不总是愿意加入他们挑剔的同事。这当然是勒萨克雷的情况。通过对这部作品的主要创作者——作曲家伊戈尔·斯特拉文斯基、设计师尼古拉斯·罗伊里奇和他们的创作密友——的叙述,阅读《神圣之舞》的最后七秒,本文强调了意图和诠释的引人入胜的不稳定性。根据斯特拉文斯基自己如何从加冕和奉献的角度看待他的作品,它质疑了《圣歌》是一种祭祀仪式的观点。
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