Jo Robinson

Mapping the Field: Moving through landscape

For the last three years, together with Dr Gary Priestnall in the School of Geography at Nottingham, I have been leading the ‘Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham, 1857–67’ project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between performance history and geography.1 This project – supported by AHRC funding – has created a Web-based, interactive map of the midnineteenth-century town, enabling users to explore the environment of Nottingham and see spatial and temporal connections between key sites of performance, both theatrical and civic (www.nottingham.ac.uk/mapmoment). The map locates competing performances on the same day, or over the period of a week or month, shows the location of different venues within the town and the patterns of development over the period, sketches the routes of performance parades and processions through Nottingham and enables the user to drill down to read details of performances Mapping the Field Moving through landscape

Becoming More Provincial? The Global and the Local in Theatre History

The issue of globalization has recently been exercising many minds in the field of theatre studies as elsewhere, resulting in various calls for approaches to theatre history that are less nationalistic or eurocentric. Yet of all art forms theatre appears to be, by its nature, the most parochial, tied to the needs of distinct social, ethnic, or other interests within constituencies limited by the economics of touring. Here Jo Robinson places arguments about globalization and theatre in a broader context of the current debate within the social sciences, and argues that exploring the ways in which performing cultures are truly interconnected may best be achieved by an exploration of neglected local histories. The author is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Nottingham, and is currently leading the AHRC-funded three-year project, ‘Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857–67’, which is exploring the use of maps and mapping to recuperate performance history within the area. She is also Co-convenor of TaPRAs Theatre History and Historiography Working Group.

Mapping the Moment: a spatio-temporal interface for studying performance culture, Nottingham, 1857–1867

The Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham, 1857–67 project (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mapmoment) is an interdisciplinary collaboration between performance history and geography, which has as its aim the investigation of the complex connections between the different kinds and sites of entertainment, and between the people and communities involved in making and watching performance, in what was then the rapidly developing East Midlands town of mid-Victorian Nottingham. As questions of space, proximity and temporal relationships are central to the choice-making processes of both venue managers and potential spectators, so we sought to create a resource, based on a map of nineteenth-century Nottingham, that organised information about the town and its performance culture in ways that highlighted such connections and allowed us to explore the relationships between place, performance and audience within the town. Here we describe the creation of the resource and reflect on the development of o...

Theatre History and Historiography

This collection of essays is the first time a group of theatre historians have come together to consider the challenge of applying ethical thinking to attempts to truthfully represent the past. Topics include the life of the celebrated Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, the little-known records of hitherto forgotten women involved in Victorian theatre, amateur theatricals enjoyed by the British army in colonial India, the loss of a pioneering arts centre for African and Caribbean culture, performance art in Wales and present-day community arts in Northern Ireland. While confronting such difficult issues as the instability of evidence and the unreliability of memory, the contributors offer fresh perspectives and innovative strategies for fulfilling their ethical responsibility to the lived experience of the past.Until comparatively recently there has been little systematic effort to record the contribution to British theatre history of the diversity represented by Black British and British South and East Asian theatre makers. That failure to ‘see’ and acknowledge this lacuna within the academy reflected what in 2001 was condemned as widespread institutional racism within the theatre industry itself. The other ‘faces’ had been rendered effectively invisible. This chapter considers the ethical and evidential challenges associated with the task of recovering the history of a project created to enhance an important concept of cultural identity: the little-documented failure in the 1990s of the Nia Centre, the UK’s first black arts centre which opened in Hulme, Manchester in 1991. My exploration raises a number of key ethical challenges: How in the aftermath of the Nia’s collapse and in the almost complete absence of archival records, is the historian to mediate what inevitably are multiple truths coming from different perspectives? Whose, and what values were, and remain, at stake both at the time of the project itself, and in the telling of the history? How does the historian deal with failure especially if the circumstances were obscure and little regarded? The dream of the Nia died more than a decade ago, but the participants in that history are very much alive and their sensitivities have to be respected as part of the ethical challenge.

Introduction to Theatre History and Historiography Ethics, Evidence and Truth

This collection of essays is the first time a group of theatre historians have come together to consider the challenge of applying ethical thinking to attempts to truthfully represent the past. Topics include the life of the celebrated Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, the little-known records of hitherto forgotten women involved in Victorian theatre, amateur theatricals enjoyed by the British army in colonial India, the loss of a pioneering arts centre for African and Caribbean culture, performance art in Wales and present-day community arts in Northern Ireland. While confronting such difficult issues as the instability of evidence and the unreliability of memory, the contributors offer fresh perspectives and innovative strategies for fulfilling their ethical responsibility to the lived experience of the past.Until comparatively recently there has been little systematic effort to record the contribution to British theatre history of the diversity represented by Black British and British South and East Asian theatre makers. That failure to ‘see’ and acknowledge this lacuna within the academy reflected what in 2001 was condemned as widespread institutional racism within the theatre industry itself. The other ‘faces’ had been rendered effectively invisible. This chapter considers the ethical and evidential challenges associated with the task of recovering the history of a project created to enhance an important concept of cultural identity: the little-documented failure in the 1990s of the Nia Centre, the UK’s first black arts centre which opened in Hulme, Manchester in 1991. My exploration raises a number of key ethical challenges: How in the aftermath of the Nia’s collapse and in the almost complete absence of archival records, is the historian to mediate what inevitably are multiple truths coming from different perspectives? Whose, and what values were, and remain, at stake both at the time of the project itself, and in the telling of the history? How does the historian deal with failure especially if the circumstances were obscure and little regarded? The dream of the Nia died more than a decade ago, but the participants in that history are very much alive and their sensitivities have to be respected as part of the ethical challenge.

Congregations, Audiences, Actors: Religious Performance and the Individual in Mid-Nineteenth-century Nottingham

On 30 November 1860, the Nottingham Journal reported to its readers that the ‘anomalous practice of conducting public worship in a theatre, commenced in London last winter, has extended to Nottingham’: On Saturday night placards were posted on the walls in the poor, thickly populated areas of the town, announcing that a religious service would be held in the Theatre, St. Mary’s Gate, and inviting the attendance of persons who were not in the habit of going to places of worship.1

Mapping the Place of Pantomime in a Victorian Town

On Boxing Night 1865, Nottingham’s New Theatre Royal — which had opened in September that same year — staged its first pantomime, The House that Jack Built. ‘The house was filled in all parts to overflowing, more than 2000 being present’ according to the report in the next day’s Nottingham Journal.1 And what greeted those spectators, as the preview to the pantomime in the Journal made very clear, was a production that was very precisely located in Nottingham itself: ‘the librettist has interwoven with it [the well-known and popular nursery story] certain references and remarks which give a local habitation and a name’.2