Tracy C. Davis

Between History and Event: Rehearsing Nuclear War Survival

Performance historian Davis opens a window onto the civil defense movement that was a mainstay of Western governments from 1949 until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc from 1989 to 1991. Civil defense activities included playing out many as if scenarios wherein a time out of time reality was created, something that NATO members referred to as the scope of play (porte du jeu) and the play of decisions (jou des dcisions). These activities, Davis argues, are inherently performative. But are they history?

Live and technologically mediated performance

“Theatre is different from all other forms of theatrical presentation because it is live. . . . “At the heart of the theater experience, then, is the performer-audience relationship: the immediate, personal exchange; the chemistry and magic which gives theater its special quality.”” / I use this quotation, from an introductory course document prepared by Professor Kaoime Malloy, to stand for what I shall call the traditional view of live theatrical performance. The key word is immediate , which suggests that the traditional definition of live performance is founded on an opposition between the immediate and the mediated. From this perspective, the performer/audience relationship in film, for instance, is thought to be mediated by the camera and the rest of the filmic apparatus; in the theatre, by contrast, this relationship is seen as direct and unmediated. Such distinctions are largely commonsensical. Whereas stage actors can appropriately be considered the “authors” of their performances, film actors cannot. As the actor Willem Dafoe emphasized when I interviewed him, film actors basically provide raw material that is shaped into performances by directors and editors and therefore need not be as concerned about the through-lines of their performances as stage actors. Audiences witness theatre actors in the moment of performance but see performances by film actors only long after the actors have done their work. Stage acting is therefore temporally immediate to its audience in a way that film acting is not. Perhaps because of its disciplinary genealogy, performance studies often exhibits a bias toward live events and a resistance to including technologically mediated ones among its objects of inquiry. Performance studies is rooted in the fields of theatre studies, anthropology, sociology, folklore, speech, and oral interpretation, all of which take live events as their major points of reference, whether those events be aesthetic performances, cultural performances, rituals, or everyday behavior and conversations.

Do You Believe in Fairies?: The Hiss of Dramatic License

When Peter Pan asks audiences to affirm their belief in fairies in order to revive Tinker Bell, this can be interpreted as an affirmation of the willing suspension of disbelief thought to be an essential condition of theatrical spectating. However, closer analysis of the original 1904 production of Peter Pan, including its variation from conventional pantomime, reveals the intertext of two contemporaneous debates in ethnology: the idea that the last of the fairy folk were departing from Britain, and the more empirical observation that gypsy-tinkers were losing their rural way of life. This reveals Peter Pans query as a reflection about the status of oppressed groups, and thus less an affirmation of innocence than a referendum on the desirability of modernity. This case study is postulated as an example of dramatic license—a previously under-theorized concept—proposing this as a term with specific referentiality to the theatrical medium, in which a mimetic, intellectual, and ideological problem is explicitly placed before an audience in order to elicit a response.

The People of the “People's Theatre”: The Social Demography of the Britannia Theatre (Hoxton)

In 1882, Walter Besant declared that the hinterland beyond Aldgate had two million people yet “no institutions of their own to speak of, no public buildings of any importance, no municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no soldiers, no picture-galleries, no theatres, no opera—they have nothing.” The fact that Whitechapel first appeared in the theatrical annals in 1557, Stepney contained several of the largest engineering projects in Regency London, and Shoreditchs Britannia was one of the most successful theatres in Victorian Britain belies the prejudice in Besants statement. Cultural historians of all types need to resist such propaganda and have good cause to suspect the entire record of life, leisure, and entertainment in the industrialized inner suburbs. The history of nineteenth-century English theatre has—with very few exceptions—focussed on London, yet apart from essays by Michael Booth and Clive Barker little serious attention has been paid to theatre in the East End. Booth points out the limitations arising from scholarship that ignores the area where half of the metropolitan theatre seats were located, while Barker shows the methodological difficulties that arise once a redressive investigation into the audience is undertaken. The omissions from the historical record are compounded by narrow selectivity of enquiries: leading performers receive scholarly attention while supernumeraries (supers), ballet dancers, front of house staff, property makers, and the many functionaries who made up the whole community responsible for running a theatre are consistently neglected. These characteristics are somehow more evident in scholarship on the East End, where no matter how sociogeographically biased the enquirers may be the working class and its conditions are central themes, and the repertoire has always been allowed (perhaps stereotyped) as sensational.

The Context Problem

In the minute investigation of old oil canvases, modern art restorers use a technique called rigatino to fill in where flecks of paint are damaged or missing. These fine hatch marks, made with thin paint, signal to later scholars and restorers what constitutes the restorers work while fully maintaining the distinctiveness and integrity of the original artists brush strokes. In other words, restorers have devised a straightforward method to indicate the exact positions of evidentiary lacunae and to mark the impositions of their own hand amidst the work of old masters. Unlike the superscripts of footnotes amidst a printed text, rigatino blends with the original picture, though upon close investigation it is always distinct.

Private Women and the Public Realm

Following the translation of Jurgen Habermass The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989, we have come to see “the public” and “the private” as historically contingent categories bearing upon nests of social practices. The public and private are not just distinctions of geography—so that beyond our front doors we are necessarily and unavoidably in the public—for they bear on authority, authorized voice, citizenship, and credibility in democratic societies. Whereas the Hellenic Greek social order recognized freedom only in the public realm, and only embodied by household masters, the nineteenth-century model of separate spheres cast the public realm as the place where individuals defended the family (equated to the private) from state domination while debating the proper roles for the sexes. Unacknowledged in both models is that agents of the state and the private individuals who have access to the public realm are normalized as exclusively male and of the hegemonic class. The Greek and Victorian models—explicitly relegating women to the home (private) and men to the marketplace (public)—are equally open to critique for being as class-blind as they are hyperbolically universalizing of all cultures and sub-cultures, as if they obeyed a natural law instead of ideological preferences. If we write theatre history with either model in mind and assume that “the public” does not carry with it connotations of power, then we are distorting the evidence and misfiring on our interpretations.

Introduction: the Performing Society

The taxonomies of writing about theatre morph with time. What originated as memory was committed to the page in reviews, diaries or letters; anecdotes were codified in memoirs;1 the theatre was increasingly remembered through biographies of its stars and histories of its buildings; and only later did the recording of performance become a scholarly activity of theatre history. Recounting that history — the history of theatre history itself — thus inherently poses a problem of methodology as well as creating a falsely precise stratification of generations of scholarship and criticism the history produces.

What are Fairies For

In recent research, attention has been paid to the prominence of fairies in nineteenth-century folklore, literature and fine arts. Two other areas of fairies’ proliferation have been neglected: ethnography and the theatre. Variously regarded as the products of invention or documentation, fairies figured consistently in the nineteenth-century imaginary as well as the more empirical realms of scholarship and stage embodiment, suggesting that they may have served more, or deeper, purposes than mere lighthearted distraction and aestheticized diversion. In particular, examination of a relationship between ethnography and theatre challenges the historiography on fairies and suggests this chapter’s abiding question: ‘what are fairies for?’1

The Show Business Economy, and its Discontents

Economists, like all historians, make assumptions. One of their favorite assumptions concerns a hypothetical but ubiquitous entity called homo economicus (“economic man”), who makes rational choices to maximize his or her own profit within the organized chaos that is called a marketplace, buyers seeking to pay low prices and sellers trying to get high prices. When homo economicus is present, the degree of maneuverability on prices is determined by the scarcity of what is being sold. While this may be too reductive to encompass the entire range of human choices, economists nevertheless recommend that historians test the concept against the evidence. Historians often balk at the abstraction of homo economicus motivated exclusively by material advantage. After all, we do not live by bread alone. True enough. But admit that most people devote a considerable proportion of their energies to seeking material gain, especially in the realm of activity that deals with producing, earning, buying, and selling, and you open the intellectual door to homo economicus . Let’s temporarily ignore non-pecuniary motivations, construct a model featuring economic man, take it for a ride, and see whether the results (in terms of predictive power) justify such an extreme assumption. Furthermore, don’t forget that economics makes no predictions about the uses to which homo economicus puts his wealth; grasping merchants may use their profits to support the church, to build monuments to themselves, or to endow homes for stray cats – the economist pays no heed.

Uncle Tom's Cabins: The Transnational History of America's Most Mutable Book

As Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin traveled around the world, it was molded by the imaginations and needs of international audiences. For over 150 years it has been coopted for a dazzling array of causes far from what its author envisioned. This book tells thirteen variants of Uncle Tom’s journey, explicating the novel’s significance for Canadian abolitionists and the Liberian political elite that constituted the runaway characters’ landing points; nineteenth-century French theatergoers; liberal Cuban, Romanian, and Spanish intellectuals and social reformers; Dutch colonizers and Filipino nationalists in Southeast Asia; Eastern European Cold War communists; Muslim readers and spectators in the Middle East; Brazilian television audiences; and twentieth-century German holidaymakers.