Eighteenth‐century theater history and performance studies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Wessel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Theater History ◽  
And Performance

The Overexpressive Celebrity and the Deformed King: Recasting the Spectacle as Subject in Colley Cibber's Richard III

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 950-965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia H. Fawcett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Theater History ◽  
Richard Iii

In this essay, I examine Colley Cibber's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III (1699) to explore the intersections between celebrity and surveillance in eighteenth-century England. Drawing on vocabularies from performance studies, disability studies, theater history, and literary studies, I theorize a strategy of self-representation that England's first modern celebrities developed to maintain their fame while protecting their privacy from the spectators' anatomizing gaze. Cibber used his performance of Richard's disabled body to disrupt his spectators' attempts to characterize or categorize his identity. By displaying a body that demanded attention at the same time that it defied Enlightenment grammars of behavior—and by publishing literary self-representations littered with misspelled words and blotted pages—Cibber became an early practitioner of “overexpression,” a strategy that allowed him to make himself visible without becoming vulnerable to his public's attempts to interpret, dissect, and disseminate the secrets of his private life.

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Eric Hernandez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Common People ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Emotional Processes ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Conversation

This book assembles a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, arguing that these works negotiated tragedy’s vexed relationship to ordinary life. This “bourgeois and domestic tragedy” imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an “ordinary suffering” divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, bourgeois tragedy treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, realistic, and entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this book tracks instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. Describing this shift as an episode in the histories of both tragedy and emotion, it revises the standard critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy and reads the genre’s emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation over whose life—and whose way of life—is grievable, as well as how that mourning might be performed.

Cultural Labour

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brahma Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Folk Performance ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

scholarly journals A systematic review of definitions of motor vehicle headways in driver behaviour and performance studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Raaj Kishore Biswas ◽  
Rena Friswell ◽  
Jake Olivier ◽  
Ann Williamson ◽  
Teresa Senserrick
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Driver Behaviour ◽  
And Performance

The Fiery Pacific: Volcanic Eruptions and Settler-State Theatricality in Oceania, 1780–1900

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-392
Author(s):  
Diana Looser
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Volcanic Eruptions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Red Color ◽  
Form Part ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
The City

In the closing scene of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's melodramaLa Tête de mort; ou, Les Ruines de Pompeïa(1827), audiences at Paris's Théâtre de la Gaîté were presented with the spectacular cataclysm of an erupting Mount Vesuvius that invaded the city and engulfed the hapless characters in its fiery embrace. “The theatre,” Pixérécourt writes, “is completely inundated by this sea of bitumen and lava. A shower of blazing and transparent stones and red ash falls on all sides…. The red color with which everything is struck, the terrible noise of the volcano, the screaming, the agitation and despair of the characters … all combine to form this terrible convulsion of nature, a horrible picture, and altogether worthy of being compared to Hell.” A few years later, in 1830, Daniel Auber's grand operaLa Muette de Portici(1828), which yoked a seventeenth-century eruption of Vesuvius with a popular revolt against Spanish rule in Naples, opened at the Théâtre de Monnaie in Brussels. The Belgian spectators, inspired by the opera's revolutionary sentiments, poured out into the streets and seized their country's independence from the Dutch. These two famous examples, which form part of a long genealogy of representing volcanic eruptions through various artistic means, highlight not only the compelling, immersive spectacle of nature in extremis but also the ability of stage scenery to intervene materially in the narrative action and assimilate affective and political meanings. As these two examples also indicate, however, the body of scholarship in literary studies, art history, and theatre and performance studies that attends to the mechanical strategies and symbolic purchase of volcanic representations has tended to focus mainly on Europe; more research remains to be undertaken into how volcanic spectacles have engaged with non-European topographies and sociopolitical dynamics and how this wider view might illuminate our understanding of theatre's social roles.

Antropologia teatrale e performance studies. Assonanze e tracce della ri(n)voluzione performativa postmoderna.

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mabel Giraldo
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Artistic Work ◽  
And Performance

Starting from the finding of the performative drift that marked the theatrical research through the Seventies and Eighties, this essay aims to show how two of the main protagonists of the period – Theatre Anthropology and Performance Studies – have contributed in their affinities and specificities to marginalizing of the theatre as a cultural phenomenon and devaluating of the artistic work, inaugurated (and not yet rectified) by Postmodernity.

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