The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography 9781350034297, 9781350034327, 9781350034310

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
How to Use This Book
Chapter 1: Introduction
Notes
Chapter 2: Research Methods and Methodologies
Thinking About Method, Thinking About Thinking
Discourse and discipline
Erasure and recovery
The means of engagement
Reading materials
Reading lives, writing lives
Ways of looking
Entities and analysis
Audiences as entities
Bodies as evidence
Thinking about thinking again
Chapter 3: Current Research: Case Studies from the Field
CHAPTER 3.1: Seeing Differently through Time and Space: Introduction
CHAPTER 3.1.1: A-foot in Time: Temporality in the Space of a Moment in Theatre History
Notes
CHAPTER 3.1.2: Nuwhju and the Archive: Recuperating the History of Aboriginal Australian Performance Practice
Framing and erasing the performances
Reframing Aboriginal performance
Cross-cultural context
Conclusion
Note
CHAPTER 3.2: Challenging Dominant Histories: Introduction
CHAPTER 3.2.1: Theatre History versus Theatre Canon: The Chilean Case
Teatro Dramático Nacional (National Dramatic Theatre, 1912) and Antología Bicentenario (Bicentennial Anthology, 2010)
Anthology, canon and historiography
A historiographic corpus analysis
Notes
CHAPTER 3.2.2: When Napoleon Went to the Theatre: A Closer Examination of Stories and the History of the Milanese Patriotic Scene
Notes
CHAPTER 3.3: Politics, Precursors and Erasure: Introduction
CHAPTER 3.3.1: How to Make Political Theatre? Polish Socialist Realism as a Historiographical Problem
The archive
Forensics
The factory
Political theatre
Notes
CHAPTER 3.3.2: ‘The First Actress Party’: Adunni Oluwole and the First Guerrilla Theatre in Nigeria
Adunni Oluwole (1905–57)
The First Actress Party
A forgotten pioneer
The street performances
‘The First Actress Party’ as Guerrilla theatre
Guerrilla theatre in Nigeria
Conclusion
Notes
CHAPTER 3.4: Mapping Landscapes of Theatre: Introduction
CHAPTER 3.4.1: Mapping London’s Amateur Theatre Histories
Introduction
Amateur theatre: A hidden history
Amateur theatre in and around the West End
Amateur theatre in the regions of London
Conclusion: Deep mapping
Notes
CHAPTER 3.4.2: Between Back Province and Metropolis: Actor Autobiographies as Sources to Trace Cultural Mobility
Provincial theatre life
Narrating mobility
The ‘mental map’ of German-speaking theatre
Conclusion
Note
CHAPTER 3.5: Place and the Performance Event: Introduction
CHAPTER 3.5.1: History versus Historiography: A Renaissance Case Study Revisited
A drunk sponge in wonderland
The onlookers’ embodied response to environment
Changing our environment, we also change our brain
Notes
CHAPTER 3.5.2: Of Shrine and Stage: A Study of Huizhou Temple Theatre in Late Imperial China
Temple theatre and the development of theatre in China
Huizhou’s ancestral shrines
Ancestral shrines as temple theatres
Yuqing Tang
Conclusion from archaeological and architectural evidence
Notes
CHAPTER 3.6: Material Evidence and the Archive: Introduction
CHAPTER 3.6.1: Historiography of Yellowface: Stage Make-up, Materiality and Technology
The hue and surface of yellowface
Towards a history of yellowface
CHAPTER 3.6.2: Archived Voices: Attempting to Listen to the Theatrical Past
Yaakov and Rachel
Sounding source
Enacting sources of the Hebrew language
The 1952 broadcast
Notes
CHAPTER 3.7: The Imperatives of Local Difference: Introduction
CHAPTER 3.7.1: What’s In a Name? The Performance of Language in the Invention of Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Theatre History
The Devil in the Detail
Parsi Gujarati
Sanskritization
Anti-Parsee attitude and the Indian National Congress
Srikruhna Vijay
History writing
Notes
CHAPTER 3.7.2: Korean Masked Dance Drama and a Historiography of Emotions
Theoretical background
The performance context
Yangiu Byeolsandaenori
Heung, han and musim: Emotions of Yangju Byeolsandaenori
Understanding affect in Korean masked dance drama
Affect and cultural difference
Notes
CHAPTER 3.8: Rhizomes and Palimpsests: Theatre Histories across Cultures: Introduction
CHAPTER 3.8.1: Erased Trails: Investigating Icelandic-Canadian Theatre History
From Iceland to Canada
The place of theatre within research on Icelandic-Canadian culture
But is it Canadian?
Approaching immigrant amateur community theatre
Notes
CHAPTER 3.8.2: Decolonizing Theatre History in the Arab World
Contextualizing the debate
Islam and theatre
The postcolonial turn and double resistance
Notes
Chapter 4: Changing Perspectives and Current Challenges: Introduction
CHAPTER 4.1: A Manifesto for Performance Research
Theatrical Performance and Academic Research
Early English theatre and performance research
What performance research cannot do
What performance research can do
Case study
Conclusion
Notes
CHAPTER 4.2: Digital Histories, Digital Landscapes: New Possibilities of Arranging the Record
Digital landscapes of performance: Mapping the Moment
Possibility space and digital performance place
Democratizing the digital: Crowdsourcing and citizen scholarship
Nottingham Theatre: A Warning!
Notes
CHAPTER 4.3: Historians in Dialogue: A Roundtable Discussion
Works Cited
A Note on References
Annotated Bibliography
Theatre Historiography
General IInternational Histories
Moroccan and Wider Arabic Theatre
Asian American Theatre and Performance
Theatre in Chile and wider Latin America
Chinese Theatre
Theatre of the German-speaking world
Icelandic Theatre History
Indian Theatre
Israeli Theatre history
Italian theatre history
Korean theatre history
Theatre in Nigeria and Wider Africa
Polish Theatre
Amateur Theatre
Digital resources
Selected Resources
Index

Citation preview

THE METHUEN DRAMA HANDBOOK OF THEATRE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

The Methuen Drama Handbooks and The Bloomsbury Handbooks series is a major series of single-volume handbooks to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each handbook offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the series is that each handbook provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources. Published The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies Edited by Sherril Dodds ISBN 978-1-3500-2446-5 The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory Edited by Robin Truth Goodman ISBN 978-1-3500-3238-5 The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art Edited by Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic ISBN 978-1-350-05757-9 The Methuen Drama Handbook of Performance and Interculturalism Edited by Daphne Lei and Charlotte McIvor ISBN 978-1-350-04047-2 Forthcoming The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre Edited by Sean Metzger and Roberta Mock ISBN 978-1-3501-2317-5

THE METHUEN DRAMA HANDBOOK OF THEATRE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

Edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in hardback in Great Britain 2021 This paperback edition published 2023 Copyright © Claire Cochrane, Jo Robinson and contributors, 2021, 2023 Claire Cochrane, Jo Robinson and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Posters from the Theatre Royal Nottingham archive © Ian Webster All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-350-03429-7 PB: 978-1-350-33621-6 ePDF: 978-1-350-03431-0 eBook: 978-1-350-03430-3 Series: Methuen Drama Handbooks Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To our families, with gratitude for love and support.

vi

CONTENTS

List of Figures x List of Contributors xii Acknowledgements xix How to use this book xx 1 Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson

1

2 Research Methods and Methodologies Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson

21

3 Current Research: Case Studies from the Field

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3.1 Seeing Differently through Time and Space: Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson

54



3.1.1 A-foot in Time: Temporality in the Space of a Moment in Theatre History Rosemarie K. Bank 3.1.2 Nuwhju and the Archive: Recuperating the History of Aboriginal Australian Performance Practice Maryrose Casey 3.2 Challenging Dominant Histories: Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson









3.2.1 Theatre History versus Theatre Canon: The Chilean Case Milena Grass Kleiner, Mariana Hausdorf Andrade and Nancy Nicholls 3.2.2 When Napoleon Went to the Theatre: A Closer Examination of Stories and the History of the Milanese Patriotic Scene Laura Peja 3.3 Politics, Precursors and Erasure: Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson 3.3.1 How to Make Political Theatre? Polish Socialist Realism as a Historiographical Problem Dorota Sosnowska

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67 77 79

90 99

101

viiiCONTENTS













3.3.2 ‘The First Actress Party’: Adunni Oluwole and the First Guerrilla Theatre in Nigeria Ngozi Udengwu 3.4 Mapping Landscapes of Theatre: Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson 3.4.1 Mapping London’s Amateur Theatre Histories David Coates 3.4.2 Between Back Province and Metropolis: Actor Autobiographies as Sources to Trace Cultural Mobility Katharina Wessely 3.5 Place and the Performance Event: Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson

112 124 126

139 149

3.5.1 History versus Historiography: A Renaissance Case Study Revisited 151 Clelia Falletti 3.5.2 Of Shrine and Stage: A Study of Huizhou Temple Theatre in Late Imperial China 161 Xiaohuan Zhao 3.6 Material Evidence and the Archive: Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson 3.6.1 Historiography of Yellowface: Stage Make-up, Materiality and Technology Esther Kim Lee 3.6.2 Archived Voices: Attempting to Listen to the Theatrical Past Ruthie Abeliovich

173

175 185



3.7 The Imperatives of Local Difference: Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson



3.7.1 What’s In a Name? The Performance of Language in the Invention of Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Theatre History 199 Rashna Darius Nicholson 3.7.2 Korean Masked Dance Drama and a Historiography of Emotions 210 Hyunshik Ju 3.8 Rhizomes and Palimpsests: Theatre Histories across Cultures: Introduction 222 Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson





197

3.8.1 Erased Trails: Investigating Icelandic-Canadian Theatre History 224 Magnus Thor Thorbergsson

CONTENTS



3.8.2 Decolonizing Theatre History in the Arab World (The Case of the Maghreb) Khalid Amine

ix

236

4 Changing Perspectives and Current Challenges: Introduction Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson

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249





4.1 A Manifesto for Performance Research Elisabeth Dutton 4.2 Digital Histories, Digital Landscapes: New Possibilities of Arranging the Record Jo Robinson 4.3 Historians in Dialogue: A Roundtable Discussion

261 274

Works Cited 287 Annotated Bibliography 322 Selected Resources 338 Index 350

FIGURES

2.1

Ontology, epistemology and methodology: a directional dependence 22

3.2.1.1

Teatro dramático nacional: tomo 1 / precedido de un prólogo de Nicolás Peña M. Santiago de Chile: Impr. Barcelona, 1912

3.3.2.1

82

An artist’s impression of Adunni Oluwole taken from an obituary image, with additional features described by eyewitness reports (impression by Miracle Eze)

119

Map showing the approximate location of each of London’s private theatres between 1780 and 1851

132

3.4.1.2

Map showing the approximate location of each of Thomas Francis Dillon Croker’s amateur theatrical performances between 1858 and 1870

135

3.5.1.1

Reconstruction of the throne hall of the Duke’s Palace in Urbino, set up for the 1513 festa 156

3.5.2.1

A memorial archway (paifang) erected in 1578 in front of an ancestral shrine of the Hu clan at the entrance to Xidi Village, Yixian County, Huizhou, 27 January 2015

164

‘Punishment-opera stele’ (faxi bei) mounted on the eastern wall of Jufu Tang (Hall for Gathering Blessings) – an ancestral shrine built during the Tongzhi era (1862–74), Yeyuan Village, Xin’an of Qimen, 25 January 2015

166

3.5.2.3

Yuqing Tang stage viewed from the left-sided opera-watching tower, 29 January 2015

169

3.6.1.1

James T. Powers (1862–1943) in San Toy at Daly’s Theatre in New York City, 1900

181

3.4.1.1

3.5.2.2

3.6.2.1

The stage in the Ohel’s 1928 performance Yaakov and Rachel 188

3.7.2.1

Yangju Byeolsandaenori’s masks, 2015

214

3.7.2.2

Chwibari, his baby and the audience members, Society for Preservation of Yangju Byeolsandaenori, 2009

216

3.8.1.1

Map showing the distribution of Icelandic-speaking theatre in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota according to the information in Árni Sigurðsson’s article

233

FIGURES

4.1.1

xi

Rehearsal photo of William Gager’s 1583 play Dido, dir. Elisabeth Dutton (2013)

257

Still from the documentary film Performing Dido, dir. Maria Sachiko Cecire, about the EDOX production of William Gager’s Dido in the dining hall of Christ Church, Oxford, dir. Elisabeth Dutton (2013)

258

4.2.1

Database schema for Mapping the Moment

264

4.2.2

Screenshot: Mapping the Moment interface

265

4.2.3

Screenshot: Archives page, ourtheatreroyal.org 272

4.1.2

CONTRIBUTORS

Ruthie Abeliovich works as a lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research focuses on audiovisual aesthetics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre and performance art. Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Theatre Research International, TDR, Performance Research and Theatre Journal. Immersed in the Hebrew language on a daily basis, its aural properties and various theatrical and ideological manifestations have been the focus of her most recent studies. She is the author of Possessed Voices: Aural Remains from Modernist Hebrew Theatre (2019) and the co-editor (with Edwin Seroussi) of Borderlines: Essays on Mapping and the Logic of Place (2019). Khalid Amine is Senior Professor of Performance Studies, Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tétouan, Morocco. Previously Research Fellow at the International Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ at Freie Universität Berlin, he is now a member of the advisory board. He is the winner of the 2007 Helsinki Prize of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and was Friedrich Hölderlin Guest Professor at GoetheUniversity, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2017–18). Since 2007, he has been founding president of the International Centre for Performance Studies (ICPS) in Tangier and convener of its annual international conferences. He was member of IFTR Ex-Com (2011–18) and head of jury at the Arab Theatre Festival (6th Edition, Sharjah 2014). Among his published books are Beyond Brecht (1996), Moroccan Theatre between East and West (2000), Fields of Silence in Moroccan Theatre (2004), Dramatic Art and the Myth of Origins (2007) and Dancing on the Hyphen: Studies in Arab Theatre (2019). Amine is co-author with Marvin Carlson of The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the Maghreb (2012); he is the co-editor of Performing Transformations (2012), The Art of Dialogue: EastWest (2014), Intermediality, Performance and the Public Sphere (2014), Memory and Theatre (2015) and also editor of the Arab Journal of Performance Studies (AJPS). Rosemarie K. Bank is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and is Professor of Theatre at Kent State University in the United States. Her articles have appeared in journals including Theatre Journal, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Theatre History Studies, Essays in Theatre, Modern Drama and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and in the anthologies The American Stage, Critical Theory and Performance, Performing America, Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance, Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory, To Have and Have Not: Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist Theatre, Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor and others. She is the

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author of Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (1997) and co-editor (with Michal Kobialka) of Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (2015). She is currently working on a book-length manuscript concerning performances of and by American Indians, of which her essay in this volume forms a part. Maryrose Casey is Associate Professor in the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University, Australia. She has published widely on Indigenous Australian theatre and performance. Her major publications include the multi-award-winning books Creating Frames; Contemporary Indigenous Theatre (2004) and Telling Stories Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Performance (2012). Originally a theatre practitioner with extensive experience as an actor, writer and director, her research focuses primarily on racialized performances as a site of cross-cultural communication and negotiation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Within this focus, her interest is in the initiation and presentation of public performances framed as cultural representations and the ways in which those representations are read and understood and translated into the historical record and social memory through narratives of culture and race. Her current research projects focus on the colonial encounter in the nineteenth century. David Coates is a teaching fellow in the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies and early career fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. In 2017, he completed his PhD at Warwick, investigating The Development of Amateur Theatre in Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1914, which he is currently reworking as a monograph. Since completing his doctoral studies, David has developed a number of new research interests including queer theatre histories, the Victorian theatrical trades and grave-hunting as part of a theatre historian’s research methodology. David is a long-standing member of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) and the Society for Theatre Research (STR) and has served on the executive committee of both organizations. He is also a member of the IFTR’s Historiography Working Group and was the administrator for the IFTR Warwick World Congress in 2014. Claire Cochrane is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Worcester in the UK and a former convenor of the IFTR Historiography Working Group and of the TaPRA History and Historiography Working Group. As a historian, her work focuses on the history of British theatre mostly in the twentieth century and now the twentyfirst century. Her monograph Twentieth Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire was published in 2011. She has written and published widely on regional British theatre, especially on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the producing theatre located in her home city. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Theatre Research International, New Theatre Quarterly, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Cahiers Élisabéthains and Research in Drama Education. Her other research and publication interests include Black British and British Asian theatre practitioners and audiences, amateur theatre and Shakespeare in performance. She co-edited with Jo Robinson Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth published in 2016. She is now Series Editor with Bruce McConachie of Methuen Drama’s Cultural Histories of Theatre and Performance.

xivCONTRIBUTORS

Elisabeth Dutton is Professor of Medieval English at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; before moving to Switzerland, she was Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. She is the author of Julian of Norwich: The Influence of Late Medieval Devotional Compilations (2008) and editor of an edition of Julian (2008) and of John Gower: Trilingual Poet (2010). More recently, she has published articles on the dramaturgy and performance of early English plays inspired by her experience of directing them: she has staged, among other plays, the N Town Plays, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, John Bale’s Three Laws and Skelton’s Magnyfycence. She heads two theatre research projects: ‘EDOX’ (Early Drama at Oxford) and ‘Medieval Convent Drama’; both projects take archival and performance-based approaches, staging and filming little-studied scripts originally produced in very different institutional contexts – the early modern, all-male Oxford College and the medieval female religious house. Clelia Falletti is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, now retired. Her noteworthy publications include Civiltà teatrale del XX secolo; Promemoria del teatro di strada; Il teatro italiano. Cinquecento e Seicento; Le grandi tradizioni teatrali: Il Medioevo. Since 1981, she has participated in the research of ISTA (International School of Theater Anthropology) directed by Eugenio Barba. Her interest in the relationship between neuroscience and the work of the actor and the reception of the spectator led her to organize five international conferences at La Sapienza (2009–13); to publish some essays and finally to the edition of the volume Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience (Methuen Drama, 2016). She is co-editor of a theatre series for two publishing houses and is on the editorial board of the Italian magazine Teatro e Storia and of the Brazilian Revista de Estudos da Presença. As a dramatist and advisor, she participates in the work of two theatre groups, Potlach and Abraxa. Milena Grass Kleiner is Associate Professor in the Theatre School at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Director of the Millenium Nucleus on Art, Performativity and Activism. She works as a theatre translator and researcher, with interests in the representation of state violence in Chilean theatre, and history and memory in post-conflict societies. She is currently an elected member of the executive committee of the IFTR. Key recent publications include the essays ‘The Construction of Material Referentiality in Chilean Theatre: Los que van quedando en el camino (2010)’ (The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, 2019), ‘Memoria, teatro e historiografía: aprendizajes y prácticas interdisciplinarias’ (with Nancy Nicholls, in Investigación interdisciplinaria en cultura política, memoria y derechos humanos, 2018) and ‘Beyond the Walls: Campo de la Ribera (Argentina) and Villa Grimaldi (Chile) in the Urban and Social Fabric’ (with José Manuel Rodríguez Amieva, in MemoSur/MemoSouth: Memory, Commemoration and Trauma in Post-Dictatorship Argentina and Chile, 2017). Mariana Hausdorf Andrade is an actress and theatre director. She holds a BA in History from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and an MA in Latin

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American Cultural Studies, Universidad de Chile. Her research topics include theatre direction, Latin American theatre history and theatre archives. Hyunshik Ju graduated as Doctor of Korean Literature from Sogang University in South Korea in 2010, majoring in Korean drama and performance. His doctoral dissertation thesis was ‘A Study on Reflexivity of the Traditional Korean Masked Dance Drama’. He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Media Arts Culture, Kyonggi University, South Korea, with a focus on performance and performativity studies. Areas of interest include performativity in Korean theatre; traditional Korean theatre and Orientalism; North Korean theatre’s politics; technology and performativity. Recent and forthcoming publications include ‘Becoming Hamlet for Only Nine Days: Korean Workers and Documentary Theatre’ (Theatre Research International, 2016) and ‘Toward a Space of Dissensus: The Oasis Project in Urban Space, Scriptive Things, and Relational Aesthetics’ (Korea Journal, 2019). Esther Kim Lee is Professor in the Department of Theater Studies at Duke University in the United States with affiliations to the Asian American Studies Programme and International Comparative Studies. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (2006) which received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She is the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas (2012). From 2013 to 2014, she was the chief editor of Theatre Survey. Her latest published book is The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Methuen Drama, 2015). She teaches and writes about theatre history, Asian American theatre, Korean diaspora theatre and globalization and theatre, and she is currently working on a monograph on the history of yellowface in the United States. Nancy Nicholls is a lecturer in the Institute of History at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, with research interests focused on the themes of memory, oral history and contemporary Chilean history. Her work covers oral histories (including researching experiences of repression among victims of the Chilean dictatorship (1973–90) based on survivor testimonies), human rights in contemporary Chilean history and Holocaust narratives. She has also undertaken research on the history of Chilean contemporary theatre and the theatrical representation of human rights violations during the dictatorship. Her key recent publications include ‘Mobility, Migration and Integration: Experiences and Narratives of Holocaust Survivors in Chile, Colombia and Mexico’ (with Lorena Avila and Yael Siman in Lessons and Legacies 14, 2019); ‘Defensa de derechos humanos en Chile en el contexto transnacional del movimiento de defensa de los derechos humanos, 1973–1990’ (in Revista Estudos IberoAmericanos, 2019) and ‘Memoria, teatro e historiografía: aprendizajes y prácticas interdisciplinarias’ (with Milena Grass Kleiner, in Investigación interdisciplinaria en cultura política, memoria y derechos humanos, 2018). Rashna Darius Nicholson is an assistant professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She studied Performance Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of Copenhagen and holds a PhD from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Prior to joining HKU, she held a

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research fellowship at the ERC-Developing Theatres Project, LMU Munich. Her work has been published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Theatre Research International. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Parsi theatre between 1853 and 1893. Her interest in Gujarati linguistics stems from listening to standard Gujarati, Parsi Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi and English as a child in Bombay. Laura Peja is a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the Università Cattolica in Milan, having previously taught at Pavia University and the Faculty of Musicology in Cremona. Among her primary areas of interest are contemporary European drama and Italian theatre between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. She has recently published an annotated edition of Vittorio Alfieri’s Saul in the bilingual series ‘A canon of European Drama’ (ETS, Pisa 2018). She is the coordinator of the editorial board of Comunicazioni Sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies (Milan) and serves on the executive committee of Drammaturgia (Florence). She is also a member of the board of the CIT, Center for Theatrical Culture and Initiative Project, Mario Apollonio, based at the Università Cattolica, which supports research and projects with groups of operators who deal with training and intervention related to alternative forms of theatre. Jo Robinson is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Newcastle University, UK, and a former convenor of the IFTR Historiography Working Group and of the TaPRA History and Historiography Working Group. Her broad research interests in theatre and performance focus on the relationships between performance, place, community and region. She led the AHRC project, ‘Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham 1857–1867’, outputs from which were published in Performance Research, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film and the International Journal of Humanities and Computing; she has also worked with theatres and other institutions in the East Midlands region to develop a model of citizen scholarship to support volunteer research into heritage, including the UK Heritage Lottery-funded project ‘Our Theatre Royal Nottingham: Its Stories, People and Heritage’. Her publications include Theatre & the Rural (2016) and, with Claire Cochrane, the edited collection Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth (2016). Dorota Sosnowska works at the Department of Theatre and Performance in the Institute of Polish Culture University of Warsaw. As theatre historian and theoretician, she is particularly interested in the issue of sources, performance’s remains and archive. She is the author of the book Królowe PRL. Sceniczne wizerunki Ireny Eichlerówny, Niny Andrycz i Elżbiety Barszczewskiej jako modele kobiecości (Queen of PPR: Stage creations of Irena Eichlerówna, Nina Andrycz and Elżbieta Barszczwska as Models of Feminity) (2013) about three great actresses from communist times (2013). She also co-edited a volume entitled Robotnik. Performanse pamięci (The Worker. Performances of Memory) (2016) about worker’s culture in the context of theatre and performance. She is a collaborator in the international project ‘Performances of Memory: Testimonial, Reconstructive and Counterfactual Strategies in Literature

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and Performative Arts of the 20th and 21st Centuries’, and has published articles on the subject in Performance Research. For two years, between 2008 and 2010, she worked at Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw as a project coordinator. Magnus Thor Thorbergsson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Iceland focusing on the history of theatre among Icelandic immigrants in North America. Following an MA in theatre studies from the Free University Berlin in 1999, Magnus worked as a dramaturge at the Reykjavik City Theatre and as a theatre critic for the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. Between 2005 and 2015, he was a lecturer at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, contributing to the founding of a study programme in theatre and performance making and serving as its first programme director. Magnus completed a PhD degree from the University of Iceland in 2017 with a thesis on Icelandic theatre, national identity and modernization 1850–1930. He has published several articles and book chapters on Icelandic theatre in Icelandic and English, most recently on avant-garde theatre in Iceland for the Brill series A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries. Ngozi Udengwu is a senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria, where she teaches courses and supervises research projects at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She has presented papers at conferences in many countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, South Korea, India, South Africa, Uganda, Ghana and Tanzania. She has published many articles in mainline journals, and she is the author of Contemporary Nigerian Female Playwrights: A Study in Ideology and Themes (2012). She is a member of professional organizations and associations including the Society of Nigeria Theatre Artists, the IFTR and the African Theatre Association (AfTA). She is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and is currently the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Katharina Wessely studied Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna, and was Junior Fellow at the IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften) Vienna from 2004 to 2005, being awarded the 2005 TheodorKörner-Preis for her dissertation project. She has held positions as lecturer at the Institute for German Studies at the Philosophical Faculty of the Masaryk University Brno (2006–9); Marie-Curie Fellow at the Institute of Theatre Studies at the University of Bern (2011–13); Research Fellow at the IASH (Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences), University of Bern (2013–15); from 2015 to 2018, she was researcher and project leader at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she is currently an associated researcher. Her main research interest is theatre history as cultural history, especially theatre historiography with regard to space, place and mobility, with a special focus on the region of the Habsburg monarchy. Xiaohuan Zhao was born and brought up in China. He received his BA and MA from Central China Normal University and his PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Otago before taking up his current position as Senior Lecturer in Chinese literature and theatre

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at the University of Sydney. He is concurrently Distinguished Overseas Professor at the Institute of Theatre and Theatrical Relics of Shanxi Normal University and Adjunct Professor of Donghua University in Shanghai. His publications appear in T’oung Pao, TDR/The Drama Review, Asian Theatre Journal, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft and Zhonghua xiqu (Chinese Traditional Opera), among others, with a specialist focus on ritual/religion and literature/theatre. His most recent book is Drama, Fiction and Folk Belief: Traditional Chinese Literature and Culture from an Overseas Perspective (2018). He is now engaged in a book project on the history of Chinese temple theatre.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was commissioned by Mark Dudgeon for Methuen Drama and the ambitious and diverse scope of the theatre history and historiography included here is very much the outcome of his request for an international orientation. Throughout the authoring and editorial process, he has provided genial support, accepting with equanimity some of the more radical of our ideas and only occasionally protesting. We thank Lara Bateman and other members of the Methuen Drama editorial team for their help and advice. Our gratitude is also due to the anonymous peer reviewers of the original proposal and to the valuable and perceptive comments also made anonymously on the first complete draft. Susan Bennett agreed to be our critical friend, reading the manuscript and pointing out strengths and weaknesses – we hope we’ve been able to improve the book as a result. We must also thank Jan Clarke and Laurence Senelick for their generous advice as we sought to expand our range of international entries to the Selected Resources section at the end of the volume. The majority of our collaborators on this project were first encountered through the ever-increasing policy of international inclusivity pursued by the IFTR. Our intellectual and methodological understanding has been nurtured by our longterm membership of the IFTR Historiography Working Group and we salute all our colleagues, many of whom have found their way into this volume through references to their work even if they have not contributed an essay. We had to make some very difficult choices about international selection, and the absences will be as prominent as those theatre cultures we have promoted. However, it is our hope that the historiography speaks very broadly about current preoccupations in our discipline. As always we are grateful for the research environments, time and resources represented by our respective university departments in Worcester and Nottingham. In particular, we acknowledge the support of the University of Nottingham’s Research Leaders’ Programme which enabled the roundtable conversation held in Belgrade that makes up part of Chapter 4 of this book.

How to Use This Book CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

The editorial intention which has determined the structure and content of The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography has been to survey, elucidate and expand the current landscape of the academic discipline of theatre history. We aim to provide an overview of key topics, research areas and current challenges, offering a useful and manageable guide to developing research in the field. In the Introduction, we outline the ways in which historiographic thinking within the discipline has evolved, largely within the Anglo-American and European academy, in recent decades, and introduce readers to key Englishlanguage scholarship published by leaders in the field since the late 1980s. Framing our approach to the essays which follow, we also outline the ongoing debate about global and local priorities in theatre history. Our aim here is to enable internationally broader and more inclusive engagement with the diversity and multiplicity of theatre and performance cultures experienced in the past, which continue to resonate in the cultural and geopolitical formations of the present. Each of the international group of scholars who have contributed examples of their work to this volume are practising theatre historians whose individual research foci derive specifically from their lived ‘insider’ status and local investment in, and knowledges of, the physical environments they explore. In order to ensure the historiographic cohesiveness and utility of the volume as a whole, the second section ‘Research Methods and Methodologies’ distinguishes between these two terms by delineating foundational objects of enquiry and the means by which they are researched within overarching concepts and value systems as exemplified by the contributor essays. Additional illustrative material is also introduced here, drawn from the work of other well-known and emerging historians. Readers of the volume will be able to see how established orthodoxies of theatre historiographic method have been interrogated, challenged and perhaps reimagined to enable fresh perspectives. At the core of the volume and forming its most extensive component in ‘Current Research: Case Studies from the Field’, readers will encounter sixteen specially commissioned essays. As we explain in our Introduction, our decision to foreground embedded knowledges of the local and regional is accompanied by the wish to highlight questions of historiography which transcend impressions of the parochial. The essays are thus divided into eight pairings, each focused on a primary thematic stimulus which is outlined in a brief introduction. By putting essays together, we hope to encourage readers to consider them productively alongside and against one another. However, such pairings do not exclude other fruitful links and potential synergies between topics.

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The next section, titled ‘Changing Perspectives and Current Challenges’, offers two essays which highlight the gathering momentum of two relatively new methodological directions: practice as research (PaR) where research questions are explored through performance, and digital humanities research, grounded in twentyfirst-century exploitation of rapidly advancing technology. The section concludes, however, with a transcribed and edited roundtable conversation facilitated by the editors between a number of the contributing essayists, with the aim of enabling synthesis and dialogue between the different topics and approaches addressed in this volume. Through their lively interaction and commitment to the collective project of the book, the commonalities of practical scholarship and synergies of intellectual enquiry emerge very strongly. Most certainly, our contributors acknowledge what is new and useful in the practice of theatre history and historiography, but at the same time they retain the scepticism and pragmatism determined both by their individual circumstances and the perennial challenges of capturing the past in all its complexity. We hope that this dialogue can be a model of cooperation and collaboration for other researchers in the field. The comprehensive List of Works Cited is then augmented by a Selected Annotated Bibliography. Each of the contributors has identified key texts central to the historical and historiographic understanding explored in their work relevant to their local theatre and performance culture. As part of our aim to encourage a more inclusive approach to the international dissemination of our work and in the hope that readers in languages other than English might wish to access valuable scholarship written in languages familiar to them, each contributor has been encouraged to provide ‘home’ language titles, all of which through their good offices have been translated into English. Finally the Selected Resources section of the book provides readers with an introduction to key physical and digital resources available to researchers. Each of the contributors has been invited to direct readers to local archival repositories, museums, libraries etc. that have proved accessible and helpful for their research and the guide also includes details of major internationally known institutions and databases. Through the different sections outlined here, our aim is for this book to provide readers with a more expansive and inclusive sense of theatre histories both nationally and locally around the world, moving decisively away from a purely Western academic focus, while at the same time providing an up-to-date survey of current research concerns and questions in the field of theatre history and historiography. Throughout we have been motivated to create dialogues between different scholars, topics and approaches, and we hope that the reader will in turn join that dialogue, drawing on the different elements of the book to support and develop their own interests and researches.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

Why in the transition from future to past, should the present not be the time of initiative – that is, the time when the weight of history that has already been made is deposited, suspended, and interrupted, and when the dream of history yet to be made is transposed into a responsible action.1 Ricoeur 1985: 208 The material traces of the history of theatre may be found anywhere in the world that has been associated with the phenomenon of performance. A randomly selected and by no means exhaustive list of those traces could include carved, painted or photographed images; outdoor gathering places; architectural remains or fully functioning buildings; artefacts such as masks, musical instruments, mimetically significant clothing, properties and scenic pieces; documents – inscribed on a range of mediums – of play texts, codes of practice, inventories, contracts, receipts, maps, letters, journals, newspapers, postcards and, since the late nineteenth century, recorded voices and filmed action. Along with, or sometimes instead of, the preserved concrete traces, there might also remain embodied or cognitive traces, bearing witness to the way the body and mind recall and reproduce the experience of performance through time. That our collective understanding of the concept of theatre as cultural practice has been significantly enlarged and diversified over the last 100 years or so is largely, we would argue, due to the development of theatre history as a recognized academic discipline within which successive generations of scholars have worked to identify, verify and shape the traces of theatre into descriptive and analytic narratives of past experience. It is not our intention in this handbook to produce a comprehensive history of theatre history, but the genealogy of our discipline – the extent to which it is in a constant state of evolution and renegotiation – is of importance to our apprehension of where we are now and our capacity to make, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, ‘the present ... the time of initiative’ in the interests of the future. Of particular importance to this goal is our attempt to broaden the international scope of our discussion by actively seeking greater knowledge of other traditions and authorities of theatre history. Our aim is thus to go some way towards mitigating the effects of what the Indian scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty has called ‘asymmetric ignorance’ – a concern to which we return later in this introduction (1992: 2).

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Accounts disseminated from within the Anglo-American and European academies of the origins of theatre history as a distinctive university discipline usually foreground the work in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century of Max Herrmann in Berlin and (less prominently) Hugo Dinger in Jena (Quinn 1991). What was initiated through lectures, scholarly associations, individual books, serial publications and so on culminated in the case of Herrmann in the founding in 1923 of the Theaterwissenschaftliches Institute in Berlin. The activities of the Theaterwissenschaft group of German-language scholars – which saw institutes and museums established in Cologne, Kiel, Munich and Vienna – were inevitably shattered by the Second World War, but remain firmly associated with the ‘scientific’ method of historical enquiry and the pursuit of objective ‘facts’ derived from the rigorous scrutiny of collected documentary and artefactual evidence. Almost simultaneously in North America, the appointment in 1899 of Brander Matthews to the very first US chair of dramatic literature at Columbia University in New York reinforced an academic tradition of locating the study of theatre within departments of literature, thus prioritizing the dramatic text and the study of ‘great’, mostly European, canonical playwrights. As Marvin Carlson has recently emphasized, what was pioneering about both Herrmann and Matthews was the insistence that the play as a text on the page could only be reimagined and revitalized for the stages of their own time through an understanding of the original performance conditions: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that the foundation of modern theatre studies was grounded upon a spatial reorientation – from the linear reading of drama to the three-dimensional staging of it’ (Carlson 2010: 195–6). Institutionalizing theatre studies, and thus by extension theatre history, within university departments irrespective of their broader disciplinary orientation, however, took the scholarly practice of theatre history into what is effectively a gladiatorial arena. Academics argue with each other, and as they do so conceptual frameworks and the theoretical underpinning of basic methodologies shift and change. The result – as we hope the work included in this handbook amply demonstrates – is a richer, more inclusive, democratically aware and self-reflexive approach to the challenges of the discipline. The problem, however, as the USbased historian Ellen Mackay has pointed out, is that theatre history ‘perpetually rebegins itself ’. Past scholarship is purged: ‘in pursuit of a cleaner slate, much of what has been said before must be discarded’ (2010: 23). Furthermore, the tendency to construct binary oppositions out of favoured subject matter and methodologies has the capacity to both oversimplify and distort historical understanding. Within the late-twentieth-century climate of postmodernism and the rejection of positivist adherence to demonstrable facts, there still appears to be a need to call into question the ‘scientific’ method, mostly now referring back to the work of A. M. Nagler, the Austrian-American heir to the Theaterwissenschaft tradition through his influential A Source Book in Theatrical History, which was published in 1952. In her New Readings in Theatre History (2003), the British historian Jacky Bratton targets both strands of the early-twentieth-century academic legacy through her interrogation of meticulous fact-checking, taking as an example the ‘archaeo-historicism’ of Robert D. Hume, best known for his research

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in late-seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century British theatre. Bratton sets out to demonstrate the ways in which powerful literary figures in the British cultural elite appropriated what was to be best known of nineteenth-century British theatre history, in a push towards a focus on canonical literary drama. Such a focus had a doubled effect on the history of British theatre: it occluded the importance of mass popular theatre, and discounted the value of those distinctly non-literary evidentiary traces capable of imbuing the records of the past with felt life. Bratton has, for UK theatre historians, been an important influence in returning scholarly attention to both these aspects of theatre history. The writing of this introduction has also been influenced by another very recent challenge to the received wisdom about the scholarly basis of British theatre history. Richard Schoch’s vigorously polemical Writing the History of the British Stage 16601900 (2016) sets out to restore the legitimacy and credibility of the documented records produced before the advent of the twentieth-century modernist academic. What had been gently disparaged as inaccurate and naïvely anecdotal or pointlessly pedestrian about the various ‘histories’ published by the antiquarians, textual editors, booksellers, journalists and theatrical insiders of the late seventeenth, eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries – 300 years’ worth of thinking about the theatre – should, Schoch suggests, be recognized not merely as miscellaneous sources of fragmentary information to be rummaged through by appropriately trained professional historians, but as historical and indeed historiographic interventions in their own right, each offering distinctive interpretive perspectives. This argument potentially has wider international implications for the reappraisal and re-evaluation of the multiplicitous voices from the past, and suggests the importance of awareness of multiple, previous and ‘other’ historiographical frameworks which must be recognized if we are to fully understand those voices. We should look harder at what has been sedimented in the historical memory: what has been, in Ricoeur’s words, ‘deposited, suspended’. And we should ensure that we bring to those deposits and sediments the frameworks which are appropriate to best understanding and evaluating them. How we look affects what we see; what we see should affect how we look. Thus, one of the core objectives of this volume is to share and widen knowledge not just of more internationally various theatre histories, but also of the key individuals responsible through time for the transmission of that knowledge. A key question running through the handbook, and one which has motivated our choice of commissioned essays, is that of ‘who speaks in theatre history, and who has the right to speak?’ And what languages do they speak in, and from what contexts? Here, it is worth noting that the development of digital technologies and spaces provides both a potential transformation in terms of not only the methodological tools that we deploy, as Robinson discusses later in this volume, but also our access to knowledge. In some ways, the development of the internet over recent decades has democratized the discussion of theatre history, as it has enabled the creation of a vast repository of enthusiastically acquired information capable of dissemination outside the walls of the academy by aficionados of theatre and performance – who are sometimes understandably oblivious of, or actively resistant to, scholarly authority.

4HANDBOOK OF THEATRE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

This material is potentially a rich resource of audience reception and response, given the centrality of shared emotion and experience to the theatrical encounter, but it is one which can also be potentially overwhelming for the academic researcher: if everyone speaks, who can we hear? The key difference, we would suggest, and the one which has driven the authorial and editorial imperatives of this volume, is the importance of historiographic understanding to the work which historians do. The Oxford English Dictionary (2002) defines historiography as both the ‘writing of history’ and ‘the study of history-writing’: what we write about, how we write and why we write. Recently, the US-based scholars Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka have offered the pithy definition of ‘the arrangement of the historical record’ (2015: 2): that economy of expression serves to refine to a powerfully constituted core the labourintensive task of establishing the methodological, ideological and philosophical components of the arrangement. Moreover, in line with a growing preoccupation with the ethical turn in theatre studies, the fundamental responsibility of the historian to find ways to tell a verifiable truth about the past – despite the contested nature of ‘truth’ – demands greater attention to the transparency of the historian’s objectives. In a previous collaboration on a collection of essays – published in 2016 as Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth – and drawing on historiographic expertise in other disciplines, we sought ‘to explore the ways in which theatre historians apply ethical thinking to the truthful representation, recovery or re-visioning of the different ways and means by which theatremakers in the past have enacted stories or scenarios related to human experience’ (4). There, we cited the German historiographer Jörn Rüsen’s statement that ‘it belongs to the historian’s responsibility to reveal not only those features of the past which fit into the self-esteem of contemporaries, but also to reveal those hidden but effective disturbances in their self-esteem’ (2004: 199); in this volume, too, we seek to encourage awareness in both contributors and readers of how our choices of object, method and perspective affect what and how we see. It is thus important to acknowledge our own positioning and context as theatre historians and historiographers. Who are our contemporaries and forebears, and what are our ingrained approaches and understandings? As British theatre historians with personal research interests focused on the history of theatre in the UK, much of the record we arrange – and subject to rearrangement – is drawn from the scholarship of British theatre history. Arguably, it is down to the cultural as well as political legacy of the British Empire that the theatre of our small group of islands has attracted the interest of such substantial numbers of international historians especially from (formerly British) North America. However, the founding of the International Federation for Theatre Research/Fédération International pour la Recherche Théâtrale (IFTR/FIRT) in 1955 as a result of an initiative of the British Society for Theatre Research (established in 1948) brought together in its first meeting delegates from twenty-one countries to what was a dual English/French language organization. In France, the Société d’Histoire du Théâtre had been founded in 1932 by August Rondel, the librarian of the Comédie Française. IFTR/FIRT rapidly expanded to draw in theatre and performance scholars from

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all over the world, and the impact on the discipline of theatre history has been considerable. The majority of the contributors to the Handbook have engaged with IFTR and an important core have been members of the Historiography Working Group. Indeed, the majority of the individual essays included were first discussed at the annual conference held in Stockholm in 2016 when the overarching theme was ‘Presenting the Theatrical Past’. It is also worth reminding ourselves that every scholar who considers her/his field of theatre studies retrospectively has to apply the methodological tools of the historian even if she/he does not self-identify as a historian. That said, it is our sense that interest in theatre history and historiography has gathered momentum since the beginning of the twenty-first century and the commissioning of The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography follows on from the comparatively recent publication of a number of key English-language volumes dedicated to historiographic enquiry. Moreover, although the academic writing is in English – an issue to which we return later in this introduction – and the writers for the most part belong to a community of scholars well known to each other, there is a gathering sense of international engagement, of expanding temporal, spatial, geographical boundaries. While mindful of the futility of attempting to pinpoint a clearly delineated turning point in the history of a cultural practice, it is convenient for the genealogy of our project if we trace back our particular line of descent to 1989 and the publication by the University of Iowa Press of Interpreting the Theatrical Past. The editors Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie brought together thirteen theatre historians, all but one based at North American universities. The exception, the German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte, was then teaching at the University of Bayreuth, but all were effectively in the same debating room in the academy. As Bank and Kobialka point out, the 1989 collection offered no precise definition of historiography (2015: 1). Instead, as the Postlewait/McConachie introduction put it, the intention was not only to identify historiographic problems and issues but also to provide interpretive approaches that apply broadly to theatre and challenge assumptions (ix). The first essay in the collection by R. W. Vince offered a succinct historical survey of the development of the discipline together with a discussion of both ‘sciencing’ and the likely impact of ‘sociocultural’ historians on the broadening of the field. His conclusion, however, betrays a lingering insecurity about status and legitimacy as he asks ‘will theatre history be able to take advantage of new historiographical theories and methods and establish itself as an independent discipline?’ (1989: 16). Thirty years on from that question, the flourishing of interest in the discipline may be clearly seen in the appearance of a growing number of publications – including those subsequently produced by Vince’s fellow interpretive essayists, Marvin Carlson, Joseph Roach, Tracy Davis, Erika Fischer-Lichte, McConachie and Postlewait – which bear witness to both historiographic ambition and independence. Postlewait’s successor volumes to Interpreting the Theatrical Past – his single-authored The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (2009) and the 2010 collection of essays, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, co-edited with Charlotte M. Canning – offer still more various perspectives on the discipline.

6HANDBOOK OF THEATRE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

While much of the case-study material in The Cambridge Introduction is drawn from Postlewait’s mainly British theatre specialisms, his valuable interrogation of the evidentiary basis of much established theatre history foregrounds vital questions about the theatre historian’s responsibility to the past as well as providing the reader with key guidelines on methodologies and approaches (guidelines to which we will return throughout this volume). In turn, the fifteen essays collected together in Representing the Past are designed to enable the reader ‘to think with – not just about’ (2010: 9) the five categorical ideas of archive, time, space, identity and narrative. The aim was to engage with ‘some of the fundamental conditions of historical inquiry and understanding’ (3) while still recognizing the importance of new perspectives and methods derived from the humanities such as feminist studies, gender studies, postcolonialism, cultural materialism and new historicism. As applications for thinking with, the categories open up new areas of investigation. Within ‘Archive’, for example, the ‘unwritten’ of the sixteenth-century English morris dance; within ‘Time’, the ‘crisis of representation’ in relation to India’s pasts provoked by cultural difference and the ‘intrinsic Indian and extrinsic Western ideas of time and history’ (168). At all times, as the editors warn, ‘the historical representation seeks to be an objective image of the thing itself, yet it cannot avoid being, in some capacity, a subjective distortion of that thing’ (11). The importance of recognizing such new perspectives is also highlighted in the introduction to Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, edited by Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen and also published in 2010. Bial and Magelssen emphasize key shifts in the discipline clearly driven by changes in the second half of the twentieth century which they claim saw ‘members of previously “unhistoried” populations – women, ethnic and racial minorities, non-Western nations – begin to enter the academy in large numbers’. This, they argue, ‘combined with postmodern philosophy’s critique of hierarchical structures of knowledge’, has led to the recognition of both a need to widen the scope of that academy’s gaze, and for new historiographical approaches and methods ‘more suitable to a nonhierarchical and multicultural understanding of theater’ (2010: 2). Certainly, their collection widens the gaze to look at, for example, Nicaraguan dance drama, Jewish involvement in early American theatre and performance-oriented genres of theatre in India. The widening of the gaze is thus not just in respect of the ‘who’ and ‘where’ of theatre and performance but also in respect of the ‘what’, as the diversification of models of performance continues apace – which opens up opportunities not just for new histories but also for new historians. That widening gaze, however, must acknowledge the difficulty of avoiding what the cultural and postcolonial theorist Timothy Brennan calls ‘superficial gestures of inclusiveness’ (2014: 12). The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History published in 2012 and edited by the British historians David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, utilizes a similar structural strategy to Postlewait and Canning in organizing essays around a series of core concepts and questions of ‘Why?’, ‘When?’, ‘Where?’, ‘What?’, ‘How?’. Here, the ‘Where’ section is deployed to bring in wider geographical frameworks, with case studies ranging from the local represented by the English regional city of Liverpool in an essay by Ros Merkin, to ‘Finland’ by S. E. Wilmer, ‘Egypt’ by

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Hazem Azmy, ‘Traditional Theatre: The Case of Japanese Noh’, by Diego Pellecchia and finally Marvin Carlson’s ‘Reflections on a Global Theatre History’ in which he builds on the concerns first set out in his 2004 Theatre Survey article, ‘Become Less Provincial’ – an intervention to which we will return. But while the ‘Where’ section covers the wide ground indicated earlier, the majority of the case-study material in the volume overall is taken from examples of European theatre. Despite the undoubted historiographic value of the variety of topics and methodologies assembled by the very distinguished community of scholars brought together to contribute to this volume who include, along with Postlewait, Carlson, Bratton and Fischer-Lichte, the Swedish Willmar Sauter, the French-Canadian Josette Féral and the Swiss Stefan Hulfeld, the fault lines and odd, unequal conjunctions in the internationalizing efforts remain. Bank and Kobialka cite Brennan’s warning while adopting a robust stance towards the way their contributors’ essays explicitly ‘focus on disclosing how particular modes of thinking have been embedded in our perceptions of time, space, and matter and how those modes have been shaped to serve political, cultural, and ideological agendas’ (2015: 12). Avoiding what they perhaps see as an unwanted ideological agenda of other writers – and a challenge which this volume itself explicitly takes up – Bank and Kobialka’s own introduction notes that: Rather than striving to include subjects and milieus because they demonstrate a desire to be done with Eurocentric thought and historiography, the essays in this collection work against centrism by understanding historiography as the encounter with a material ‘Other’ that forces the historiographer to acknowledge his/her own temporal and spatial materiality. (2015: 13) Such an understanding was also foregrounded in our own Ethics and Evidence collection where gestures of inclusiveness to the ‘Other’ were integral to our approach in relation to both telling stories that have not been told and the ways in which we tell them. For the most part, however, our own gaze was inwards, fixed on the questions raised for historians of British performance culture. Writing about ethics and bias in her own field of American theatre, Rosemarie K. Bank considered the implications of bad faith historiography. However, apart from this, our collection made only one gesture outside an Anglo-American perspective: Poonam Trivedi’s exploration of the ‘intellectual and ethical responsibility to recover and recoup the whole picture’ of colonial India’s contested theatre histories, ‘warts and all’ (2016: 103–4). However to aim, as we do, in this handbook to find a way of enabling a more inclusive conversation from a wider range of international standpoints is to enter a difficult and disputed territory. The next section of this introduction again begins retrospectively as we trace the story so far of our joint preoccupation with the local within the global. In 2007, Jo Robinson’s article ‘Becoming More Provincial? The Global and the Local in Theatre History’ marshalled aspects of a wider debate about the contested nature of the all-pervasive discourse of globalization in order to address Marvin Carlson’s claim, made in his 2004 Theatre Survey article, that adopting a more global perspective in the practice of theatre history would ‘deepen and enrich our

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knowledge of theatre and the way it has functioned in other parts of the world’ (2004a: 177). Carlson’s article, written in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the knowledge of the catastrophic consequences of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, can be read as genuinely idealistic about the possibility that the theatre and performance academy within the United States could in some way intervene to disrupt the ‘long and unfortunate tradition of indifference to the concerns, needs, and interests of other parts of the world’ (178). Carlson demanded an expansion of the geographical scope, moving away from an approach which is centred on ‘the European and American tradition, with the theatres of the rest of the world ignored entirely or lumped into brief summaries in chapters’ (177). The results of expanding the focus of scholarly study in this way will be, he argues, twofold: at a basic level, we will ‘deepen and enrich our knowledge of theatre and the way it functions and has functioned in other parts of the world’, but in addition, in a move which relates ‘to the increasing interconnectedness of our world as it enters this new millennium’, we will be able to consider how theatre has operated across and between cultures, how it has incorporated, for good or ill, materials from other cultures and how it has not infrequently served itself as an important medium of cultural exchange (179). Here then, Carlson seemed to be asking not only for a broadening of the objects of study but also for a new perspective, one which stresses and works with interconnectedness. Indeed, by the end of his essay, such interconnectedness is presented as inevitable in the current climate of globalization: There is [...] a sense in which all theatre is local; but in an increasingly interconnected world, neither theatre nor politics can be viewed as only local without a serious distortion and misunderstanding of each. Local and regional concerns have not ceased to exist, but in the new millennium they seem inevitably to be more and more imbricated with the international and indeed the global. (180) As if in direct response, the publication in 2006 of Theatre Histories: An Introduction, edited by Phillip Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, was situated as the first, academically coordinated, English-language attempt to allow cultural perspectives that are relatively neglected in the West to be considered, and not in the margins of western theatre or according to its criteria but in and of themselves and as a means for illuminating our understanding of human expressiveness at large. (xviii) In examining topics that range from late-Neolithic ritual pilgrimage in England through medieval theatre and Shakespeare to pantomime, Ibsen, Brecht and beyond – as well as Noh and Kabuki from Japan, Kathakali and Kutiyattam from Kerala in India, Yoruba ritual and postcolonial theatre in Africa, shamanism from Korea and radical theatre in Latin America – the authors of Theatre Histories provided their readers with many examples of theatre and performance culture from around the world, with the aim of widening their understanding of how theatre can be defined and how it has operated in particular cultures at particular times. When

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Carlson returned to his preoccupation with global theatre history in 2013 in his essay published in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, he professed his admiration for Theatre Histories – by then in its second edition – but nonetheless critiqued structural imbalances in content and organization which he attributed ‘to its reluctance to shift from traditional paradigms in both subject matter and presentational mode’ (155). Such criticisms mirrored Robinson’s earlier concerns, expressed in 2007, that while the book’s authors ‘do offer a widening of material and knowledge, the book simply fails to achieve the broadening of method and of perspective which is essential for the study of the global’: instead, ‘the global perspective’ of the book is largely that of a long – and inclusive – voyage to different parts of the theatrical world to bring back to the western student of theatre history new knowledge of different locals, rather than a perspective primarily founded on an awareness and understanding of interconnections and their consequences. (234) Building on Postlewait’s argument in his essay, ‘Historiography and the Theatrical Event: A Primer with Twelve Cruxes’, that ‘what historians see – or fail to see – depends upon not only where but how they look, how they constitute both the field of study and the method of investigation’ (1991: 161, original emphases), Robinson thus questioned the volume’s claim to be truly offering a global perspective. Theatre Histories is now in its third edition – revised, sumptuously illustrated and augmented by new technology (2016) – but its revised authorship is in terms of formal national affiliation still homogeneous, albeit representing wide-ranging and exemplary scholarship drawn from diverse influences. If, as the new general editor Tobin Nellhaus states in the introduction ‘knowing about theatre globally is vital today’ (2), students accessing this rich resource will still largely be looking out from their Anglophone theatre departments with their perspective channelled through expertise located in physically and intellectually familiar environments and through largely shared assumptions. So, how might the paradigm shift – a change in how we look as well as where we look – called for by both Carlson and Robinson begin to happen? How might a perspective founded on an awareness and understanding of interconnections and their consequences be attempted? In attempting to answer this question, we need to acknowledge the extent to which the concept of the ‘global’ is, for the time being at any rate, essentially a Western dominant power construct and that in relation to theatre and performance the international is made up of a myriad of different traditions, practices and aesthetic values. As Carlson pointed out in 2013, the nation state as a totalizing category which can be legitimately utilized as a model for exploring a particular narrative of theatre history is simply not equal to the ever-shifting complexity, past and present, of cultural, linguistic and indeed political boundaries. Instead, he called for a shift towards a ‘rhizomatic approach’ – a model offered through the theories of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari which ideally ‘moves freely across phenomena, making connections potentially in all directions, without seeking fixed structures or linear narratives. It allows for fluid multiple connections without privileging any controlling models of either representation or interpretation’. Arguing

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that ‘theatre history has always been far more rhizomatic than theatre historians have admitted’, such an approach ‘recognises that theatre both past and present is best understood not as a series of […] linear narratives but as an ever-shifting web of cultural interweaving’ (157). The key principle of interconnectedness – whether within national boundaries at the level of the capital, regional or hyperlocal, across boundaries as in Katharina Wessely’s article on actor mobility across German-speaking territories or indeed troubling such boundaries as in Magnus Thor Thorbergsson’s essay on Icelandic immigrant theatre in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentiethcentury Canada – remains a foundational principle of this collection, as we will make clear in our later discussion of the volume’s structure and of the various potential pathways through the material contained here. ‘Cultural interweaving’, however, is not a simple concept either methodologically or ideologically. In 2014, while the Indian theatre-maker, scholar and political activist Rustom Bharucha was prepared to accede to the notion of performance cultures, he made clear that he was not quite so sanguine that ‘interweaving’ such cultures can free one from the burdens of appropriation, decontextualisation, cosmeticization, commodification and the myth of an ‘equal’ playing field in the global cultural economy. (180) Bharucha was here contemplating the inevitability of the ‘positive failure’ of an attempt to replace what he called the ‘hoary category’ of the intercultural as it originated in 1970s’ Euro-American performance studies with a new paradigm of ‘interweaving performance cultures’. The context is Bharucha’s contribution to the collection of essays published in 2014 in The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism, which was one of the outputs of the Institute for Advanced Studies ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ project established at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2008 and led by Erika Fischer-Lichte. As she explains in the introduction to the collection, the clear thematic focus was to deal ‘with the problems and possibilities that emerge from processes of interweaving performances cultures [a term] which is a translation of the German Verflechtungen von Theaterkulturen’ (11). The fact that even this preliminary act of translation created ambiguities of meaning and thus arguably by extension intent, was just one indicator of the challenges offered by this consciously ‘utopian’ project. Verflechtungen is a German noun for which there is no exact equivalent in English. Addressing this in a public dialogue conducted in 2010, Fischer-Lichte and Bharucha explored the slippage between verb and noun. For Bharucha, the term came across ‘as an activity, a method, a way of doing things’ rather than an institutional category, an ‘entity represented by a noun’, and by implication vulnerable to stasis and distortion (2011). That different models and conventions of theatre and performance have evolved internationally through time by way of happenstance, convergence, gifting, borrowing, invasion and coercion is, as Fischer-Lichte points out, indisputable. What upped the stakes politically, she argues, is that as the twentieth-century era of the postcolonial came into being – effectively creating a new map of the world which, in theory, broke down divisions between the colonizer and the colonized – the concept of the ‘intercultural’ developed in Western academies and in centres of

INTRODUCTION

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performance research in the 1970s and 1980s was predicated on the suggestion that ‘we all meet on an equal ground’. The outcome in reality was another version of unacknowledged Orientalism. The ‘intercultural’ saw theatre forms that positioned, as Fischer-Lichte puts it, ‘the West against the rest’ producing, at its most extreme, examples of what Bharucha calls HIT (hegemonic intercultural theatre) exemplified most prominently perhaps by the internationally celebrated works of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Robert Wilson and Tadashi Suzuki. At the same time, the less glossily visible but no less influential anthropological foraging into the festive and ritual practices of societies located far outside Western traditions resulted in the assimilation and/or appropriation of culturally specific borrowings for aesthetic and ideological purposes that were potentially offensively at odds with their original function. The issue here is not that interchange was a new strategy of enrichment for Western theatre-makers and audience. In his essay ‘Theatrical Translation as Modernization in the First Age of Globalisation’, New Zealand–born Christopher Balme, whose early work in Decolonising the Stage drew on postcolonial experiments he dubbed ‘syncretic theatre’ (1999) locates an earlier moment of globalization in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century, during which ‘a seismic shift took place in the way nations and cultures began to deal with one another’, and argues that ‘this shift is reflected in the way theatre was organised, and how it functioned as a cultural force’ (2014: 106). Rather, both the allure and the problem of an intercultural approach was that it was construed and presented differently, as a humble reaching out to the previously subordinated Other for new knowledge as an act of mutual exchange. Except, of course, as Bharucha – with his background of grass-roots performance interventions in areas of India, the Philippines, South Africa and elsewhere – knows only too well, within the power structures of the global cultural economy, the material benefits of such exchanges are invariably disproportionately accrued by the exchange partner whose dominance is favoured by existing material circumstances. What applies to the practices of theatre and performance applies also (possibly more so) to the histories of those practices. As the Moroccan theatre scholar Khalid Amine – who is one of the contributors to this volume – has pointed out elsewhere: Our task as subaltern [sic] scholars is further complicated while revisiting the existing body of world-theatre histories; we are hardly visible, and if mentioned at all, then often on the borderlines between absence and presence. (25–6). Amine draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s observation made in 1992 that ‘Europe works as a silent referent in historical knowledge’. Chakrabarty’s term ‘asymmetric ignorance’ – introduced earlier in this introduction – refers to the fact that ‘thirdworld historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate’. Amine’s aim to ‘redeem postcolonial performance history from its interminable oppositional thinking’ offers the hope that democratic interweaving might first redress the balance in favour of more equal knowledge, but then also recover ‘the irreducible plurality’ and ‘interconnectedness of cultures’ which allows us to reconfigure our historiographic understanding.

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Such an approach requires historians to pay attention then, not just to the different parts of the world, but to the conditions of theatre-making in those varying locations as well as to the links and interconnections between them, not least because, as Tracy C. Davis and Christopher Balme argue in their ‘Prospectus’ for their multivolume Cultural History of Theatre, Theatre history has largely reoriented towards understanding performance as a social entity: normatively constitutive of sociability, productive of the public sphere, received by socially constituted units and sub-units, and reflective of wider social conditions both in its ostensible content and the reactions it engenders. (2015: 403) And what is true of theatre and theatre-making is equally true of theatre history writing: the production of theatre history is also inflected by local knowledges, as we made clear in Ethics, Evidence and Truth, citing Rüsen. The historian’s ‘set of norms and values is a part of the past they interpret with them’, and they need to become aware of – and, we argued, transparent about – ‘the cultural constitution of themselves and their world’ (Rüsen 2004: 203). Chakrabarty draws attention to the difficulty imposed by dominant intellectual norms and values with a list of names well known as authorities in the Western historical academy: Whether it is an Edward Thompson, a Le Roy Ladurie, a Carlo Ginzberg, a Lawrence Stone, a Robert Darnton, or a Natalie Davis – to take but a few names at random from our contemporary world – the ‘greats’ and the models of the historian’s enterprise are always at least culturally ‘European’. ‘They’ produce their work in relative ignorance of non-Western histories, and this does not seem to affect the quality of their work. This is a gesture, however, that ‘we’ cannot return. We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘outdated’. (1992: 2) There is no mistaking the anger in this statement, characteristic of the oppositional thinking which Amine seeks to mitigate. Conscious of the great names of European poststructuralist theory – some of whom have already appeared in this introduction – we are also mindful that asymmetric ignorance of performance cultures is also accompanied by ignorance of other authorities, knowledge of which may also enable a different, more dynamic arrangement of the record. Thus, alongside the varied range of essays and authorial voices commissioned for this volume, we have also asked our contributors to help us develop an annotated bibliography that aims to introduce our readers to those key authorities and authors who make up the intellectual landscape from which they write. Responding to what is now thought of across a range of disciplines as the ‘new materialism’, Bank and Kobialka’s preoccupation with the instability of history leads them to an imperative to derive historiography from historical subjects rather than applying it to them (original emphases). The materiality of history would be seen ‘as a state of unrest, of continuous change, a history that was not subject to methodology, that did not receive interpretations, that did not reflect or represent a theory applied to it, but exposed the presence of these in history (and historians)’

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(2015: 3). Arguably, this too is a utopian aim. But the exposure of factors within the materiality of history and within and, we suggest, outwith,2 the historian, puts into creative tension past and present lived experience in ways which at the very least serve the ethical obligation to avoid Bank’s concept of bad faith history (Bank 2016: 48). If the idea of the arrangement of the historical record can take us back to the idea of interweaving as a dynamic activity, then looking at that record as a continual process of multiple cultural transmutations – and acknowledging the ‘discontinuity, indeterminacy, the limitations of traditional logic and language, elastic and multidirectional temporality’ which Bank and Kobialka see as ineluctable outcomes of historical enquiry grounded in materiality – becomes a necessity. The exposure of the ‘burdens’ associated with positive failure which Bharucha lists could conceivably be accepted as part of the process. But if interweaving – and the pursuit of a rhizomatic approach to history – remains the desirable goal, it is still vital to pay attention to what is being woven together: in other words, to examine the nature of the threads and/or the nodes. It is here that the second key approach of this collection is foregrounded, in that our attention must also focus on the locals that a rhizomatic approach necessarily links and weaves together. In making this point, we are conscious that we move into more problematic territory, potentially risking the labels of ‘provincial’ (Carlson 2004a) or worse, as Balme puts it in critical terms: In the eyes of most theatre historians, however, theatre remains a resolutely local, even parochial, phenomenon, in which the local perspective enjoys unconditional priority over other research paradigms. (2014: 105) Aware of these dangers, Robinson’s 2007 call to ‘become more provincial’ sought to bring both local and global into focus, arguing that our methods of investigation must always be specific, always local: that global networks always come to ‘touch the earth’, in Nicholas Albrow’s terms, at specific locations and times (1997: 52). Thus, as Sonia Massai argues, citing Anthony D. King: Theorists of the global dimensions of cultural production agree that the formulation of a ‘theory of culture at the level of the international’ can only be undertaken starting from ‘different social, spatial, or cultural locations in the world’. Such locations include neighbourhoods, cities, regions and sub-regions, linguistic, religious, and political ecumenics, along with national identity and traditions, as equally significant determinants of cultural production. (2005: 43) Attempts to look at local lived experiences situated in necessarily partial slices of space and time are of course complicated – to varying degrees across the essays included in this volume – by temporal distance, by the difficulty of the twentyfirst-century historian accessing the mentalités of the long-gone communities for whom the theatre or performance under examination was entirely familiar. But that difficulty is itself, we would argue, indicative of the need for (extending Bank and Kobialka) an historiography derived from the locally specific historical subject which foregrounds the complexity of difference from within a materially different perspective. It is this principle that has guided us in our search for contributors to

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this volume, and in the questions that we have asked of their work. How might lived experience within the physical location of historical enquiry, within its specific material opportunities and constraints, and perhaps most importantly working from within the cognitive understanding derived from an inherited mentalité shaped by that physical environment, materially affect the historiographic choices which are made? If the historian is accustomed to standing/sitting/walking within a different place, an/other local, what is the effect of being an ‘insider’ rather than an ‘outsider’? Given that as historians we all look back at the past, even our own pasts, as outsiders, is that an enquiry hopelessly muddied by the multiple factors which shape perception and interpretive capacity? Or is the ‘matter’ of materiality and the extent to which it ‘matters’ more complex than that? Interweaving multiple, international theatre histories, we suggest, needs greater attention to the multiple materialities simultaneously incorporated into the process. Introducing ‘materialities’ as a key term in cultural geography, the Scottish geographer Hayden Lorimer draws our attention to ‘things that are multiple’. It is a term ‘suggestive of emerging theories about how we should understand the very existence of stuff [our emphasis] and our diverse experiences of, or encounters with it’ (2013: 60). It is ‘concerned with complex spatial relations and with the quality or consistency of matter, and its elements potentially in different states’ (60). But in describing ‘the nature of the lived world’ there are greater ethical responsibilities: Among the broad community of human geography, a vocabulary of ‘materiality’ also has been used as a determining measure of research with real-world application or significance, based upon a principled model of critical academic engagement. As a fullest expression of political and social commitment, the materialising of an abstract idea is its real observable instantiation in a more just society. (60) What is now established as the ‘new materialism’ emerged in the second half of the 1990s most prominently, and independently, in the work of the Mexican-American artist and philosopher Manuel DeLanda and the Italian-Australian feminist theorist and philosopher Rosi Braidotti (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 93). In what in 2012 was promoted as the first published monograph on new materialism, the authors Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin explain: The term proposes a cultural theory that radically rethinks the dualisms so central to our (post)-modern theory and always starts its analysis from how these oppositions (between nature and culture, matter and mind, the human and the inhuman) are produced in action itself. It thus has a profound interest in the morphology of change and gives special attention to matter (materiality, processes of materialization) as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought. (39) A new tradition has emerged through a process of rereadings of old or even abandoned texts giving a new orientation to the canonized past, ‘simultaneously giving us a past, a present, a future’. In DeLanda’s work, building on Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological,

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biological or social history’. His non-linear ‘bottom-up’, ‘philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy’ treats each new emergence in each of the parallel worlds as ‘mere accumulations of different types of materials, accumulations in which each successive layer does not form a new world closed in on itself but, on the contrary, results in coexistences and interactions of different kinds’ (DeLanda 2000: 18). Taking the long view of human cultural practice within a dynamic mass of physical systems offers the possibility of an alternative perspective on the dualisms within which we all tend to construct our ideological and aesthetic positions, including that of postcolonial discourse. In 2004, David Kerr, writing with Stephen Chifunyise on theatre and performance in a land mass termed ‘Southern Africa’, pointed out that so-called ‘indigenous’ performing arts are many thousands of years old. Thus, terms such as indigenous and pre-colonial are ludicrously inadequate ranging from Paleolithic times to the late nineteenth century. The category pre-colonial gives the colonial incursion into southern Africa a centrality, which is probably disproportionate to its actual impact. (2004: 265) This is not to suggest that the converging and diverging elements of origin – the historic bifurcations as DeLanda puts it – of twentieth-century and twenty-firstcentury injustices and inequalities should be ignored in the arranging of the record or that they do not profoundly shape the point of view of the historian. But an interweaving process which enlarges the scope of the local within the impossibly multiple choices available to an attempt to be internationally inclusive can perhaps foreground coexistences, interactions and synergies, while always acknowledging the environmental circumstances which determine specific differences. Thus, in agreeing to write for us, each contributor becomes part of the rhizomatic structure of connections of theatre history, and we are consciously inviting them to enter into dialogue both with us as editors and with other contributors, not least in the conversation that we reproduce in our final section on the challenges in the field of theatre history today. Working with the collaborators we have commissioned, we have paired each historiographic project within thematic categories designed to elicit the distinctive features of each writer’s ‘local’ while also drawing attention to theatre and performance practices or cultural objectives which might reveal unexpected parallels across time and space. Those conversations are, of course, reproduced here in English, even though the majority of our contributors do not write in English as their first language. The overwhelming dominance of English-language publication means that the understanding of the historical subject can be very easily lost in translation; more important still, as the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o has trenchantly pointed out as he now writes in Gikuyu rather than English, language plays an important role in hierarchies and systems of oppression (2013: unpaginated). This is a topic which Rashna Darius Nicholson has explored extensively within her work on the Parsi theatre of nineteenth-century India and that is the focus of her essay here, in which she argues that it is only by drawing attention to linguistic heterogeneity, to

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the overlooked disjunctures, discrepancies, failures and anomalies of language that we can begin to write more global theatre histories. Indeed, the debate between Fischer-Lichte and Bharucha on the meaning and syntactical function of the single word ‘interweaving’ in German and English could be replicated many times over within different language communities. In his 2007 monograph African Theatre and Performances, Osita Okagbue begins with the fact that most African cultures and languages do not have specific words for theatre or drama, and then sets about trying to differentiate between verb-noun expressions of performance practices in languages such as Hausa and Igbo that are spoken by millions in a broad band of West African countries (2007: 1–2). Thus, we recognize that the ability to manoeuvre linguistically between different nuances of meaning, to think in two different cultural modes, offers a particularly distinctive, but nonetheless slippery means of access to cultural understanding. It also reinforces the complexity of the larger historiographic challenge to our collective task of making history out of the lived experience of the past. It is notable that many of the texts that we have introduced here are collections of essays, like this one, and perhaps this is not a coincidence: it may be that only collections of essays – written by multiple authorial hands – are able to begin to provide the kind of multiple perspectives and starting points that we seek to introduce to our readers. As Steve Tillis writes, ‘the uniqueness of regional and local histories is of crucial importance to the world theatre historian’ (2012: 381): we have therefore invited our contributors to reflect on aspects of theatre history which mobilize a detailed and embedded knowledge of the local and regional, while also highlighting questions of historiographic approach and method that are of interest and relevance beyond the particular geographical or temporal contexts from which they emerge. What has become immediately obvious is the extent to which each arrangement of the record challenges any reliance on notions of fixed national identities or territorial boundaries. Waves of invasion, examples of competing military and political interests, the imposition of unfamiliar cultures are absorbed and remade in patterns of syncretism. What we mean by pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial cannot be confined to specific eras or geographical locations. In recognition of this combination of local difference and historiographic patterning, the sixteen essays which form the core of this volume have been thematically paired. Through this organizing strategy, we hope to encourage readers not just to focus on one topic, one time period or one geography, but rather to read the essays productively alongside and against one another while remaining open to other possible links. Indeed, while we began the preliminary stages of the development of this project with the selection of clearly differentiated themes and topics, it rapidly became clear that preoccupations, perspectives and modes of working overlapped, creating unexpected synergies even when the locations and foci of research were ostensibly very different. Even as we have tried to foreground cultural difference, commonalities of past human experience and understanding of the societal function of theatre and performance have also been revealed. The first pairing brings together the work of Rosemarie K. Bank and Maryrose Casey, in two essays that address the theme of ‘Seeing differently through time and

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space’. Both essays examine the impact of colonial appropriation on ways of seeing: Bank on the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the geographical area of what is now Mexico and the southern states of America in her essay ‘A-foot in Time: Temporality in the Space of a Moment in Theatre History’; Casey within the context of the strengthening grip of white British settlement on the newly named continent of Australia in the nineteenth century in ‘Nuwhju and the Archive: Recuperating the History of Aboriginal Australian Performance Practice’. As Bank probes the different historiographical positions underlying definitions of Amerindians that colour perceptions of performance practices concerning what ‘American’ means and has meant, her observation that ‘cultures don’t see and don’t play the human in the same way at different times and spaces’ is foundational for our collective historiographic enquiries. Casey’s examination of the documented observations of Aboriginal performance practice by white settlers and amateur ethnographers in what is now Queensland similarly works to shift the established frames and premises of European cultural domination through which Indigenous performances have been viewed and subsequently erased. Paired together under the theme of ‘Challenging Dominant Histories’, the essay written collaboratively by Milena Grass Kleiner, Mariana Hausdorf Andrade and Nancy Nicholls on ‘Theatre History vs Theatre Canon: The Chilean Case’ and Laura Peja’s essay ‘When Napoleon went to the Theatre: A Closer Examination of Stories and the History of the Milanese Patriotic Scene’ speak from within very different contexts, but both draw our attention to the way that ideologically oriented points of view can be shown to be instrumental in creating and sustaining ‘conventional’ theatre histories and understandings across time. Both essays highlight repeated instances of political intervention through the perceived efficacy of theatre to achieve culturally hegemonic goals – a phenomenon which threads through all of our essays where moments of significant change or reimposition of power relations are integral to the discussion. In the paired essays addressing the theme of ‘Politics, Precursors and Erasure’, both Dorota Sosnowska and Ngozi Udengwu are engaged in a process of recuperating and reframing past theatre histories which are located almost simultaneously within post-1945 contexts of national turmoil: in Sosnowska’s newly communist Poland and in Udengwu’s Nigeria struggling to free itself from British colonial rule. Udengwu’s ‘“The First Actress Party”: Adunni Oluwole and the First Guerrilla Theatre in Nigeria’ foregrounds the forgotten relevance of a pioneering female performer to established and male-dominated narratives of the origins of a form of activist street theatre. Sosnowska’s ‘How to Make Political Theatre? Polish Socialist Realism as a Historiographical Problem’ scrutinizes the persistent and unexamined claims about the only successful socialist realist spectacle. By returning to the material specifics of the surrounding sociopolitical circumstances and ‘forensically’ rereading the intended political rhetoric of the remaining visual and written documentary traces, Sosnowska argues for the reintroduction of ‘history’ into what has become an ahistoricized, free-floating, non-event. For Udengwu, the task of recuperation can only be achieved through oral history, fragmentary and at times anonymized testimony assessed alongside a now unverifiable ‘master’ narrative.

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Our next two sets of essays focus explicitly on space and place, moving from the macro-perspective of theatrical landscapes towards the exploration of individual historical sites of performance. Under the shared title of ‘Mapping Landscapes of Theatre’, Katharina Wessely’s essay ‘Between Back Province and Metropolis: Actor Autobiographies as Sources to Trace Cultural Mobility’ and ‘Mapping London’s Amateur Theatre Histories’ by David Coates both explore different ways of utilizing mapping to explore social and topographical formations of theatre within roughly the same nineteenth-century time period. Drawing on the concept of the ‘mental map’, Wessely traces the routes of professional development through individual recollections of actors journeying within the German ‘cultural sphere’ of the German empire and Austro-Hungarian monarchy, while Coates deploys the capabilities of spatial history via map visualizations that evidence the extent of the concentration and dissemination of amateur theatre activity in London, calling attention to its almost complete erasure from the historical record. In ‘Place and the Performance Event’, our contributors tighten the focus of their investigations, exploring historiographies that utilize the materiality of the built site of performance in order to understand and explore the spatial and embodied experience of performer and spectator within the very different contexts of late Imperial China and the Italian Renaissance. Xiaohuan Zhao’s essay ‘Of Shrine and Stage: A Study of Huizhou Temple Theatre in Late Imperial China’ examines what the layered-through-time evidential basis of surviving architectural remains can reveal about the communally generated relationship between ritual and performance, while Clelia Falletti draws on insights provided by cognitive neuroscience in seeking to understand the past experience of the place of performance, as through discussion of the performance of Eutichia that took place in Urbino in 1513, she juxtaposes the ‘invention’ of theatre and especially of perspective scenic designs with a change in mentality that produced this new way of perceiving the world. The site-based work of Zhao and Falletti introduces a concern with material evidence that is pursued by our next contributors, whose work foregrounds the cumulative diversity of material and embodied evidence, and highlights the ways in which an understanding of changing local and temporal contexts can shape particular responses and engagement with that evidence within theatre history. Under the theme of ‘Material Evidence and the Archive’, Esther Lee’s ‘Historiography of Yellowface: Stage Makeup, Materiality and Technology’ focuses on the troubling history of the convention of yellowface make-up which alters the face of a non-Asian actor to look phenotypically ‘Asian’. Ruthie Abeliovich’s essay ‘Archived Voices: Attempting to Listen to the Theatrical Past’ reflects on the opportunities and challenges afforded by a 1952-released radio recording of a 1928 theatrical production of the biblical play Yaakov and Rachel, produced by an amateur company of third-wave European Jewish immigrants to Palestine. In both these essays, our contributors show that the act of paying attention to the ‘stuff ’ of particular kinds of materiality has the potential to enable new historiographic approaches and understandings of changing temporal contexts. The felt need for understanding the local contexts – temporally and geog­ raphically – of performance histories resonates across the essays contributed by

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Rashna Darius Nicholson in ‘What’s in a Name?: The Performance of Language in the Invention of Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Theatre History’, and by Hyunshik Ju in ‘Korean Masked Dance Drama and a Historiography of Emotions’, gathered together under the heading ‘The Imperatives of Local Difference’. Nicholson traces the impact on nineteenth-century Parsi theatre – its making and its history – of the rapid and violent process of the codification of Parsi Gujarati, through its Sanskritization in the British colonial period in India. Ju, arguing for a locally inflected and culturally differentiated understanding of emotional response to an ancient dance drama form, is alert to the difficulty of capturing in words – and in words written in English, rather than the Korean language – the essence of those emotions, particularly as their meanings and effects shift through time. Nicholson, extrapolating from what happened linguistically in British colonial India, shifts to the consequences as revealed in twenty-first-century historiography: difference is effaced through standardization and thus a dominant global norm is imposed. Such questions clearly resonate throughout this volume, in which the majority of our contributors write in their second or third language. Our contributors return to issues of language, terminology and meaning again in the roundtable discussion in the fourth section of this book. Our final two essays in this section, written by Magnus Thor Thorbergsson and Khalid Amine, return us to ‘Rhizomes and Palimpsests: Theatre Histories across Cultures’. Thorbergsson’s ‘Erased Trails: Investigating Icelandic-Canadian Theatre History’, focused on Icelandic immigrant theatre in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, identifies a series of historiographic challenges in arranging the record of practices which he describes as ‘geographically, culturally and linguistically in-between’. Again, the process of mapping historical evidence is utilized to reveal a complex understanding of theatrical and community space, formed through interconnecting networks of immigrant groups, as Thorbergsson argues for a move from linear narratives of development towards new and interwoven multiple structures. In his ‘Decolonizing Theatre History in the Arab World (The Case of the Maghreb)’, Khalid Amine also explores and interrogates multiple points of connection, here between European and Arabic theatre cultures, arguing that the desired provincialization of hitherto dominant Eurocentric scholarship in the interests of Arabic theatre research – a critical focus on the ‘local’, in the terms set out in this introduction – can only be achieved by acknowledging and recovering the irreducible plurality and age-old interweaving between European theatre with other histories and traditions. His questions, namely, ‘What is the task of Arabic performance research in an era of globalization? Is there still a global divide between affluent countries and wretched ones as far as theatre practice is concerned?’ speak directly to our international and ethical priorities. We recognize that our attempt at greater international inclusivity represents no more than pin pricks on the global map of theatre history, and in writing this introduction we are conscious of how much we did not know at the start of this process – and how dependent we as ‘outsider’ editors are on our ‘insider’ informants and the efficacy of our interweaving of theatre histories from around that globe. Throughout the book, we have stressed the importance of materialities and the

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nature of the impact of the physical environment on both the lived experience of the past and the present circumstances of the historian. Despite global communication networks and virtual impressions of instant access made available through constantly renewing technologies, the ‘real’ produces real effects felt in bodies and minds produced by a variety of factors some of which are comparatively recent or transient, others generated over much longer periods of time. DeLanda has encouraged us to think more confidently about the kinds of performance practices which emerge from very fundamental variations in landscape, climate and ecosystems down to the level of the microbial and how these in turn can shape the histories which are made and the means by which they are made. ‘Banal’ materialities like persistent extremes of heat and humidity, damp, mould, flood or the commonplace depredations of large populations of destructive insects, obstruct the use of the tools of what we think of as traditional scholarship, as do the political shifts in borders, societies and economic and institutional structures that affect access to archives and other material remains of performance. The ample resources available to the historians who have led the way in our discipline over the past decades considered in our overview, are still in very short supply or effectively non-existent in other regional or national locals even where the performance culture has been very rich. Some of that variety of circumstances necessarily marks the different approaches and registers adopted by our essayists. That fact, as we intend to show in the work of our diverse group of collaborators, means that the practice of theatre historiography and the discourses developed around it are themselves open to alternative perspectives and objectives which in turn change the way we see and think about what we do. Each of the essays is comparatively short, but we hope that the core historiographic issues will come across clearly. We make no apology, however, for encouraging each historian to give readers a taste of some of the material which illustrates the historical scenarios, personalities, events and locations which have stimulated their research interests. The vividness with which the lived experience of the past is communicated remains an essential attribute in our work.

NOTES 1. This quotation is used by kind permission of the University of Chicago Press. 2. For our purposes, a useful Scottish preposition meaning ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’.

CHAPTER 2

Research Methods and Methodologies CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

THINKING ABOUT METHOD, THINKING ABOUT THINKING In our Introduction, we argued for an approach to theatre history founded on the notion of interweaving as a dynamic rhizomatic activity, and suggested that it is vital to pay attention to what is being woven together – to examine the nature of the threads and the nodes – in making the case for a more expansive approach to the materiality of theatre history. But as theatre historians, we also need to think carefully about how that ‘stuff ’ is described and woven together: here is where questions of method, and methodology, move to the foreground. Using ‘how we look determines what we see’ as a mantra to help us think about the means by which we research theatre history foregrounds the lenses through which we look, how these are constructed, the process through which they change – and thus how the way we look changes. Here, we are engaging with issues of knowledge and knowing: questions of ontology, epistemology, methodology and method. At the outset of this chapter we thus reflect on the former two terms and what they entail before we turn our focus to methods and methodology, because our answers to these questions shape what we look at, how we look and thus how we see. As a starting point, Figure 2.1 provides an overview of the relationship, and emphasizes the importance of engaging with and reflecting on ontological and epistemological knowledge alongside methodology and method. Questions about ontology are questions about what exists – about how we understand the world and how it works. Here, theatre historians face a double bind. As scholars of theatre, we recognize the ontological claim exemplified by Peggy Phelan’s observation that performance always disappears, ‘becomes itself through disappearance’. As historians, we grapple with shifts in ontological understanding of the changing relationship between ‘history’ and ‘truth’. Our temporal moment determines our understanding. In 1977, the Welsh Marxist literary scholar and cultural critic Raymond Williams, recently credited as the godfather of cultural materialism, outlined his concept of

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FIGURE 2.1:  Ontology, epistemology and methodology: a directional dependence. Figure reproduced from Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

‘structures of feeling’, fully aware of ‘the always moving substance of the past’ and the effect of change. Such changes can be defined as changes in structures of feeling. The term is difficult, but ‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’. It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal and systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable), over a range from formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experiences. (132) Williams, writing at a time of radical change driven by increasingly polarized political and economic ideologies, was seeing the ways in which the Marxist thought which had shaped his understanding of the material conditions of his own working-class family life in the Depression-blighted 1930s had now profoundly shifted modes of critical engagement with the cultural products of aesthetic sensibility. As Williams was formulating his tripartite structural model of the dynamic relations between the residual, emergent and dominant strands of cultural influence threading simultaneously through the fabric of society, the discourses which were subsequently collapsed together as poststructuralism – composed of multiplying interdisciplinary strands of philosophy, theology, linguistics, anthropology and psychoanalysis – were challenging fundamental concepts of subjectivity and identity, how meaning is made and then potentially unmade through the play of language, and how knowledge and power can combine together in systems of control and oppression. In the first of our exemplar essays, Rosemarie K. Bank cites Michel Foucault’s direction towards those moments when a number of things break the surface at the same time (1973: x–xiii). They are a cue that something significant in history is happening, what Walter Benjamin means by an ‘origin’, a moment when elements re-code

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and relate anew, re-directing meanings, becoming what they were, but as if born again, with significances they did not have before (1977: 45–6). These moments always come before the places where we see the boundary signs, indeed, those signs tell us the beginning has already begun, that the borders of existing thought and action have already been transgressed. It will be clear that Foucault’s ‘moment’ – which converged with that of Louis Althusser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard and the others of the poststructuralist pantheon thinking and writing at the same time as Williams – was signalling the transgression of borders. In Bank’s case, as in others of our selected essays where spatial imperatives have a determining role in the historical narrative, ‘borders’ have a concrete geopolitical significance. But Bank’s primary objective for her ‘spatial history’ is to apply Foucault’s notion of the episteme – his term for a temporal epoch where a particular set of ideas/discourses and actions predominate – to her understanding of the temporal circumstances which shape historiographical endeavour. Prior to the dominant values of the Enlightenment now destabilized, as Lyotard puts it, through postmodernism’s ‘incredulity toward metanarrative’, there were, Bank argues, other much older intellectual authorities – Aristotle, mediated by Thomas Aquinas – shaping the way ‘cultures think the human’ and thus by extension how ‘they play the human’ and come to the attention of theatre historians. These are ontological questions.

DISCOURSE AND DISCIPLINE Perhaps the biggest question for the theatre historian is about the nature of history itself and what historians think their methods will achieve: in Hay’s words, ‘What’s out there to know?’ and, in epistemological terms, ‘What we can hope to know about it?’. The British historiographers Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow have dubbed ‘devastating’ the effect of the ‘postist phenomena’ of European philosophy on ‘the old modernist “discipline” of history in its professional, academic forms’ (2004: 1). Indeed, they effectively dismiss the nomenclature ‘discipline’ in favour of ‘discourse’ and, they insist, that discourse needs to undergo interrogation both critically and reflexively. For them, the coming of the postmodern has challenged the belief that historians possess ‘certain empirical methods by which they could have objective and demonstrable knowledge of “the past” both in its generalities and in its particulars’ (2, original emphasis): as Hay notes, ‘the empirical cannot be used to adjudicate ontological claims unless one takes as a starting point the (ontological) unity of appearance and reality’ (2004: 263, fn. 3). The past in all its multifarious complexity has vanished. History is what we make, stimulated by our own present interests and imperatives. However, while the injunction to reject the term ‘discipline’ removes the connotation of unbending authority and strictly applied systematic rules, what it should not do is remove the necessity for rigour and respect for a considered apprehension of truthfulness in the way chosen methods and methodological frameworks facilitate engagement with past lives. Laura Peja’s

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essay in this volume, ‘When Napoleon Went to the Theatre’, challenges the way in which a particular narrative of theatre history has become dominant largely because of ideological bias, while fully recognizing as she puts it ‘that no people of no place in no historical period is a monolith, and even less so in complex periods of change’. What underpins her argument is a scrupulous searching out and rereading of documents which when examined clear-eyed tell a markedly different story. The broadening and deepening of theatre scholars’ methodological stimuli has, as Mechele Leon points out in her introduction to In the Age of Enlightenment (Volume 4 of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Theatre series), led to ‘a change in thinking about theatre and performance that shifts it from an accessorized or secondary place in relation to the “background” of politics, culture, ideas and events (what we generally regard as the “real stuff ” of history) to an active and central player that is constitutive of history’ (2017: 2, emphasis in original). If theatre and performance are now to be considered as a social entity ‘in the centre of the historical landscape’ then theatre history’s field of enquiry encompasses – as Leon puts it in relation to her curated volume and as will become obvious here – ‘theatre’s generative and reciprocal roles in political practices, physical environments, material and economic life, and social interactions, as well as its presence in far-flung geographical sites of cultural intervention, political control and social anxiety’ (3). As a result of these shifting epistemologies within the academy, which suggest that there is much more to know about theatre and its networked relationships than what happens in the space of performance – theatre history is now profoundly interdisciplinary in the methodologies by which it seeks to acquire that knowledge. Cultural geography, anthropology, sociology, economics, urban studies, postcolonial studies, law, ethics, theories of memory, identity, race, ethnicity and nationhood – all provide ways of thinking about the phenomenon of performance and when, where and how it happens. And it is important to acknowledge that in seeking to understand theatre’s operation and relationships within these wider social contexts, theatre historians may need to mix together multiple methodological approaches. Clearly, there is the danger of adopting a dilettante approach to disciplinary border crossing, but equally there is no doubt that alternative lenses and hooks to scrutinize and probe new research areas and prise open previously intractable research questions have yielded important new knowledges. What is key here, as we have noted elsewhere, is that we reflect on method and methodology, and articulate our choices: The character of the historian, her or his commitment to epistemic virtues and thus to the ethics of scholarship, becomes more dynamic, more open to reflexivity and scrutiny. Importantly it permits the entry of ‘the self ’ of the historian and ensures that, as [Herman] Paul puts it, ‘epistemic virtues […] are not etched in stone’ (2011: 1); that individual choices can be made and seen to be made. (Cochrane and Robinson 2016: 10) Thus, throughout the essays in this volume, we have encouraged our contributors to reflect on the kinds of knowledges that they draw upon, their methodologies and their methods that shape the particular case studies – from different periods and

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different geographies. Our task in this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to their strategies – but as will become clear, our approach here too is one of interweaving as the essays speak to recurring methodological questions. As political scientist Roland Bleiker suggests, If a puzzle is the main research challenge, then it can be addressed with all means available, independently of their provenance or label. A source may stem from this or that discipline, it may be academically sanctioned or not, expressed in prose or poetic form, it may be language based or visual or musical or take any other shape or form; it is legitimate as long as it helps to illuminate the puzzle in question. (2003: 420) Such an approach suggests a different relationship between method and ontology, moving away from Hay’s clear notion of directional dependence. Nick Robinson and Marcus Schulzke make the case not just for plural methods but also for plural thinking that ‘can and should penetrate to the very heart of individual methods, so challenging the very logics at their heart […] it is possible to reconcile research methods and their underpinnings because of their shared interest in seeing with precision’ (2016: 1000).

ERASURE AND RECOVERY But what is it possible to see? As the work of several of our essayists clearly shows, the dominant narratives of theatre history can be seen to have been aligned with exclusionary power structures. Professional theatre historians like to build up their reputations on claims to new knowledge – the excitement associated with finding out new ‘things’. But more profoundly, much of what is now ‘new’ is more likely to be centred on great swathes of past experience which, rather than simply fading from memory as a natural consequence of the passage of time, have been ‘forgotten’ because systems of remembering have been deemed unnecessary. Thus, Ngozi Udengwu’s work on drawing attention to the story of Adunni Oluwole, a pioneering female performer on both the Nigerian travelling stage and in the wider political sphere, is underpinned by Udengwu’s trenchant remark that ‘it is well known that history is allergic to women’s contributions’. Her project derives in the longer term from the more expansive second-wave feminism of the 1970s – another outcome of the postist phenomenon: based largely on personally collected oral history, her research entailed travel to the sites of Oluwole’s life, tracking down eyewitnesses reluctant to identify themselves and encountering silence within institutional memories of a difficult woman who refused to conform to social expectations. Doggedness in such circumstances would appear to be one of the primary qualities required of the historical researcher. As Udengwu’s essay makes clear, it is only comparatively recently in the Nigerian context that attempts by women within the academy to recover the lives of forgotten women have been accorded adequate recognition. And as Susan Bennett pointed out in her proposal for ‘Decomposing History’ in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History published in 2003, despite the proliferation of revisionist history-making which by

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the end of the twentieth century had led to increased familiarity with the dramatic writing of key female dramatists now considered part of the canon of American and British drama, there are literally hundreds of women active in nineteenth-century theatre who remain virtually unknown (2003: 71) The detailed work which Bennett cites (72) of scholars such as Gwenn Davis and Beverly A. Joyce – compiling a bibliography of American and British women writers from 1660 to 1900 (1992) – and Katherine Kelly’s international anthology of Drama by Women 1880s-1930s (1996) was augmented in 2005 by the checklist of nineteenth-century British women playwrights appended to Katherine Newey’s Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. Newey’s method was to chart the names of hundreds of women and thousands of play titles through a process of cross-checking previously published handlists – notable for the paucity of women’s names – with the results of combing through catalogues, in the case of the British Library available through a combination of online resource and card index (2005: 190). In attempting, as Bennett suggests, to recompose history after a process of decomposition of the body of previously accepted record, the encounter with the sheer quantity of contradictory evidence is capable of significant rebalancing agency. Both in 2005 and more recently in a chapter published in 2016, Newey has reflected on the methodologies which have framed her methods-dictated efforts. In 2005, pointing out that ‘feminist theory has questioned the notion of such a unitary category as “woman”, and post-structural theory has turned its attention to questions of authorship as the central focus of writing history’ (1–2), she admitted to wariness of naïve or essentializing categorization of her hundreds of different women theatre-makers or attempting to show that ‘women’s playwriting was necessarily different in form and content from men’s’ (3, emphasis in original). At the same time, the project of materialist feminism to identify women who had been rendered invisible remained at the centre of her work. In 2016, she took up the ideologically harder task of what historians ‘should’ do while engaging with the lives of women who in their historical moment would not have aligned themselves with, or would have been actively hostile to, the emancipatory rhetoric and activism of first-wave feminism. Methodologically, in the context of a book grappling with the ‘ethical turn’ in theatre studies, her lens for exploring and ‘seeing’ her case-study ‘conservative’ women became that of the feminist philosophers formulating ‘the ethics of care’. As Newey explained: in common with other post-Enlightenment approaches to identity, feminist ethics challenges monolithic views of the self, investigating the ways in which subjectivity is formed through discursive and material practices, proposing interdependence and interrelationship as the foundations for an ethical or moral world view. (90) Philosophically, however, both feminist and care ethics derive from new ways of approaching Aristotelian thinking on virtue: ‘what makes an individual human being innately good or virtuous’, as we explained in 2016. It’s worth pointing out then that each border transgression, each redirection of meaning carries with it the traces of past thought and influence. Each episteme is a construct of old and new but reconfigured in the moment of change. The same can be said of the methods

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historians use. In our Introduction, we refer to gladiatorial methodological battles: the polemic against positivism, scientific method, archaeo-historicism and so on. New materialism is asking us to rethink binary oppositions and ‘the dualisms’ which negate the relational possibilities of coexistence and interactions. The recent scholarship which Bank references in her essay demonstrates how the lenses shaped by postcolonial perspectives have enabled her to see the ways in which Enlightenment thinking ‘forced a system of hierarchizing history’ out of which emerged categories of ‘race’ and thus concepts of racial inferiority which legitimized the nineteenth-century colonial project and ways of thinking and representing the American Indian. Bank’s reading of pre-Enlightenment historiography enables her to look more steadily at the earliest performative encounters between sixteenthcentury Spanish conquistadors and the indigenous peoples they will colonize and subjugate. The ontological questions which postcolonial methodologies address drive the objectives of other essays in our volume: Esther Kim Lee on the way make-up and the transformative cosmetic effects advised in instruction manuals reify the exclusionary hierarchies of cultural difference; Rashna Darius Nicholson on the issue of orthography and the homogenization of South Asian languages; and as the concluding essay in that section of the volume, Khalid Amine on the ‘multiple crossroads and palimpsests’ which centuries of repeated colonial incursions have produced. As we hope we have made clear, research methods – the tools we use and the processes we undertake – are inextricably bound up with methodologies – that is the concepts and value systems directing the methods – which are in turn shaped by the dominant discourses and ontologies that are influential at any particular time. The discussion of approaches that follows, then, does not aim to be a checklist of theatre history methods and there is no neat matching of method to topic – rather, we introduce some different viewpoints as to what can/might be known, and suggest some potential means by which such enquiries might be pursued.

THE MEANS OF ENGAGEMENT Historians have to be able to assemble the evidential basis of what they make from traces of the past which have some kind of accessible materiality. This needs to be readable or observable, or measurable or possibly, as some historians are beginning to think following the affective turn, feel-able. More likely, the methods used add up to a composite of all of these attributes – things that are multiple. We have to be able to engage with the materials of the past and, if that is a given about method, then the larger methodological question concerns the provenance and means of engagement. In our postist epistemic moment, this is anything but simple. The list of resources provided at the end of this volume includes major international museums and archives, but as our contributor essays demonstrate, the absence or paucity of available documents or artefacts has a material impact on the making of history. The physical erasure of the past either figuratively, or in the most extreme circumstances of oppression, literally, means that few tangible traces survived or were considered worth preserving. The nineteenth-century Australian colonial context

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within which Maryrose Casey has directed her research functioned, and arguably continues to function, to override Indigenous performance practices with imported models of theatre which took little account of environmental specificities. Here, the traces have to be found elsewhere in repositories assembled for other communities of interest emerging from the white settler experience: local newspapers and periodicals, accounts by amateur anthropologists and ethnographers, memoirs of what was encountered and seen. The methodological necessity and complexity of reading against the grain and looking differently at what in the original record was seen by eyes observing difference through lenses constructed from other cultural assumptions, is not only making a new history of Aboriginal performance, but assembling a new archive. The larger and more high status the official repository, the greater the authorizing effect of erasure – an issue that Milena Grass Kleiner, Mariana Hausdorf Andrade and Nancy Nicholls clearly identify in their discussion of the discursive power of canon formation in the Chilean national case, ‘within a cultural field in which the circulation and investigation of past theatre creation and practice are rather scarce and still precarious’. David Coates’s account of trying to locate documentary evidence of amateur theatre activity in London during the nineteenth century is eloquent on the accumulative effect of the sheer randomness of dispersal and acquisition combined with the selectivity of curatorial priorities. Coates’s project underlines the importance of seeing relevance in the fragments of mundane, obscure and unambiguously non-glamorous paper remains especially as his field of excavation covers the terrain of ‘theatre’ in its most internationally recognized and celebrated Western form. Moreover, Coates’s account of the journeys undertaken in search of his evidence also casts light on the dynamics of what we have already highlighted as national and international archival power relations represented in the capacity to control what is perceived to be of value. That the individual memorabilia encapsulated in the ‘acting books’ detailing the activities of nineteenth-century amateur theatre enthusiasts in the suburbs of London should find their way to the uncatalogued boxes and files of the New York Public Library or the Harvard Theatre Collection illustrates the effect of wholesale and largely undifferentiated collecting endeavours – a kind of colonial appropriation in reverse. Where access to resources is dependent on the means of communication between the local periphery and the metropolitan core, especially when the local could be an entire formerly colonized subcontinent, and the metropolis the former capital of empire, the role of the curator/archivist in identifying and cataloguing becomes crucial. As Maggie B. Gale and Ann Featherstone point out, even in the comparatively well-funded and managed US archives, ‘the desire and capacity to collect often outruns’ the physical ability to sort and organize (2011: 25). For the Delhi-based historian Poonam Trivedi, engaged for an essay in 2016 in what for her was the necessary, but ethically sensitive task of exploring the way the widespread amateur theatre leisure pursuits of the occupying British army in nineteenth-century colonial India had infiltrated and influenced the formation of modern Indian theatre, the challenge that significant documentary sources – the personal papers of the expatriate English – are held in British archives, in particular the British

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Library, meant knowing what was in the library before travelling there (2016: 105). Access to postcolonial ways of looking and seeing regularly encounter physical barriers which are the legacy of the colonial past: as Nicholson notes in the dialogue between contributors that caps the ‘Current Challenges’ section of this volume, ‘politics also has a role to play in terms of the construction of the archive, and the kinds of access we have’. The increasing global reach of online catalogues has been a boon, but is dependent on the technical and human energy resources and skills of the providers to initiate, manage and maintain them – and more practically on the actual energy resources required to power both the servers and the means of access. Where recipient resources are limited, the technical capacity to benefit is not necessarily guaranteed. Archives are the product of human labour as well as environmentally unstable circumstances and as such are vulnerable – to the impulse to discard as well as to collect, as Nicholson also notes. In the interests of enabling future histories to be made, historians have been instrumental in encouraging the preservation of records where the day-to-day practical business of making theatre for now makes a responsibility for the past very difficult. In the United States, the American Theatre Archive Project – set up in 2010 under the auspices of the American Society for Theatre Research – has seen a partnership between a theatre historian and dramaturg for Disney Theatre Group, Ken Cerniglia, and a Yale University archivist, Susan Brady, initiate a network of regional advice and support groups for local theatre companies, as well as providing a comprehensive guide, Preserving Theatrical Legacy: An Archiving Manual for Theatre Companies (Brady et al. 2015). In the UK, the Unfinished Histories project, spearheaded in the first instance by Susan Croft (2018) combining the skills of theatre scholar and archivist, focuses on collecting, recording, storing and exhibiting the memorabilia and memories of the Alternative Theatre Movement of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This enterprise of cultural history taps into a temporal moment which saw a convergence of theatre and performance-related activity from the hitherto marginalized: radical political and community-oriented groups, women and gay practitioners, Black British and British Asian groups and the beginnings of opportunity for differently abled actors. In this volume, as examples of historiographic impact, both Casey and Coates have demonstrated the individual possibilities of local victories in rebalancing hierarchies of memory and selection in the creation and maintenance of the record. Casey, in steadily adding to the archives – including the AusStage database – of what’s known about Australian Aboriginal theatre, and Coates stimulating changes in archival collection policy. Despite these efforts to expand the archival record, theatre historians need to be alert to the additional obstacles in terms of collecting, preserving and accessing that have been more recently created by the guardians of the public sphere in the form of the twin legislative controls represented by freedom of information (FOI) and data protection. If, as we have previously noted, theatre’s role at the centre of social, political and economic life is constitutive of history, then documents relating to how this has played out in the past have the capacity to disclose uncomfortable truths. Where theatre has operated close to, and through the patronage of, centres

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of political power as is the case with formally constituted ‘national’ theatres, the tensions become obvious. The Helsinki-based historian Hanna Korsberg has invested significant research endeavour in the archives of the Finnish National Theatre where documents reveal the pragmatic choices made by the theatre’s directorate as they manoeuvred between the conflicting allegiances generated by Soviet and German claims to national dominance during the Second World War (2001). As Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky explain in the introduction to their jointly authored The Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History, the opening up of the archives of Russian theatre after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 offered golden opportunities to explore one of the richest and most turbulent periods of twentiethcentury European theatre history – an opportunity grabbed in the knowledge that the doors could slam shut at any time (Senelick and Ostrovsky 2014: i–xiii). Hopes that comprehensive rights to FOI – embedded in Western European and North American political culture by 2006 and at that time thought to be spreading globally – were going to offer a magic key to truth-seeking historians, have since been subjected to a reality check. Published in 2009, after the UK’s 2005 Act reached the statute books, Freedom of Information: Open Access, Empty Archives? edited by Andrew Flinn and Harriet Jones brought together an international group of researchers whose essays detail the delays and obstructions encountered. Previous constraints such as the UK’s thirty-year rule on the release of designated documents promised certainty despite the long wait. Old established informal relationships with archivists based on mutual trust yielded far better results than the time-consuming obligations imposed on archivists tasked with complying with an FOI request. Most significantly, the fear of ‘empty archives’ was expressed now that institutions and individuals may find ways of communicating and circumventing, which do not produce evidentiary materials open to future interrogation. More recently still, data protection across Europe since 2018, based on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is now predicated on the principles of using personal details ‘fairly, lawfully and transparently’. How those principles are to be interpreted is open to debate as the historian tries to navigate through the messy detritus of lives implicated in the cause and effect of past events. Udengwu’s essay in this volume demonstrates the difficulties of such a navigation, as she describes how her attempt to recover more fully the life of Oluwole was met by a wall of silence erected without benefit of any legal sanction. Requests for anonymity of witness statements and the circumstances within which they were made have had to be honoured despite the concomitant loss of experiential texture to her narrative: in the final analysis the victim is the historical subject herself. Our discussion of archives thus far has been a largely practical one, examining limitations, restrictions and potentials. But no discussion of archives is complete without acknowledging the role of poststructuralist scrutiny in drawing attention to the power exerted by the archive and the priorities and value systems shaping the human agency which determines its composition. Jacques Derrida’s ‘Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne’, translated for English-language readers as ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, captures both the control and the allure it represents. Stripped back to its Greek root arkheion, it was ‘a house, a domicile, an

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address’ (1995: 9) but the address was that of the archons, the magistrates who held political power; those who command. In English ‘fever’ connotes both illness and a febrile state of enthusiasm. For Derrida: We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives. […] It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. (57) There is a recognition here of the hopeful anticipation and sense of privilege generated by archival research: the access permitted by endorsement and appointment, the conditions of security and protection, the feeling that we are literally touching history as we handle the materials once held by the subjects of our enquiry. In ‘The Allure of the Archive’ (2003), Helen Freshwater cites Frank G. Burke’s unselfconscious celebration of the joy of working with these materials […] the excitement of the chase for facts, the vicarious participation in the lives of the great, near great, and no-account, and the recognition that history is a seamless encounter of human beings acting very humanly as they go about expressing and living their hopes, joys, fears, frustrations and sorrows. (735, citing Burke 1997: x) But if arkhe in Derrida’s wordplay is a commencement as well as a commandment, what we can never do is get back to the point of exact origin, although in the moment of ‘anarching’ there is, as the cultural theorist Erin Manning has explained, ‘a repeating of traces of events, the transition not inert, but carrying potential’. Freshwater goes on to make clear that ‘the archival researcher must foreground his or her own role in the process of the production of the past; responsibility to the dead requires a recognition that the reanimation of ghostly traces – in the process of writing the history of the dead – is a potentially violent act’ (738). Whatever traces of the lived past are permitted the light of day in the archive, it’s the job of the historian to read, look and measure, leavening each investigative action with informed speculation and imaginative, empathetic engagement. How then do we read, and what can that reading tell us?

READING MATERIALS There is a powerful argument for documentary research based on direct contact with material traces. In her introduction to A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages, Jody Enders evokes the image of the medievalist sitting in a dusty archive looking at worm-eaten piles of parchment or vellum which clamour for reanimation. On the one hand, they host the vivid remnants of intense dialogues conducted by early readers who marked their codices with elaborately sketched index fingers, flagging key passages much as we do nowadays with highlighter pens. On the other hand, manuscript illuminations and historiated initials in cobalt blue and

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glorious gilt establish another sort of artistic dialogue while, at the margins, a space of contestation and subversion opens up. (2017: 8) In this marginal space of intertextuality, the reader can reflect on the historiographic implications of divergent human mentalities, compliance and dissent which ‘speak’ through fragile textual markers and challenge assumptions about dominant discourses. Enders also raises the issue of language in medieval play texts both where the author is known and where plays are anonymous, noting that all the European vernaculars, in various stages of linguistic evolution, can be found alongside – or inserted within – the authorized lingua franca of Latin, Hebrew and Arabic. ‘Language’, Enders reminds us, ‘is more than an artistic choice: it is a political choice often cast in political terms’ (6). She points to the ambiguities arising from contemporary scholarship’s differing nomenclature for the same language – Old French/Anglo Norman for example – and a tendency even in well-respected modern editions for the presence of more than one translated language to remain unacknowledged. It is well known that the interventions of mostly nineteenth-century editors in plays deemed worthy of the canon were responsible for ‘homogenizing, normalizing and sanitising’. In effacing dialectical markings and correcting what were assumed to be errors in spelling, grammar and syntax, ‘they also effaced key information about playwrights, audiences and readers, creating a collateral damage of misinformation that endures even in modern scholarly editions’ (6–7). The political ramifications inherent in such linguistic choices made in the shifting territorial power relations of more than a thousand years ago might reasonably be thought to require little attention from present-day readers and actors. But Enders’ comments chime perfectly with Rashna Darius Nicholson’s observations about language in her essay for this volume. By paying close and detailed orthographical attention to the highly charged controversies about ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ language generated through the proliferation of Gujarati-language newspapers and journals in nineteenth-century Bombay, Nicholson is able to foreground the way ‘outwardly insignificant choices and seemingly trivial disputes between dots, accents and vowels provide a meta-commentary on inter-group cultural capital, political legitimacy and social inferiority’ and to argue that ‘the privileging of a meta-pragmatics of legibility [in modern scholarship] discounts how visual conventions of writing – the hyphenations, spellings, word breaks and punctuation – inevitably align the historian with contending socio-political schemes’. Both Enders and Nicholson seek to extrapolate from the materials that they read, looking beyond the ‘facts’ of the dots and the illuminations to the conversations and contexts – theatrical, cultural, social, historical – that they mobilize. Such an approach of looking beyond the words on the page to the network of relationships that they evidence is central to Laura Peja’s essay on the foundation of the Milanese Teatro Patriottico (Patriotic Theatre). Here, she rereads the microhistory of the theatre’s foundation evidenced in key primary sources: three letters exchanged between Milanese citizens and the French commander of Lombardy. While acknowledging the plausibility of the information they contain about popular support for the venture, the fact that both Milanese signatories later had close

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relationships with the French government evidences a potentially much more complex set of relationships and motives that trouble the repeated claim that the Teatro Patriottico was essentially a revolutionary instrument. Peja reads against the grain of earlier historians’ interpretations, ‘discarding the myth of objectivity and taking instead responsibility for a situated look that asks questions and interrogates evidence’. This is an approach to gathering and rereading the ‘facts’ of theatre history which is also championed by Jacky Bratton (2003) – and more recently Christopher Balme (2010) – in relation to the theatrical playbill, source of what Bratton describes as the ‘solid, comfortable stuff of theatre history’, ‘normally […] treated as a simple source of extractable factual information’ (2003: 38, 39). Bratton and Balme seek to move beyond what Balme characterizes as material for the ‘hunter and gatherer’ approach (47) to the facts contained within the playbill – dates, times, places, performers, repertoire, ticket prices and so on (albeit with Bratton acknowledging that ‘the most scrupulous historians remind us that the plays advertised did not always happen, and sometimes performances took place that were not listed’ (39)) – and instead mobilize the documentary record in different ways. For Bratton, her reading of the playbill ‘as a whole’ becomes the starting point of an intertheatrical conceptualization of theatre history, in which ‘every element on it is a signifier which, like all signifiers, has a meaning only as part of a system of relationships’ (39–40): of repertoire, performers, theatres, locations, audiences, memories and expectations. Balme’s focus, in contrast, is on the playbill’s work beyond that of detailing the performance event, as ‘probably the most important point of articulation between the institution and its public’ (2010: 52–3). ‘Theatre’, Balme argues, consists of a complex set of institutional as much as artistic practices that need to be brought into historiographic focus. By extracting the playbill from the archive we can begin to gain access to these institutional cultures and practices. (59)

READING LIVES, WRITING LIVES This approach of reading multiple documents in relationship to each other in order to access wider institutional cultures and practices also proves fruitful for Katharina Wessely in her essay, ‘Between Back Province and Metropolis: Actor Autobiographies as Sources to Trace Cultural Mobility’, which draws on a number of actor autobiographies to explore how actors and actresses portrayed their careers, thereby constructing their individual as well as collective identities. Such an approach allows Wessely to move beyond the inevitable questions as to the evidentiary credibility and value of individual stories – written in hindsight at the end of careers, and as she notes, often reproducing familiar, almost literary, tropes in order to establish a sense of belonging to the authentic group of theatre professionals, particularly with reference to the outset of their careers, ‘such as descriptions of periods of hardship overcome by the will to perform on stage, or of the enthusiastic but non-lettered impresario’ – to highlight the importance of mobility in the history of the Germanspeaking theatre.

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Richard Schoch draws attention to the present-day scholarly interest in autobiography and biography which has seen the anecdote as the staple of the genre ‘redeemed as a valid form of historical discourse’, and acknowledges that biographies have given a voice and thus a place in theatre history to marginalized figures (2016: 15). That said, and despite the fact that what has become a highly influential means of transmitting historical knowledge to popular as well as academic readers can be seen to emerge clearly in the British context during the eighteenth century, Schoch contends that they are not germane to his attempt to understand the development of theatre history. Rather ‘they are primarily expressions of the social construction of subjectivity and the commodification of public personalities; only secondarily are they instances of historiographical debate’ (15). Schoch’s consciously selective reading prioritizes other historiographic objectives, but for feminist scholars for whom the relationship between autobiography, social construction and subjectivity has been central to the foregrounding of women’s life experience, and for those attempting to understand social and economic formations, the characteristics identified by Schoch are precisely the reason why attention should be paid despite the problems the various models of ‘life writing’ present. Thomas Postlewait’s 1989 chapter on ‘Autobiography and Theatre History’ remains a wide-ranging and valuable introduction to the key questions which arise from the sheer ‘historical abundance’ provided by the thousands of ‘self-reports’ which he calculates have proliferated in the sphere of individual memoirs (252). There is the allure of ‘gossip’ – offering access to a private space of knowledge – as was disarmingly promised in the 1870s by the Victorian actress Fanny Kemble for her multivolume autobiographical series, and there is also the undoubted readability associated with the anecdote-laden narrative form. Postlewait concedes that the historian can identify factual errors and unreliable anecdotes, yet after we have corrected specific data, we are still faced with the formal aspects of autobiographies – their style, voice, plotting, characterization, typology, themes and genre – that define them, at least in part, as literary texts. No neat distinction between history and fiction is possible because autobiography and the novel have developed as sibling forms. (253) Yet, despite these provisos, as Leigh Woods points out in his discussion of the various biographical approaches to the charismatic but turbulent career of the earlynineteenth-century English actor Edmund Kean, the juicy stories about his life – the gossip – ‘seems oddly to appropriate a greater authority to itself once it is written down. And the more often it is written, the greater the weight of the authority it assumes’ (1989: 235). The strategy Postlewait recommends is the one adopted by Wessely, reading patterns across autobiographies in relation to the historical moment of their production and what can and cannot then be said: In the final analysis, historical and fictional discourses cannot be separated from their institutional, social and cultural functions. Therefore, just as we investigate the conditions, aims, and values of theatre, we need to ask, period by

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period, what are the generic, social, financial, vocational and moral functions of autobiographies. (257–8) Recently, David Roberts, who has authored the scholarly lives both of the English Restoration actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton (2010) and of the Irish migrant Restoration playwright George Farquhar (2018), has acknowledged a ‘healthy academic suspicion of biography as both symptom and engine of myth’ (2016: 33). Responding to an opportunity to consider the ethical dimensions of his work and directly referencing the philosophical preoccupation with the Other in the writing of Emmanuel Levinas – a ‘Levinasian call to represent the other as a being rather than a concept’ – Roberts develops a Derridean ‘circumfessional’ approach (34) that situates the biographical subject as part of a network of friends, associates and professional colleagues. Here, too, the focus moves beyond the individual performer to studying his subject ‘as components of the public and private identities of their immediate peers’ (40). But above all, Roberts notes that ‘biography might best be described […] as a reconciliation of sympathy and judgment, of author and subject: an embrace of the Other that endeavours to keep it firmly at arm’s length; an explicit writing of the Other that cannot help being a representation of Self ’ (34). Thus, the reader of biography, just as the reader of autobiography, needs to be alert to the motivations, contexts and understandings of the writer, as much as to the ‘facts’ that make up the narrated life that she or he records. In parallel with this finding of new ways to legitimize and enrich the historiographic value of biography, the value of anecdote has also been looked at anew, and is increasingly defended, as Postlewait noted in 2003, ‘often in tandem with critiques of positivism and the concept of historical objectivity (2003: 50). Bratton mixes memoir, anecdote and biography together in her consideration of sources that she suggests have too often been ‘trawled for “factual” information that can be extracted’ rather than for ‘what their writers or their subjects seem to stress, or what their contemporary readership might have understood of theatre history from them’. Citing Jonathan Bate, Bratton argues that ‘the point of the anecdote is not its factual, but its representative truth’ (Bate 1998: 5), rather, anecdotes are ‘chiefly important as a control of social resources through the making of myth and legend’ (Bratton 2003: 103): The recounting of anecdotes, which are the building blocks of theatrical memoir and autobiography, may be understood not simply as the vehicle of more or less dubious or provable facts, but as a process of identity-formation that extends beyond individuals to the group or community to which they belong. (102) The questions to be asked of such material, then, are not really ones of ‘fact and fiction – objectivity and subjectivity – in the handling of evidence’ (Postlewait 2003: 65). Rather, the reader should pay attention to the stories that are told and retold, exploring the ways in which they gain traction and value in the making of theatre histories, always alert to the attraction and hold of particular kinds of ‘gossip’ for the adventurer in the archives. Such questions take us back to where we began. What is included in and what is excluded from the archives and the documents that

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they contain? How are those choices made, and why? And how should we read both the absences and the presences? As the essay written by Grass Kleiner, Hausdorf Andrade and Nicholls reminds us, we need to be aware of what is lost, or excluded, as much as what remains. And with what remains, we should read not just for ‘facts’ but for the narratives, histories and practices that those facts – and the ways in which they have been recorded, utilized, woven together both at the moment of their initial creation and by previous theatre historians – mobilize and call upon, alert to our own position and present moment as historians too.

WAYS OF LOOKING Where the focus of the previous section has been on the act of reading – of texts, documents and languages – in this section we turn to the linked but different practices of looking and seeing. While acknowledging the limitations and problematics of publishing reproductions of images, most recently highlighted by Joanne Tompkins (2017: xv) and Jan Clarke (2017: 552–3), here we begin by discussing an image which the reader will find in Xiaohuan Zhao’s essay in this volume as Figure 3.5.2.3, which reproduces a photograph taken during Zhao’s field research into the performance history of Huizhou Temple Theatre in late Imperial China. Although a two-dimensional photographic record of an investigation conducted within the physical space of the temple, here reproduced in black and white, Zhao’s image of the Yuqing Tang stage invites the act of close reading, or rather close looking. Even without initial knowledge of the building’s history, we can identify the palimpsestic features: the weathered wooden stage frame with its extraordinarily elaborate carving, the gilded characters on the column hangings, the doors opening onto the compartmentalized stage, the contrasting colours of old and new wood, beautiful and possibly new hanging lanterns, the screened viewing place on the opera-viewing tower and the ladder propped against the base – and to the left of the image, what looks like a recent attempt to replicate the impression of a carved roof support with a painted facsimile. This is both a carefully preserved monument and a living, used, sacred and theatre space. Faced with an image that offers a number of clues and questions, but no answers, the researcher must look elsewhere to thicken out this picture. Zhao’s essay informs us of both the complex and layered archaeology of the heritage represented here – that this is an image of a locally authorized 2011 renovation of a nineteenth-century rebuild of a burned-down seventeenth-century original and that other inscribed documents, some very ancient such as millennia-old oracle bone inscriptions or much later nineteenth-century stele, constitute artefacts from which the researcher can extrapolate augmented, supplemental knowledge of ritual performance practices and community investment. Zhao goes on to detail additional seventeenth-century written sources, ranging from bureaucratic statistical data and socioeconomic surveys to eyewitness accounts of attendance at temple festivals. The history which he then makes weaves together these fragments, positing a continuum of experience from past to present – but his physical encounter with built remains, and the image that his photograph makes available for readers and future researchers, opens up a particular set of questions.

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For just as the image of the Yuqing Tang stage reveals a palimpsestic layering of original, restored and renovated architectures and performance practices, so – we suggest here – researchers need to be aware of a similar historical and cultural layering of visual practices. This is a point made repeatedly by both theatre historians and theorists of visuality: Jim Davis, writing about visual representations of theatre spectators between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, cites Jonathan Crary’s assertion that ‘vision and its effects are always inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions and procedures of subjectification’ (Davis 2017: 518; Crary 1992: 5), while David Wiles, writing about the evidentiary value of historic images of theatre spaces, reminds his reader ‘that seeing is historically conditioned and that different cognitive styles, different ways of seeing, characterise various periods’ (2010: 235). Clelia Falletti’s essay in this volume, which we have paired with Zhao’s under the heading of ‘Place and the Performance Event’, identifies a moment when the influence of such changing styles can be clearly seen – another example of ‘a number of things break[ing] the surface at the same time’. Drawing on the frames of cognitive neuroscience in order to examine the moment of the Italian Renaissance as it is understood as the affirmation of a new vision of the human being and the world, Falletti brings together the rise of the ‘mental construct’ of perspective vision in everyday life through the work of painters and woodcarvers and the ‘invention’ of the theatre, particularly of the perspective scene. She argues: ‘Perspective vision meant putting the human being at the centre, giving him dignity, measuring and organizing every reality according to the human body. All of this resulted from a change in the way the world was conceived; hence the way we began to perceive the “real” world around us also changed’. Falletti thus draws attention to the position of the human spectator/perceiver/ observer – as, in a very different way, does the photographic image of the Yuqing Tang stage. Rather than looking straight on to the acting space, Zhao’s viewpoint in the image is clearly a provisional and limited one, positioned as it is to one side of the stage and taken from one of the opera-watching towers that Zhao describes as originally reserved for women and children. The image thus draws attention to the stratification of the practice and experience of spectatorship in such theatres, as well as to the choices which this individual historian has made about the evidence he wishes to capture and how best to do so. Such provisionality is in sharp contrast to the certainties associated with the regularly reproduced images of historic stages that will be more familiar to Western readers. In his detailed discussion of the largely unquestioned pictorial representations of the theatres known to Shakespeare, Wiles has to remind us that the celebrated image of the Swan Theatre, drawn by the Dutch tourist Johannes de Witt, ‘which would define how the twentieth century visualised Elizabethan theatre’, does not represent an actual viewpoint, but instead responds ‘to an impossible perspectival challenge by rendering three superimposed layers independently’ (2010: 223, 225): ‘The circular Elizabethan playhouse contained no privileged point of vision from which the whole could be seen and known’ (229). We are again reminded that choices about how we see determine what we can

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see – and that as a result, method can silently imply ontology. ‘What is observed is never entirely freed from the subjectivity of looking’ (Davis 2017: 533). In the context of a volume that has sought to introduce a wide range of geographical, as well as historical, perspectives, it is also important to note that the lenses through which we look are shaped not just in terms of historical cultures but in terms of geographic and national ones. Just as Milena Grass Kleiner suggests in the conversation between contributors reproduced later in this book that ‘what global means to you, what global means in Chile, it’s not the same’, so ways of seeing, and of interpretation, will differ across geographies and cultures. If, as Maike Bleeker describes in Visuality in the Theatre, ‘growing awareness of the inevitable entanglement of vision with what is called visuality – the distinct historical manifestation of visual experience – draws attention to the necessity of locating vision within a specific historical and cultural situation’, theatre historians need to be alert to the historical, social and geographical cultures in which images and objects have been produced. Those contexts may sometimes be troubling ones, as with Esther Kim Lee’s discussion of what she terms the archetype of ‘yellowface’. Lee reads the images of stage Chinamen reproduced in James Young’s make-up book of 1905 alongside textual categorization of colour, reports of stage performances and repertoire, and a shifting history of perception that distinguished a modernized and cosmopolitan Japan from the backward Chinaman, based on the white American’s view of Chinese labourers. We have written elsewhere of the difficulties – and ethical responsibilities – of mediating between different value systems, between what philosopher Jorn Rüsen identifies as ‘the normative horizon and value system of the past and the present’ (Cochrane and Robinson 2016: 14, citing Rüsen 2004: 203). Lee’s careful delineation of yellowface as archetype enables her to draw out these shifts and relationships, highlighting parallels with as well as differences from current ways of seeing. How then to proceed in relation to images and objects from the past? Christopher Balme’s foundational essay, ‘Interpreting the Pictorial Record: Theatre Iconography and the Referential Dilemma’, draws on the work of Italian theatre historian Cesare Molinari, who ‘elaborates three epistemological levels of iconographical documentation relevant to theatre history: direct, indirect, and documents representing an ideal concept of the theatre’ (1997: 192). The first category evidences a ‘direct and immediate relationship’ between the document and a specific theatrical event (192) – albeit that this is a claim that is always limited, even in relation to the films of productions that can capture all or some of what is seen on stage, but never the ‘eventness’ of the live theatre experience. The second category is of documents ‘whose object is not exactly the theatre, but in which one can catch a glimpse of the contemporary theatrical practice’, while the third refers to illustrated books, and perhaps the frontispieces that Clarke considers in her recent essay on the use of iconography in seventeenth-century French theatre history (Balme 1997: 192, citing Molinari 1991: 3, 4). While acknowledging the nuance provided by such distinctions, Balme argues for a move from a focus on image and object ‘purely in terms of its documentariness, i.e. its function in reconstructing the theatrical past’ (192, original emphasis), and towards a focus on the image itself as an object of research, asking what discursive practices it connects to and evidences. For it is important to remember that – unlike

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Zhao’s photograph, taken during a research field trip – such images were rarely made with documentation in mind. As Clarke notes, quoting Robert Erenstein: ‘visual artists produce work for their contemporaries, not for future theatre historians’ (2017: 552; Erenstein 1997: 186). Of any image, we might reasonably ask, then: who made the image, and for what purpose? What does and can it represent? How – and in what context – is it now being reproduced? What are the contexts of visuality, in Bleeker’s terms, in which we now see it? The picture of Adunni Oluwole inserted into Udengwu’s essay as Figure 3.3.2.1 is an interesting example of an attempt to visually reimagine and thus re-place a forgotten woman within theatre history while simultaneously providing some documentary status. The dates and nature of Oluwole’s theatrical performances in 1950s’ Nigeria mean that there is little surviving visual record. The one existing photograph is a grainy image included in a newspaper obituary, which has then been reproduced across websites and articles treating her political career (see, for example, http:​//wom​an.ng​/2017​/07/b​rief-​histo​ry-ad​unni-​oluwo​le-hu​man-r​ights​-activist-​ fough​t-wor​kers-​gener​al-st​rike-​1945/​), but the original publisher of the obituary has disappeared. The specially commissioned picture for the essay reproduces both the elements of the photographic image, and the prominent features of facial tribal marks reported by eyewitnesses. For Udengwu, this picture represents both the ‘first actress’ of her title and an act of reclamation of women’s stories. However, as Oluwole recedes further into the past, entering myth as well as history, her image, like so many celebrated portraits from previous eras, may well acquire a continuing resonance. We make its provenance clear along with its provisionality and purpose, mindful of Clarke’s insistence that ‘we must still imperatively remain aware of the various contexts within which theatrical images of all types were made, as well as of the objectives of their creators and the prevailing representational modes (and their implications)’ (2017: 552); we would add that we also need to be aware of the contexts – and the prevailing representational modes – in which they are being seen. In the twenty-first-century moment, this is perhaps particularly important for those images and models that we encounter via digital means, either on the internet or via databases of digitized artefacts. Clarke points out that images are all too frequently ‘googled’ ‘without being subject to the necessary scrutiny, particularly regarding the teasing out of the component elements and the evaluation of their relative significance or specific historical context’ (552), while Wiles notes the problematics of computer models of theatrical spaces, such as those discussed briefly in this volume by Jo Robinson’s essay, arguing that ‘historians need to see differently, not have seeing done on their behalf. Modern technologies have shaped ways of seeing, so their use by historians is perforce problematic’ (2010: 220). Both Clarke and Wiles raise concerns about the apparent transparency of such digital imagery and experiences, reminding the reader to retain a critical eye, but it is important to note that elsewhere an argument can and is being made for digital approaches as themselves enabling a new and critical perspective on existing theatrical histories and facts. Debra Caplan suggests that digital data visualization can be ‘an exciting new addition to our methodologies’ (2016: 572), offering ‘a way to reanimate the complex web of personal relationships, economic transactions, and social

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interactions that once came together to create a performance event’ (2016: 560) and also to bring otherwise hidden figures out of the obscurity of theatre history. Robinson’s essay considers one data collection and visualization project centred on the English town of Nottingham in the nineteenth century, but we note here the rapidly increasing global and chronological reach of digital databases of theatre history. In a recent essay, ‘Data Models for Theatre Research: People, Places, and Performance’ (2016), Jonathan Bollen lists twelve example research projects from around the globe, ranging from the Abbey Theatre Archives Performance Database in Ireland (http​s://w​ww.ab​beyth​eatre​.ie/a​bout/​archi​ve/) to Theatre Aotearoa in New Zealand (http://tadb.otago.ac.nz). Readers will find details of selected projects, including some of those listed by Bollen, in the annotated resources section of this volume; like Robinson’s Nottingham project, many of them offer the possibility of connecting, displaying and interrogating their data sets through the interface of a map, and it is this way of seeing that we turn to here. In ‘Re-assessing Obscurity: The Case for Big Data in Theatre History’, Caplan notes recent debates about the role of micro-historical methods in theatre history, contrasting these with the ‘historical macroscope’ that big data offers to the researcher (2016: 572). Whether online or offline, the map offers one potential macroscopic approach, enabling the tying together of different stories, events, places and people in order to illuminate the collaborative and often mobile practices of performance. Three essays in this volume about very different places and subject matter – Katharina Wessely’s discussion of actor biographies in the Germanspeaking theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century; Magnus Thor Thorbergsson’s analysis of the development of Icelandic amateur theatre in Canada and territories of the northern United States across an overlapping but slightly later timescale from 1880 to 1951; and David Coates’s exploration of the practices of amateur theatre within and outwith the West End of London during the nineteenth century – all draw, actually or conceptually, on the notion of the map as a way of moving from individual stories to wider explorations of practices, often testing established narratives in doing so. Coates cites Richard White’s argument that mapping ‘reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and […] undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past’ (White 2010); by plotting amateur activity onto the landscape of London, his essay tests our assumptions about the value and practices of amateur performance in a city where the focus of theatre historians has conventionally been on the commercial professional theatre of the West End. In similar ways, Thorbergsson offers a new geography of theatrical mobility – both of actors and of repertoire and practices – across the landscape of Canada and the northern states of America as Icelandic immigrants developed networks of community theatre. Building on Marvin Carlson’s use of the ‘rhizome’, adopted from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Thorbergsson offers us a map that crosses borders and preconceived categories, calling for a ‘resistance towards pre-given structures, teleological linear narratives, and common working analytical tools such as the concepts of national/ethnic, however tempting these may be’, instead ‘examining the details of the routes, flows and points of intersection of the

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network’. A similar resistance can be identified in Wessely’s essay, discussed earlier in this chapter, which introduces the concept of the ‘mental map’, noting that the actors whose autobiographies she considers operate across a landscape occupied by German-language theatres that might bear little relationship to the ordinary cultural and political map of the same space. Wessely thus highlights that useful though the concept of mapping might be, we still need to be clear as to what is being mapped, how and why. Just as we have argued for careful consideration of the evidential value of images and objects, so it is important to understand that maps, too, do different kinds of work. As Dennis Cosgrove writes in Mappings, ‘All mapping involves sets of choices, omissions, uncertainties and intentions – authorship – at once critical to, yet obscured within, its final product, the map itself ’ (1999: 7). Notwithstanding these caveats, all three contributors would argue that maps help us to connect points of historical data in new and revealing ways. In the context of this book, with its emphasis on operating at both the global and the local, mapping helps to interweave wider narratives with local detail, offering one potential answer to what historian Thomas V. Cohen calls ‘the scale question: how to think big and small at once’ (2017: 67). Cohen is writing here about ‘The Macrohistory of Microhistory’; in the following section, we shift our attention from the expansive scale of mapping and big data visualization back to a concern with materiality and ‘stuff ’, the entities of material evidence.

ENTITIES AND ANALYSIS We study the collective, collaborative, cultural practices of theatre and performance as material entities – what Manuel DeLanda, following Deleuze and Guattari, calls ‘assemblages’ where social entities are considered legitimate agents in thinking about human history. The ‘social whole’ whose properties emerge from ‘the interactions between its parts’ (2016: 9) is not solely composed of human beings. Assemblages are always composed of heterogeneous components. ‘To properly apply the concept of assemblage to real cases we need to include, in addition to persons, the material and symbolic artifacts that compose communities and organisations’ (10). This concept – drawn from new materialism and a realist ontology – suggests a methodology and accompanying method that invites us to think about theatre historically in terms of the ‘real’ component parts which make up entities. What new epistemologies might we develop by using this lens to examine physical artefacts, structures of economic enablement and the vital real presence of the audience to reify our historical sense of entities more strongly? The materials within which live performance is embedded change, renew and transform within shifting environmental circumstances. Stone, clay, hair, feathers, paper, wood, metal, glass, cloth, leather, paint – on bodies as well as fabricated settings – oil, wax, gas, electricity and so on form the physical properties through which and within which human performers interact. For example, research on the range of technologies in use in different time periods and cultures increases our knowledge of theatre and performance ‘production’. In her discussion of practical approaches to medieval texts in this volume, Elisabeth Dutton emphasizes that in

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medieval schemes of knowledge, theatre was not a literary art but a mechanical one, an insight generated from significant recent research. Philip Butterworth’s 1998 book Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre takes the arrival in Europe from China in the thirteenth century CE of gunpowder as the stimulus for the medieval use of pyrotechnics – literally fire and flame – to recreate hell-mouths, thunderbolts, boilings and burnings, dragons and devils (vii). As he explains, his sources are drawn from ‘guild, civic and ecclesiastical records; firework writers’ recipes; eyewitness accounts; recipes in Books of Secrets and stage directions in plays’ (xiii). In her chapter for In the Middle Ages, ‘Technologies of Performance’, Katie Normington acknowledges Butterworth’s work as she extends her Europe-wide survey of the multiplicity of effects which contributed to ‘the fundamental visual nature of medieval drama’ (2017: 191) as theatre-makers deployed time-honoured industrial craft skills together with new inventions such as pulleys, counterweights, clocks and mirrors. What is of particular interest historiographically, is that a focus on material components can reveal unexpected parallels and synergies even where cultural practices appear to be radically different. In his research into West African performance, Osita Okagbue emphasizes that African theatre must not be evaluated within Western analytic frames – especially notions of ‘mature’ European literary dramatic traditions. At the same time, his observations on the way indigenous forms are constantly being renewed and revised in response to changing contexts lead him to identify ‘an almost irreverent postmodernist appropriation of alien materials and threats in a process of discursive containment’ (2007: 10). The Ijele masquerade of the Igbo took on the jet bombers, fighters and military personalities prominent during the 1967–70 Nigerian civil war; by 1997, performances were assimilating computers, satellite dishes and communication masts (10). In this volume, Maryrose Casey demonstrates that the failure to recognize Australian Aboriginal performance as centuries-old theatre practice which paralleled and even possibly predated European conventions such as set, script, actors, directors, props and costumes was precisely because colonial observers’ ways of seeing failed to identify them as such. Elsewhere, Rosemarie K. Bank points out that records of Aztec performance practices narrow (emphasis ours) rather than widen the gap between Amerindian festivals and Spanish performance conventions: that it was possible to see in indigenous performance the devices and objectives associated with the Spanish moros y cristianos and autos sacramentales. Alongside a greater investment of research into the visual properties of the whole, has come a stronger focus on the ways in which the structural underpinning of the performance entity is dependent on the collective economies which create and hold together the means of production. The dichotomy set up in Western theatre between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ is of comparatively recent origin, deriving from the emergence in the sixteenth century of what could be considered a theatre industry where workers could expect their labour to be paid out of the profits made from a paying audience who in turn were expected to reward satisfactory levels of artistic skill. Forms of premodern or preindustrial modernity performance practices nevertheless required and continue to require – as Okagbue’s observations of traditional Nigerian practice suggest – systems of community-authorized support or elite patronage. The

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European medieval documentary sources previously referred to largely come from ecclesiastical, civic and guild records which supply detailed accounts of what was paid for, and by whom, and arguably represent the most concrete evidence of performance organization. In this volume, Xiaohuan Zhao’s discussion of lineage-based village temple theatre foregrounds not only similarly high levels of collective investment in sacred–secular celebration, but also the burden of responsibility this imposed. However, for much of the twentieth century, theatre historiography proved reluctant to engage with theatre as a commodity. Within the academy, the exemplary theatre of the avant-garde took priority over mass ‘materialistic’ commercial appeal. An exception was made for analysis of the effects of state subsidy – introduced in principle as a result of the incorporation of theatre into European nationalist cultural capital. Published in 1998 and edited by Hans van Maanen and S. E. Wilmer, Theatre Worlds in Motion: Structures, Politics and Development in the Countries of Western Europe provides substantive comparative information on the theatre systems of seventeen European nations including France, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany. The breakthrough work on the economics of theatre came in 2000 with Tracy C. Davis’s The Economics of the British Stage 1800-1914. As she states in her introduction: Some might argue that developments in repertoire and achievements in standards of artistic presentation – the two themes that dominate theatre historiography – pale in significance alongside the introduction of creature comforts, quests for safety, the creation of effective state apparati of authority, new companies law, and the development of whole new branches of industry – first music hall then cinema – to rival the theatrical stage. I argue for their mutual consideration. If culture’s historians ignore business, they overlook the resources that make or break an artistic choice. (2000: 1) In 2011, Claire Cochrane’s Twentieth Century British Theatre Industry, Art and Empire extended the overview of organizational and institutional structures in order to demonstrate the interdependence of social and economic factors in the creation and maintenance of theatre as cultural practice. During a century when state and local subsidy of artistically ambitious theatre gradually emerged as a reality with concrete and quantifiable effects on institutional innovation and change, it was also necessary historiographically to break down conceptual and ideological boundaries between commerce and altruism in order to examine the quotidian pragmatics of economic exchange. In order to do that, new knowledges – effectively a new materialist epistemology focused on the basic business of theatre – had to be acquired: the limited company constitution, annual reports, rules of governance, building maintenance, investment protocols, the means by which theatre artists sustain their lives, ideals and aspirations (which in turn emphasizes the need for preservation and examination of different classes of documentary records, as highlighted earlier in this chapter). The entities of performance practices delineated in Osita Okagbue’s exploration of West African theatre coincide temporally with Cochrane’s landscape of British

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theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. While the mentalities represented in the African cultural landscape are ostensibly entirely different, the questions asked by the Nigerian researcher within a familiar, lived environment demonstrate exactly the same methodological priorities about the processes of making and analysing the performances: How are the performers trained? How do they prepare for a performance? How do the spectators interact with the performance? What kinds of costumes are worn, and what kind of props are used? Who makes these accessories of performance? What is the nature and use of space? How do the performers bring the diverse but interconnecting elements together? And crucially, how do the spectators assess this assemblage? (2007: 9) Okagbue here highlights that there can be no entities of theatre in any time or place without an audience – and this can be just one individual – watching, listening or otherwise enabled to experience the moment of performance. The audience necessarily completes the entity. In 2012, Susan Bennett – whose Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, first published in 1990, was the first and highly influential book-length study of the phenomenon of audiences – reflected on the ‘knotty problems’ that emerge from attempts to research historical audiences. We need, she suggests, ‘to examine evidence that falls outside – sometimes far outside – the usual range of material. What might seem to be esoteric, minor, or otherwise marginal remnants of the same historical moment can often not only redefine what we imagine constitutes appropriate evidence for our work but pose new and relevant questions’. Theatre history, she adds, ‘needs to pay more attention to theatre geography’ (2012: 19–20). Our volume, of course, does pay attention to theatre geography, with spectators and audiences in different locations and contexts woven into our contributor essays. Khalid Amine describes the call to Moroccan audiences ‘to drift’ spontaneously into the traditional circular public gathering of the al-halqa: there is no specified space for the performance maker (the hlayqi) and neither is there a specified time. This is in marked contrast to the spatially and temporally controlled audiences of modern Western-style building–based theatre – itself a product of the exigencies of commercial exchange. In Nicholson’s essay, we see how the social stratification and exclusions of Bombay Parsi theatre audiences in the late nineteenth century were products of linguistic and cultural identity wars, while Udengwu’s essay highlights a shift in the role of spectators from spontaneous observers of outdoor masquerade performances, throwing casual rewards, to paying audiences for the touring professional concert parties. This shift would cast Adunni Oluwole’s subsequent guerrilla street theatre campaigns into sharp relief.

AUDIENCES AS ENTITIES We began this discussion by incorporating audiences into the concept of the entity – thus appearing to comply with what Helen Freshwater in Theatre & Audience identifies as ‘the common tendency to refer to an audience as “it”, and, by extension,

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to think of this “it” as a single entity, or a collective’ (2009: 5). This ‘risks obscuring the multiple contingencies of subjective response, context and environment which condition an individual’s interpretation of a particular performance event’ (5). Freshwater is drawing here on Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ (2007), an essay that has gathered much recent attention with its challenge to the assumption that the individual audience member sits in her/his seat in a state of ignorant passivity. In the twentieth and now twenty-first century, audiences and the effect theatre has on them matter more than at any other time in history: indeed, Rancière’s primary aim is to foreground the continuing importance of theatre as a means of shaping engaged public discourse. As Cochrane pointed out in her attempt to recuperate the ‘contaminated’ audiences for amateur theatre in Wales in the 1920s and 1930s, never before in the epistemic moment of high modernism had audiences been as variously ‘ente​rtain​ed/da​zzled​/expl​oited​/educ​ated/​enlig​htene​d/ ref​ormed​/chal​lenge​d/inv​ited to interact/participate, and wooed’ (171). It is that history of interventionist effort and preoccupation with political efficacy and cultural value that has driven recent initiatives for more depth and rigour in research and greater understanding of the heterogeneity that makes up the component parts of the assemblage, not least because as DeLanda puts it ‘assemblages can become component parts of larger assemblages’ (2016: 20). Such initiatives include the 2014 special issue of Theatre Journal that focused on opening up ‘new ways of thinking about what “we” do when, as individual spectators or members of audiences-as-collectives, we attend, watch, participate in, or reflect on performance’ (Knowles 2014: xiv). In 2017, the UK/Australian-led ‘International Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts’ (iNARPA) was launched, which aims to ‘critically interrogat[e] emerging methods of audience engagement that have the potential to capture the impact of the audience experience in a rigorous way; minimise positive bias; and shed fresh light on questions of cultural value’ (Walmsley 2017). As historian of the very recently established National Theatre Wales, Kirsty Sedgman has analysed the complex interplay between ideas of national and local identity and belonging by specifically focusing on the audience and ‘how people found value’ in a much contested institutional concept which has an ideological longevity stretching back into the nineteenth century. Sedgman concludes that at its best, ‘audience research is less about understanding experience per se than it is about understanding how people understand their own experiences’ (2017: 318), not least because as Freshwater argues, ‘it is important to remember that each audience is made up of individuals who bring their own cultural reference points, political beliefs, sexual preferences, personal histories, and immediate preoccupations to their interpretation of a production’ (2009: 6). Sedgman’s work moves decisively away from the notion of the model or ideal spectator to engage with the detail of individual audience responses, via postshow questionnaires and follow-up semi-structured interviews through which she generated ‘qualitative “respondent portraits” that considered in depth the spread of interviewees’ responses across different questions’ (2016: 192). For the historians who come after us to arrange the historical record of now from a future perspective, this detailed evidence will add more dynamic components to their assemblage.

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The question for us as theatre historians is how to build on this increasingly nuanced understanding of spectatorship when our focus is audiences of the past. Viv Gardner neatly summarizes the problem. ‘From the past, our evidences are fragmentary, partial and contradictory – defensive actors, nostalgic memorialists, narratising journalists, anti-theatrical pamphleteers and social reformers. Within this frame the spectator is almost always silent, unless a theatre critic’ (2000: 26). The key question is who speaks for the audience and thus controls and shapes their history? Gardner’s list identifies established and comparatively undemanding methods of access. Deploying the sources previously cited, we can outline debates and conflicts of opinion; we can use the theatre critic to supply vivid details of what he or she actually saw from their vantage point, and we can repeat their accounts of the exceptional moments of audience response, especially the celebrated eyewitness reports of protests or actual riots which Thomas Postlewait has recently scrutinized (2009: 60–85). Marvin Carlson has pointed out that ‘theatre history provides many examples of audiences that have not responded to a performed work in the expected manner, and the frequency of such disjunctures demonstrates very clearly that the community of readers assembled for a theatre event may be applying very different strategies from those of the model readers assumed by the performance’ (1989: 85). Furthermore, as Yael Zahry-Levo’s work on the power of those she calls ‘mediators’ – theatre critics whose work subsequently migrated into the wider public sphere through more authoritative publications – has shown, their ideologically and aesthetically charged opinions have the capacity to influence not only dramatic canon formation but also dominant but partial assumptions about audience reception (2008). This is an issue highlighted by Dorota Sosnowska’s essay in this volume, where she notes that the principal mediator of the reported enthusiastic audience response to her case-study play was a leading woman theatre critic who was most certainly complicit in the propagandist agenda of the newly installed communist regime. By mobilizing pre-existing knowledges of the audience, Sosnowska can offer a very different explanation for their enthusiasm. For the most part, however, if we are to more fully understand the experiences of audiences, we are faced with interrogating the documentary remains of these powerful myth-makers: other more systematic tools need to be deployed. In their jointly authored book on nineteenth-century London audiences, Reflecting the Audience, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow drew upon ‘the fullest range of quantitative data available’, examining ‘public records, police reports, census returns, newspaper accounts, playbills, transport timetables, communications networks, biographies, autobiographies, diaries, indeed any source that might broaden our understanding of mid-Victorian theatre audiences’ (2001: 227, 228). Also located in the nineteenth century but in a regional English context, the ‘Mapping the Moment’ project discussed in Jo Robinson’s essay sought to expand the field of evidence still further, building up a detailed picture of the local landscape of performance in order to ‘map the relationships between theatre and alternative sites of entertainment, between the drama and the wide variety of alternative forms of entertainment and performance which was offered to the potential spectator on any particular night, in order to understand what we can term the theatrical social culture – the

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intertheatrical mesh – out of which the individual spectator would have emerged’ (Robinson 2004: 14). In doing so, Robinson drew explicitly on Susan Bennett’s theorization of contemporary theatre audiences which builds on the reader-response work of Hans-Robert Jauss to suggest that the spectator ‘comes to the theatre as a member of an already constituted interpretive community and also brings a horizon of expectations shaped by the pre-performance elements’ (1997: 139). These elements include not only economic and geographical issues – how much does the ticket cost? How easy is it to get to the place of performance? How much leisure time does the spectator have at his or her disposal? In what kind of milieu is the performance space located? – but also the cultural value and location of the performance, the status of the performance as event and the selection and process of planning to attend that event, ‘which can affect receptive mood’ (Bennett 1997: 124). Here, by looking to empirical evidence of patterns and structures – from transport timetables to ticket prices – as well as diaries and autobiographies, Davis, Emeljanow and Robinson sought to expand the focus from individual, often atypical recorded experience, towards a structural filling in – as far as possible – of the cultural horizon of expectations out of which spectators might have emerged. In doing so, they worked towards a much more nuanced approach to audiences, countering the dominant ‘myths’ of audience histories, which Henk Gras and Harry van Vliet identify as shared across Britain, Europe and the United States: The dominant narrative of Dutch theatre historiography meshes with the European historiographical tradition. Davis and Emeljanow sketched the British traditional narrative, supported amongst others by the authority of Allardyce Nicoll and George Rowell, as ‘a progression towards the restoration of literary drama, improved standards of production, and greater social respectability, both on and off stage’. (2004: 472, citing Davis and Emeljanow 2001: 97–8) Arguing that ‘audience research needs data on spectators’, Gras has worked extensively with a set of records from different Rotterdam theatres, creating separate time series analyses of ticket sales from 1802 to 1916 (Gras and Franses 1998; Gras, Franses and Ooms 2003) and an analysis of the subscription lists for season tickets and coupon booklets covering the period 1773–1912 (Gras and van Vliet 2004). It is important to note, as Gras and Franses acknowledge, that ‘qualitative judgments about theatre performances in the past cannot be directly tested’, but they argue that ‘qualitative arguments to support the conjectured decline of the theatre contain quantitative elements which can’. For example, their analysis allows them to test critics’ claims of declining standards, with managers accused of ‘playing to the gallery’, against quantitative evidence that shows gallery occupation itself declining during that period. Such an approach suggests that a combination of qualitative data – looking at repertoire and critical responses – and quantitative data, where available, can aid the researcher in building up a more nuanced understanding of theatre spectatorship. Finally, it is important to remember that the act of spectatorship is historically contingent and thus, as we have emphasized throughout, the historian has to

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mediate between a present way of seeing and reading and what might be glimpsed of past perspectives. Hyunshik Ju begins his essay examining the affective properties of Korean masked dance drama, by reflecting on his own feelings as a spectator as he sits in the rain to watch a centuries-old tragic story unfold. It is then that he turns to the political and social context of the eighteenth century and what he argues is a different landscape of emotion available to audiences and perhaps a different embodiment of experience.

BODIES AS EVIDENCE In the conversation between our collaborators reproduced at the end of this volume, Dorota Sosnowska emphatically claims the importance of theatre history ‘because it’s a history of bodies’: ‘no other kind of history has such an access to living, experiencing bodies – and it’s of course a great challenge, because this is a very specific material, especially in terms of history and loss – dead bodies’. What Sosnowska is saying here represents a tacit acknowledgement of the extent to which theories of the transmission of embodied knowledge are transforming approaches to theatre history – that just possibly after all, to echo Stephen Greenblatt’s famous phrase, we can ‘speak with the dead’ (1988: 1). This methodological shift emerged out of what was a sharp division between the performance practitioners of what’s ‘now’ and the theatre scholars of what’s ‘gone’. In what has become a disciplinary rapprochement, it may also be that we are seeing signs of another border crossing – towards what more can be understood about the materiality of bodies and brains and a challenge to the epistemic relativism of poststructuralism. In 2003, in her groundbreaking book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Diana Taylor set up a binary opposition between the fixed repositories of what she later listed as ‘documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, compact discs’ (2008: 92) located in ‘First World’ archives – with which our exploration of ‘reading’ and ‘looking’ began earlier in this chapter – and what can be learned from embodied practice, the repertoire of scenarios passed on in what she calls ‘acts of transmission’ between societies where languages are both various and largely communicated orally (92). She reflected on the implications of Peggy Phelan’s statement that ‘performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of the representations of representation’ (Phelan 1993: 146) as compared with Joseph Roach’s suggestion that ‘performance genealogies draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made or remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words’ (Roach 1996: 6). Taylor pointed out that ‘debates about the “ephemerality” of performance are, of course, profoundly political. Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if performance practices lack the staying power to transmit vital knowledge?’ (2003: 5). Staying power, she argues has been traditionally predicated on selected tangibility ‘supposedly resistant to change’ (2008: 92), especially in the documents written down in the languages of political and economic dominance. Her activist focus on valorizing ‘intangible

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cultural heritage’ draws attention to what can only be passed on through bodies, ‘living practices’ transmitting ‘historically continuous’ knowledge that achieve a ‘staying power that belies notions of ephemerality’ (92). Earlier in this chapter, we sought to draw attention to the different ways of looking that are steadily overcoming the lack of formally conserved archival remains – thus breaking down the inequalities associated with global power blocs and recovering ‘unseen’ histories. But notable as perhaps an unintended consequence of foregrounding embodied practices, has been the extent to which performance studies has had a liberating effect on researcher interaction with archival documents. As Sosnowska points out in her essay for this volume, ‘with the understanding of the not-ephemeral and not-disappearing but rather remaining and stable character of performative acts, comes a redefinition of the spectacle’s leftovers’ and new ways of thinking about the sources ‘as a spectacle itself, living and remaining in all the different media’. For her, ‘choosing the body as a medium of history does not really mean to dispose of the archive. It rather means to treat the archive as what Robin Bernstein calls a “ghostly discotheque” full of past and present bodies, gleaming through the materiality of what is left over’. Of course, the technologies which developed during the twentieth century have added to the ghostly materiality. For Sosnowska, this has given access to a twominute fragment of film and the glimpse of the performing body of an actor whose significance she scrutinizes as she ‘dances’ with other remains. For Ruthie Abeliovich, two generations of technology have resulted in the possibility of digitized access to a 1952 radio recording of a 1928 theatre production of the biblical play Yaakov and Rachel which, as she explains in her essay for this volume, were products of two key temporal moments: in pre-state Palestine in 1928 and in 1952, during the formative years of the State of Israel. Abeliovich cannot literally speak to the dead, but she can listen to the dead speak to each other and hear in their voices the individual differences in the way they speak the Hebrew of the translated text: evidence, she argues, of the seismic impact of the third wave of European Jewish immigration to Palestine. Her essay refers to the gathering momentum of aurality studies, the focus on the aesthetics of the voice ‘as an object, that gains signification from its material qualities’ and which moreover ‘cannot be separated from the cultural conditions and prevailing philosophical ethos in which it was shaped’. She cites the methods deployed by other scholars trying to gauge the vocal qualities of great actors beyond the reach of technology: Peter Holland in ‘The Sound of David Garrick’ (2007) and Judith Pascoe in The Sarah Siddons Audio Files (2013) who draw on textual and visual sources to describe the theatrical phenomenology of the past. Abeliovich argues that ‘recorded theatre sounds present us with the possibility to overcome the transiency of performance, by positioning the listening subject as an agent that transforms the played voices into an ongoing repertoire of gestures and connects past aural expressions with the ways we listen in the present’. Within that present, technology can also be used to add bodily presence and practices back into our reading of texts – as with the 2010 online edition of the plays of the seventeenth-century English dramatist, Richard Brome. This includes links from the play texts to filmed extracts of practical workshops in which individual

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play editors worked with actors to explore the potential of the texts in performance. This process enabled those editors to ‘share with users of the online edition the insights they gleaned from watching sequences in rehearsal and explain how this dimension of the research process influenced their interpretation of textual, thematic and theatrical issues’ (Cave and Lowe 2010). But inevitably, efforts to recover bodily experience in and of the distant past require other ways of thinking and doing including the doing drawn from other disciplines. Abeliovich cites the view of the ethnologist Regina Bendix (2000) that the esoteric system of musical notation utilized by expert musicologists can act as a disciplinary barrier to nonexpert study of sonic performances. However, the case studies utilized by Jim Davis (Davis et al. 2011) to exemplify practical research methods in theatre historiography suggest the possibility of the fruitful interplay attendant on what Joseph Roach termed ‘kinaesthetic imagination’ (1996: 26–7). Both Katie Normington – writing on medieval English convent drama – and Gilli Bush-Bailey – writing with Jacky Bratton on early-nineteenth-century English Romantic performance styles – cite dance historian Susan Foster’s Choreographing History, where she introduces the notion of ‘bodily writing’ (1995: 4) and the theory that ‘physical traces of the past are embodied within our somatic expression’ (Davis et al. 2011: 87). Again the conceptual dance with things – and thus with different approaches – recurs: ‘the employment of Foster’s methodology necessitates analysing a range of interdisciplinary sources, including archaeological remains, sumptuary laws, wills and behaviour manuals, in order to see how bodies lived’ (92). Writing elsewhere, Gilli Bush-Bailey describes the practical challenges of clothes and bodies. ‘The opportunity to experiment with authentic early nineteenth century clothes revealed the vast difference in body shapes between past and present. The small-armed, fitted jackets of the period were impossibly small for the more developed upper body of our twenty-first-century actors,’ while capacious buckskin trousers were clearly designed for legs and thighs which spent more time walking and riding (2013: 192): discoveries possible only through bringing together embodied experience of past and present through practice. However, as Elisabeth Dutton points out in her ‘manifesto’ for Performance Research written for this volume, performances of historical texts ‘will illuminate a play in unpredictable ways: it is not always possible to know what one will learn from performance research, because its focus must be, precisely, performance, and preparing a performance is a collaborative creative process of discovery, of serendipity and disappointment, the outcome of which is only gradually revealed’. While the performance can be designed with a particular focus ‘such as the constraints of particular playing spaces, or the acoustic effects of different voices, or the viability of a piece of stage machinery’ and thus potentially impart valuable research data, it must also consider affect as well as effect in the ways in which modern audiences are creatively engaged. The increasing scholarly attention to affect, now recognized as ‘the affective turn’, takes us back to where we began this chapter, with Raymond Williams and his ‘structures of feeling’. How and why we feel, our concern with ‘meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt’ are central to the experience of theatre

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and performance and arguably the hardest to retrieve from the bodies of the past. Our essayist Hyunshik Ju quotes both Williams’s concept and Erin Hurley’s belief that ‘feeling runs like a red thread through the history of theatrical production’. For his research into Korean performance, Ju adopts a social constructivist approach to emotional response and its popular representation by offering an historically situated understanding of premodern eighteenth-century cultural difference through aligning societal structures with performance affect. It is in this territory of affect, however, that we are beginning to see a transgression of the borders of existing thought and action which may be signalling a major epistemological shift. The adoption of the methodologies and methods of cognitive neuroscience within theatre and performance studies has been enormously controversial despite the fact that related work in a number of social scientific and humanities disciplines has been circulating for some time (McConachie 2013: 4). Now one of its leading advocates, Bruce McConachie has claimed that ‘several of the experimentally based conclusions of cognitive science undermine assumptions and ideas about performing and spectating that most theatre artists, critics and historians take for granted’ (4). His explanation for our hesitation in entering this arena is our commitment to the ‘blank-slate understanding of mind and society’ inculcated by the different branches of poststructuralist theory which have rejected the essentialist implications of evolution and biology (5). Along with the persuasive insights, contributed for example in Falletti’s essay into the ways our ‘bodymind’ reacts to physical stimuli, has come the more radical challenge to epistemological relativism. As historians grappling with our ethical obligation to represent the lived experience of the past as truthfully as we can, the suggestion that the falsifiability imperative of scientific methodology (5–6, emphasis ours) offers, perhaps, a more rigorous model of empirical research, is increasingly hard to ignore.

THINKING ABOUT THINKING AGAIN McConachie’s claims at the outset of Theatre & Mind are broad in scope, as he notes: ‘Poststructuralists also believe in epistemological relativism. Because truth claims can never be entirely disentangled from ideology, they hold that all knowledge is subjective and relative’ (5). Ontology and epistemology twine together here: what we hope this introduction to ways of thinking and researching has offered is above all a prompt to think with care, adopting Bleiker’s terms, about the nature of the puzzle being investigated, and about both the appropriateness and the limitations of the tools and approaches being brought to bear. In bringing together into dialogue a series of case studies from different periods, different geographies, different performance traditions and thus at times from different ontological and epistemological traditions, the rest of the volume offers our readers the opportunity to reflect on different methods and methodologies in the context of specific puzzles and narratives. In Khalid Amine’s final case-study essay, he draws on the call made by the Moroccan sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi for pensée-autre (other thinking) that disrupts hierarchical distinctions and definitions, ‘a way of re-thinking difference

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and sameness without recourse to essentialist absolutes and “isms”’; ‘an “epistemic” resistance of all closed systems’. What Amine is arguing for represents a challenge to both Occidental and Oriental epistemologies, because neither approach is in itself able to capture the complex, fragmented and multilayered narrative of the history of theatre and performance in the Maghreb. What is important, then, as we hope the following case studies will show, is to begin with the local experience, the local puzzle, and to build a methodology and approach that enables historical understanding: what we see should prompt us to carefully consider how we see.

CHAPTER 3

Current Research: Case Studies from the Field

CHAPTER 3.1

Seeing Differently through Time and Space: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

We begin our collection of individual essays with two contributions from different continents, each of which examines a moment of performative encounter between different cultures and its subsequent interpretation. At its most fundamental, the historiography posited in both these essays – by Rosemarie K. Bank and Maryrose Casey – gets to the heart of why historians restlessly seek to retroactively redirect and rearrange what is known about the past. In drawing attention to the effects of dominant historiographies, both Bank and Casey stress that historians write or otherwise represent the historical record from the perspective of their own subject position, which in turn informs their construction of their chosen historical subjects and their actions. The ideologically shaped value systems and imperatives of the present determine the point of view brought to bear on the past. As Bank’s intellectual exercise in time-travel back to pre-Enlightenment historiography demonstrates, this is a process repeated from generation to generation and it is the role of the historian to acknowledge and probe the epistemological consequences of that process. The specific temporal and spatial distance between the fields of enquiry – sixteenth-century Mexico and nineteenth-century Australia – delineated in the two essays serves to reinforce the historiographic correspondences and to remind the reader that despite the ‘local’ focus of these essays, they each raise questions for any historian of performance working within their own local. Casey’s account of the way the legacy of colonial subjugation of the Aboriginal Australian ‘other’ – justified through concepts of nineteenth-century ‘racial’ hierarchies – has infiltrated and distorted Australian theatre history clearly supports Bank’s argument, which is marshalled around the epistemological sources of the shift from the early-sixteenth-century possibilities of ‘radical incommensurability’ to the postEnlightenment-enforced ‘attempt to translate one world into another’. The rich indigenous performance cultures which both historians describe and now want their readers to ‘see’ differently thus perfectly exemplify the understanding that theatre should be considered a social and political entity in the centre of the historical

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landscape, especially as both Bank and Casey show how performance could be simultaneously a means of negotiation and a weapon in the intercultural contest of colonization and resistance. Both essays show the reformation of space as new geopolitical entities come into being – renamed and reified as nations which require the legitimacy bestowed by narratives of origin. As Bank and Casey interrogate and disturb historiographically embedded assumptions about the origins and character of ‘American’ theatre and ‘Australian’ theatre, the evidence of ceaselessly evolving cultural syncretism which emerges not only challenges our notion of what theatre has represented in the past, but also and importantly, what and who it represents in the present and ‘the dream of history yet to be made’.

CHAPTER 3.1.1

A-foot in Time: Temporality in the Space of a Moment in Theatre History ROSEMARIE K. BANK

Historical events, history and historiography happen in time and space. Historical events come to our notice because they are recorded in histories, histories that reflect perceptions of the historiographical views of the histories’ subjects and the histories’ authors, that is, their views of how a historical record (historia) should be arranged (graphia), and how historical actions ought to be understood. Readers of those histories in subsequent eras have their own views of historiography and may come at the history because they are students of, for example, historical events in Mexico in the earlier sixteenth century, of indigenous and of New Spain cultures, or because they are students of historiographical practices or views, or students of the history of anthropology or for a variety of other reasons. How you look determines what you see. This seemingly self-evident postulate conveys a wholly deceptive ease of relationship between looking and seeing, between what has been and what is and between time and space, relationships that are anything but easy, self-evident or straightforward. For almost two decades, I have been pursuing how performances of and by American Indians in the United States defined what ‘American’ meant during the long nineteenth century, performances couched in the rhetoric of what twentiethcentury scholars describe as Enlightenment thinking. The borders of my study quickly slid through time and space to the earliest America of explorers, adventurers, missionaries, soldiers and bureaucrats, and outside the country-bound confines of the theatre history I had planned to write, into worlds of philosophical, cultural, legal and scientific history I hardly felt competent to examine. I painfully, if not quickly, made several discoveries, of which the chief one was that everything about my subject was contested and nothing more than how to read histories about it. Moreover, in these twenty years of working, dominant historiographies of US colonial history, as well as of Enlightenment thinking, have slid forward and come to be viewed as the greatest enemies of my subject’s true unfolding.

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Like its predecessors, Enlightenment historiography engaged in ‘the search for formal structures with universal values’, but this unity Immanuel Kant and others sought in multeity, in reason, categories and processes ‘that release us from the status of “immaturity”’, as Kant puts it (Foucault 1984: 46, 34). This Enlightenment, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze argues, forced a system for hierarchizing history as a movement from the simple to the complex, the primitive to the civilized. This, as will be evident in what follows, was not a new idea, but Eze usefully reminds us that the largest period of Kant’s academic career was informed by the invention of ‘race’ as a category and was spent researching and teaching cultural geography, what is today called ‘anthropology’ (a nineteenth-century ‘invention’, as was the word ‘biology’) (1997: 2–4). By the 1770s, a large body of morales, mores and ‘customs’ had been published about non-European cultures. J. G. A. Pocock argues that Enlightenment accounts of human effort originate in ‘the conversion of theology into history’ (2008: 96), visible in the joining of intellectual and moral philosophy, with human society (rather than divine authority) as the framework. Instead of the ‘radical incommensurability’ which José Rabasa rightly suggests allowed sixteenth-century New Spain to embrace ‘the existence of two (incommensurable) worlds in one consciousness without incurring contradiction’, Enlightenment historiography created contradiction in its ‘attempt to translate one world into the other’ (Rabasa 2000: 51). Ironically, then, just as one branch of Enlightenment thinking sought equality for all, another branch emphasized the diversity that made that ‘universal value’ unattainable, while still another branch of thought implicated the political economy ‘universal value’ created (the structures of the material conditions of life) as the likely cause of this contradiction. In a spatial theatre history, such as I propose to write, one looks for those moments when, as Michel Foucault observed, a number of things break the surface at the same time (1973: x–xiii). They are a cue that something significant in history is happening, what Walter Benjamin means by an ‘origin’, a moment when elements recode and relate anew, redirecting meanings, becoming what they were, but as if born again, with significances they did not have before (1977: 45–6). These moments always come before the places where we see the boundary signs; indeed, those signs tell us the beginning has already begun, that the borders of existing thought and action have already been transgressed. Unlike the forward-moving recodings of historical actions, historiographical redirections of past historical activity are often retroactive. Rabasa marks such a shift in identifying the presence of a pre-Enlightenment historiography in sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of New World performances, a presence which has been obscured by subsequent binarized Enlightenment historiographies (2000: 17–19). Historiographical positions underlying definitions of Amerindians colour perceptions of performative practices concerning what ‘American’ means/has meant. Though of interest to me, this question was hardly pursued by either sixteenthcentury history writers or earlier nineteenth-century theatregoers. What joins the inquiries are the historiographical issues raised, and how these illuminate our thinking about historical events and affect our expectations of theatre-historical writing. There is, indeed, no history without time, though time is how we measure space, not the space we measure.

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The informing interest in moving backward from the nineteenth to the sixteenth century and from what became the United States to what was not then known as Mexico was a search for a very early, but not the earliest, performance within the borders of what is now the United States, referenced in earlier theatre history texts as ‘a commedia [play] written by a Spanish captain, and presented in 1598 on the banks of the Rio Grande near what is now El Paso’ (Texas). Earlier scholarship reassured us that this and other Spanish and French performances ‘had no more to do with the development of American theatre’ (US) than did indigenous performances, a development and theatre that ‘was wholly English in origin’ (Hewitt 1959: 1). To be sure, more recent histories have expanded the tale, giving us an author’s name (Marcos Farfán) for the 1598 play and a subject matter (‘deals with Farfán’s conquests there’) and a context (‘also religious plays by Juan de Oñate’s band of colonizers’) (Wilmeth and Curley 1998: 23). My interest in this performance, rather than an earlier auto sacramental about a saint’s life performed in Florida in 1567, was stimulated by Patricia Ybarra’s theatre-historical study of Tlaxcala, Mexico, during the 1500s, and the legacy of its historical events, and (even more) its histories and historiographies, to subsequent Tlaxcaltecan performances. That legacy suggested that what was performed in 1598 was ‘Cortés’s entry into Mexico’ and his reception there of twelve Franciscan missionaries (Ybarra 2009: 139): ‘American’ events in an ‘American’ space. Telling that story requires telling an earlier one. When Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Yucatan in February 1519, he was well aware he would be dealing with multiple Amerindian political entities. He allied with the Tlaxcaltecans of central Mexico and other indigenous members of the Aztec coalition of the unwilling, and entered Tenochtitlan, the legendary capital of the Aztec Empire, now Mexico City, in November 1519. At each point of impact along his line of march, Cortés made use of what Patricia Seed identifies as the Spanish ceremony of possession (1995: 69–99), a fully ritualized protocol for conquest uncharacteristic of other European nations. This protocol included the reading out of an announcement of intent to claim the land in the name of the Christian monarch(s) of Spain, the call for any counterclaims to be presented then and there, and the notice that silence equalled acceptance and subjection, such that any objection raised at a future date would be regarded as rebellion and severely punished. Forms of this announcement, which became known as the requerimiento, had been used by Christopher Columbus (and duly notarized by the official accompanying him), and would continue to be heard by Spaniards and Amerindians throughout the sixteenth century (Greenblatt 1990: 16–39). The requerimiento was part of the ceremony of possession used by Cortés when he invested Tenochtitlan in August 1521. Theatrical performance was a major weapon in the Spanish battle for supremacy in the New World and in the Amerindian counter-insurgency, indeed, performance, by its nature two-faced, particularly suited the indigenous peoples of New Spain. As Cortés travelled to what is now Mexico and Central America, he was often met with festivals, underscoring a long indigenous tradition of staging and performance, including parading, singing, dancing, music, games, naumachia and dramatizations. Cortés was involved in many enactments, including mock battles (which the Aztecs had also staged), in which Cortés was an actor and for which he was a spectator and,

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ultimately, a subject (Harris 2000: 74–5, 117–21). Cortés settled in Mexico City, where, in 1524, he welcomed the twelve Franciscan missionaries for whom Cortés had sent to Spain, representatives of an order charged by the pope (in 1496) with converting recently conquered Spanish Muslims. Cortés humbled himself before the friars, kneeling and kissing their hands, as an example to the Mexica of how they were to behave towards the Franciscans (Versényi 1993: 2), some of whom established a successful mission in Tlaxcala, which played a role in the best-known theatricals from Mexico in the sixteenth century. The historiography that informed early Spanish actions in the New World, such as Cortes’s, did not begin with him, but traces to the two great authorities, Aristotle and the thirteenth-century Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who mediated Aristotle for Christians and promoted his reputation in Europe. These authorities were requisite to understanding the unknown in terms of the known, a known they described via classification systems in place centuries before the first encounters between the Old World and the New. Intended to eliminate ‘otherness’, to reconcile such matters as ‘the nature of Amerindians’ to what was known of humankind the world over, and to explain Amerindian behaviour to Europeans in terms of the perceived universality of norms among them, few observers prior to the beginning of the seventeenth century, as Michel Foucault has observed, attempted to classify and describe cultural differences and dissimilarities (Foucault 1973: 51). From the end of the twelfth to the beginning of the sixteenth century, historian Anthony Pagden argues, Aristotle and Aquinas offered Europeans like Cortés a schema for those within and those outside the social order: they were civilized men or they were barbarians, that is, non-Christians living in a savage or uncivil way (Pagden 1982: 14–16). Spaniards initially classified Amerindians as ‘men’, creatures with souls, but of the class of barbarians, inferior men whose cultures marked them as lacking the essentials of civil life (families, cities, written language, etc.). Barbarians were, not infrequently, taken to be what Aristotle called ‘natural slaves’ (as apart from ‘civil slaves’, such as prisoners of war), those who in the great duality that constituted Aristotle’s universe lacked the reason and virtue that make ‘true men’ (Pagden 1982: 15–26).1 Though the Spanish Queen Isabella had insisted, in 1501, that the Indians of Hispaniola were subjects not slaves, and could not be exported to Spain as slaves after that date (Pagden 1982: 33–4), the encomienda system, introduced by Columbus in 1499, functioned as a form of de facto slavery in which, in exchange for protection, religious instruction and a small wage, Amerindians were consigned to labour for encomenderos for all of their lives. The Indians watching Cortés’s pageant of submission in 1524 would fulfil the classification of ‘natural slaves’ to (at least) encomenderos like Cortés. Opposition to the encomienda system was focused in a fiery sermon delivered by the Dominican priest Antonio de Montesinos in Hispaniola in 1511, which prompted a royal request by Ferdinand II for an official debate (or junta). The results supported the encomienda system, but raised serious moral questions about Aristotle’s determinism, for example, how Amerindians could be brought to the faith if, as ‘natural slaves’, they could not be improved. Though scholars in the sixteenth century did not think empirical data paved the road to

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truth, neither did they ignore the flood of texts from the New World correcting the initial impression of a lack of family structures, cities, languages, cultural activities and political systems of Amerindian peoples, among them Toribio de Motolinía’s 1541 History of the Indians of New Spain, with its astonishing account of the theatrical activities of the Indians of Tlaxcala. A reading of Motolinía’s History offers a clear indication of the inadequacies of Enlightenment thinking to engage the complexities of New Spain culture in the sixteenth century. For their part, the Spanish had brought a vigorous performance repertory with them, including dances, plays, masquerades, melees and other equestrian competitions, moros y cristianos – dramatized mock battles between Moors and Christians, which Max Harris locates as early as 1150 in Spain and 1524 in New Spain (2000: 67–114) – and a wealth of autos sacramentales, often organized into pageants, after the establishment of the Feast of Corpus Cristi in 1264. Many of these entertainments are competitive and it is not surprising that the most elaborate were pressed into service in the Spanish ceremony of possession. One might, as many have, see the use of culture as a weapon in the binary thinking attributed to all, though located only in some Enlightenment historiographies, but such usage pre-dates the Enlightenment by centuries. Aztec performance traditions, as they manifested themselves in pre-conquest festivals between 1321 and 1521, at least as far as Spanish chroniclers were later able to decode and rerecord them, also indicate the widespread use of competitive entertainments for cultural purposes. I defer here to Harris’s detailing of them, marking only the relevance of these festivals to war, war games, mock wars, the enactment of the moral order by priests and the reinforcement of the Aztec social order as regards, for example, sexuality, or the place of merchants, warriors, priests, peasants, slaves and captives in the scheme of things. These narrow rather than widen the distance between Amerindian festivals and Spanish performance practices in the sixteenth century. Long before Spaniards involved the Amerindians of New Spain in moros y cristianos and autos sacramentales then, there are records of Aztec festivals using the devices associated with them, including large-scale community engagement, elaborate sets, public spaces used for performance, impersonation, elaborate music, clever dialogue, parody and extensively choreographed dances. As Leo Cabranes-Grant sees it, ‘Under intercultural pressure, objects and peoples move more than usual; they are dis-placed, re-located, and replaced at vertiginous – and often violent – speed’ (2016: 4). The Franciscans were very good at their mission, quickly learning Amerindian languages (which few civil administrators did) and cannily incorporating Aztec empire performance traditions with Spanish ones. No one mixed the forms better than Toribio de Benavente, Fray Motolinía (‘Father Poor One’ in Nahuatl), who marks three performances that expanded the parameters of theatre in New Spain: a Corpus Cristi pageant at Tlaxcala in 1538 and two moros y cristianos in 1539. I must leave details of these to Motolinía’s History (Motolinía 1950: 93–120) and to recent historians (Ybarra, Harris, Versényi and others), and content myself here with noting the numerous stations along the line of march during the Corpus Cristi pageant at which scenes from biblical and New World texts were enacted by Tlaxcaltecan actors on elaborate sets. Scholars debate who deserves credit for the event, but both

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Motolinía and his contemporary Bartolomé de las Casas give it to the Amerindians, who designed, built and staged the pageant. Concerning the moros y cristianos, I will note only that they were both conquest plays, The Conquest of Rhodes presented at Mexico City in February 1539, and The Conquest of Jerusalem produced in Tlaxcala on 5 June 1539. In both, stages were erected in the main city square, with a castle for the siege and combat flowing from each of multiple pageant stations. Musicians, singers and dancers performed on or around these sets. In the first, Cortés featured as the Master of Rhodes, a hero of this fictively successful campaign to retake the island. In the second, The Conquest of Jerusalem, however, an Indian done up as Cortés played him as the Sultan leader of the infidels, defeated in part by a New World army of Amerindians from New Spain (Harris 2000: 123–31). Extensive resources were given to these ceremonies, but it would have been utterly impossible to stage them without Amerindian personnel, skills and performance traditions. Las Casas affirms that in Tlaxcala, ‘even those who “took charge” of the play were Indian’ and that no one ‘meddles in [either the moros y cristianos or] the autos that they put on’ (Las Casas, quoted in Harris 2000: 132–3). Harris calls The Conquest of Jerusalem ‘arguably the most spectacular and intellectually sophisticated theatrical event in post-contact sixteenth-century Mexico’ (134). Both conquest plays and the Corpus Cristi pageant, two of the three performed only by Tlaxcaltecans and in Nahuatl, are signs of a culture staging itself, recoding and remaking its own cultural meaning in terms of its own history. Thousands of Amerindians participated in these festivals, impersonating the leaders opposed to them – popes, cardinals, bishops, emperors and kings, saints and prophets, the army of Spain, indeed, the armies of other European nations – at the same time that the New World fields its own army to rescue the Old, and bows down to Old World gods. Beginning in the 1520s, as Cortés staged his reconquista of Tenochtitlan and a ceremony of reception for the twelve apostles in the New World, the direction of intellectual life in Spain began to change, resulting in a substantial restructuring of the theological thought of Catholic Europe by the early 1600s. The change was, again, focused by a royal request for an opinion, this time by Ferdinand’s son Carlos I, who asked the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria in 1537 to address ‘the Indian problem’. Vitoria, head of what became known as ‘the School of Salamanca’, and with no direct knowledge of the New World, gave a public lecture on the subject, resulting in the widely circulated 1539 manuscript De indis, finally printed in 1557 by Vitoria’s pupils eleven years after their master’s death. In the first part of De indis, Vitoria used all the Aristotelian tropes to demonstrate that Amerindians did not meet the criteria for barbarians or for natural slaves. In the second part of the work, however, he demonstrated all the Indians’ shortcomings, in his view, which justified Spanish intervention in their cultures (Grisel 1976: 305–25). If there was a contradiction in applying Aristotle’s concept of nature’s slaves to rational Indians, natural law – one’s place in the scheme of things as determined (by God) and not a matter of free choice – kept the ‘socially inferior’, whether Indians or European peasants, in place. The ‘natural slave’ was replaced by ‘nature’s child’ (Pagden 1982: 57–108). The mandate to missionaries was to instruct these ‘children’, offering them education as a means of achieving full ‘man’ status. It seems to me no accident

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that the great period of Indian performance in the New World, exemplified by the 1538 Corpus Cristi play and the two 1539 moros y cristianos, came at a time when Vitoria’s De indis, quickly known in New Spain, underscored the importance of teaching ‘nature’s children’ how to play civilized men.2 De indis marks the appearance of ‘a law of nature’, if not quite an international law as we think of it today, though it was not the best-known historiographical treatment of Amerindians in the sixteenth century, a distinction shared by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to Mexico, and José de Acosta, a Jesuit missionary to Peru. They came down on opposite sides of the encomienda issue, a system the Council of the Indies attempted, largely in vain, to abolish via the Nuevo Leyes of 1542, but they united behind Vitoria’s conclusion that Indians, though barbarians (in not being Christians), were not ‘nature’s slaves’. Las Casas took the field in the famous 1550–51 debate in Valladolid against Juan Gines de Sepulveda, who attempted to reassert the position, held by encomenderos in the New World, that Amerindians were and ought to be slaves. Las Casas’s argument is summarized in his lengthy Apologética historia, printed in 1552 (see Pagden 1982: 119–45), but his views were well known, both in Old and New Spain, due to his earlier publications. By the time of writing this work, Las Casas had a large body of empirical and historical data available to him to substantiate not only that pre-conquest societies met Aristotle’s criteria for civil societies but also that their cultural differences supported rather than obviated the fundamental similarities that unite widely separated groups. Las Casas reinterpreted Aristotle’s Politics to make the point that to label everyone not a part of your group a barbarian (as Aristotle does of non-Greeks) fails to distinguish among them, substituting evaluation for classification. Using Aquinas’s commentary on the Politics offered Las Casas a way to distinguish among barbarians: those who behaved barbarically (found in cultures the world over); those who had all the markers of civilization (laws, language, writing, etc.); those who were social, but lacked other cultural markers (including Christianity); and those who were anti-social, savage, ferocious and slow (whom Aquinas thought few in number the world over, since such creatures are an affront to God’s offer of grace) (Friede and Keen 1971). By spreading ‘barbarism’ across the world through universal cultural norms, Las Casas insisted upon a spatial historiography intended to free Amerindians held in bondage because they were Amerindians. In both the lecture halls of Spain where he taught, and after decades spent among them, Las Casas concluded that only fools and liars could deny that Amerindians, like all other men, possessed rational souls (Pagden 1982: 137). History, however, was subject to temporal as well as spatial historiography. If, spatially, all men throughout the world were once barbarians (that is, lived in caves, had to form societies, etc.), they also bore witness to a temporal scale, with those towards the bottom only ‘younger’ in culture than those farther up. This theory of cultural evolution, in Las Casas’s view, showed the Indians of central Mexico (for example) as at the limit for development as pagans and ready to be brought to full civil(ized) form, and into the sixteenth-century moment, via conversion to Christianity. This converso I would label not ‘nature’s child’, but ‘nature’s man’.3

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If the Apologética utilized empirical data in the service of a revised historiography, Jose de Acosta, author of De pro curanda indorum (written in Lima in 1577, published in Seville and Salamanca in 1588–89) and the Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), produced the most widely read account of the Spanish Indies in Europe and introduced a classification system extensively utilized in the seventeenth century, one that ‘had a considerable impact on the anthropological literature of the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries’ as well (Pagden 1982: 198–9). This is also the historiography that corresponds in time to the performances of 1598 which exemplify my argument.4 Acosta’s contribution to what must be seen as a sequence of non-Enlightenment historiographies – from ‘nature’s slave’ to ‘nature’s child’ to ‘nature’s man’ – was to reject the ability of ancient historiographers to account for a world of which the ancients had no experience. Where Las Casas argued, via Aquinas, that ‘natural slaves’ were rare, Acosta maintained there were no ‘natural slaves’, only those habituated by climate, education or custom to behave like slaves. We are, Acosta argues, what we have been taught to be. Acosta’s wide travels in America exposed him to a variety of Amerindian cultures and he distinguished among them systematically as no European before him had done. The result was a hierarchized view of human (including Amerindian) evolution in terms of space and time, with Aztecs and Incas (as well as the Chinese) at the apex, more loosely organized groups (without writing) in the middle and tribes with (to Acosta) no discernible social organizations at the bottom. All were barbarians (lacking Christianity), but no one was ‘nature’s slave’ (Pagden 1982: 160–2). Societies most disadvantaged in time and space, Acosta argued, required the most intervention to be brought to reason, which, to him, meant to live in a ‘civilized’ way (including on encomiendas) as well as to acquire the means to salvation. Reason and language were intrinsically interwoven in Acosta’s argument. He and many in the sixteenth century thought that while language expressed forms which already existed in society, language did not create those forms, a perspective which caused insurmountable problems for the perpetuation of indigenous languages, which the Spanish thought unable to express abstractions (of which absent alphabets were indicative) (Pagden 1982: 181). Abandoning picture books and analogies with indigenous religions that too often produced false or risible results (if not satanic allusions), Acosta’s system of universal ethnology added a temporal to a spatial scale for universal history. As liberating as all this sounds and as great an intellectual advance as was the move away from Aristotle’s deterministic universe as extended in Thomas Aquinas, if 1600 was quite a different world than 1500, it was not a better one for Amerindians. We left Hernán Cortés on his knees in Mexico City in 1524 as the ‘twelve apostles’ are en pointe to turn Aristotle’s ‘nature’s slaves’ into Vitoria’s ‘nature’s child’. The Franciscans wrought better than they knew, and none in Mexico better than Toribio de Motolinía. While Motolinía’s Corpus Cristi plays and moros y cristianos in 1538 and 1539 nicely show us Franciscans intending to teach Vitoria’s ‘nature’s child’, their Amerindian performers play Las Casas’s ‘nature’s man’, impersonating figures in biblical history, vanquished Moors and conquering Christians, Cortés as Christian

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hero and villainous infidel, popes, emperors, kings and priests, even then mounting the stages of the Old World, in the dance of dulce et utile, the sweet and the useful, that sixteenth-century performance inherited as its charge from antiquity. Both goals can be discerned in 1591, when 400 Tlaxcaltecan families migrated from central Mexico towards the Rio Grande. Their journey was marked with ceremony – gifts, pronouncements, receptions and performances – a script for conquest through persuasion. The purpose of the journey was to settle the Rio Grande area with peaceful Indians, following the (mistaken) belief that local Indians would find other indigenous peoples more allies than enemies (Ybarra 2009: 132). The Tlaxcaltecans had staged that conquest many times and ‘often used performances of complicity to lobby for special privileges from the viceregal authorities’ (Ybarra 2009: 7). By the end of the sixteenth century, these stagings connected daily living to representation. The sign of 1598 marks the first time these New World stories cross the border, the first time the performance in what is now the continental United States is about the New World (at least, as far as I know at this writing). In this telling, a grand expedition of conquest was sent towards the Rio Grande into the territory then known as New Mexico to subdue the Puebloans and secure the Spanish northern silver route. According to social historian Ramón Gutiérrez, the expedition leader Juan de Oñate intended to restage Cortés conquest of Mexico, a story familiar to the Puebloans since the 1520s, and to stage Cortés’s reception of the ‘twelve Apostles’ (1993: 50). To this end, Oñate brought with him the banner of ‘Our Lady of the Remedies’ Cortés had carried into Tenochtitlan in 1519, Tlaxcaltecans ‘both as actual participants and as characters in his conquest plays’ (Ybarra 2009: 58) to help stage the conquest and to model submission, a pueblo woman captive to play ‘Malinche’ to Oñate’s ‘Cortés’ and twelve Franciscan priests to play the ‘twelve apostles’ of 1524. On 20 April 1598, on the Mexican side of the river, near modern-day El Paso, Oñate took possession of all New Mexico according to the usual forms, and received four local emissaries, dressed them in Spanish clothes and gave them gifts. There was a great celebration, a military salute and ‘a play’ (Gutiérrez 1993: 51–2), about which we know nothing more. Ten days later (30 April), on the (now) US side of the river, however, Oñate realized his conquest narrative, collapsing the four years between 1521 and 1524 in Mexico City into a ceremony dedicating a chapel for the Indians, followed by a mass and the reception of native emissaries from nearby pueblo villages, who were given gifts and clothing to don, as Cortés had given Montezuma in 1519, following the tradition for superior guests towards inferior hosts (Harris 2000: 160–2). A performance followed of The Arrival of the Franciscan Apostles, scripted by Captain Marcos Farfán de los Godos, and enacted by Oñate’s soldiers, the twelve Franciscan missionaries in his party, the Tlaxcaltecans and Oñate himself. Playing Cortés, Oñate kissed the hands and was raised from kissing the feet of his twelve friars, as was Cortés in 1524, and ordered the Puebloans, led by Spanish soldiers in Indian costume and by the Tlaxcaltecans, to show submission to the missionaries (Villagrá 1610 [1992]: 131; Gutiérrez 1993: 51–2). These events culminated in a mass baptism of the ‘newly converted’ Indians. When The Arrival of the Franciscan Apostles was concluded, Oñate prayed, took possession of the (now US) territory according to the

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stipulations of a revised (and duly notarized) requerimiento (Villagrá 1610 [1992]: 138) and punctuated possession with a show of gunfire and a mounted display, finishing with the erection of a cross to mark time, place and action. Though this is not the earliest European-Amerindian theatrical production on what is now US soil, it would be hard to beat as an example of the syncretism productive of an American (US) culture. It was a distinctly American story that Oñate re-enacted, showing political supremacy, religious submission and the correct behaviour of ‘nature’s man’. The expedition’s chronicler, Gaspar Perez de Villagrá, records that the Puebloans ‘reverently approached on bended knee and asked to be received into the faith, being baptized in great numbers’. This now familiar scenario, enacting spiritual conquest, was followed by Oñate/Cortés’s prayerful evocation of the requerimiento, for god to ‘give to our King and to me […] the peaceful possession of these kingdoms and provinces’ (Gutiérrez 1993: 51–2, quoting Villagrá; also Villagrá 1610 [1992]: 138): the whole an example of theatre teaching behaviour via a history that was re-enacted ‘as first imagined and represented in drama’ (Gutiérrez 1993: 52). Performances continued to mark Oñate’s line of march towards modern-day Santa Fe and Taos. At Bernardo in June, Oñate staged a mounted skirmish between Moors and Christians, an all-Spanish rehearsal for later use. At Santo Domingo pueblo in July 1598, the Cortésian ceremony of submission was enacted again, as it was along Oñate’s route north to Ohke/San Juan de los Caballeros, where a New World moros y cristianos was produced in September 1598 (Gutiérrez 1993: 53; Harris 2000: 161–4). The text of The Arrival of the Franciscan Apostles does not survive. It is unlikely to have been more than a scenario of often staged events, reflecting the foundational American myths of 1519/21 and 1524 (Trexler 1984: 192). These tales had come to preface demands for obedience and vassalage, to the king and to the friar who returned with the Indians to their pueblo (if they failed to provide these, Oñate warned the chiefs, ‘their cities and pueblos would be put to the sword and destroyed by fire’) (Gutiérrez 1993: 53, quoting Villagrá). Would-be conquistadors like Oñate were encomenderos with armies. It was a system Acosta supported, just as conditions north of the Rio Grande reflect Acosta’s tripartite definition of barbarians (now the Tlaxcaltecans join the Aztecs and Inca at the top and the Puebloans are slotted in midway towards the bottom of the hierarchy). Still, history and historiography had moved on since Cortés’s day. In defying anti-slavery views dating to Vitoria and well known in Mexico from the 1540s, Oñate was forced to account for the three-day massacre he visited upon the Puebloans in 1599, and for his enslavement of the survivors, during a crown inquiry into his actions, which stripped him of his office and nullified his contract to exploit the area’s natural and human resources (Rabasa 2000: 106–7; 112–21). The course of conquest no longer favoured Oñate’s tactics and, thanks to Las Casas, the world was watching. The historiographies destroying the legitimacy of Aristotle’s ‘nature’s slaves’ did not produce a ‘natural man’ who was envied (as in the Enlightenment), but neither did they promote the actions Oñate sought to embody in playing Cortés. A history through history was now in place attesting to the complexity of Amerindian societies and the diversity of the New World’s peoples, which made

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Aristotle’s binary universe of civilized men and barbarians contrary both to human experience of the New World and to God’s plan for the salvation of the world, as the Spanish saw it. How cultures think the human is how they play the human, and my argument is that cultures don’t see and don’t play the human in the same way in different times and spaces, nor do co-existent cultures perform the human according to one scenario. In the Rio Grande valley in 1598, the performance of The Arrival of the Franciscan Apostles acts out established sovereignty (grounded in central Mexico, at the heart of the Aztec empire) in an attempt to secure submission as a response. While autos sacramentales, moros y cristianos and tropes of American history like The Arrival of the Franciscan Apostles revitalized a performance mode common in Aztec days, they built their own incommensurable historiography, for example, in the acceptance of the new gods with retention of the old ones, in a performance that represents submission in a form that consumes and replays it. In achieving this, simultaneous subjects are able to dwell in opposed worlds without incurring contradiction. Historically, there is a great distance between performances by Indians for Indians in New Spain, such as The Arrival of the Franciscan Apostles in 1598, and performances of Indians by whites for whites, such as those presented in the United States in the nineteenth century. Historiographically, only the mode and space have changed; the cultural issues have not. The centralized and sovereign world of New Spain and New Mexico in the late sixteenth century is arranged inside a structure that gives place a universal time marking a common past, the Father time, rather than an absolute moment (such as 1524) where religious and political power fuse and American time begins. By the nineteenth century, the unknown native has disappeared into the known American. This tale will also be retold, as contradiction futilely tries to drive out the incommensurabilities that are at the heart of America’s oldest dramas of conquest and regeneration.

NOTES 1. ‘Men’ is used here with deliberation, since women were classified, with children, as ‘less than men’. 2. The connection of New World performances to Vitoria is mine, and, certainly, the date of the debate is too close to those of the performances, given the time it took for news to travel from Spain to Mexico in the 1530s, to be causal, but not too distant to suggest the same climate of ideas. 3. ‘Nature’s man’ is my term for what, in European thinking in the sixteenth century, lies between ‘nature’s child’ and ‘civilized man’, a stage the encomienda-minded in Mexico and South America, laymen and priests alike, doubted Indians could achieve, even when Christianized. ‘Nature’s man’ is distinct from the ‘natural man’ of the Enlightenment. 4. The moral in Acosta’s title indicates what we know in English as mores (from the French), rather than the English word ‘moral’.

CHAPTER 3.1.2

Nuwhju and the Archive: Recuperating the History of Aboriginal Australian Performance Practice MARYROSE CASEY

This chapter examines Aboriginal Australian performances documented by white settlers and amateur ethnographers in Queensland in the nineteenth century in order to recuperate practices of non-European performances in the colonial cross-cultural environment. Previous Eurocentric accounts and the histories of performance that drew on them relied on narratives of colonialism that framed indigenous peoples as primitive (Oxford 1977: 96; Murdoch 1992; for further discussion see Casey 2004: 10–14). Within this framework, the performances for entertainment under discussion, drawing on Aboriginal traditions of fun performances, have been styled as contaminated by European culture because they are topical performances and therefore incorporate the European presence. These performances that mock and satirize everyday subjects have been on this basis either erased or seen as derivative because of the premises of European cultural domination that have been part of colonialism. However, once these premises are set aside a rich part of the embodied encounter between Aboriginal people and settler colonists becomes apparent. This challenge to usual readings of Aboriginal performance from the past also has implications in the present. The Eurocentric frames that have hidden past performances continue to affect the reception and understanding of contemporary Aboriginal performances. Any performance expresses embedded cultural epistemologies, axiologies and ontologies – as does the reportage and documentation of performances and the history based on those writings. In the context of the colonial embodied encounters, when the individuals at each point have different cultural positions separated across time, the resulting understandings of historical practices can tend to be very limited and express more about the individual historian and her or his cultural position than about the historical performance practices under examination. The challenge is thus to negotiate the available information in its many forms to recreate a meaningful

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picture of the moment of performance with its physical actions and intentions in a way that also reveals the competing positions of the indigenous participants and the non-indigenous documenter and interpreter. Since the 1990s, I have sought to document Aboriginal Australian theatre practices from a position as an outsider both temporally and culturally. Over the last seven years, I have focused my research on nineteenth-century Aboriginal Australian initiated and controlled performances for entertainment presented in the cross-cultural context before white settler colonists. As a white Australian, that places my position outside in multiple ways. In order to offer any depth or meaningful understanding of the performances I am writing about, I need to have some depth of knowledge and understanding about the cultures and practices of the original performers; understanding and knowledge about the colonists who wrote about those performances and provide most of the documentation in the archive; a critical understanding of my own cultural standpoint; and, wherever possible, shared information from the descendants of the original performers through family stories and cultural knowledge. My understanding of these different elements has developed over time, hopefully improving, but will always remain a series of approximations. This chapter draws on my previous research and discussions to focus on the historiographic issues around writing about culturally specific performance practices from a different standpoint culturally and temporally. Until the twenty-first century, Australian theatre practice was usually understood and written about in terms of the theatrical performances brought to Australia after European settlement in the late eighteenth century. The performances I am focusing on were not included in histories of Australian theatre performance. Indeed, when I first attempted to secure research funding to undertake comprehensive archival research to gain a deeper understanding of the cross-cultural performances after European settlement, grant assessors declared that such performances never happened and there was no information to find. I now have records of thousands. The implied meaning of Australian performance history is changing. It no longer means only European-initiated styles of theatre. Recent work such as Anna Haebich’s study of Noongar performance continues to reveal the hidden histories of encounters and changes the way in which lineages of performance are understood (2018). Traditionally, Indigenous Australian cultures are heavily performance based, with overt choreographed presentations playing an important role in areas ranging from education to resolving judicial issues and for entertainment. As I have argued elsewhere, historical or traditional Aboriginal performances can be divided into three main groupings: ceremony, often secret and sacred; public versions of Dreaming stories intended primarily for educative purposes; and topical performances for entertainment (2009). The latter, Aboriginal Australian public performances for entertainment, styled as ‘ordinary corroborees’ by the anthropologist W. Baldwin Spencer at the turn of the nineteenth century (1901: 6) and therefore not worth recording, and then as ‘imaginative and inventive’ performances for ‘public enjoyment’ under the heading of a type of ceremony by Ronald and Catherine Berndt in the first half of the twentieth century (1965: 387) as a way of creating space for a level of cultural respect, are the focus of

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this discussion. These practices predate and in many ways parallel practices that are usually exclusively attributed to European theatre in terms of elements such as set, scripts, actors, directors, props and costumes and defined performance spaces. These performances for entertainment often remained part of the repertoire for decades, in some cases hundreds of years. The term ‘corroboree’ is a corruption of words from the Dharuk language from the Sydney area, such as caribberie, meaning to dance or a mode of dancing. The word corroboree was taken up and popularized as a term by the European settlers and carried across Australia, then reclaimed by Aboriginal people for staged public events in the nineteenth century (Howitt 1904: 413). Corroboree, in common usage in Australia, is applied to all types of events, whereas in fact there are many different words used by specific Aboriginal language groupings to denote dozens of different genres of performances whether public or private. In studies by white musicologists and anthropologists, these performances are often described as either dance or song without regard to the other elements of the performance. For example, a leading ethnomusicologist of the twentieth century, Alice Moyle, documented, recorded, analysed and publicized the variety and the complexity of Australian Indigenous music but not the physical elements of the same performances (1966). Further, when the dances are examined, dance scholarship over the last century has tended to frame European-based dance as purely an aesthetic art form and politically and socially neutral. Indigenous and First Nations dance has tended to be framed as ritual or erased. I would argue that no art form is politically neutral and that the reception and documentation of Aboriginal Australian performance as an inferior form is very political and embedded in the colonial enterprise. The usual terms used are folk theatre or proto theatre implying that non-European practices are a primitive form in development towards European theatre (Jeyifo 1996: 152). These performances by Aboriginal people in the cross-cultural context embodied claims to sovereignty over the land, intellectual control in the recounting of events (which is not the same as oral history) and were often a satirical response to the colonizers’ claims of authority and control (Casey 2012: 49–55). Given the spiritual beliefs of Aboriginal people, a central part of all embodied performances was mimetic reproduction of the living worlds as a form of recognition of the connection to the sacred. Generally referred to as mimicry, rather than the mimetic representation of European theatre practice, this feature is the one that white colonists and settlers consistently noted and documented in their observations. The majority of white accounts focus on clowning or on mimetic performances of animals such as kangaroos. In his book The Story of the Blacks: Aborigines of Australia, Charles White recounts a multitude of humorous stories about Aboriginal people’s performance skills and sense of fun (1889). White was an amateur historian known for collecting and meticulously recording material about elements of early Australia including bush rangers and Aboriginal encounters which he compiled into published histories. One story, attributed to a man called Surgeon Cunningham in the 1850s, tells of an Aboriginal man called Bidjee-Bidjee making an appearance at a ball shadowing and exactly mimicking in behaviour and dress one of the local

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leading white social figures known as the ‘Beau’. Other accounts speak of imitations of various authority figures (‘Grand Corrobory’ 1835: 4).

FRAMING AND ERASING THE PERFORMANCES Culturally specific performances by colonized peoples within the contexts established by dominant colonizers and settlers are often framed as cultural tourism. An adaptation that, depending on the point of view, salvages or perverts the cultural heritage of the ‘other’ in a way that, by implication, sacrifices cultural value in order to achieve economic value on the colonizer’s terms. These are contested positions in the present but when they are retrospectively applied to past cultural transactions, they become even more problematic. As I have argued elsewhere, performance has played and been used as a critical and crucial part of the colonial enterprise in Australia (Casey 2012a). Historically, Aboriginal Australian cultural performances include a rich and diverse range of genres of public entertainment that were toured and traded across the country between Aboriginal communities before European colonization. These practices continued long after European settlement. In 1902, John Walter Gregory, the British geologist and explorer, recounted that on a scientific expedition around Lake Eyre: The natives were then celebrating a corroboree of new songs and dances, which had been composed by a native genius up in Queensland, and was being passed through the country from one tribe to another. A party of Cowarie blacks had taught it to some of the Peake natives at a corroboree on the Maoumba. The deputation were now performing it to their own tribe, after which they were going to teach it to the people of Oodnadatta. (6) My own research has shown that across the long nineteenth century, Aboriginal performances for entertainment under the general term corroboree were a widespread form of commercial entertainment organized by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal entrepreneurs for both black and white audiences (Casey 2009). However, until recently, corroboree performances for entertainment witnessed and documented by white settlers have rarely been examined. As I previously stated, they have generally, from an anthropological perspective, been categorized and allowed cultural value as ceremony or oral history (Berndt and Berndt 1965: 386–7). I have argued elsewhere that these categories are inappropriate for performances created for laughter on topical issues (see Casey and Bradley 2011). One of the results of this type of categorization is a slippage between ceremonial performances and ones created for entertainment or education. But where performances for entertainment that challenge or problematize these two categories are examined, the tendency has been to label these performances either as cultural tourism or as tainted in some way. The latter perspective is represented in its most extreme form by the historian Manning Clark who described Aboriginal people as ‘reduced to prostituting the corroboree’ (1987: 222–3). Of the former, the most influential is Michael Parsons from tourism studies (1997; 2002). He argues that these types of events ‘emerged in Australia in the nineteenth century as a cultural product jointly negotiated between

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two cultures’, Aboriginal and the dominant European or Anglo cultures. He divides the performances into four main types: the peace corroboree, a performance to re-establish positive relations with Europeans often initiated by Europeans; the command performance, a performance orchestrated to affirm Anglo power; the gala performance, a corroboree organized to mark a civic Euro-Australian event; and the commercial or tourist performance event (1997: 46–7). The main focus of his research is on performances that actively engage with the settler economy which he labels the ‘tourist corroboree’ within the paradigm of cultural tourism. Thomas Hinch and Richard Butler define cultural tourism as ‘tourism activities in which indigenous people are directly involved either through control and/or by having their culture serve as the essence of the attraction’ (2009: 17). The basis of cultural tourism is that, as Urry argues, indigenous people and their cultures are the subject of the tourist gaze (1990). While the role of passive tourist has been problematized by a number of scholars (Coleman and Crang 2002: Haldrup and Larsen 2010), the focus here is on interrogating the actions of both the Aboriginal performers and European settlers in a particular temporality and context. The debates within tourism studies often ‘pit tourism as an agent for indigenous people’s economic independence and cultural rejuvenation against arguments of hegemonic subjugation and cultural degradation’ (Hinch and Butler 2009: 16). This binary between cultural value and economic value presumes that cultural value has been in some way compromised by the context of commercial production. A pivotal factor in this position is the presumed commodification of Indigenous cultures or elements of those cultures for the non-Indigenous audience. In this analysis, performances presented to non-Indigenous audiences are a commodity that to a greater or lesser extent has been modified to suit the audience. There is, in the current international economies of tourism, a solid basis for this type of conclusion. However, when the contemporary situation is imposed retrospectively as the sole frame onto performances from the past, the complexity of the cultural negotiations can be lost and there is the risk of repeating the colonial practices of erasing and silencing cultures. Thus, such performances in the cross-cultural context are, when they are examined, framed as examples of lack of cultural power and agency for Aboriginal people. The three main positions from which they have been examined are as ‘inauthentic’, as hybrid performances or as cultural tourism. Candice Bruce and Anita Calloway, in their study of images of corroborees representing the ‘inauthentic’ position, describe these types of performances as a ‘white spectator sport’ (1991: 88). They argue that Indigenous historical and traditional performances were controlled through the appropriation of them as ‘a form of entertainment staged specifically for the benefit and entertainment of “whites”’ (86). The latter two positions – hybrid and cultural tourism – overlap in the ways in which they are applied because they both rest on the premise that Aboriginal performances for entertainment were developed for white audiences and that these audiences are the critical point of reference (Parsons 2002; Haebich and Taylor 2007: 30–1). But the presupposition in all these framings is that the intentions of the performers are to please the white audience. I would argue that this viewpoint is far from accurate.

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REFRAMING ABORIGINAL PERFORMANCE In the nineteenth century, Aboriginal men and women performed in the crosscultural context for a range of reasons including claiming their sovereignty over their land, demanding space for their lives and cultures in the face of colonization, educating the colonizers and engaging with the settler economy in the face of removal of their lands and traditional foods (Casey 2012: 49–55). Aboriginal Australian performances for entertainment from the nineteenth century dealt with aspects of European colonization and racism within their own traditional practices. There are contemporaneous accounts by local settlers and European visitors as well as government administrators of a number of these in histories of the area, local newspapers and personal diaries. They include performances that were satirical and treated with humour and laughter, traumatic acts of racialized violence in Australia, where the Aboriginal audiences are documented as laughing uproariously in response. Examples include performances from Arnhem Land in the north where one centred on white men abducting women for sexual use; there are others from Stradbroke Island off the coast of Queensland that include the ways in which the Europeans in the volunteer land army used their training and arms to kill Aboriginal people. These performances offer ways of acting out and dealing with events that cause communal and individual traumas (see Casey 2014). The remainder of this essay examines performances by Quandamooka people as significant encounters in the cross-cultural context. The Quandamooka region in south-east Queensland, Australia, now known primarily as Moreton Bay and its islands, was the site of violent frontier conflict across the nineteenth century. Colonial newspapers regularly represented the ‘Moreton Bay Blacks’ as murderers for defending their land. At the same time, Aboriginal communities and colonists traded and negotiated with each other. Throughout this period, the people of Quandamooka, the Ngugi (Moreton Island), the Goenpul and Nununkul (North and South Stradbroke Islands) continued their performance practices for entertainment. These were created in the first instance for their own communities. They were also on occasions presented for the white audiences. Based on the content and context, I argue that these cross-cultural performances were presented with intent to challenge the imperial notions about Aboriginal Australian people that were foundational to the colonial enterprise. As I have documented elsewhere, Aboriginal performance practices for entertainment, like practices for ceremony, historically include alternating a number of elements within the framework of the performance; these elements include storytelling through narrative, dialogue, poetry, dance, mime, song and visual art usually accompanied by percussion and other musical instruments (Casey 2012). Topical performances for entertainment were created and owned by individuals who taught and directed others in the required elements of the performance, song, dance and story, with the performances then toured and traded between communities as discussed earlier in this essay. Corroborees for social occasions were created around topical themes, events and observations. These were performed for intra- and inter-community gatherings

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(Hardley 1975: 6). The narratives centre on social events, celebration of hunting prowess, anything that can be turned into a story for entertainment. The words used for these performances do not necessarily translate easily into contemporary English. For example, among the Yanyuwa, originally largely from the Sir Edward Pellew Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory, now settled around the Borroloola region, these stories are nguyulnguyul, or in the Yanyuwa Aboriginal English – ‘fun’. Nguyulnguyul also carries more complex meanings and resonances, especially in relation to composition and performance that speak to the achievements within the creative endeavour. The word denotes the achievement of ideals: that the performer and the composer have created something that draws people to want to hear and participate in it. The term can be associated with ideals of excellence in creative endeavour at all levels. Thus, a person who creates performances that are nguyulnguyul is also described as being ngirriki, which is glossed as ‘tricky’, but a thicker description would carry the weight of a person who transcends normal accomplishments.1 This account of practices is necessarily generalized and there would have been and still are regional differences. However, the documented evidence suggests a high level of similarity in practices across the country in the long nineteenth century. There are literally hundreds of performances documented by early settlers through to bureaucrats, anthropologists, passing artists and tourists well into the twentieth century across Australia. Though there seems to have been little attempt to understand or engage with the performances on their own terms rather than as an interesting spectacle, there are numerous details recorded such as the costume or body paint in one documented performance in New South Wales in 1841, where a performer was described as having ‘his legs painted exactly like a Highlandman’s hose, even to the garter’ (Albert Bushman 1841: 2). Or the description of a set and props, as in one account in 1883, that included a 4.3-metre model of a crocodile described as ‘made of bark and painted so as to resemble one in the minutest degree’ (‘Aboriginal Corroboree’ 1883: 2).

CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXT Rather than being passive victims of white entrepreneurs and audiences, I argue here that Indigenous people used their own historical practices of performances for entertainment to engage with the settler economy and assert their sovereignty. The performances I am focusing on are all associated to some extent with Nuwhju, known as Billy Cassim, an Aboriginal man of the Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island) in Queensland. He was a well-known figure in the islands of Moreton Bay and on the mainland in the nineteenth century. Many local white residents and visitors to Moreton Bay in the late nineteenth century wrote about Nuwhju’s performances. One of these was Thomas Welsby, a leading figure in Queensland colonial society. Welsby was a keen amateur historian and founding member of the Queensland Historical Society. He wrote seven books about the history of the Moreton Bay region: Schnappering (1905), Early Moreton Bay (1907), The Discoverers of the Brisbane River (1913),

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The History of the Royal Queensland Yacht Club (1918), Memoirs of Amity (1922), Sport and Pastime in Moreton Bay (1931) and Bribie the Basketmaker (1937). He also wrote a pamphlet, The Story of Newstead House (1939), as well as four papers for the society’s journal, all demonstrating his commitment to recording Queenslanders’ reminiscences and for using original documents in research. Many of his books were serialized in Queensland newspapers. His focus was on the history of settlement but significant Aboriginal individuals such as Nuwhju are occasionally included in the cross-cultural encounter. Welsby described Nuwhju as ‘an entrepreneur, an artist’ and ‘possessed of certain literary qualifications of an aboriginal character’ (1921: 17). Nuwhju, who died in 1890, was probably born in the 1820s or the early 1830s. He was well known for the corroborees he created for the entertainment of Aboriginal communities on the islands. They were toured and traded between communities throughout the islands and across to the mainland. These were also performed for white audiences. Nuwhju’s comic performance corroborees were often sharply satirical about race relations. Nuwhju’s corroborees were described in a number of accounts about the early settlement of Moreton Bay by leading white colonists such as Welsby and George Watkins. There are accounts of about six of his corroborees, two of which are clear examples of laughing at white men’s violence against Aboriginal people. The ‘Soldier’ corroboree, created around 1884, was a performance based on satirizing the military training of the Territorial Army and Native Police and their use of their weapons and training to mete out brutal treatment to Aboriginal people (Welsby 1913: 116; Watkins 1891: 141). The performance included a long mocking speech about the ‘wonderful Sandgate soldier man’ (Welsby 1921: 17). Sandgate is a nearby town on the mainland. There was also a series of clowning sequences where the trainee soldiers would take fright at the sound of their guns firing while they were training. The ‘Soldier’ involved a large cast with performers playing soldiers and officers as well as volunteers in training, Indigenous victims male and female and grieving wives plus musicians and singers. It also included a series of danced mock battles between the Aboriginal people and the European volunteers (Welsby 1967: 122–3). Another performance by Nuwhju was ‘The South Passage Corroboree’. In the narrative of this performance text, a group of Aboriginal people go to the telegraph office on Stradbroke Island with a false report that a large ship had run afoul of the shallow waters and ended up aground on the other side of the island. In response, the operator sends word to Brisbane and a steamer comes to aid the ship. When the crew of the steamer arrive and find they have been tricked, they abuse the Aboriginal people who have come to witness the fun, and in their rage shoot at them. The performance ends with the Aboriginal people escaping unharmed into the bush and enjoying the joke. The performance of the ‘white sailors’ was described by a white audience member as exaggerating their words and behaviour until they appeared ‘ludicrous’ (Sketcher 1890: 787). Both of these corroborees are comic narratives about violence against Aboriginal people, which were created to laugh at both the killing and the attempts to kill people at a time when this violence was actually happening. These comedies create an opportunity to counter the narratives and discourses of white superiority and

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instead show the white men as the problem. Contrary to colonialist descriptions of Aboriginal people, in these comedies the white man is the one ‘who has little control over his feelings and is liable to give way to violent fits of temper, during which he may very likely behave with great cruelty’ (Spencer 1913). The premises of racialized hierarchies and narratives in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are challenged. In Nuwhju’s ‘Soldier Corroboree’, the volunteers are shown to be cowardly and incompetent as they train, and then mindlessly violent in their attacks on the Indigenous people. Another layer is added to the exposé through mock speeches such as the one about the ‘wonderful Sandgate soldier man’ (Welsby 1921: 17). These Sandgate men are shown, in the comic juxtaposition, to be pompously unaware of their own actions and consequences as well as lacking in both ethical behaviour and courage. ‘The South Passage Corroboree’ reveals the white men as easily manipulated and when thwarted as resorting to mindless violence. Another performance, which offers a different perspective on relationships between white settlers and Indigenous people, focused on the sinking of the paddle steamer Sovereign. In March 1847, the Sovereign left Brisbane on a regular voyage to Sydney. On board were fifty-four passengers and crew. As the ship went round the south end of Moreton Island in the South Passage, it struck a sand bar and sank in rough weather. Of those on board only ten survived – and those survived because Aboriginal men from Quandamooka swam out through rough seas and rescued them at the risk of their own lives. One of those men was Nuwhju. Three months later, in June 1847, some of the men from Amity Point in Minjerribah/Stradbroke Island combined with Turrubul on the mainland to perform a corroboree on what was then the outskirts of the colonial settlement of Brisbane at Kangaroo Point. The performance was described as a dramatic representation descriptive of the wreck of the Sovereign. […] Those who witnessed the scene (of the performance) state that their rude gestures were highly expressive of that unfortunate event, and of the actions they were intended to represent. (‘The Black’ 1847: 2) This performance can be understood in all sorts of ways. If performances are categorized as oral history then the performance is a naïve form of history and merely reproducing what happened. But if Aboriginal people are viewed with more basic respect, the performance raises the question of why these groups chose to perform a re-enactment of the whites’ vulnerability and dependence at the main settlement of Brisbane. The performance potentially contests narratives about Aboriginal people as helpless, erased and challenges narratives about white superiority, affirming Aboriginal strength and sovereignty. The performance is also about relationality. The people of Quandamooka on Minjerribah/Stradbroke Island were related through centuries of intermarriages to the Turrubul peoples. The performance brings the strength and connections of both peoples before the settler colonists. The story shows their strength in the land and sea on which they had lived for more than 65,000 years, performing relation to place and knowledge about that place. The performance also – perhaps – acts as

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an invitation to the settlers to develop a new relationship. An invitation that was ignored at the time and since.

CONCLUSION Aboriginal theatre continues to negotiate the pre-existing narratives about their practices. It is still not uncommon to hear people in theatre foyers after a show say that ‘we’ meaning white settler colonists, gave them, Aboriginal people, theatre. This creates an image of Aboriginal people as secondary. The Aboriginal performance practices were widely known and the focus of endless fascination for settlers from the time of the First Fleet in the late eighteenth century. There are literally thousands of images of corroborees from the nineteenth century in the form of drawings, illustrated magazines, paintings, lithographs and postcards that visually reduce the performances to wild dancing around a fire. These images were widely reproduced. They can be found in books such as Dot and the Kangaroo and as mass-produced lithographs such as those produced by commercial printing companies like Calvert and Waddy and Shallard Gibbs & Co. The composition and representation of corroborees in these images are practically uniform. At the same time across the century and since the reportage in newspapers continually claim that Aboriginal people are elsewhere, they no longer perform corroborees and they have not been seen for decades (for example, ‘Local Intelligence’ 1856). This situation is also paralleled in journals and diaries where people say they do not understand what they are watching (Westgarth 1848). All of these reports combine to erase what were widespread practices. Even now in the twenty-first century, depending on one’s knowledge and positionality, the record and history of Aboriginal theatrical practices for entertainment can be radically different. Are they just tainted foolishness, naïve oral history or important encounters in the history of colonization? It is the responsibility of all theatre historians to knowingly choose how they engage.

NOTE 1. ‘Aeroplane Dance’ is described as nguyulnguyul and Frank Karrijiji is often described as ngirriki. The source for this information is John Bradley based on thirty years’ work on the Yanyuwa language and a dictionary.

CHAPTER 3.2

Challenging Dominant Histories: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

‘No people at no place in no historical period is a monolith’, Laura Peja argues in her essay on the historiography of the Italian Jacobin triennium and its ‘Patriotic Theatre’, which is paired here with the collaboratively written essay by Milena Grass Kleiner, Mariana Hausdorf Andrade and Nancy Nicholls. Peja’s reminder serves as a useful warning to theatre historians to look beyond, through and past dominant historical narratives to find the counter-narratives and alternative subject positions, as well as the discrepancies and absences that mark the official record, opening up a gap between the complexity of historical events and the narratives that we as historians shape from them. The paired essays in this section provide two exemplary case studies for such a critical approach that tests and interrogates established histories, while operating at very different scales. At the heart of Peja’s essay is a microhistory, generated through close examination of an exchange of three letters, all contained within a single day, between Milanese citizens and Napoleon’s commander in Lombardy, in which a proposal to use a particular building to stage ‘only and continually democratic plays’ is approved with remarkable swiftness. From there, Peja offers the reader a rereading of the dominant historical narrative of the independent, revolutionary, patriotic impulse behind the founding of the Patriotic Theatre which suggests a much closer relationship between the protagonists and the French government – a rereading then supported by a critical interrogation of the repertoire performed in that theatre, which emphasizes law and justice over revolutionary impulse. In contrast to the micro-historical approach modelled by Peja, the essay of Grass Kleiner, Hausdorf Andrade and Nicholls challenges emerging dominant narratives at the level of the cultural identity of a nation state: Chile. Collecting, analysing and critiquing the limited number of texts that make up what they identify as the canon of Chilean theatre historiography, they are able to identify and interrogate both the emerging historical narratives of Chilean theatre and performance and the absences – ‘of most subaltern practices, including non-professional and nontext-based productions’ – which those narratives elide or conceal. Beginning with the national anthologies of drama that were published to celebrate the centenary and bicentenary of Chilean independence, Grass Kleiner, Hausdorf Andrade and

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Nicholls read the developing historiography of Chilean theatre against the grain, identifying not just the dominant tropes and narratives, but also what is obscured and missing: shanty town community theatre, labour theatre and so on. Citing the work of Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Grass Kleiner, Hausdorf Andrade and Nicholls note that ‘every historiographic production is selective in terms of the sources, historical events, and agents that it consciously or unconsciously includes or excludes’. The essays paired together here work to remind the reader of that historiographic truth, and provide example approaches, questions and frameworks that can be applied to other fields of historical enquiry.

CHAPTER 3.2.1

Theatre History versus Theatre Canon: The Chilean Case MILENA GRASS KLEINER, MARIANA HAUSDORF ANDRADE AND NANCY NICHOLLS

The Chilean case stands as an example of the heterogeneous state of theatre historiography around the world. Far from being a ‘recognised academic discipline within which successive generations of scholars have worked to identify, verify and shape the traces of theatre into descriptive and analytic narratives of past experience’, as Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson state in the Introduction to this handbook, we suggest that at the local level, theatre history is still a field strongly influenced by the circulation of the dramatic canon. We propose to treat Chile as a paradigmatic case of theatre as it has been and is incorporated into the construction of cultural identity: a process that goes back to the country’s constitution as a sovereign nation in 1810 when the first National Junta claimed independence from the Spanish Crown. One hundred years later, as part of the centennial independence celebrations, President Montt commanded the production of an anthology of the plays written throughout the nineteenth century that was to include ‘the most meritorious plays, those worthy of being preserved’ (Teatro Dramático Nacional 1912: vi; all translations from Spanish are by the authors unless otherwise stated) (Figure 3.2.1.1). In so doing, the authorities were asserting the role theatre was to play in the creation of the new nation state – a role in which positivist historians were already engaged through an extensive narrative of the Chilean National History project, thus sealing the close, long-standing relationship between performing arts and political life that was to become intense in the second half of the twentieth century. Interestingly enough, when the moment to commemorate 200 years of independence came along, the command was again the same. The Bicentennial Commission summoned by the presidency asked for another anthology. The 10,000 copies of the four-volume Antología: Un Siglo de Dramaturgia Chilena 1910-2010 (Anthology: Chilean Plays within a Century 1910-2010) – broadly known as the Bicentennial Anthology – were distributed free throughout the country and became an unavoidable reference for any scholarly approach to Chilean theatre in the last century. Compared to the ubiquity of the Bicentennial Anthology, theatre historiography in Chile counts only a limited number of texts that might be considered historical

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studies in the sense that they address the development of theatre either at a certain moment or throughout a specific period of time. In our first attempt to analyse this corpus, we found a great diversity of problems: difficulties in establishing the selection criteria, a certain randomness in the disciplinary approaches and a clear disparity in the depth of their analysis. The evident lack of a proper disciplinary debate raised new questions for us to address. What kind of cultural hegemonies are at stake when representing and narrating the history of Chilean theatre? Do these texts critically reflect on what a history of theatre means from an epistemological, methodological point of view? Are they just mirroring the canon already established? If so, how is this canon built? How does it circulate? How is it preserved? Does it change through time? And, finally, what role does it play when the historiographic density is so thin? Those are the questions we will try to answer in the following pages.

TEATRO DRAMÁTICO NACIONAL (NATIONAL DRAMATIC THEATRE, 1912) AND ANTOLOGÍA BICENTENARIO (BICENTENNIAL ANTHOLOGY, 2010) The origins of our investigation lie in a question that, in this case, precedes the full development of theatre historiography. Due to the limited number of agents and mechanisms involved in the processes of canonization and historicization – mainly scholars working at the two oldest and most prestigious universities in the country, as we will see – these have been deeply interrelated. The historical narratives of Chilean theatre have reproduced the canon, and at the same time have helped to build it into a self-referential loop that has excluded most subaltern practices including nonprofessional and non-text-based productions, thereby constructing a hegemonic cultural discourse which is scarcely questioned. This loop is clearly illustrated by the anthologies commissioned by the government for the commemorations of independence from Spain. On the centennial of Chilean independence from the Spanish Crown in 1910, Santiago, the capital city, marked the festivities with innumerable investments in civil works – the construction of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Mapocho Railway Station, the public sewage system and a new public lighting system among others. These improvements were fostered by the republican ideals in vogue at the time, which rested on a deep faith in progress, institutions, democracy and the Constitution. Culture was seen as a key element for the country’s development, and theatre as a privileged method for educating the citizenry – an idea that lingered from the colonial period, when the eighteenth-century Spanish authorities turned theatre into ‘the most protected public entertainment, encouraged by the rulers and Enlightenment thinkers [...] theatre seemed an effective means for civilizing and educating the people’ (Viqueira 1987: 53). The first republicans adhered to this Enlightenment ideology, and theatre was seen as a tool for the construction of a new nation. The commissioning of the first anthology by President Pedro Montt (1906–10) to celebrate the Centennial of Independence drew on this tradition that linked theatre with the birth of the nation.1

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In its first pages, Teatro Dramático Nacional (Volumen I) included the law signed by the president of the republic on 10 November 1908 creating the Library of Writers of Chile. Article 1 states: The intellectual production of Chile in the hundred years of independent life that the Republic is on the verge of commemorating, represents, in its array of works on important, substantive subjects, one of the most characteristic and honourable manifestations of national progress. (1912: v) Hence, given the task by the government to disseminate national knowledge – something that until then had lacked either a systematic plan or clear selection criteria – the Library of Writers was created in order to publish written works created in Chile and by Chileans living abroad from 1810 onwards, which were considered of distinct value, but were barely known or were difficult to find. According to the introduction to the volume, the value of the plays was to be strictly related to their ‘intrinsic merit’, or their ability ‘to reveal the state of culture or mentality of a certain period of national history’ (1912: vi). The anthology was meant to foster national identity; its patriotic mode is bluntly exposed in the titles of its selected plays which refer to mythical milestones in the origins and constitution of the republic (Camila or the Southamerican Patriot (1817) by F. C. Henríquez; The Independence of Chile (no date) by J. A. Torres) or to historical heroes (Almagro’s Conjuration (1858) by G. Blest Gana; Manuel Rodríguez (1865) by C. Walker Martínez) – along with the frequent subtitle of ‘historical drama’. This detailed account of this ‘foundational milestone’ has less to do with its canonical success than with the fact that the same kind of national project was replicated 100 years later on from 1910, when the Bicentennial Anthology 19102010 mirrored the model of the Teatro Dramático Nacional (Volumen I). In the first place, both anthologies were the result of commissions by the state: to the Library of Writers in 1908, and then to the University of Chile and the Catholic University in the early twenty-first century, whose representatives were to follow the command given in a speech by President Ricardo Lagos: We begin today this great national project of the Bicentennial. To this endeavour I encourage you, with the words of the Prospect of La Aurora de Chile, written during the Patria Vieja (Old Homeland) [1810–14], which remain in full force:  ‘... come, help, support, with your lights, meditations, books and papers, our weak efforts and works. The Motherland urges us. All the Americas are expecting we do good’. (2000: 163) The genealogy from independence to centennial to bicentennial, which gave an unprecedented place to culture in the neo-liberal context of the twenty-first century, was thus sealed and explained only by a return to that republican project forged in ‘the dawn of the Motherland’ where national progress rested on public instruction. Following the logic of public mission, the Bicentennial Anthology was taken up by the joint effort of the University of Chile (founded in 1842) and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (founded in 1888). Here, it is relevant to note that the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage was not created in Chile until 2017;

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FIGURE 3.2.1.1:  Teatro dramático nacional: tomo 1 / precedido de un prólogo de Nicolás Peña M. Santiago de Chile: Impr. Barcelona, 1912. cxxxiii + 539 pages; 22 cm. National Library of Chile Collection, available at Memoria Chilena: http:​//www​.memo​riach​ilena​. gob.​cl/60​2/w3-​artic​le-82​70.ht​ml.

before that, both universities functioned not only as creative training centres but also as key agents in artistic production and cultural development. Shielded by the authority of their institutions and their academic work, scholars María de la Luz Hurtado (Theatre School UC) and Mauricio Barría (School of Performing Arts of the University of Chile) recruited an advisory board of thirty-one theatre experts who reviewed around 400 dramatic texts: the work resulted in four volumes that included thirty-nine plays and were organized in consecutive periods, namely, 1910–50, 1950–73, 1973–90 and 1990–2009.

ANTHOLOGY, CANON AND HISTORIOGRAPHY In the emerging Chilean theatrical historiographical field, the Bicentennial Anthology has been read as canonical. This purpose is made explicit in its prologue, where the editors quote the definition of ‘anthology’ by the Royal Spanish Academy (‘worthy of being highlighted; extraordinary’ (in Hurtado and Barría 2010: 12)) and state

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that ‘we were aware that an anthology, especially if it is edited by official bodies for such special events, tends to establish an unavoidable referential canon’ (Hurtado and Barría 2010: 12). Every canon is organized on the basis of a series of criteria that determine what the authorized cultural agents consider valuable or worthy of being preserved at certain historical moments. According to Hurtado and Barría, the plays were selected on the following basis: ●●

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That they had a high quality in their writing and dramatic content; That they were appealing enough to still be performed at the present time by different types of theatre groups and within different public circuits;

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That they were aesthetically and thematically representative of their time;

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That they had value in terms of preservation, memory and/or patrimony;

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That each period should be represented by about ten plays, which together represented the dramatic landscape of the period in terms of stylistic diversity, genres and proposals of meaning, as well as including a diversity of authors. (Hurtado and Barría 2010: 13)

As we can see, the twentieth century brought with it an expansion of the criteria that the anthologized plays had had to fulfil a hundred years earlier. In this sense, it is especially noteworthy that the previous ‘intrinsic merit’ unfolds here in different theatrical characteristics; and that the quality of the writing and the dramatic proposal is paralleled now with production and reception interest. The plays still have to represent their ethos, but they also must exhibit heritage and memorial value. From one anthology to the other, disciplinary development and changes in cultural practices and policies become evident, bringing greater conceptual precision as well as the emergence of new problems. For the same reason, the Bicentennial Anthology is more complex in terms of styles, authorships and subjectivities. Nevertheless, any canonical exercise, particularly when dealing with an institutional project such as this one, has blind spots and obscures as much as it enlightens. An anthology is, therefore, not only a cultural, artistic statement, but also a political one, which must be carefully analysed. In this case, although each volume contains a similar number of plays, the time periods become shorter as the four volumes progress, which means that recent times are over-represented. Elsewhere, there are other areas of under-representation: within the thirty-nine plays of the Bicentennial Anthology, only five were written by women; none of them was written by someone belonging to an indigenous group or by provincial authors. The scarce presence of female authors is problematic, and reflects the undoubtedly unquestioned male hegemony in Chilean society. But should we expect that a national anthology adopts a policy favouring the representation of gender and indigenous minorities, or contesting geopolitical centralism? What is the right decision: to reproduce the hegemonic system or to use the canon to promote diversity? What are the criteria and needs determining what is ‘worthy of being highlighted’ nowadays? In the Chilean context, where there is practically no publishing market for plays, the inclusion in a commemorative edition (of no less than 3,000 books in 1912 and 10,000 in the bicentennial, mostly distributed for free in educational establishments,

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libraries and state offices) guarantees persistence over time, circulation within and outside the country and the possibility of future productions. Furthermore, the durability provided by the canon becomes one of the necessary conditions for any historiographic exercise: the continuing existence of the sources. In this sense, the Bicentennial Anthology was welcome: ‘the anthology proposes a canon that, with minimal modifications, will illuminate the last republican century and will serve as invaluable material for future studies on Chilean dramatic literature’ (Matamala 2010: 130). Nevertheless, the statement that the canon per se illuminates the past is problematic. Considering the scarce development of Chilean theatrical historiography, the establishment of a canon can easily occlude everything it does not include, especially because there has never been a solid editing industry in the country specifically devoted to theatre plays. Bearing in mind that a flourishing publishing environment acts as a counterbalance for the selective process of canonmaking, the aforementioned precariousness means that the plays not included in the Bicentennial Anthology might be completely lost in a couple of decades, as has happened with the dramatic texts of very successful productions – both in terms of audience and critics’ reception – premiered in the 1990s that are forgotten today. In this context, Matamala’s statement that the Bicentennial Anthology is ‘a first step towards a solid critical historiography of the Chilean theatre’ (Matamala 2010: 130) disregards the fact that the plays in the anthology might well be the only plays available for such a historiography. The rapid connection between anthology and historiography is striking, more so because the first here seems to appear as a necessary antecedent to the second. Nevertheless, an anthology should be the result of a critical analysis of the past; that is, the result of a historiographical reflection. Otherwise, the anthological selection could be arbitrary, and make its own selection criteria invisible – or establish very broad and mutually exclusive criteria, as we have previously seen. On the other hand, and this seems to be the case here, what happens if, rather than promoting a ‘solid critical historiography’, the anthology ends up constructing and reproducing canonical configurations that are scarcely questioned due to the meagre development of the same historiography?

A HISTORIOGRAPHIC CORPUS ANALYSIS In order to answer the previous question, we analysed the written works historicizing Chilean theatre from 1973 to the present. Even though that starting point might seem dubious when analysing in detail contemporary practices that do not correlate with the 1973 political coup – something that was debated by members of the advisory committee of the Bicentennial Anthology – this event still marks a point of no return. The civilian–military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the first elected socialist president, initiated ‘the Dictatorship’ based in a terror regime that included centres of extermination, torture and forced disappearance along with the installation of a deeply neo-liberal economy and a regressive political system which undermined social and civil rights and reshaped Chilean society forever.

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The corpus of Chilean theatre historiography that we examined was composed of more than a dozen texts which historicize Chilean theatre between 1973 and the present using different approaches. We selected books and book chapters, excluding articles because in Chile there is just one journal devoted to theatre studies – Apuntes de Teatro, with no international indexation despite its sixty-three years of existence – and the few journals on history do not publish papers on theatre. We grouped these works into three categories: those that aim to provide analysis and historicization of theatre at the national level; works focused on theatre in various Chilean regions; and writings on university theatres and community theatre. Works dealing with a specific company and/or author were also excluded, because our aim was to analyse the ways in which these historiographical writings produce a narrative construction of the historicization of Chilean theatre at a broader level. The analysis revealed that the history of Chilean theatre that has been written is very diverse in terms of disciplines (the authors are not historians, but sociologists, journalists and other writers), objectives and historical junctures. For instance, when referring to objectives, Juan Andrés Piña (Historia del Teatro Chileno 19411990) aims to go beyond chronological reviews of outstanding playwrights, and the analysis and periodization of their productions, to address the theatrical event within a specific historical context (Piña 2014); whereas María Teresa Zegers (25 Años de Teatro en Chile (1970-1995)) focuses on the ‘chronological detail’ and pays less attention to the historical context than to the description of productions, her analysis being based on articles by actors, directors and critics – mainly María de la Luz Hurtado (Zegers 1999). If we consider the historical junctures at which these texts have been written, the temporal spectrum is broad. Grinor Rojo wrote in exile the three essays of Muerte y resurrección del Teatro Chileno (Death and Resurrection of the Chilean Theatre) (1981–4) as a contribution to overthrowing the dictatorship, which thus occupies a central place in his objectives, analysis methodology and language. On the other hand, post-dictatorship texts can be seen to be in dialogue with the new contexts, interests and problems in which they are written. For instance, Paola S. Hernández, in Teatro de Argentina y Chile, Globalización, Resistencia y Desencanto (The Theatre of Argentina and Chile, Globalization, Resistance and Disenchantment, 2009), analyses the theatre of dictatorship and post-dictatorship from the perspective of globalization, investigating the ways in which theatre is concerned with and reacts to the symptoms of this phenomenon (Hernández 2009). Finally, some of the texts are openly declared to be ‘Histories of theatre in Chile’, while others introduce historical elements despite not being defined as historical works as such. Moreover, only a few consider theatre in Chile their subject matter in broad, general terms, addressing mostly specific aspects – a particular theatre company or the theatre production of a specific city or region. For example, Pamela Díaz Lobos (2011) studies the theatre companies in the city of Valparaíso, examining whether or not these come to constitute a local movement in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; Consuelo Morel (2013) produces a mémoire of the Escuela de Teatro UC (Theatre School of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile) between 1979 and 2009 – the third volume of a series initiated by Gisele Munizaga and María de la Luz Hurtado (1980); and Soledad Lagos (1994)

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analyses the Chilean-devised theatre (teatro de creación colectiva) towards the end of the 1980s. The histories of the provincial theatres counterpoint the histories of theatre at the national level – ‘national’ standing here generally for Santiago2 – because they often refer to places, people and theatrical events excluded in the latter. Overall, these histories collect data, reconstruct facts, but they do not open a debate where discordant, dialogical voices are heard. The account tends to be monological. Another characteristic of the corpus is the pre-eminence of descriptive over critical analysis. Instead of questioning the past, the works studied here reconstruct it through compilations and chronological descriptions of theatrical events. In so doing, the selection of productions, playwrights, companies, actors and actresses, and other agents relevant to the theatre field of the period produces a homogeneous set of commonplace references, which are generally grouped into four categories: the university theatres,3 the so-called independent professional theatre, the amateur theatre and the commercial theatre. The result is what we identify as a ‘recanonization’ loop, which obscures other kinds of theatre – shanty town community theatre, labour theatre, exile theatre, theatre for children, among others – possibly because they are considered not aesthetically relevant. This making invisible of other types of theatre results also from the lack of sources enabling their study, a problem that is present in theatre historiographic work per se and not only in the Chilean context. According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, every historiographic production is selective in terms of the sources, historical events and agents that it consciously or unconsciously includes or excludes; hence the importance of historical debate for a more inclusive, complex historicization (Trouillot 1995) – which would also lead to a critical approach to the canon construction. In respect of questions of audiences and reception, there is similarly little analysis. The Chilean scholar María de la Luz Hurtado argues that between 1976 and 1981, theatre had an enormous impact on society as an agent of political resistance and social criticism in the hardest times of dictatorship. With an overall population of four million people, estimates of theatre audiences in Santiago vary widely between around 10,000 and around 120,000,4 who ‘belonged not only to the wealthiest sectors, but also showed a clear social heterogeneity due to the promotional policies benefiting workers and popular organizations’ (Hurtado 1990: 153). What prompted the high attendance at these productions? Was it the artistic quality of the productions or an expression of protest by a society strongly repressed in its ideas and acts? Or was it even a way to regain the cultural active life that existed prior to the coup d’état? If the plays were seen by working-class audiences, would there be a link between these productions and what Chilean historians Gabriel Salazar and Julio Pinto call ‘community cycle’? Here, they refer to the sociocultural context that ‘re-emerged and strengthened in the popular sectors, [between 1976 and 1982, as] a new type of class consciousness, based on the memory of individual endeavour, and a diversified capacity for action and production, in which “the political” was another faculty, immersed in “the social” and determined by “the cultural” and “the local”’ (Salazar and Pinto 2002: 241), one that later would fuel the protests against dictatorship. Answering these questions would facilitate a better understanding of

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the history of Chilean theatre not just as an artistic phenomenon, but also as a sociocultural and political one. On another level, the corpus of historiographic texts that we analysed presents some methodological complexities. The works generally lack a proper historical question that underpins the scrutiny of the past, positions the authors and allows the reader to understand the research approach. As Thomas Postlewait points out, ‘The quality of the historical investigation depends directly on the quality of the questions being asked’ (Postlewait 2009: 2). Methodological issues and problems also include non-explicit criteria for the selection of plays, companies and artists – here inclusion seems to respond to an illustrative purpose in a sort of confirmation of the author’s claims, rather than to the development of a critical analysis. In terms of the sources – mostly written documents – they are primarily plays and reviews, which results in various problems, including the limitation of theatre analysis to purely dramaturgical aspects. It is also fairly common that authors do not make any distinction between theatre and dramatic text; in some cases, neither the play text nor a video recording was preserved, and successful productions fell almost completely into oblivion except for what was preserved within the memory of spectators. In terms of types of evidence, Juan Andrés Piña’s Historia del Teatro en Chile 1941-1990 stands out. The author relies on a comprehensive set of interviews with relevant people, quoting the interviewees by their names, yet does not mention the spatiotemporal context in which these interviews took place. This is a key element in understanding the interpretation of the subject’s own artistic work, and that of the others: its evidential value certainly varies if expressed at the opening night, or twenty years on, recalling the theatre event. A final point to make in relation to evidence is that scholars tend to overlook the constitutive material differences of the sources. Dramatic texts, newspaper reviews, news and notes, photographs, testimonies or interviews are treated indiscriminately, without tackling the epistemological problems each of them introduces to the analysis. The materiality of these documents is rarely addressed as related to a specific time and space context, that determines their conditions of production and circulation, their aims and functions within the broader social and cultural discourse. Lastly, the history of theatre in Chile as constructed through this corpus has mostly been formed by a linear logic, according to which the theatrical events take place over time, interwoven with their politico-social, economic and cultural contexts, and are largely explained by these same elements. For the period we studied, three timelines seem to have been constructed by the various texts: one that lines up the theatre events along with the general context of the country, with a more specific treatment of the cultural situation; another that analyses the professional theatre of the universities (mainly that of the Catholic University and the University of Chile); and, finally, a last one that deals with ‘amateur’ theatre. The way in which the events scattered along these three discrete timelines are interwoven, mutually influenced, determined, set apart or perhaps not affected by each other at all, is not always clear, and the possibilities of synchronic analysis are therefore lost. On the other hand, events tend to be organized following a causal logic between the historical events

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and the theatrical ones, especially when it comes to the 1973–90 dictatorial period (Piña 2014; Hurtado, Ochsenius and Vidal 1982). This obscures the question (asked elsewhere in this volume) of whether or not theatre historiography should provide its own periodization, different from the one that political historiography has set, and attuned with the specific development of the theatre field. Even though the number of scholars that produced the corpus that we analyse here is small, the various types of academic training they originally received in different disciplines, and the very diverse way in which they answer key historiographical questions – ‘what we write about, how we write and why we write’, as Cochrane and Robinson remind us in the Introduction to this handbook – have prevented the rise of a coherent or even conjoined critical debate where discordant voices are promoted in order to retrieve the complexities of the past. As a consequence, the works published from 1973 until 2016 that historicize Chilean theatre share common methodological problems and become a key part of a hegemonic discourse in which the role of national theatre anthologies is particularly relevant. The enclosed nature of the field has created a loop where those writing the history of Chilean theatre are also those leading the construction of theatre canon; thus, instead of contesting each other, unquestioned historical narratives determine the selection of plays and productions worth transmitting to future generations for its exemplarity, and the latter in turn reasserts the former. Our analysis of Teatro Dramático Nacional and Antología Bicentenario is an attempt to better understand what their functions might be within a cultural field in which the circulation and investigation of past theatre creation and practice are rather scarce and still precarious. This is due not only to the limited number of theatre scholars trained in the historical discipline, but also to the little interest that history schools in Chile afford to culture and the arts. Our analysis of the Chilean theatre historiographic corpus has shown that those few historians who have carried out research on theatre have still not yet produced a comprehensive general survey depicting a heterogeneous landscape, and dealing with historiographical questions – although we do note here the birth of a new generation of theatre scholars like Marianna Hausdorf Andrade, co-author of this article, Andrés Kalawski, researching Chilean acting performance in the early twentieth century, and Marcia Martínez, who works on reconstructing the history of provincial theatre in Concepción. Interestingly, Hausdorf and Kalawski both combine degrees in acting and history, which allows them a particular insight on theatre practices. Nevertheless, the incorporation of all these texts into a specific field of debate like the one we propose here – even if only preliminary – should foster the raising of new questions, and underpin the development of more varied methodological and epistemological approaches. It is also important to multiply the voices in this discussion, which has so far been confined to the university academic space, and even then to very few institutions within it. This might help us to understand why the names – and the assumptions – of the same canonical scholars tend to be widely quoted without any critical scrutiny, with the result that the revised anthologizing exercises fulfil a canonical function that cannot be questioned or critiqued. These

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anthologies can easily be constituted as hegemonic accounts of the Chilean theatrical past, especially if we consider the importance of written documents as sources of reliable information. This dependency on written documents is, of course, especially contradictory in the case of the history of the theatre, which is itself shaped by performance. However, it is an approach that is very predominant in our country due to the lack of published dramatic texts. The canonical constructions of the Chilean theatre must be constantly revisited and questioned in the light of diverse inquiries and concerns, which should arise from a critical analysis of past performative practices, a matter for which the development of a proper theatre historiography would be very productive. In May 2017, Chilean society was shaken by the uprising of a young feminist movement that occupied most universities in the country demanding non-sexist education and the immediate stop of gender violence. This is a movement against power structures that preserve themselves through loops of reciprocal affirmation. The question at stake here is whether scholars in the field will lock themselves within the privileges of high culture and academia, or whether they will engage in disruptive, critically self-reflexive practices – as we argue for here – that will ensure a permanent broadening of the field through the incorporation of new agents, objects, methods and questions about our theatrical past.

NOTES 1. The anthology replicated the effort to build the republican identity of the nation that had already been forged by positivist historians such as Diego Barros Arana and his sixteen volumes of the Historia de Chile, written between 1884 and 1902. 2. A problem shared even by the Antología (Anthology; Hurtado and Barría 2010), considered ‘a key piece for the humanities interested in researching Chilean identity, at least from the metropolitan point of view, it being usual in this kind of works not to consider the provincial’ (Matamala 2010: 130). 3. In Chile, so-called ‘university’ theatres were created throughout the country in the 1940s. Provided at first with stable casts, they staged a series of contemporary American and European plays in a theatre d’art mode. The Experimental Theatre of the University of Chile was the first to be founded (1941), followed by the Rehearsal Theatre of the Catholic University (1943), the Theatre of the University of Concepción (1945), the Theatre of the State Technical University (1958) and the Theatre of Antofagasta (1962). After a short period of time, these universities also created theatre schools to train the professional actors they needed, playing a decisive role in Chilean cultural development for decades. 4. We quote these vague figures as indicative of the lack of reliable information in relation to past theatre audiences, and of the broad spectrum of data that theatre scholars are willing to accept.

CHAPTER 3.2.2

When Napoleon Went to the Theatre: A Closer Examination of Stories and the History of the Milanese Patriotic Scene LAURA PEJA

The year 1796 is remembered for Napoleon Bonaparte’s brilliant victories in North Italy. Still only twenty-seven years old, Bonaparte led the Armée d’Italie across the Alps and the revolution came to Italy. On 14 May, following his victory over Austrian troops at the Battle of Lodi four days earlier, Bonaparte wrote to his brother Joseph: ‘We are masters of all Lombardy’ (The Confidential Correspondence 1855 I: 29) and the following day he entered Milan in triumph. The Italian campaign continued with Napoleon making swift progress from one end of the Po Valley to the other, pausing only to rest in Milan where his wife Josephine had arrived. To celebrate the Festival of the Foundation of the Republic on the 1st Vendémiaire (22 September in the French Republican calendar: when the French First Republic was proclaimed, in 1792, the day after the Convention abolished the monarchy), Napoleon is said to have watched a performance in Milan by a patriotic theatre group; the play was Virginia by Vittorio Alfieri. The venue for that special evening was the Teatro Canobiana, a building large enough to hold most of Milan’s population at the time, all of whom were invited by the municipality (the temporary government the French had put in charge) to attend the play free of charge. An immense throng attended the performance. With rounds of applause they greeted our liberating Hero, who with his presence came to crown a spectacle unexampled among us. With intense enthusiasm, the public relished its republican overtones and even the most delicate and moving qualities. (Amatore del teatro 1796; translation is author’s own)

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These were the effusive words of an article entitled Teatro patriottico (‘Patriotic Theatre’) that appeared in the Giornale degli amici della libertà e dell’uguaglianza (Journal of friends of freedom and equality) by a commentator who signed himself ‘Amatore del teatro’ (amateur of the theatre). But what exactly was the nature of this phenomenon, ‘patriotic theatre’? The name was used, together with ‘Jacobin theatre’, with reference to the civic theatres that arose in many Italian cities after the establishment of democratic governments following the arrival of the French army.1 In general, these theatres were born on the impulse of intellectuals who, enthused by Enlightenment ideas, considered the theatre as a form of popular education. The amateurs who played Virginia in the presence of Napoleon in September 1796 had sought permission to found the theatre they called the Teatro Patriottico in June of that year. This theatrical institution is still alive. In 1805, it changed its name to the more neutral one of Accademia dei Filodrammatici (Academy of Theatre Amateurs) and is now one of the oldest theatres still active in Milan.2 The Jacobin journals welcomed the plays performed by the patriotic amateurs in Milan; perhaps as a result, later theatre historians have somewhat hastily assumed that ‘dead in Paris, Jacobin theatre arose again on the 10th of June of IV year in the playhouse of the “Collegio Longone”’ (Bottoni 1990: 19)3 and celebrated this theatre as, ‘though rudimentary and partially, an Alfierian moment of the theatre: republican theatre not dependent on princes’ (Monaco 1968: 14). From the late 1960s until the end of the 1980s, the political engagement of the cultural elites in Italy was strong and many Italian theatre historians looked into the past with a pronounced interest in utilizing and drawing on history in order to direct and shape the course of present events. It is therefore necessary to ask if the judgements they expressed on patriotic theatre rest on historical facts or on a certain idea of the present which seeks to find its justification and create its mythology in the past. It is true, as Marc Bloch, one of the founders of the Annales School, said, that ‘every historical research supposes that the inquiry has a direction at the very first step’ (Bloch 1993: 51, Eng. edn); thus a ‘passive observation’ is not possible for the historian (and if it were, it would be useless, anyway). But this fundamental principle, which has to make the historian aware of his/her own responsibility, does not justify a biased approach that does not pay enough attention to facts in order to support ideological preconceptions. Theatrical historiography seems to have too often looked into the past to justify the celebrated idea of theatre as a revolutionary art, in contrast to more conservative modern media which are considered more ‘system-supportive’. There is a general truth underpinning this idea, especially because in the contemporary period theatre has often played the role of a ‘cheeky brat’ in contrast to the giants of journalism and television establishments that are much more connected to finance and politics, and therefore more controlled by the system. Also in relation to censorship it is the theatre, as a live event, that succeeds more easily in escaping it. Nonetheless, the idea of ‘revolutionary theatre’ cannot obviously be applied without a great deal of caution to historical periods where theatre itself was the main medium and thus a powerful means of manufacturing consent.

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Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, theatre had been increasingly considered a privileged instrument for disseminating civic virtues. We can find some interesting thoughts in the work of the eminent Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Della perfetta poesia italiana (About the perfect Italian poetry) 1706), and thereafter the idea of theatre as a civic instrument increasingly spread all over Europe thanks to the philosophes of the Encyclopédie. Especially after the French Revolution, reform of the theatres was called for, along with the creation of a new repertoire worthy of a free people. In 1794, the Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety), the first effective executive government of the revolutionary period in France, issued a decree which founded the ‘theatre for the people’. As has already been pointed out, the predominance of political concerns in the scholarship of the French revolutionary theatre has resulted in an enormous discrepancy between the complexity of historical facts and the simplified history/ story that has been told (see Kennedy et al. 1996; Feilla 2013). My argument in this essay is that something similar has happened to the historiography related to the Italian Jacobin triennium and that in fact, the rousing vision of the Teatro Patriottico as an essentially revolutionary instrument, an organ of pure republican propaganda, does not hold. A patriotic, revolutionary and strictly republican theatre was certainly the dream of an elite of intellectuals; however, according to the evidence discussed here, the dream did not match the reality. What is more, the very foundations of this theatre in Milan seem to have had much more to do with the need of the French holders of power to impose consensus than with the calls for freedom coming from the people, or at least from certain parts of Milanese society. The last assertion introduces at least two problematic historiographical aspects. One is related to the obvious fact (never underlined enough, though) that no people of no place in no historical period is a monolith, and even less so in complex periods of change such as the Jacobin triennium. Focusing on one single aspect of social life deeply connected with the whole, such as theatre activity, may enable us to more clearly evidence the complex articulation of actions and to follow some of the threads twisted inside a society that could not be but deeply shaken by rapid and huge events. And that is one of the contributions that the history of theatre can give to more general historiography. The second historiographical aspect is the evaluation of the sources that underpin this established narrative. I argue that in the second half of the twentieth century, an ideological bias often undermined historical research. Historians seem to have frequently taken the highly politicized journalists of the Jacobin journals as witnesses above suspicion. In 1989, republishing in four volumes one of the most influential Jacobin journals published in Milan during the triennium, the Termometro politico della Lombardia (Political thermometer of Lombardy), on behalf of the Istituto Storico Italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea (Italian Historical Institute for the Modern and Contemporary Age), the editor presented the journal as ‘the most balanced and mature Milanese democratic public opinion’ (Criscuolo 1989, I: 7). Without spending too much time on discussing the questionable adjectives ‘balanced’ and ‘mature’, let us stick to the more simple ‘Milanese’. As is well known, there was little of the Milanese in the Jacobin journals, including the Termometro

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politico. The vast majority of the journalists who founded these journals were in fact exiles, political immigrants coming from all over the country: Francesco Saverio Salfi, born in Cosenza, came from Naples via Genoa; Matteo Angelo Galdi and Giuseppe Abamonti from Salerno; Giovanni Antonio Ranza from Vercelli; Giovanni Rasori from Parma; Melchiorre Gioia, Giuseppe Poggi and Leonardo Cesare Loschi from Piacenza. Even an individual born in Milan, such as Carlo Salvador, had only returned to the city in 1796 following Napoleon’s army, after years in Paris supporting Robespierre and Marat, and cannot therefore be seen as an expression of the Milanese thinking of those years. Turning to Pietro Verri, a thinker who without doubt can be labelled as Milanese, it is interesting to note that while initially he had started a collaboration with the Termometro politico della Lombardia (Capra 2001: 584–9), it soon ended. Evidently it had become immediately clear that their viewpoints did not match and in fact soon afterwards, in his Storia dell’invasione de’ francesi repubblicani nel milanese nel 1796 (History of the invasion of the French Republicans in Milan in 1796), he spoke about the new periodical sheets published in Milan as ‘a true sewer of slanders, abuse and indecencies, not only against religion but probity, and graceless vomiting, and without any other merit than a coarse audacity’ (Verri 2010 [1796]: 800; translation author’s own). Even though well-documented research on Pietro Verri (Capra 2001) seems to suggest that he could be considered quite reasonably ‘balanced and mature’, his status and social and intellectual position make it more difficult to describe him as ‘democratic’ (even though this term perhaps deserves a wider discussion, for which there is no place here). It was probably alluding to him, who was part of the municipality, that the founders of the Termometro politico journal, Salvador and Salfi, spoke about that municipality as a ‘host’ made up of ‘men of letters or selfstyled philosophers, who clinging to the superiority of the lights they possess, or rather ascribe to themselves, would still like to assign to themselves the superiority of rule’ (‘Sintomi dell’aristocrazia’ 1796, I: 107). I have spent some time on these skirmishes between intellectuals because they perfectly show how ideas, points of view and positions in 1796 Milan were diverse and complex and continuously changing. There were, of course, the two obvious factions – those who cheered Milan’s ‘liberation’ on 15 May after nearly a century of subjection to the Hapsburgs of Austria and those who believed that the city was being conquered by a threatening, predatory enemy army that merely paid repeated lip service to the idea of bringing freedom. But there were also many shades of grey between these two extremes, not to mention the fact that opinions and views also developed and changed as events unfolded; not even among the French military hierarchy were ideas and plans always clear and shared. The people had to face a situation completely new, unknown and in itself in continuous redefinition. Some books have already made important contributions to the study of this complex period (see, for example, Broers 2004), but an accurate study of the Italian theatre under French domain, which takes into account the larger questions about shaping public opinion, cultural policy and the specific relationship between France and Italy, is still missing. The history of the patriotic theatres continues to be told

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with a certain ‘revolutionary emphasis’ and mainly on the basis of Jacobin journals. Keeping the research focused on theatre reveals that, at least as theatre critics, the Jacobin journalists proved to be not so trustworthy: they even wrote and criticized a production without having seen the play (see Peja 2016). They showed themselves as highly committed to a political ideal and deeply aware that theatre could be a formidable tool to support their purpose. So, they were interested in promoting the notion of a new theatrical impulse – they tried to give the idea that all had changed in the whole town after the French arrival. This, rather than reporting the ongoing reality, was more their target and purpose. Obviously, they did not waste words on the traditional theatrical activity that many documents attest as continuing in Milan during the Jacobin triennium: academies, balls, farces and improvised comedies. There was no reason for them to speak about those continuing activities (except sometimes to complain about them, so certifying that they were still going on), while, on the other hand, there were many reasons not to underline the highly aristocratic theatre life that was celebrated in Milan after the French arrival. Many events were organized to honour General Bonaparte’s spouse, Josephine, who, during her stay in Milan, frequently attended these – not exactly democratic – parties: events much more in tune with the entertainment that kings and queens of the Ancien Régime had enjoyed for centuries. After all, the French entrance into Milan had mirrored the classic entrances of the kings. There are some striking aspects in the choices of time, itinerary and rituals followed on the occasion: the tribute of the keys of the city to General Massena on 14 May; the choice of a deeply symbolic date such as the Sunday of Pentecost for Napoleon’s entrance the following day; and the passage through the arch of Porta Romana (Roman gate), the first and the main imperial entrance to the city, the starting point of the road leading to ancient Rome and considered the gate used also by Roman emperors. Public lighting throughout the city, music, a programme for the night at the Scala Theatre and a lavish banquet for around eighty French officers in the former archducal palace, where Napoleon immediately took up residence, complete the picture.4 How could these aspects of the reality have been of use to intellectuals trying to persuade people that the newly arrived French liberators were completely different from the old Hapsburg tyrant? On the contrary, the Teatro Patriottico was of extreme interest to these authors: they did not miss the opportunity to emphasize its activity. The narratives about its foundation, still endorsed by historians, are told to us as the story of a revolutionary Milanese enterprise. However, on the basis of a reexamination of the documentary evidence, I argue instead that it actually originated as much, if not more so, as a strategic move prompted by the French establishment. Historians should consider these factors, and the reasons why there could be discrepancies between different sources such as the Jacobin journals and the more institutional Corriere Milanese or, for example, the public announcements printed and circulated by the publisher Veladini. Furthermore, even though some of the fundamental primary sources were destroyed in the air raids of the Second World War, it cannot be ignored that some of them, also related to the foundation of the Teatro Patriottico, had been copied before they were lost (Martinazzi 1879). If we look at these sources (generally known, but I argue never carefully considered),

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what we find is, first of all, a letter written in French to General Despinoy, the General Divisionaire commander of Lombardy, asking for permission to use the disused playhouse of Collegio dei Nobili (the noble college, called Collegio Longoni, one of the religious schools closed by Napoleon) ‘to perform only and continually democratic plays’ (‘du pieces démocratiques seraient uniquement et continuellement déclamées’). The letter is signed by an engineer named Giusti and a bookseller named Bernardoni (on behalf of some other citizens) and it is dated 28 June (10 of Messidor in the French Republican calendar). We also have the positive reply to this letter signed by General Despinoy the same day and then, again dated 28 June, another letter signed by Giusti and Bernardoni who inform the municipality of the permission accorded by the general and ask for its collaboration. The speed of these exchanges, all dated the same day, is striking and could perhaps lead us to ask whether the general really received a letter about something he had never heard of before, or if – in fact – the whole thing was planned in agreement with him. When we look for information about the signatories of the letter, we first find that Innocenzo Domenico Giusti was to later start a career as a public servant during the Italian Republic (with Napoleon as president), eventually becoming the chief engineer (Berengo 1980: 30). Little is known about him, except that he was among the founders of the Società dei classici italiani (Italian classics society) which published 249 volumes of the classics of Italian literature between 1802 and 1814, an enterprise supported by the government, which also proved to be of great remunerative success. Giusti was especially involved on the managerial and speculative side of this big editorial initiative (Berengo 1980: 35–7). He is also known to have bought a ‘licence as a bookseller and printer’ in 1816 for his son. In a letter to G. P. Vieussieux, Giuseppe Montani described him as ‘an educated man, an engineer by profession, employed in the Royal Accounting Office, a wealthy property owner and a subtle speculator’ (Berengo 1980: 80). The other name is that of Giuseppe Bernardoni, who is more well known and celebrated in publications related to the history of the Teatro Patriottico: he was in fact one of the actors and the first director of the theatre. He translated many plays that were performed in the Teatro Patriottico, probably starting with the Guglielmo Tell by Antoin Marin Le Mierre, traditionally considered the play which ‘inaugurated the theatre’ (Martinazzi 1879: 11). Doubts have arisen about the author of this play, and some names have been mentioned, among whom are Giuseppe Compagnoni and Michel-Jean Sedaine. Bosisio argues that the confusion is understandable ‘given the many dramas, based on the story of the Elvetic hero, written almost simultaneously’ (1990: 280). It is true, but again, paying attention to the evidence, the matter can be easily clarified. In the library of Accademia dei Filodrammatici there are three copies of this play, published in Milan in 1796, where the French author is mentioned. Not the translator, who on the other hand could well be Bernardoni: he took part in the performance (as the translator did, as he informs his readers in his initial Translator’s note) and he translated (and signed) other plays for the Teatro Patriottico. Moreover, the same Martinazzi ascribed this play to Bernardoni. He is usually mentioned only as a pupil of Giuseppe Parini, a poet, a literary man and a lexicographer, but it cannot

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be forgotten that when Milan became the capital city of Cisalpina in 1797, it seems that Bernardoni became ‘police inspector of one of its eight districts’, then ‘secretary of the police committee’ and then ‘head of division’ (Fontana 1900: 226). So the two names that officially bear the responsibility of the foundation of the Milanese Teatro Patriottico are people whose closeness to the French government is proven (at least subsequently). The foundation of the theatre thus seems, on careful reconsideration of the evidence, to have taken place in relation to – if not in active collaboration with – the French government. Obviously, this consideration does not imply that a genuine revolutionary, democratic and deeply patriotic impulse could not have played any part in the foundation of the theatre. Many people were involved in this enterprise and, in any case, we have no evidence that the government had complete control over the activity of the theatre. What I am trying to suggest, on the contrary, is that the pure popular and democratic ideal that we have always been told about by historians is not proven. Things are more complex and probably more than one purpose converged onto the same target. The French occupiers’ need to develop consensus met and was matched by the Italian Jacobins’ need to educate the people. Some additional contextual elements also seem to confirm the possibility that the French took the opportunity to sponsor (and control) a theatrical initiative in that moment. Following the French conquest, revolt and counter-insurgency ensued, which were immediately repressed. Only ten days after the French arrival in Milan, the people had to attend the first of a significant number of capital executions,5 which had become much less frequent in the previous decades (see Mereu 1988; Pagano 2016); these were intended to make clear to the Italians that Napoleon would brook no resistance. Also in the hinterland, in the preceding month of May, order had to be brutally established more than once, with the notorious examples of Pavia and Binasco ravaged by the French army. On 24 May, the same General Despinoy who was involved in the exchange of letters with Giusti and Bernardoni established a curfew (‘at the Ave Maria of the evening everyone must shut up their houses and shops’; Raccolta di ordini e avvisi 1796); in the middle of June, he came into public conflict with the municipality, whom he rebuked in the courtyard of the civic palace, coram populo. Even more significant, on 28 May (exactly one month before the date of the correspondence (28 June) about the use of the Collegio Longoni), he dissolved by proclamation the Società degli amici della libertà e dell’uguaglianza (Society of friends of liberty and equity). This popular society, that counted around 800 members, was a revolutionary group, founded simultaneously with the French arrival in Milan in order to support the revolution. It was thanks to their initiative that the first liberty pole (the French ‘arbre de la liberté’) was planted in Milan. Why should the general have dissolved this group if not because it seemed to be dangerous: perhaps too committed to the first ideals of the 1789 revolution, which were no longer being followed by the French (cf. Rao 1998)? It must not be forgotten that on his entrance into Milan, in answer to a voice in the crowd who had shouted ‘à bas la Noblesse’, General Massena replied: ‘non mes

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amis, vive la nation Francaise, vive le peuple de Milan’ (so Pietro Verri wrote to his brother Alessandro on 14 May (Verri 2012: 1161–2)). Gradually, the moderate currents, opposed to the exponents of Jacobinism and radical patriotism, went on to establish themselves ‘more and more resolutely with the consent of Bonaparte himself ’ (Raponi 2005: 14). Not surprisingly then, less than one year later in May 1797, Pietro Verri, writing again to his brother, affirmed that it was clear that Bonaparte ‘does not want a revolution or upheaval’ (Carteggio 2012: 1324). If the general dissolved the popular society and then supported the creation of a theatre, it is easy to imagine that he had every intention of keeping it under his control and not allowing its activities to become dangerous or subversive. This is a hypothesis that a look at the repertoire seems to confirm (cf. Peja 2016). Obviously, the theatre chose plays which celebrated the heroic overthrow of corruption and tyranny by virtuous citizens, and the subsequent birth of a new era of law and liberty, as was already mandated in August 1793 by the French National Convention, which decreed that the tragedies of Brutus, Guillaume Tell and Caius Gracchus should be performed three times a week in Parisian theatres for free. But it is interesting to note that among the texts they could have chosen they opted for Virginia and Brutus the first by Vittorio Alfieri, texts full of references to the law, centred on the idea of justice. The whole structure of Virginia refers to a court case; the place is the Ancient Roman venue for trials (the Forum Romanum), and there are many occurrences of words connected with justice, law, court, witnesses, evidences and testimonies throughout the play. Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic, was certainly one of the most celebrated heroes during the French Revolution. He punished his own sons with death after discovering they were involved in the conspiracy against the Republic. But one of the main ideas conveyed by this play (especially in Alfieri’s text) is that of justice, which can be terrible but must be honoured. In contrast, the theatre did not produce, for example, Brutus the Second by Alfieri, about Caesar’s death at the hand of Brutus, even though Marcus Junius Brutus had also been a hero of the Parisian revolutionary scene and would be again during Italian republican scenes, even in Rome, for example, in 1798. But tyrannicide was a sensitive issue that could also have been dangerous, while celebrating justice and appealing to rules seems to have been more suitable to the political needs of the French government in those first few months in Milan, when the violent repression of counter-insurgency was an ongoing concern. The French had good reason to promote the idea that the search for order is a need of justice. Like Brutus, Napoleon would have only been righteous in attending dry-eye trials and capital executions of the wicked who had conspired against the Republic. Justice can be severe but is nonetheless necessary. Why then did the Jacobin journalists keep on cheering the patriotic scene if the choices were not as revolutionary as they would have liked? In general, and not only in relation to the theatre activity, the Jacobins were certainly not happy at the direction French government politics was taking (and in many cases they were censored and journals closed). Nonetheless, their main energies were not employed against the French, but rather in promoting their ideas among the people, trying to

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persuade the majority of the goodness of the new ideals, against the conservative and reactionary field. They could not afford to confuse a mass of largely uneducated people with nuanced arguments between groups that were, in the public’s eyes, on the same side. They were part of the happenings and they were trying to influence them: they legitimately told stories to make history. And this is exactly what historiography now has to understand and study: to make of those stories, history. We can now observe that there were obvious Jacobin motives for simple, unidirectional narratives, and also motives for the theatre historians of the 1970s to stick to those narratives; however, today we cannot avoid seeing the evidence that stands against that linearity. As Keith Jenkins (1991) suggested, history is not ‘the past’ in general: it does not have the otherness of the ‘before now’. History is the way we write about that past. One of the key points of this volume, clearly underlined in the Introduction, is the need for an ethical turn in theatre studies that acknowledges the positioning, the motives, the needs of past and present historians, discarding the myth of pure objectivity and taking instead responsibility for a situated look that asks questions and interrogates evidence.

NOTES 1. The expression ‘patriotic theatre’ has often been preferred by theatrical historians (De Michelis 1966: 16; Bosisio 1990: 101ss; Themelly 1991). ‘Jacobin’ is in general quite a vexed term (cf. Guerci 1999; Galasso 2013) and specifically in relation to the theatre, the conservative critics of the late nineteenth century used it with derogatory intent (Paglicci Brozzi 1887), underlining a too extremist intent. 2. In recent decades it has been best known for its actors’ school (founded in 1805, and frequented by many famous Italian actors, including, for example, Alberto Sordi and Lella Costa). 3. Note that the date is incorrect here – the correct one is 28 June, or 10 of Messidor in the French Republican calendar. 4. See Il corriere milanese ossia il cittadino libero (n 38/39, 19 May 1796) and Beccattini. 1799. I cannot go deeper into all these interesting aspects here, but will leave them for another occasion. 5. Browsing the sheets of the Corriere milanese and the Raccolta di ordini ed avvisi stati pubblicati dopo il cessato Governo Austriaco, Milano, presso Luigi Veladini in Contrada Santa Radegonda, we find around ten sentences in three months in Milan alone: before 1786 the average was around 13.3 sentences in one year. Note that there were also some striking names among the executed, including, for example, a dean of Milan cathedral. (For a more detailed list see Peja 2016.)

CHAPTER 3.3

Politics, Precursors and Erasure: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

In Jörn Rüsen’s taxonomy of the temporally determined responsibilities of the historian, the first is the responsibility historians have to their contemporaries for ‘the specific needs of orientation’ of their own time. ‘Historical memory has to contribute to the validation and legitimation of the life order of today’ (2004: 197– 8). The essays included here – ‘How to Make Political Theatre? Polish Socialist Realism as a Historiographical Problem’ by Dorota Sosnowska, and ‘“The First Actress Party”: Adunni Oluwole and the First Guerrilla Theatre in Nigeria’ by Ngozi Udengwu – are written by theatre scholars personally invested in their respective contemporary performance cultures. Their essays focus tightly on specific moments of national turbulence during which new models of political theatre briefly emerged, but they also widen out their discussion to consider the way the longer-term legacy has been mediated. They are both concerned with the perennially felt need to pin down the precursors of innovation and the origins of complex aesthetic, social and political outcomes. At the core of their task, however, lies the ineluctable fact of disappearance and the problems that arise when evidence can no longer be securely grasped or clearly seen because it has gone: when the historian needs to account for what might be contradictory evidence of what came after, or, in the interests of reclamation, correct the misattribution of credit for innovation. As a feminist historian, Udengwu seeks to retrieve her subject Oluwole – the difficult and erasable woman – from the shadows cast by later, but more prominent and better-mediated male performance activists. Sosnowska, on the other hand, grapples with what she decides is a phantom, nothing more than a successively and successfully reiterated claim to unverifiable concrete strategies of a new form of theatre – socialist realism – deemed vital for a newly constituted authoritarian state in no need of a history. As Thomas Postlewait points out in his interrogation of the contradictory documentation of the legendary first performance of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi in Paris in 1896, ‘it reveals how and why certain kinds of cultural interpretations, including popular narratives and ideological presuppositions, produce misconceived explanations of an event’s context and meaning’ (2009: 61). The microhistories represented by these paired essays demonstrate vividly realized commonalities of popular experience

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reacting under intense political pressure. The foregrounding of the individual and historically obscured progenitors of political performance affect – the actor Józef Pilarski who ‘embodied the workers’ history and traditions’ and Adunni Oluwole joining the workers in strike action ‘sitting out with them in the field through the night’ – enables history to be opened up more fully through alternative perspectives. Through the historiographic process of rethinking and rearranging what evidence has survived, the continuities between past and present are perceived more strongly in a larger and more inclusive public sphere of performance efficacy.

CHAPTER 3.3.1

How to Make Political Theatre? Polish Socialist Realism as a Historiographical Problem DOROTA SOSNOWSKA

The Polish People’s Republic (PRL), the communist totalitarian regime in Poland, was officially established in 1949. The new political rule was introduced with the help of rigged elections, a new constitution, many arrests and mysterious disappearances, violence, the unification of two leftist parties into one monolithic structure, wideranging propaganda and, centrally to the focus of this essay, socialist realism – a new doctrine regulating all spheres of artistic life in Poland. Andrzej Paczkowski – a Polish historian – writes:1 The cultural revolution – a strange and terrifying mix of the necessary ‘educational revolution’ with the thesis stating that ‘class contradictions are becoming sharper with a progress of socialism’ – entered its decisive stage at the beginning of 1949 and in all domains at the same time. The conventions (or ‘working groups’) of all artistic circles happened in a row starting with writers (Szczecin, January 20–23) and ending with filmmakers (Wisła, November 19–22). (Paczkowski 1998: 283; all translations from the Polish author’s own unless otherwise noted) The First National Theatre Conference was organized by the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), the Ministry of Culture and Art and by the Polish Organization of Writers on 18–19 June in Obory near Warsaw. It was an event conforming to the same scenario as other conferences: with a common and univocal support for the new doctrine in theatre. But Włodzimierz Sokorski – the minister of culture at that time – was not naïve. He stated afterwards that those words of support were only a mere declaration. Nonetheless, his understanding of the new goals for theatre was not very precise either. ‘Revolution in the theatre is a question of fighting for new content and not new staging in isolation from new content. New content will introduce new elements in theatrical convention’ – were his words (Sokorski cited in Jarmułowicz 2003: 43). The main battlefield, where the fight for socialist theatre

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was supposed to take place, was then the written texts of drama – that is why writers were one of the organizers of the theatre conference in Obory and why they were better represented there than people from the theatre. Although the new authorities cared deeply about theatre, which it understood as a powerful propaganda tool, it had no idea what a socialist realist theatre should look like. The doctrine imported from Soviet Russia was vaguely connected with realist convention and Stanislavsky’s acting method but it did not refer or relate to anything well established in Polish theatrical culture. The censorship apparatus was in place, but the idea of this new theatre was not clear. It is not a surprise then that when a group of young actors came to Sokorski asking him for their own theatre where they could practice the conventions of socialist realism, study it further and prepare spectacles conforming to its rules, they were given permission and a building. That is how the Nowy Theatre (New Theatre) in Łódź appeared on the theatrical map of Poland. They began with a drama by the Czech author Vaško Káňia called Brygada szlifierza Karhana (Karhan Grinder’s Brigade) that depicted the generational conflict in a tractor factory somewhere in the Czech-Slovakian Republic. It premiered on 12 November 1949, and even today it is considered the one and only successful socialist realist spectacle. But what does this really mean? It is my aim in this essay to explore this question, interrogating and reframing the evidence that remains in the archives. Thanks to the ‘Polish Film Chronicle’, we can today watch two minutes from this 1949 spectacle. ‘In the whole of Poland, a theatre piece called Brygada szlifierza Karhana by the Czech worker Vaško Káňia is triumphing. Here is a fragment of the spectacle, for which the Nowy Theatre troupe was awarded the Labour Banner. Józef Pilarski gives a great performance as Karhan’s father. Just a moment ago, Old Karhan, grinding piston rods, broke the record established by his son’s brigade’ – says the voiceover.2 ‘And now boys, come to me’ – says Old Karhan, and we see the young grinders appearing in the frame with Karhan’s son played by Kazimierz Dejmek at the front of the group. The scene takes place in the factory interior: we can see a wooden stool, two columns and a grey concrete wall. At the back, behind the actors, agitation posters are hanging. Dressed in realistic work suits, the actors act with neither any psychological depth nor any comic effect. Their acting is very simple – as in a comic book. ‘Lift up Daddy Karhan!’ – they shout on hearing that the team of old grinders is grinding one piston rod in less than four minutes. The scene ends with a joyful expression of happiness by the group and the young workers, tossing Karhan up in the air. The spectacle was recorded by the ‘Chronicle’ because of the emotional state the performance produced in its audiences – one that Maria Czanerle, a theatre critic connected to the Party and a great admirer of Kazimierz Dejmek’s work, described as ‘spellbinding’: ‘Is it not a wonder that Vaško Káňia and the theatre cast a spell on everyone with Brygada szlifierza Karhana? Not only on the workers of Łódź and the theatre public. Brygada came to Warsaw and took the capital by storm. Cultural activists, prominent people and reviewers have lost their heads’ (Czanerle 1983: 10). The author explains the play’s rapturous response in terms of the enthusiasm, sincerity and authentic eagerness of its young creators. And even if

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one does not want to give credit to the critic, who here was of course playing a role in the totalitarian cultural apparatus, one must admit that something interesting was happening around the spectacle when Marta Fik – one of the most important theatre critics and historians in Poland, with a much more distanced relationship to the Nowy Theatre and its creators – writes that: ‘It is not really well explained why they [Nowy Theatre] succeeded so well, even if we take into consideration all of the injunctions and limitations of the socialist realism period. It became needed, and not only politically needed, and it is hard to believe that the enthusiasm it caused was fully pretended’ (Fik 1983: 95–6). Brygada szlifierza Karhana was staged over 150 times and, as previously mentioned, has entered Polish theatre history as the one and only successful socialist realist spectacle. In my opinion, this characterization is still valid today and fully reflects the helplessness of Polish critics and theatre historians, who from a historical perspective, can only see a negative phenomenon in socialist realism, focusing on the fact that it was imposed by the authorities and describing how that was done.3 They cannot find a suitable place for a spectacle that, both in terms of theatrical transformations and the memories of the then young generation, effectively pierces through the conviction that, since 1949, theatre has functioned only under oppression, that true artistry was defending itself from or yielding to a foreign, alien, evil and imposed propaganda of mass, politically engaged, realistic workers’ art.4 But the famous poet Wiktor Woroszylski, belonging to the so-called ‘spotty generation’ who supported the communist system from an ideological standpoint, and ignored its oppressive character until it became too obvious, stated: ‘Dejmek’s theatre – it was like an intensive flash of my life and life of my generation, of what was best in it, not infallible, but most fervent, most truly caring for something bigger than us, “the youngest”’ (Woroszylski in Fik 1983: 93). The only way to escape from that situation is to call Dejmek and the young actors’ initiative genuine and committed, naïve and sincere – thus explaining away the ideological and the political, but at the same time effective, gesture with reference to authenticity of emotion and the naïve involvement of people who ‘knew only the hell of Nazism’ (Czanerle 1983: 12). From such a viewpoint, the Brygada szlifierza Karhana play thus loses the potential to sharpen the paradoxes of culture and reality. This viewpoint also avoids coming to terms with the problem of the political theatre with all its paradoxes: how, in communist times, can a play become a successful spectacle despite the political involvement of its creators? My aim here is to go back to this show, produced sixty-seven years ago, to look at it afresh in terms of a historiographical problem.

THE ARCHIVE In addition to the two-minute ‘Chronicle’ fragment, one can find a lot of reviews from different newspapers, a couple of photographs and a theatre programme in the archive. However, their status – as leftovers of the socialist realist spectacle – is very problematic.

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The theories of contemporary performance studies have liberated researchers from the obligation to objectively describe the spectacle based on documents in the archive. The sources are no longer understood merely as a tool for the historical reconstruction of the actual piece but rather as a spectacle itself, living and remaining in all of the different media: from live performance to the recording, from the viewer’s experience to the gossip. With the understanding of the not-ephemeral and not-disappearing but rather remaining and stable character of the performative acts, comes a redefinition of the spectacle’s leftovers. They lose their status of being remains, traces of the past and lost acts. In this new perspective – offered, for example, by Rebecca Schneider (2011), Diana Taylor (2003), José Esteban Muñoz (1996) and Robin Bernstein (2009) – they gain the status of ‘ephemeral evidences’ (Muñoz 1996), ‘scriptive things’ (Bernstein 2009), materiality that becomes its own transgression in the forever ongoing performative time loop. As Schneider states: Arguably, this sense of performance is imbricated in Phelan’s phrasing – that performance ‘becomes itself through’ disappearance. This phrasing is arguably different from an ontological claim of being (despite Phelan’s stated drive to ontology), even different from an ontology of being under erasure. This phrasing rather invites us to think of performance as a medium in which disappearance negotiates, perhaps becomes, materiality. (Schneider 2011: 105) This means that a researcher entering the archive is invited not to search for the past but to ‘dance with things’ – to use them and perform the script being offered. In the dialectic of the body and the archive on which performance studies based their new theories, the two poles are clearly oppositional – ideologically defined (the archive is connected to the patriarchal, white and Western culture; the body and performance are a source of history and identity for excluded, colonized and marginalized cultures) and methodologically differentiated (as in the archive/ repertoire proposed by Taylor) – but their material dimension is the same. Body and archive are, in fact, two methodological perspectives on the theatre and performance history: where body means ‘body-to-body transmission’ in the ‘syncopated time’ of re-enactment (Schneider 2011), negating the need to treat performance as lost and enabling researchers to find routes towards past performances through contemporary culture; and archive means the standard historical research based on sources and implying that what is the real subject of the research is long lost and cannot exist outside of past experience. For both of those perspectives, the actual archive, the set of documents, sources and material leftovers, is a crucial place. Choosing the body as a medium of history does not really mean to dispose of the archive. It rather means to treat the archive as what Robin Bernstein calls a ‘ghostly discotheque’ full of past and present bodies, gleaming through the materiality of what is left over: Ultimately, historians must place our living bodies in the stream of performance tradition. The archive then becomes a ghostly discotheque where things of the past leap up to ask scholars to dance; and we listen, accept the invitation, and, hearts pounding, step onto the floor. (Bernstein 2009: 89–90)

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For those Western theoreticians attempting to overcome the patriarchal, white and Western logic of the archive, this means a change in the perspective on what is stored on its shelves and the introduction of performative practices inside it. This new understanding of history and historical acts provides a way to overcome the manipulations and politics that archives are vulnerable to and to resituate, by performative practices, the history of those not represented in the official archive. Theatre and performance history is then a matter of practice in contemporary art and in the archive where the presence of a researcher questions the unidirectional flow of time. But the documents from the ‘one and only successful socialist realist spectacle’, Brygada szlifierza Karhana, contain a script that is very problematic. The reviews, the photographs and even the programme were all written or taken to conform with all of the propaganda rules then in force. They are intended to reinforce the schema offered by the authorities which introduces the notion of the ‘new man’ living his ‘new life’ full of struggle for the ‘new order’ but beautiful and happy – a subject created by the never-ending workers’ revolution. Later in this essay, I will show how far that image is from the reality of the Łódź factories, but for now what is important is to notice that the documents of the spectacle are not really documenting anything. In the reviews, one can read that this play is a piece of authentic, not at all ‘imagined’, life. And that’s why it so suggestively uncovers the basic notions of the workers’ struggle for the new reality. And that’s why, without a doubt, when we watch Brygada we think that we are not in the theatre but in the factory, not in the audience but in the worker’s flat. And that’s why the language of the play’s heroes is so simple, honest, not overusing the slogans. And that’s why – although we won’t find any ‘intrigue and love’ in the bourgeois meaning of those words in the play, any ‘psychological spins’ and so called artistic relishes – it catches our attention, it shrugs deeply and convinces us with the unfalsified truth of the new, beautiful life, which is going not only on the stage, but around us. (Stefański 1949) Or: And our worker from the Strzelczyk, Wifama or Famatka factories, from the cotton mill, from every factory, who watches Brygada with enthusiasm and emotion, finds his place in that spectacle, recognizes colleagues and comrades, applauds the successes of competition, lives through a tragedy of valuable machine breaking and understands that in the heart of battle for the new attitude towards work, for the socialism, in Kania’s play just like in life the ‘new man’ character is ground. (J. Bog 1950) Those documents are referring to imagined, socialist, reality than to the spectacle itself. They depict how the theatre and its reception should work and what their reader should think about it, instead of the actual events and their interpretation. There are no past bodies gleaming through those texts and photographs. Even the bodily presence of the reviewers, photographers and other producers of the archival traces becomes problematic. The level of artificiality of language and image used

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by them, questions the possibility of re-enactment of their gestures, making their status deeply unsure and inauthentic.5 There is no subversive performative script contained in those artificial phrases and frames. There is no possibility of looking at those documents from the perspective offered by performance studies – no dance is allowed by those phrasings that from the beginning to the very end make the researcher aware that they are written without any connection to reality, nor to performance nor to body. They are false not because they are hiding something, they are false because they are not hiding anything – there is nothing that can be restored or awakened in those autonomous (from theatre and from reality) forms. They are not leftovers at all. The problem with Brygada’s archive is not that it is imposing durable materiality over ephemeral performance, nor that it is archiving the culture of rulers neglecting the culture of the oppressed. The spectacle was itself a realization of the rules imposed by socialist realism; it was not subversive towards the logic of reviews and other documents. It was using the same imagination and language. The problem with this archive lies somewhere else and requires another methodological procedure.

FORENSICS The ‘new man’ that appears as a figure in every document from the spectacle is a specific propaganda construct neatly described and analysed by Mariusz Mazur in his monumental book O człowieku tendencyjnym… (About tendentious man…) (2009). The author, by situating the creature of communist propaganda within a wide historical perspective of other formulations of the ‘new man’ idea, is showing that a very important characteristic of every appearance of this figure is its lack of history. With every revolution, time is ended and a new order appears. ‘New man’ does not have any tradition, any historical reference, as history is not possible anymore. This process is described in Boris Groys’ famous book entitled The Total Art of Stalinism, in which he writes thus: Socialist realism, which regards historical time as ended and therefore occupies no particular place in it, looks upon history as the arena of struggle between active, demiurgic, creative, progressive art aspiring to build a new world in the interests of the oppressed classes and passive, contemplative art that does not believe in or desire change but accepts things as they are or dreams of the past. […] Everything is new in the new posthistorical reality – even the classics are new, and these it has indeed reworked beyond recognition. (1992: 49) In socialist realism, then, there is no history – there is only an everlasting ‘now’, in which the past actualizes itself as a scene of revolution, impossible to end but always successful. At the same time, this battle is held in the very specific reality of which socialist realism is supposed to be an image. Groys writes: ‘Socialist realist mimesis, then, attempts to focus on the hidden essence of things rather than on phenomena’ (1992: 51). Documents from Brygada szlifierza Karhana cannot be the medium of anything else than a ‘reality model’, which the spectacle did not really mimic but rather

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created in its realistic convention. Neither can they refer to the spectacle without creating the impression that this model is not universal – as in that case Brygada would not be realistic at all. Closing themselves in a perfect, auto-referential form, those documents froze time, becoming the visible mark of the end of history. In the everlasting ‘now’ of struggle for the progressive art, there is no place for unique events. It is always about the whole reality, the whole history, the whole world. The totality of socialist realism is realized much more fully in the model of art reception than in the particular artistic realizations. The way to methodologically deal with the socialist realist archive is thus not to introduce the body and its performative gestures into it – to actualize its scenarios and re-enact what is (not) documented by it – but rather to acknowledge its ideological character and establish a frame in which it should be read. The methodological model I would like to propose is that of a forensic investigation in which, according to Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan, lies a particular political potential. The concept these authors offer in their famous essay, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics, is based on the acknowledgement of a difference between witness and forensic evidence. They write: If the Eichmann trial marked, as Wieviorka claims, ‘the advent of the witness’ then we suggest here that the Mengele case constituted a parallel emergence of the ‘thing’. But each of these processes did more than introduce new forms of evidence – they did nothing less than shift the conditions by which that evidence became audible and visible, the way juridical facts were constructed and understood. (Weizmann and Keenan 2012: 13) The witness is in their concept an ethical figure, introducing gaps in memory and emotional agitation – in performative terms its liveness is a form of re-enacting truth while forensic evidence, in contrast, gains its agency through mediation: a complicated process of interpretation and aestheticization. By creating the conditions in which something becomes evidence, by addressing their findings to the forum, by taking into account not only the results of investigation but also their ability to convince the public, by avoiding the ethical condition of witnessing, forensic investigators create a space of political agency where things serve to reconstruct (not re-enact) the past. This reconstruction is not subjective, not anchored in any specific experience of the subject, but read from things – and thus has an ability to generate forums (as authors call them): new, dynamic, changing and acting publics, new political beings. To grasp the difference between such an approach and other potential models of working with the archives, I propose that each can be seen as answering different methodological questions. If traditional historical reconstruction is concentrated around a question of ‘What happened?’, and the performance studies reformulation asks ‘How did it happen?’ trying to re-enact the scenario, then the forensic question would be ‘What does this thing prove?’. Here, proving is relational (you need to prove something to somebody in the present moment). Treating documents with a certain degree of suspiciousness allows us not only to see what is stated by them, how it is stated and in what context, but also to identify what is lacking, what is

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wrong, strange, not fitting the image, what repeats itself on the basis of a meaningful series and, on the other hand, what can be effective in ‘the courtroom’ of today’s public, giving the past the ability to influence our present. In the case of Brygada szlifierza Karhana’s archive, the particular element that repeats itself across every element is the public. In the video recording, the audience’s reactions are described in the voiceover; in the programme and reviews a ‘new man’ category refers not only to the stage but also to the imagined audience. Even more striking is the fact that almost every review gives a lot of space to the public’s reactions. Even if we assume that they are false, or manipulated by authors to fit the regime’s propaganda goals, it is clear that the watchful eyes of reviewers are not looking towards the stage but rather to the public – the workers from Łódź factories.

THE FACTORY As previously mentioned, the Polish People’s Republic was not formally established until 1949. What is not widely acknowledged is that between the end of the Second World War, in 1945, and the formal establishment of that regime in 1949, a wave of workers’ strikes directed against the communist party and the new political power flooded Poland and especially Łódź – a city with a significant number of factories, known for its workers’ culture and soon to be home of the Nowy Theatre. Padraic Kenney describes the historical context of those strikes by recalling the specific situation of Łódź. Just after the war the workers, who had defended the factories (mostly in private hands at that time) from the Germans, were the ones who restarted production. It was a highly emotional moment, where the fact of defending and now restarting the factory was associated with patriotism and heroism on the one hand and the slogans of the communist party on the other. Kenney writes: ‘In Łódź, as across Poland, workers took the slogans of nationalization at face value and understood the state to mean themselves as they began reconstruction, restarted productions, and elected factory management’ (Kenney 1997: 79). But the communist authorities could not really allow the factories to be in the hands of the workers. Their goal was to introduce their own people as the managers and administrators of the whole of industry in Poland. Given the very bad economic situation of the country at that time, the violent attempts to take over factories had to meet the strong resistance of the workers. The strikes in Łódź began. During the period between April 1945 and December 1948, there were 306 workers’ strikes in Łódź alone (825 across the whole country). One of the biggest – and the most legendary – strikes took place in 1947 at the Poznański textile factory. It was a very specific place called ‘Częstochowa’ before the war, named after the city with the famous monastery in Poland. The factory was dominated by female workers known for their religious devotion and very strong relationship to the workplace. After the war, the situation was not radically different, apart from a much worse economic situation. In 1947, the communist party wanted to introduce a new procedure into the factories called ‘multimachine’ work. This meant that one worker would operate

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two machines instead of one, which would make it possible to increase production and meet the three-year economic plan. But for the female workers, it meant not only more work for the same money but also the deprivation of their own working place, their own machine and the loss of the sense of security they had in the factory. When the Poznański factory administrators introduced eight ‘volunteers’ who started the ‘multimachine’ work, the strike began. On 12 September, the workers refused to work. They came to the factory but they did not start their machines. They were waiting for the negotiations to start. Kenney writes: The strike reached its zenith on the fifth day [… when] a local PPR activist and former member of the Poznański’s factory council came to the mill to agitate; surrounded by angry workers, he struck and pushed one. In the ensuing confusion, some twenty-seven woman staged a mass fainting – as PPR investigators suggested, probably simulated. This moment of unusual leadership electrified the strike. (1997: 126) This almost artistic gesture by the protesting women is, I suggest, like something taken from the contemporary performance art field. It materialized the violence, giving it corporeal and visual shape. From that moment on, other factories stopped work, requesting information about the situation in Poznański. The next versions of the story quickly appeared: it was said that pregnant women were beaten by the authorities at the Poznański factory. The protesters’ gender is, of course, crucial in this constellation. The feminine position as the one who is weaker and under oppression was reproduced in a theatrical or hysterical way, exerting an almost electrifying effect. A body falling to the ground is a powerful image whose cruelty is inevitably increased by repetition. The more graphic the elements appear in this story, the more one needs to react: to take immediate action. The effectiveness of the workers’ strike is therefore directly linked to the effectiveness of the performative gestures, the theatrical scenarios played out by the strikers. The ability to conduct a strike is here revealed as the ability to (re)perform the hidden violence of the authorities. Those same workers, as it is possible to prove on the basis of Kenney’s book, were probably among the audiences of Brygada szlifierza Karhana – just two years after the biggest strike held in Łódź. If one believes the theatre historians and documents stating that the spectacle was played over 150 times for 64,373 spectators, then one must admit that the rebellious workers found something interesting in this spectacle praised so much by both propaganda reviewers and prominent politicians. My argument here is that what was interesting to the workers was the personage of the actor playing Karhan – the only one who was not young among the theatre troupe. His name was Józef Pilarski. He was fifty-six at the time and was well known in Łódź as an actor and organizer of the amateur workers’ theatre in factories, including Poznański, before the war. Thus, he literally embodied the workers’ history and tradition that in 1949 were banned from official discourse. As Kenney shows, the real goal of the communist authorities was to destroy the workers’ class, making it impossible for them to act against the new order while continuing to praise the class

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in official propaganda. When Old Karhan wins at the end of the play, tossed up by the young grinders, a forbidden paradigm of workers’ culture wins with him – the one that places the workers’ struggle in history, giving it a tradition and a strong identity anchored in the past. That workers could read the appearance of Pilarski in that manner is, in my opinion, proved by their performative competence shown during the strikes. I argue that – in contrast to the critics – it is possible that the workers were focusing not on the propaganda content of the play but rather on the subversive power of the historical body – the one which truly represented their identity. Contrary to critics and politicians who understood theatre in the very traditional terms of staging a play text, the workers arguably saw it as a domain of the acting body and senses produced by its presence – an understanding emphasized by the presence of Pilarski’s historical body on stage. This, perhaps unconscious, element of the spectacle made it political on a different level – it gained some subversive power over a model it was consciously proposing and promoting. The ‘one and only successful’ socialist realist spectacle is – I argue – successful because it uncovers different layers of socialist realist convention, and reveals that its fundamental problem is with the body, which is always historical and cannot be got rid of with the passing of time. The ‘new man’ cannot ever be embodied – as soon as a real body is placed on the stage, the concept loses the universality that was so important for socialist realist logic. From this perspective, it is especially clear why theatre was so problematic for the Party and its representatives – a successful socialist realist spectacle is not successful at all. To be truly socialist realist, theatre should stop using bodies: that is why in socialist realist productions performed later in Poland, machines, big scenography and objects all appeared on stage. They were, however, not successful because they lost their theatricality and became factories of boring and perfectly similar – universal – spectacles.

POLITICAL THEATRE Why then is Brygada szlifierza Karhana still called a ‘successful socialist realist spectacle’ today? What is hidden in that notion that became so obvious and reproduced many times? I argue that just like the documents in the archive, the claim covers the fear of the workers’ reaction that was dangerous for the system – which did not want the real workers to establish themselves as a powerful class – and dangerous for the understanding of political theatre. If we admit that Nowy Theatre’s production had an impact on Polish culture, that it was effective and successful as theatre and not just a socialist realist oddity, then we would need to reconfigure our understanding of political theatre that dominated later periods of the People’s Polish Republic – when it was based on national dramas working with the notion of nation, community and brotherhood but never class. The worker disappeared from the Polish stage as soon as socialist realism was over, leaving the space to heroes from Polish romantic literature. The true political effectiveness of Brygada had to become neglected – not only because of censorship, propaganda and system strategies but also because of its anti-romantic and anti-national character. Paradoxically, as I have shown, the performance both conformed to and critically targeted the socialist realist ideology

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that deprived workers of their past. But, crucially, it was also targeted at the Polish theatre, which was then searching for its language mainly in the nineteenth-century drama. In 1959, Dejmek stated: ‘We began to speak awkwardly, new and important things that were unseen in the Polish theatre, shocking our theatrical world and part of the theatre's audience’ (in Czanerle 1964: 14), revealing the anti-Polish theatre impulse that drove the Brygada szlifierza Karhana production. By bringing workers to the stage: by using their language and costumes, and designing factories on stage, Nowy Theater was ‘fighting’ not only for a new political and social order but also, predominantly, for a new kind of theatre. This is the breakthrough that glimmers in the memories of the young generation – a paradoxical moment of triumph over romantic and national convention. This, then, is how today’s theatre forum could understand this socialist realist reconstruction, and thus use it in present discussion about political theatre and its publics.

NOTES 1. This essay presents research done as part of the project: ‘Performances of Memory: Testimonial, Reconstructive and Counterfactual Strategies in Literature and Performative Arts of the 20th and 21st Centuries’ (2014/15/G/HS2/04803) financed by the National Science Center Poland (NCN) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). 2. The fragment of the spectacle can be found on the internet: http:​//www​.repo​zytorium. f​n.org​.pl/?​q=pl/​node/​6217 (accessed 19 July 2017). 3. The socialist realist convention was officially ended as a politically imposed necessity in arts with a so-called thaw in 1956 – a change in power resulting from Stalin’s death in 1953. 4. In 2008, Nowy Theatre in Łódź produced Brygada szlifierza Karhana directed by Remigiusz Bzyk as a celebration of the sixtieth birthday of the institution. The spectacle was very well received in Poland. 5. A very good example of this mechanism can be seen in Polish visual artist Ania Molska’s work entitled Zebranie (The Meeting) from 2014. In this video, contemporary actors try to re-enact the meeting organized by the Association of Theater and Film Artists in 1953 after the Berliner Ensemble visit to Poland. The language of this meeting – conforming to all the ideological rules and hiding oppositional thought behind it – makes re-enactment nearly impossible. It becomes so artificial and inauthentic that it changes into some absurd theatre game, establishing a space of impossible repetition.

CHAPTER 3.3.2

‘The First Actress Party’: Adunni Oluwole and the First Guerrilla Theatre in Nigeria NGOZI UDENGWU

INTRODUCTION Through the recuperation of the neglected contribution of a woman artist and politician to Nigerian theatre history, this essay aims to challenge long-held assumptions about the origins of a particular form of political theatre. Although the term ‘guerrilla theatre’ will probably be most familiar to performance historians through the work in the United States of Ronald Guy Davis of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded in 1965, the genre has a long history in Nigeria. Within the Nigerian context however, the first examples of guerrilla theatre have been associated with the early playwriting career of the distinguished Nigerian dramatist and political campaigner Wole Soyinka whose activism through theatre began in the late 1950s. In this essay, I argue that the practice of guerrilla theatre – defined here not just as offering political challenge to the status quo, but doing so through elements of surprise, utilizing a stripped-down theatre aesthetic and taking place in unlikely locations – has in fact an even longer lineage in Nigeria. Drawing on my research into the largely undocumented theatrical career of Adunni Oluwole (1905–57), who considered herself the first Nigerian professional actress, I focus on her street performance practice and in particular on the guerrilla theatre-style tactics she adopted between 1952 and 1954 in her effort to persuade Nigerians to reject nationalist calls for self-rule.1 I aim to explore the relationship between Oluwole’s contribution to the history of theatre in Nigeria and the practice and understanding of guerrilla theatre, which until now has been considered a later development. This essay is based on research carried out in 2011 and 2012 which attempted to uncover and document the contributions of women in the professional Yoruba travelling theatre, a theatre form popularized by Hubert Ogunde in the 1940s during British colonial rule. Ogunde, who was the pioneer and biggest name of

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the professional Yoruba travelling theatre movement, developed a theatre which involved recognizable secular actors rather than the masked performers of the traditional Alarinjo theatre (a Yoruba travelling theatre troupe) (Clark 1979). Ogunde, and those who followed his lead in this form of theatre, were the first professional performers in the first commercial theatre in Nigeria, in the sense that they were organized for the purpose of making money. They went from place to place performing for paying audiences in such venues as town halls, hotel premises and school halls, and in popular event centres such as the Glover Memorial Hall and Tom Jones Hall in Lagos, relying solely on box-office takings to sustain their activities.2 There were probably more than 200 professional travelling troupes from the beginning of this form of theatre in 1944 to its decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the practitioners gradually shifted to film and video production. Out of all of these, only three troupes were founded and led by women. Their work has not been documented and is thus not included in Nigerian theatre studies. It is well known that history is allergic to women’s contributions – and remained so until, perhaps, the United Nations’ declaration of 1975 as International Women’s Year (United Nations 1972), which marked a turning point in international policy directives towards women. Since then, increasing attempts have been made to recover, discover and document women’s history. The research I outline here has been made possible since the lifting of the prejudice against publishing women’s work which forced, for example, the distinguished feminist historian Bolanle Awe to spend two decades trying to publish her edited book Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective. In 1992, she recalled being told that the ‘time was not ripe for a publication of a book on Nigerian women and that such a book would not have much market value’ (Awe 1992: v). It is thus not surprising then that published scholarly works on the professional Yoruba travelling theatre have always been silent on women’s involvement: other approaches are needed. As the historian Deirdre Beddoe pointed out in her 1993 publication Discovering Women’s History: A Practical Guide to the Sources of Women’s History 1800-1945, the lack of documentation of women’s lives focuses attention on the importance of oral history tools and techniques, tools which I draw on in this essay. My 2011–12 research investigated and uncovered three undocumented female theatre troupe leaders, the first of which was Adunni Oluwole.3 Oluwole was, apparently, the least understood individual of her time, and appeared to take pleasure in flouting social expectations with the result that she has largely been erased from official histories. She would neither get married and raise children as was then expected of girls, nor would she engage in gender-appropriate skills and businesses such as sewing and trading. She did one outrageous thing one moment and did the opposite shortly after without caring what people might say. Perhaps as a result of her refusal of traditional gender roles – and partly for reasons related to the radical nature of her performance and political practices which I will discuss – her unique theatre style, unlike any other at that period of Nigerian theatre history, has not been documented in the historical archive. Consequently, the data for this work was collected mainly through oral interviews of elderly witnesses, mostly people who had watched some of her performances (none of the respondents was less than seventy years old at the time of the interviews in 2011 and 2012). A trip was made

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to her family home, the Jalaruru compound in Eleta, Ibadan, for authentication and clarification of information. The stories corroborate one another and are supported by a few written documents. All interviews were recorded in both audio and video formats, translated (as some of the interviewees spoke in Yoruba language) and transcribed. Unfortunately, nobody was able to produce pictures of Oluwole.4

ADUNNI OLUWOLE (1905–57) My research shows that, although she is remembered as a political activist, very little has been written on her as a theatre practitioner. The best-known account of her is a chapter written by the historian G. O. Olusanya included in Bolanle Awe’s edited collection. Titled ‘Olaniwun Adunni Oluwole’, Olusanya’s chapter contains the background of Oluwole, her religious itinerancy, her role in the General Strike of 1945, her political career and ideas, and her death in 1957, but there is no written account of her theatre career – and Olusanya does not provide any details of sources for his account. Having identified Oluwole as an important precursor of later Nigerian female theatre-makers (Udengwu 2012), it is my conviction that unless Oluwole’s story is documented now, it is in danger of disappearing from the history and development of theatre in Nigeria, and the world by extension. Her contribution to theatre is too important to be ignored, for not only was she the first professional actress, the first female actor-manager, but, as will be argued in this essay, she evolved the first guerrilla theatre in Nigeria. According to Olusanya, Adunni Oluwole was born in Ibadan to the warrior family of Jalaruru in Eleta, Ibadan, but was brought to Lagos as a toddler by her mother, who separated from her husband after a quarrel. Unable to raise her children alone, Oluwole’s mother took her oldest child, Olugbesan, to serve in the home of the vicar of St John’s Church, Aroloya. The little Oluwole was attached to her big brother and did not take the separation well. The vicar agreed to take her, as well. That was where they grew up. Oluwole started her acting career at a tender age as a pupil in St John Primary School, Aroloya in Lagos. However, either by omission or deliberate effort and despite it being on record that she took part in the dramatic activities of the Girl Guides of St John’s Church, Adunni Oluwole was not mentioned in the church’s most comprehensive historical record, ‘The History of St. John’s Church, Aroloya, Lagos 1852–1972’ written by B. B. Lewis, which does otherwise record the activities of the church’s dramatic society and its key players through the period Oluwole must have played an active part in it. The reason for this omission may not be unconnected with the rounds of disagreements she had with the church which – as we will see – led to her breaking away to start her own itinerant preaching. Whatever her offence against the church was, it is evident that it was serious enough to make the church erase her from its records and forbid anyone to ever mention her name. When I visited the church, it was clear that nobody, including the then vicar, was willing to talk about her. According to Olusanya, Oluwole’s performing career with the Girl Guides dates back to the early 1920s (Olusanya 1992: 124). She exhibited remarkable talents in those performances where her expressive power, singing, drumming and dancing

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abilities came to the fore (125). But she soon broke away from the society and formed her own amateur drama group in the early 1930s. Her first independent performance, which took place in one of the few main event centres in Lagos at the time, Tom Jones Hall, under the chairmanship of the celebrated Nigerian nationalist, Herbert Macaulay, was described as ‘a huge success’ (124) and as a result she was encouraged to continue. However, against everybody’s expectation, Oluwole suddenly abandoned the stage and took to itinerant preaching in 1933 (Nigerian Daily Telegraph 1933: 19). At that time, she had broken away from her church having quarrelled with them over a number of issues, including the bringing of corpses into the church before burial which she strongly believed was wrong because, according to her, God was the God of the living not the God of the dead. Her preaching was also directed against some aspects of Muslim doctrine and religious practices. She was a successful preacher because, as Olusanya writes ‘she was a born actress and a powerful speaker with a wonderful voice ... She was a fiery and fluent speaker always bubbling with enthusiasm which infected her followers and onlookers alike’ (125). Again, in her unpredictable manner, she shocked everyone by later converting to Islam, and proved to be equally effective. ‘Her enthusiasm, her commendable knowledge of the Bible, Quran and Ifa Divination, her fiery nature, her irrepressible energy were thrown into whatever she did’ (126). Returning to Christianity after her short adventure with Islam, she re-engaged with theatre motivated by the 1945 General Strike which revealed to her the troubled state of Nigerian politics.

THE FIRST ACTRESS PARTY Oluwole considered herself the first professional actress in Nigeria. In the 1940s, when Hubert Ogunde’s theatre started, there were virtually no actresses to employ, except a few daredevils such as Oluwole. The early phase of the professional travelling theatre featured all-male casts. In her book exploring the impact of Ogunde on Nigerian theatre, Ebun Clark (1979: 3–4) narrates how difficult it was to find female performers and how Hubert Ogunde had to outwit the public to attract actresses to his troupe, and that to retain them he had to marry them. Abiodun Duro Ladipo, the matriarch of the Duro Ladipo Theatre, recalled how they made male actors up with oranges and brassieres to make them act female roles (interview 2011). It was, perhaps, a deliberate effort to assert herself as the first actress and the first female theatre leader in the country that informed the name she chose for her professional theatre troupe – ‘The First Actress Party’. The name, therefore, is more than a name. It is a piece of history, a long and undocumented history of the ‘first’ professional actress, first female theatre leader, first guerrilla theatre and the first female presidential aspirant in Nigeria, described in her obituary as ‘an unheralded leader in the struggle for the emancipation of Nigerian women’ (‘She was a great Nigerian leader’ 1957: 7) In the remainder of this essay, I make the case that Oluwole deserves a place in Nigerian theatre studies, not least for giving Nigeria what I identify as the nation’s first guerrilla theatre. A study of her theatre style could perhaps influence the development of more guerrilla theatre interventions which at the moment are non-existent. The situation in Nigeria today is no less problematic than it was in

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Oluwole’s time, but the current official democracy after the long years of military rule potentially creates a favourable atmosphere for such practices.

A FORGOTTEN PIONEER It is unfortunate that no detailed record exists of Oluwole’s theatre career, but my research reveals some interesting information on the content and form of her theatre – not just in mainstream performance venues but also in the streets. It is her street performance, which lasted from about 1952 to 1954, that is my focus here, because it was unprecedented during this period. How can Oluwole’s theatre be called a guerrilla theatre? An examination of the modus operandi of ‘The First Actress Party’ theatre group identifies the key performance practices that Oluwole used, before I develop a discussion of the idea of guerrilla theatre, more usually associated with R. G. Davis’s San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1965. Before turning to Oluwole’s practice, it is important to understand the difficult environment for professional theatre performers at this time. Writers on the origins of the professional travelling theatre movement have all narrated how the practitioners suffered levels of discrimination and social rejection. Ebun Clark (1979: 4) explains how Hubert Ogunde, the man who started this form of theatre, was jeered at and labelled a rogue, and how he struggled to employ women in his theatre because no parent would allow their children to join such a group. Many of the practitioners interviewed for this research told similar stories. As I have recounted elsewhere, Ayox Arishekola, the director of the Ayox Arishekola Theatre, recalled the parental opposition which forced him to run away from home and ultimately escape to Ghana in order to fulfil his ambitions in theatre (Udengwu 2016: 170–6). The reasons for the negative attitude towards secular performances are varied and shift from place to place and from time to time, discussion of which will derail the direction of the current essay. Suffice it to say that at the period under review, professional theatre performers were regarded as rascals and the profession was written off as immoral and fit only for irresponsible people. It is important to mention this in order to appreciate the circumstances within which Adunni Oluwole dared to emerge as a theatre leader. If it was difficult for men to achieve acceptance from their families, it was even more difficult for women. ‘The First Actress Party’ was the culmination of Adunni Oluwole’s career in theatre. It is difficult to ascertain the exact date of the commencement of the troupe. However, what is certain is that it started after the General Strike that occurred in 1945, which lasted for forty-four days and through which Adunni Oluwole demonstrated, unequivocally, her support for the cause of the striking workers’ unions.5 Her desire to fight for social justice and to protect the welfare of the ordinary citizenry against a selfish and callously corrupt political elite was evoked by that strike. She was one of the nationalists – along with Herbert Macaulay, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo – who supported the General Strike which started on 22 June 1945, bringing colonial rule in Nigeria to its knees (Lakemfa 2012). Olusanya for his own part describes (2011: 126–7) the practical role which Oluwole played by joining the striking workers’ march, sitting out with them in the field through the night and also supporting them with food and money. In appreciation of her solidarity with the

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workers and the less-privileged population of the country, all the workers’ unions in the country jointly participated at her funeral (Olusanya 2011: 127). The strike had a profound impact on Nigerian politics by creating an enabling atmosphere for resistance and eventual independence. According to Owei Lakemfa, to be a trade unionist, or defend basic rights under the colonial system was to be seen as a dangerous person. So trade unionism was wedded to partisan politics; to be a trade unionist was to be a politician. So many of the leading trade unionists in colonial Nigeria were partisan politicians, and a number like Gogo Chu Nzeribe, Nduka Eze, Haroon Adebola and Samuel Udoh Bassey won elections into parliament at federal and regional levels. (2012a: 48) Lakemfa goes on to list other trade unionists who became successful politicians, but omits Oluwole who made the same transition from unionist to politician, and formed the Nigerian Commoners Liberal Party in 1954. Though she died before the election, her party won a seat in the parliament. As a professional theatre artist, Oluwole understood the power of theatre as an agent of conscientization and grass-roots mobilization and she took advantage of it when she formed her theatre troupe ‘The First Actress Party’ with the singular purpose to enlighten the masses on the political situation in the country, drive home her political ideas and solicit political support for her intended candidature. The word ‘party’ in the name of the troupe has two meanings. Popular entertainment companies in West Africa such as Hubert Ogunde’s ‘African Music Research Party’ had ‘party’ attached to their names because they were social gatherings which created the atmosphere of a party – where audiences were actively involved in singing and dancing with the performers, especially at the beginning of the show. But the word has a second meaning in Oluwole’s theatre where it also connotes the political agenda of ‘The First Actress Party’ theatre troupe. Oluwole was not the only theatre practitioner who was impacted by the General Strike of 1945. Three plays by Hubert Ogunde – Strike and Hunger (1945), Tiger’s Empire (1946) and Bread and Bullet (1950) (Clark 1979: 83–7) – were inspired by colonial corruption, political protest and violence in the country. Ogunde faced many indictments including official warnings, fines and bans for producing these plays. Perhaps it was a bid to avoid the fate of Ogunde, yet still present her political interventions, that informed Oluwole’s guerrilla type of theatre. Thus, the General Strike engendered not only political plays, but also, for Oluwole, a political theatre style.

THE STREET PERFORMANCES The street performance which Adunni Oluwole was noted for was not the convention in the popular colonial theatre – it was more in tune with traditional itinerant performances and minstrelsy. Street performances meant that there was no box office in her theatre. She was not known to be of good financial standing, so how was she able to do it and, most importantly, why? What was apparent in her style of theatre is that it was more of a one-woman show with her as the only actor with a speaking role supported by two or three other cast members playing minor roles. Olusanya’s

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account of her performance style is corroborated by Kole Omotoso’s 1988 semifactual novel, Just Before Dawn (200–1) which also describes how she was humiliated by the Olubadan (king of Ibadan) and his chiefs during her campaign against hasty independence. However, most of the information on Oluwole’s performance style has come from my interviews with eyewitnesses, who not only substantiate the evidence of these few documents but also elaborate on them. It should be understood from the start that ‘The First Actress Party’ was not a concert party in character. As we have seen, the concert parties of other entertainers focused on creating a party atmosphere, with a small musical band and variety entertainment – comedy, drama skits, storytelling, acrobatics and the like. ‘The First Actress Party’, however, lacked the most important attributes of a concert party performance – a musical band and a dancing audience. The most substantial eyewitness account of Oluwole’s theatre technique was given by Gboyega Ajayi, another performer who had travelled with the Oyin Adejobi Theatre Troupe to Lagos in 1952 where he met Oluwole and witnessed her street performances (interview March 2012). Ajayi was the only person to state that Oluwole had a son, known in Lagos social circles as Bob Labinjo. A trip to Oluwole’s family home, the Jalaruru compound in Eleta, Ibadan, confirmed Gboyega Ajayi’s story. The real name of Oluwole’s son was Aliyu. He too had since died. Oluwole is described by eyewitnesses as short, dark-skinned and with tribal marks on her face (three or four horizontal and three vertical marks) who often styled her hair into a bump above the forehead.6 In the Lagos of the period where horse-hiring was a thriving business, she was a spectacle on horseback: frequently seen dressed in cowboy costume and carrying a white flywhisk. Her theatre style and approach were completely different from anything seen before. Staged on the street, before an unpaying audience, and focused on current burning issues in the country, Oluwole was able to express her opinion and at the same time make the common people aware of those political issues. It is important to examine eyewitness accounts because these reveal the nature of her theatre practice. When she performed her opposition to the proposed 1956 national independence, she would usually dress in a prisoner’s uniform with handcuffs and walk through the streets with a crowd following her. She was also accompanied by a group of two or three fierce-looking men who simulated flogging her. When she got to her designated performance spot, she would begin her tirade on the political situation in the country. During these performances, she would usually impress upon her spectators that just as she was in chains and prisoner’s attire, so would they all be if they allowed Nigerian politicians to take the reins of leadership from the colonial administrators. She was not really against independence per se: indeed, Olusanya declares that Adunni was an avid supporter of the nationalist movement and the struggle for independence (128). However, Oluwole was opposed to the proposal of a hasty handover of national leadership to Nigerian political elites by 1956. She made her stand on this matter clear during the inauguration of her political party, the Nigerian Commoners Liberal Party, in 1954. Olusanya reports that during the occasion, She promised never to co-operate with any of the political Parties working for the attainment of self-government in 1956 on the ground that the measure of

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responsibility that had been placed in the hands of many Nigerian leaders had been grossly abused. […] She emphasised that the ordinary man should be allowed to choose whether he wanted the best form of colonial rule with a policy of gradualism towards successful self-government or the worst form of home rule with its evils of nepotism, disunity, victimisation and ‘life more abundant’ for a few. (128) Another eyewitness, a retired civil servant whom we met in 2012 at St John’s Church, Aroloya in Lagos and who wished to remain anonymous, narrated how, as a primary school child, he used to follow Adunni as she moved through the streets in handcuffs and prison costume made from white calico material and sewn into short knickers and a round-necked short-sleeved top. On the back of the shirt was the inscription IN JAIL WITH AWO. What he cannot forget is her popularity indicated by the large crowds of people, both old and young, who followed her about the streets. She was a spectacle to behold even before she got to the performance spot. In Just Before Dawn, Kole Omotoso corroborates this story: In the afternoon she would tie ropes around her waist and hire two strong men to pull her through the town, while she denounced those who would turn the common people to cattle the way she was being dragged through the town. (200–1) It is important to observe that she created this technique out of necessity. Although she is no longer here to state her reasons for adopting this style, we can probably infer that her approach enabled her to interact directly with the masses who were her greatest concern and to discuss political issues with the very people who were most affected by them. This form of street theatre helped curtail expenses: it involved little or no props, no costume change, no set design, no publicity – just a poor kind of theatre, stripped of nearly all aesthetic encumbrances and projecting only the political content, which needed only amateur actors as support as she was the sole star. And since this kind of performance was hardly advertised in the usual way of putting up posters and other forms of publicity, she could escape political

FIGURE 3.3.2.1:  An artist’s impression of Adunni Oluwole taken from an obituary image, with additional features described by eyewitness reports (impression by Miracle Eze).

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interference: she popped up unannounced on one street corner, put up a short performance and was gone before her detractors could get there.7 Oluwole, apparently, did not elude notice but she escaped from records. She was simply not taken seriously. Even today, some people still remember her and discuss her. For instance, Olu Falae, a popular Nigerian politician, while answering questions in an interview with Babatope Okeowo, confirmed the points previously made when he declared: Mrs Adunni Oluwole had the party of ‘Egbe koyinbo mai lo’ meaning ‘Party of white man should not go yet’. She came to Akure, I saw her, and she tied a chain around her waist and got somebody to pull her around the town. She said that the moment the white man departed, that was how we were going to treat one another as slaves, and therefore there should not be any independence. She did not want change because she was afraid of what we would do to one another after the departure of the white man. For this, he described her as a conservative politician in contrast to the progressives who supported the proposed independence. However, Falae concedes, but I then said, well, then, most people didn’t like her but what she predicted has substantially happened. We have messed ourselves up, we have had the civil war, we have had the NADECO struggle, we have had June 12, election rigging, rioting, killings, following the departure of the white man. So, her worst fears have been realised, but that is not the reason why the progressives should stop struggling. (Falae 2011) Apparently, ‘most people didn’t like her’, not because she was a woman, but rather because she was a ‘stubborn’ woman who would not accept a socially defined place for women but would rather do the opposite. However, if society is divided into rulers and ruled, she was popular with the ruled. If society is divided into aristocrats and common folks, she was popular with the latter. Her popularity with the proletariat is clearly indicated in the supporters she was able to garner in all she did including through religion, theatre and even in politics. Many people may not like her but what was her response to that? Olusanya explains, Taunted by men, she was unmoved. She used to ride through the streets of Lagos, chin up and looking straight ahead, without caring. It took a woman of unusual courage to do this in Nigeria of that period. Her courage and determination were all the more impressive considering the fact that she was acting against the wishes of her mother, brothers and sisters. (1992: 129) She was a model for women seeking to explore and improve themselves, and women who have talents and want to serve society with their talents. She was, actually unstoppable.

‘THE FIRST ACTRESS PARTY’ AS GUERRILLA THEATRE How can we explain and theorize the unique qualities of Oluwole’s theatre at this time in Nigeria, when concert party troupes were trending across 1940s and 1950s

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Africa? It is my suggestion that we need to look to other models in order to do so and that in Oluwole’s practices we can see the first evidence of a performance genre that would later – in San Francisco in 1965 – be characterized as guerrilla theatre. The question is, how can a theatre style which was developed in the 1940s be described as guerrilla theatre when the concept of guerrilla theatre was articulated in 1965? A close look at the definition and characteristic features of guerrilla theatre will reveal its close resemblance to Oluwole’s theatre style. Oscar Brocket and Franklin Hildy describe it as ‘theatre groups that seized on a gathering or occasion to present unscheduled, brief, pithy, attention getting skits as a means of arousing interest on some issue’ (1999: 570). Richard Schechner, however, emphasized its political objectives: It is called ‘guerrilla’ because some of its structures have been adapted from guerrilla warfare – simplicity of tactics, mobility, small bands, pressure at the point of greatest weakness, surprise. Central to ... the goals of guerrilla theatre is the commitment to empower the oppressed in the fight for revolutionary sociopolitical change. (1970: 163–8) R. G. Davis, the man often credited with the evolution of this theatre style with his San Francisco Mime Troupe, thought it necessary to clarify what guerrilla theatre is and what it is not. In his 1971 statement on the subject titled ‘Rethinking Guerrilla Theatre’ he states that: Guerrilla theatre was intended to be an alternative to the bourgeois theatre; instead, it has become a parallel, slipping in and out of existence, used by the egocentric, manhandled by the outraged children of the rich, even expounded upon by the meatballs of fashionable theatre. Its original intention was to describe a radical political perspective for a type of theatre that would live outside the oppressive culture of capitalism. (1987: 599–609) Referring to his original essay on guerrilla theatre which was published in 1965, Davis explains that the essay was a description of the new style of his mime troupe which was guerrilla-like, ‘The content, form, acting techniques, lifestyle and aims of the Mime Troupe constituted the guerrilla life of a theatre in an alien society’. He observes that since the publication of that essay, many groups have tried to adopt the guerrilla technique, and he describes them as an ‘aberration’ because they are either not doing it the right way or for the right reasons. He goes on to sound a warning that, ‘Because a theatre group is anti-establishment doesn’t mean that it is a revolutionary guerrilla group per se’ (1987: 603).

GUERRILLA THEATRE IN NIGERIA In 1981, in a lecture given at Harvard University, Wole Soyinka – founder of three companies including the Guerrilla Theatre Unit of the then University of Ife in 1978, spoke about guerrilla theatre in modern Africa (The Harvard Crimson, 1981). He stated that guerrilla theatre in Africa should change from its original function as a governmental tool for the dissemination of information on social issues

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such as illiteracy and health care, to become a more politically viable organization. Guerrilla theatre should be infused with what he called ‘a Political think-foryourself dimension’. It seems, from Soyinka’s suggestion, that modern African guerrilla theatre is any play with political undertones – he cites examples such as Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead and A Lesson from Aloes. Zodwa Motsa notes ‘common theatrical features’ in Soyinka’s own guerrilla theatre productions of ‘a small cast, a relatively bare stage, action presented through music, dance and mime, and various types of flashback’, through which the works ‘comment critically on the political state, human dignity, freedom and liberty’ (Motsa 2008: 224–5). Younger theatre practitioners also cite Soyinka as a pioneer of guerrilla theatre: Segun Adefila, the founder and leader of Crown Troupe of Africa, emphasizes the importance of Soyinka and of guerrilla theatre in his productions when he stated in an interview with NBF News, ‘Basically, we introduce our young adventurous personalities to the guerilla theatre which people like Soyinka and Ogunde pioneered’. His reason for describing his theatre as guerrilla is because, ‘Being political about my art is also traditional because whatever I do finds its origin in African culture. In those days, it is only the griots and masquerades that have the effrontery to sing songs that may be scathing to the king’ (Prince 2009). It would appear, from the way that both Soyinka and Adefila speak about modern African guerrilla theatre, that the term can be used for any play text or performance that makes a critical political statement. Yet, it can be argued, based on the various conceptual definitions given here, that there is more to guerrilla theatre than its political content. To fit into the definition of a guerrilla theatre, it must possess certain characteristics. Equally important as its scathing political content, is the element of surprise attack – a fundamental principle of guerrilla warfare (Guevara 1961; Nasution 1953); and choice of non-theatre spaces in public places such as streets and parks. There are remarkable differences between Soyinka and Oluwole’s guerrilla theatre style. While Soyinka had the luxury to imbue his performance with music, dance and mime (Motsa 2011) to the point of making it revue-like, Oluwole’s, on the other hand, was stripped of all extraneous aesthetic materials.

CONCLUSION It is my contention in this essay that Oluwole and her theatre have been sidelined and totally ignored by theatre scholars and critics for reasons not clear to me. Her theatre was disbanded in 1954, and she died in 1957, but this research, carried out more than six decades after her death, has revealed that although not well read, Oluwole was so courageous and creative that she was able to evolve a unique performance style that was unlike any other in her lifetime. A close study of her style of theatre shows that she developed a guerrilla-like performance technique long before it was identified and named. She should be remembered not only within Nigerian theatre history, but world theatre history as the founder of guerrilla theatre practice. It is recommended that similar research should be done on long-ignored and fast-fading theatre practices elsewhere in the world, with a view to uncovering more facts about the past that can be used to enrich today’s theatre scholarship and

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practice. In different parts of the world, a lot of women’s work has already been lost and more is on the verge of disappearing, but with enough funds and the desire and commitment to excavate the earth for the buried treasures of women’s outstanding achievements, not only in theatre but in other fields of human endeavour, knowledge will be enriched and history updated.

NOTES 1. In 1953, the Nigerian nationalist and pro-democracy activist Anthony Enahoro made the first unsuccessful proposal to the British to grant self-rule to Nigeria by 1956 (Fani-Kayode 2013). 2. This is not to suggest that the masquerade troupes who performed mainly at traditional festivals and ceremonies did not make some money from their performances, although they did not earn their living from the practice. Spectators voluntarily threw money at them. 3. Others were Funmilayo Ranco founder and leader of Irawo Obokun Theatre; and Mojishola Martins who founded and led Mojishola Martins Theatre. These two emerged years after Adunni Oluwole had died. 4. The author is grateful to those respondents who agreed to be interviewed about Oluwole during the 2011–12 research. It has not been possible to contact each of the interviewees again ahead of publication, but the author and publishers would be pleased to make any necessary corrections at reprint at their request. 5. The colonial administration failed to address workers’ demands for better working conditions and wage increases to enable them to cushion the effect of the rising cost of living and inflation. After exhausting all avenues of dialogue to no effect, all the workers’ unions in the country embarked on an indefinite strike. Full details of the strike can be accessed from Owie Lakemfa (2012b). The strike is also critically appraised in Oyemakinde (1975). 6. This description is confirmed by a picture from her obituary announcement in the newspaper. Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce the image because the newspaper has ceased production making it difficult for me to obtain the necessary permission. Adunni Oluwole died on the campaign trail reportedly of a tetanus infection (Olusanya 1992: 131). 7. She evidently did not charge fees for such street performances since the primary aim was to spread the message to as many people as possible and influence the mindset of the common man against their incompetent and corrupt leaders. It was suspected that she might have been sponsored by the colonial rulers, not just because her visions favoured the continued stay in power of the colonialists, but the fact that she could put up these performances without charging fees was an indication that somebody somewhere was providing the funds, and that person must be somebody who was favoured by her campaign. However, it needs to be pointed out that she was still doing her conventional performances alongside her street shows.

CHAPTER 3.4

Mapping Landscapes of Theatre: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

At the outset of the first of the paired essays in this section, ‘Mapping London’s Amateur Theatre Histories’, David Coates argues for the potential of new research questions, and new research methods prompted by the recent spatial turn in history. In different ways, and at different scales, the essays in this section respond to that potential and to the challenge to existing methods that such a turn entails. Both explore the different possibilities for arranging the historical record enabled by joining considerations of space, geography and mobility to that of historical time and individual event. Coates’s essay highlights the ‘digital discoveries’ made possible through two different exercises that combine spatial and temporal histories, his use of maps here providing an exemplar for others wishing to link together space and event in order to generate innovative research questions. First, he plots the details of individual theatres used for amateur performances in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, revealing a clustering together of both amateur and professional theatre around London’s West End. This suggests a more complex symbiosis between private and commercial theatres than has previously been understood. Second, by plotting the performance venues visited by the amateur performer and writer Thomas Croker in the years between 1868 and 1870 – largely on the outskirts of the rapidly growing city – Coates highlights the mobility of amateur performance, challenging the view of this as an intensely localized practice, and connecting Croker’s movements to the burgeoning development of transport networks in London in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Such questions of mobility are also central to Katharina Wessely’s essay, and to the lives of the German-speaking actors whose autobiographies she examines as part of a wider project, ‘Between Back Province and Metropolis: Actor Autobiographies as Sources to Trace Cultural Mobility’. Wessely makes it clear that for each of the actors whose life she examines – whose careers span roughly the same period from the 1860s to the 1920s – issues of space and movement are inextricably linked to their narratives of career development in two key ways. First, she draws on approaches from narratology. This entails paying close attention to the remarkably similar narrative structures and motifs through which her actors depict their own

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mobility from province to metropolis as they hope to eventually achieve stability in high-status metropolitan theatres such as those located in Berlin and Vienna. Wessely notes that for each of her actors, ‘it is the movement through space that orders the actors’/actresses’ memories’, and provides a narrative structure for their texts. Second, Wessely introduces readers to the concept of the mental map – one that does not necessarily cohere precisely to a physical landscape or geographical map, but which instead represents a shared cognitive understanding of place which potentially crosses national and physical borders. Close reading of the depictions of place in these actors’ autobiographies suggests the existence of a shared German cultural sphere and ‘a theatre culture full of inter- and transnational connections, movements and circulation of people, texts and ideas, forming an interconnected space of only seemingly static theatres’. Theatre performers are always working in place – both the place of performance and the wider geographies, social and actual, within which that site is located – and place is always about relationships. The two essays utilize different approaches to spatial history to explore those ideas, and model the possibilities for new historiographies that link place, performance and mobility.

CHAPTER 3.4.1

Mapping London’s Amateur Theatre Histories DAVID COATES

INTRODUCTION Richard White posits that mapping should be ‘a means of doing research; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past’ (White 2010). Maps can be used as a method for identifying new knowledges, with the emphasis on the process of mapping and what it reveals, rather than on the final product. Courtney Evans and Ben Jasnow call these new knowledges ‘digital discoveries’ – findings ‘that would have been more difficult or impossible using traditional research methods’ (Evans and Jasnow 2014: 321). This essay turns to mapping as a tool to assist with the recovery of the neglected history of amateur theatre in London. This task follows a decade-long surge of academic interest in amateur theatrical practices, which has led Nadine Holdsworth, Jane Milling and Helen Nicholson to claim that the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies is experiencing an ‘amateur turn’ (Holdsworth, Milling and Nicholson 2017). Nevertheless, there remains a substantial task to redress the balance of British theatre history to include the amateur – a revision that is perhaps most urgently required in the history of theatre in London, where the amateur’s existence has been almost completely erased. This essay uses mapping to exploit the ‘amateur turn’ to look afresh, through the lens of amateur theatre, at the environment of London.

AMATEUR THEATRE: A HIDDEN HISTORY A number of factors have contributed to the oversight of amateur theatre in London. First and foremost, scholarship has tended to privilege the study of professional performance – an issue that has affected the study of all forms of amateur theatre. Claire Cochrane has suggested that although amateur theatre statistically represented ‘a major experience of performance for a significant proportion of the [British] population’ in the twentieth century (2001: 233), it has been repeatedly excluded from theatre histories because it did ‘not necessarily conform to the subjective value

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judgements of the critic-historians who had tended to produce a limited, highly selective historical record’ (2003: 169). Cochrane has argued that critic-historians have shunned amateur theatre as a field of investigation because scholarship has adopted ‘a teleological view of history […] which needs evidence of progress no matter how obscure, ephemeral and illattended’ (2001: 233). This has resulted in a preoccupation with the remarkable, the unusual and ‘with the radical and experimental’ (Cochrane 2001: 233). Consequently, for the history of amateur theatre in Britain, a select number of forms that fit this brief have been examined, including aristocratic amateur theatricals in country houses (Rosenfeld 1978; Russell 2007; Haugen 2014) and dramatic entertainments onboard ships (Isbell 2013; Penny 2018). Although these histories are valuable, they are outliers; the most common forms of amateur activity, in their most common environments, have been neglected, including the widespread popularity of amateur dramatic societies in London and their performances in a wide range of venues across the city. Secondly, amateur theatre in London has been ignored as a result of its location. Although until relatively recently British theatre history has focused largely on London, the spotlight there has remained almost exclusively on the professional activity taking place within the famous rectangular district ‘bounded by the Strand, Kingsway, Oxford Street and New Bond Street’, that in the nineteenth century became known as the West End (Pick 1983: 22). Jacky Bratton suggests that certain dominant narratives of this area have been regurgitated time and time again by historians, presenting a homogenized version of what ‘London theatre’ looked like in this period. Apart from a select number of alternative theatre histories, such as that of the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, in the East End of London (Davis and Davis 1991; Norwood 2009, 2010), which have been tokenized as offering a different perspective on the city, these discourses have dwarfed and marginalized others, including that of amateur theatre. These issues also recur in the archive, presenting further problems for the historian interested in recovering amateur theatre in London. On the one hand, there is a problem of perceived quality or value. Ephemera relating to amateur theatre in London before the twentieth century are typically far less visually alluring than that which relates to the professional theatre. Developments in the sophistication of print culture which paralleled the rise of the West End saw the simple theatrical playbills of the eighteenth century evolve into more elaborate playbills and then into multipage programmes (Gowen 1998; Carlson 1993: 102). Hundreds of postcards and photographs were produced to propagate the images of the West End’s stars and the newly emerging illustrated press directed their attention towards this district of the city and its new celebrities. Arguably, just as Bratton has suggested that people and audiences ‘are drawn like moths’ to the West End – ‘to the music, the lights bright or dim, the show, the special occasion, the champagne, the oysters, the thrill of it all’ – collectors, archivists and subsequently theatre historians have been seduced by its exquisite and visually stimulating material traces, while other materials, with different stories to tell, have been shunned (2011: 45).

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There is also an issue with quantity and volume. In the major national and international repositories for theatrical materials, such as in the UK, the V&A, the University of Bristol and the British Library, and in the United States, the New York Public Library, Harvard University and the Folger Shakespeare Library, evidence of amateur theatre in London has been buried among a profusion of material relating to the theatre profession and the West End in particular. In both the British Library’s Playbill Collection and the V&A’s Theatre Building boxes, for example, there is a wealth of ephemera relating to amateur performance, yet it is concealed in collections that are catalogued chronologically by venue or region, making it exceptionally difficult to locate with ease. A similar challenge presents itself in local libraries and record offices, where these traces have to be mined from larger collections – often of personal memorabilia. A fleeting mention of amateur theatricals in a letter among family papers, an odd playbill inserted into an otherwise unrelated scrapbook or a rare diary entry mentioning an amateur theatrical event are all good examples of what Carolyn Steedman has called ‘mad fragmentations’ that ‘no-one intended to preserve’ (2001: 68). The time-consuming trawling of masses of unrelated materials, in person, in the archive, is often the only way to produce a yield. The same problems of value and priority have meant that the majority of ephemera relating to the history of amateur theatre in London has not been considered worthy of digitization, and a significant proportion is yet to be catalogued. In the Harvard Theatre Collections, for example, there are several uncatalogued collections containing materials relating to nineteenth-century British amateur theatricals, such as that which I have labelled the ‘Amateur, England, Box File’. If it were not for the archivist’s experiential knowledge of their holdings, this material would have been completely overlooked and would not have been consulted as part of the research for this project. These problems affecting the amateur’s visibility in the archive are systemic. The two largest theatre collections in Britain, housed at the V&A and the University of Bristol, have historically stipulated an emphasis on collecting material relating only to professional British theatre. The current ‘V&A Collections Development Policy’ (2015) states that the Theatre and Performance Department ‘is the deposit library on a de facto basis for professional performance in the UK’ (44) and does not mention amateur theatre as an area of interest. The 2009 ‘University of Bristol Theatre Collection: Acquisition and Disposal Policy’ took a similar position, stating that their collection offered ‘a representative cross-section of professional theatre-based activities in Britain’ (3), and only included amateur theatrical materials relating to the city of Bristol. Fortunately, the ‘amateur turn’ has influenced some archival policymakers, and when the ‘University of Bristol Theatre Collection: Collections Development Policy’ was launched in 2016, it included ‘Amateur Theatre’ in its list of key collections. In addition, the policy has ‘non-professional theatre and underrepresented material’ as one of its themes and priorities for future collecting, specifically highlighting ‘Country House and Private Theatricals’ and ‘Prisoner of War’ theatricals as the two main areas for growth (16).1 Although this change of stance should be applauded, it is likely to take years to have a meaningful impact on the collection’s holdings – and again prioritizes a particular kind of unusual amateur activity.

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The last – seemingly paradoxical – reason for the neglect of amateur theatre in London as a subject of enquiry for the theatre historian returns us to the issue of location. For a decade or more there has been a concerted effort to refocus the spotlight away from London and towards Britain’s neglected regions: histories of Britain’s other major metropolitan centres and their leading performance venues have offered the alternative narratives of Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham, for example (Wilson 2014; Robinson 2016; Cochrane 1993; Robinson et al. 2011). However, in turning their backs on London, theatre historians have overlooked the richness of the capital city’s theatrical past. Using two case studies, this essay aims to start the retrieval of the history of amateur theatre in London through both the process of mapping and the production of maps as data visualizations. In the first case study, mapping disrupts the established image and narratives of the West End by revealing an abundance of amateur dramatic activity taking place inside – or in close proximity to – this district. This proximity suggests the symbiosis of professional and amateur theatre in London – making the important role of amateur theatre in both the West End’s theatrical economy and ecology visible for the first time. In mapping the second case study, the reader’s attention is directed away from the West End to other geographical areas of the city, including its suburbs. Here, mapping and the resulting map emphasize the need for London’s theatre histories to be extended to incorporate a range of spaces and places that have otherwise evaded notice and are markedly absent in the written historical record.

AMATEUR THEATRE IN AND AROUND THE WEST END In the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, a series of permanent venues that were known as ‘private theatres’ emerged in London. These venues provided a stage for young middle-class men – and occasionally women – to perform in amateur theatricals and were regularly attended by apprentices, bank clerks, shop workers and students of law. While each private theatre may have functioned in a slightly different way, they usually secured an income from subscriptions and most charged the performers an additional fee to take a role, with the larger parts carrying a heavier tariff. By avoiding an ordinary on-the-door ticketing system and using subscriptions as a substitute income, these venues took advantage of a loophole in the law which allowed them to function without the need for a licence (‘Report from the Select Committee’ 1832: 12). This also enabled them to perform ‘legitimate’ drama, which was otherwise restricted by law to the two patent theatres – Drury Lane and Covent Garden.2 Thus, the private theatres provided an opportunity for amateurs to practice this otherwise exclusive form of theatre – a factor which was particularly important for those who were destined for the profession. Currently, the private theatres are merely a footnote in theatre history, with their reputation largely shaped by Charles Dickens’s caricature in Sketches by Boz (1994:

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120–6). In his ‘Private Theatres’, Dickens suggests that those who performed in such venues might include ‘shopboys who now and then mistake their masters’ money for their own; and a choice miscellany of idle vagabonds’; that the owner of such a venue might be ‘an ex-scene-painter, a low coffee house keeper, a disappointed eighth-rate actor, a retired smuggler, or an uncertificated bankrupt’; and that the audiences were ‘a motley group of dupes and blackguards’ (1994: 122–5). The private theatre in Dickens’s sketch is fictional, though the author makes clear that his caricature is based on several real venues that were then in operation in London. His imagined private theatre ‘may be in Catherine Street, Strand, the purlieus of the city, the neighbourhood of Gray’s Inn Lane, or the vicinity of Sadler’s Wells; or it may, perhaps, form the chief nuisance of some shabby street, on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge’ (1994: 122). Here, Dickens refers to the well-established private theatres in Catherine Street, in the West End and in Gough Street, Gray’s Inn Lane. The private theatre that he indicates as being close to Sadler’s Wells was in Rawstorne Place, and the establishment on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge was in Lower Marsh, Lambeth, where a Miss Harriett Potter was the proprietor in November 1848, when she was charged for maintaining an unlicensed theatre. Dickens would have been familiar with these, and with numerous other private theatres in the capital, some of which will have passed forgotten into history (Dickens 1994: 120). Aside from these fictional representations, only fragments of evidence of the private theatres’ existence have survived – and in the main these come, problematically, from the police reports of newspaper columns. These sources largely uphold Dickens’s caricature, supporting the notion that the private theatres were disreputable and had poor standards. For example, on 17 July 1829, The Times reported that a police constable found ‘great noise and rioting and grossly immoral proceedings […] being carried on nightly’ at one of the private theatres (‘Police’ 1829: 4). He alleged that the scenes were ‘of the greatest profligacy’: the scene beggared anything I ever saw. There were upwards of 300 persons of both sexes in the house, and the great majority of them were very young, many of them mere children. Between the acts there was romping amongst these boys and girls, and very indecent conduct on the part of many of them. At the fall of the curtain the audience left the house, and the street was in uproar for an hour afterwards. (4) This extract captures many of the key complaints made against the private theatres. They were believed to encourage vice and immorality, they disturbed their local neighbourhoods into the early hours of the morning and they corrupted the youth of society – particularly young men. However, by shunning such existing narratives around London’s private theatres and instead reading the surviving evidence against the grain, it is possible to view these venues in a very different light. For example, the private theatre in Gough Street, owned by Mr and Mrs Pym, was described by the journalist George Hodder as ‘the best known private theatre of the time’ (1870: 182). Although there are police reports recording dubious activities at this venue, three acting books containing

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playbills from this theatre have survived – two in archives on the other side of the Atlantic, and a third in the hands of a private collector in Scotland (‘Dramatic Institution’; ‘Pym’s Dramatic Institution’; ‘Subscription Theatre’). Together, these volumes suggest that performances took place at the venue at least once per week, with the acting book at New York Public Library accounting for scheduled events every Thursday between 3 November and 8 December 1831 (‘Subscription Theatre’). Such regularity appears not to have been unusual for the private theatres: a document from 1811 proposing the opening of a new venue in London records that performances are ‘to be on three Evenings in the week, from 1 November to 1 July: consisting of two unexceptionable Comedies or Tragedies, and one Musical Entertainment’ (‘Heads of Plan’). Many of the playbills from Pym’s private theatre proudly state that the venue was ‘established in 1817’, with a further playbill from the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Collections showing that it was still in operation in 1851 (‘Dramatic Institution & Theatre’). The existence of regular amateur dramatic performances for over thirty years in the heart of the West End suggests that theatre historians have allowed a handful of police reports and a Dickensian caricature to create an unfair portrayal of such venues in the written record. The process of mapping the locations of the private theatres onto the topography of London can in turn aid a ‘digital discovery’ which promotes a further shift in attitude towards these venues. Figure 3.4.1.1 plots the approximate site of each theatre onto a digital copy of ‘Reynolds’s Map of London’ of 1851. This map was chosen as it records London just before the last of the private theatres under investigation had disappeared from the city’s landscape. Through mapping the private theatres, it was possible to analyse the spatial associations between each of the various marked sites, and between the venues and the wider city. With only a few outliers, this process revealed that London’s private theatres were clustered around the West End, indicating a possible relationship between amateur and commercial practices. Barney Warf and Santa Arias have suggested that ‘where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen’ (Warf and Arias 2009: 1). The correlation between the location of the private theatres and the West End thus raises a number of questions about the symbiosis of amateur and professional theatre in this district in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the role of amateur theatre in its ecology. These questions can then be pursued as new lines of enquiry. By looking beyond the banner of ‘private theatres’ and analysing each venue individually, paying particular attention to their names, their relationship to the profession can be further unravelled. The theatre in King’s Cross was known as the ‘Subscription Dramatic Establishment’, the Catherine Street Theatre was known as both the ‘Thespian Institution’ and the ‘Pantheon Amateur Theatre and Dramatic Academy’ at different points in time, and both Pym’s Theatre and the theatre in Rawstorne Place were known as the ‘Dramatic Institution’ (‘Subscription Theatre’; ‘Unlicensed Theatres’). Collectively, the names of these venues emphasize the educative role of the private theatres, which were vital training grounds and schools of dramatic art, feeding the profession with new talent. There is evidence of theatre managers attending performances at the private theatres to view the trainees and scope out potential recruits for their professional

FIGURE 3.4.1.1:  Map showing the approximate location of each of London’s private theatres between 1780 and 1851. The base map is ‘Reynolds’s Map of London’ of 1851. Original underlying map obtained with permission from the Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library, overlay information added by the author.

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companies – and in at least one case, a manager was also an agent. Benjamin Smythson, who managed both the Sans Souci Theatre and the private theatre in Catherine Street, was celebrated after his death as ‘the well-known private theatrical Monarch and theatrical agent’ who, in later life, had ‘devoted his time and experience to rear and provide sucking honours for the “sock and buskin”, at the temple of Thalia, in Catherine Street, for the various theatrical managers in the provinces’ (Morning Advertiser 1841). There are also multiple sources highlighting the regularity with which performers would transition from the private theatres to the public stage. On 18 September 1797, for example, The Oracle and Public Advertiser stated that ‘the Private Theatre at Tottenham Court Road has given no less than five performers of much promise to the Winter Theatres for the present season’ (3). Numerous theatrical personalities record their early stage experiences at the private theatres, including among others Edmund Kean, Samuel Phelps and the playwright James Robinson Planché, who writes in his Recollections and Reflections that before having his first piece performed at a public theatre in 1818, he ‘murdered many principal personages of the acting drama’ in his youth at the private theatres in Berwick Street, Pancras Street, Catherine Street and Gough Street (1901: 3). The notion – suggested through the process and product of mapping – that amateur and professional theatricals could be interdependent in the West End is supported by evidence in the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Collections. Among the contents of box after box of ephemera relating to the largest and most famous West End theatres, there are occasional material traces of amateur theatrical activities. The St James’s Theatre boxes, for example, contain evidence that from at least the 1840s this venue played host to a number of amateur theatrical events, yet the written histories of these prestigious theatres fail to mention any such association. And although the researcher’s eye may again be initially tempted by noteworthy events – such as the performances of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour by Dickens’s company at the St James’s Theatre in 1845, at the request of Prince Albert – in bypassing the ephemera from these noteworthy theatricals, the boxes reveal items that document more ‘commonplace’ amateur pursuits, which have otherwise been overlooked (Cochrane 2003: 169–70). A playbill from April 1843 records a performance of The Duel; or, The Days of Richelieu by the Histrionics, an amateur dramatic club founded in 1842 by ‘the better-half ’ of an earlier and short-lived society, known as the Shaksperians (‘Music and the Drama’ 1842). The Histrionics had first hired the St James’s Theatre in November 1842 and continued to use it for their performances for at least ten years. But although their members were all wealthy gentlemen, none were prominent enough to have made these theatricals a subject of interest for other historians. In The Lost Theatres of London, however, Mander and Mitchenson suggest that amateur groups such as the Histrionics were part of the ecology and economy of the West End. Their acknowledgement of the embeddedness of the amateur within this district is perhaps a result of their particular vantage point, not as academic theatre historians but as former professional actors.3 They write that at the St James’s Theatre ‘amateurs were welcomed to keep the house open’ (1968:

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458). Similarly, they mention the presence of amateurs in the histories of a range of other West End venues, including the Queen’s Theatre, the New Royalty Theatre and the Polygraphic Hall – where one-man entertainments, lectures and amateurs made their way onto the stage when William Samuel Woodin, the manager, was not performing his own entertainments, from 1855 through until the late 1860s (1968: 534). The occupation of so many of the West End’s venues by amateurs at various points in their histories suggests that the amateur had a role to play in the financial sustainability of some of the major West End venues and contributed to the economic well-being of the industry at large. Further evidence of this interconnected ecology is to be found on the periphery of the West End, in the history of the Novelty Theatre, which was reopened in 1886 by L. & H. Nathan, the theatrical costumiers, with the intention of providing ‘a good West-end theatre’ for amateurs, which ‘would give them a better chance than the small halls and institutes in which they usually played’ (Nathan 1960: 91). This was a new addition to their already-extensive offering to amateurs, which included the hire and sale of costumes, wigs, make-up, scenery, lighting and various other accessories for theatrical production, highlighting the perceived economic potential of the growing amateur theatrical market in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century (Coates 2017: 238–55). However, although the Novelty Theatre hosted a variety of amateur dramatic entertainments, the venture failed, most likely because St George’s Hall had already established a monopoly on venue hire for amateur dramatic clubs and societies close to the West End. St George’s Hall, in Langham Place, played a significant role in the development of amateur theatre in London. The venue was opened in 1867 as a dual-function concert hall and theatre. Its first recorded use as a theatre was for an amateur performance by a group known as the Wandering Thespians in December 1867, marking the venue as a home for amateurs from the outset. Under the management of Thomas, Priscilla and Alfred German Reed, along with Richard Corney Grain, from 1867 to 1895 it became a fashionable and respectable resort of entertainment for the middle classes and was advertised to them for hire at reasonable rates. In the boxes of ephemera relating to St George’s Hall, in the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Collection, there are a substantial number of playbills to account for its ability to attract middle-class amateur societies to its stage between 1884 and 1901, from the Irving Amateur Dramatic Club to two companies whose names point towards other regions of the city: the St John’s Wood Dramatic Musical Society and the Lancaster Gate Dramatic Society. The inclusion of these latter groups suggests that theatrical communities were being forged in multiple regions and districts of the city, many of which were far removed from the West End. It is to these regions that our attention will now turn.

AMATEUR THEATRE IN THE REGIONS OF LONDON Thomas Francis Dillon Croker was a clerk for the P&O shipping company, as well as a writer, an antiquarian and a theatre enthusiast. He was an inveterate first-nighter, was on the committee of the Royal General Theatrical Fund and dabbled in theatre history – delivering lectures on the actor William Kemp and on the masque of

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Comus to the British Archaeological Society in 1867 and 1869. Croker was also an amateur performer. He was best known for performing theatrical impersonations, in which he imitated celebrities from the professional stage, including Alfred Wigan, John Baldwin Buckstone, Robert Keeley and Charles Mathews. He also regularly performed public readings and appeared in amateur theatricals. An acting book that once belonged to Croker survives in the Harvard Theatre Collection. The volume begins with an extensive and impressive list – four pages long – recording over 125 theatrical engagements between 1858 and 1870 (‘Thomas Francis Dillon Croker’). What follows is an assortment of correspondence, playbills, tickets, prologues and other ephemera relating to each of these engagements. Figure 3.4.1.2 shows my mapping of the approximate location of Croker’s performances onto Colton’s Environs of London of 1869 – a map chosen for its representation of the city in the year before the final performances logged in the acting book. As each point was marked on this map, the significance of Croker’s amateur theatrical career gradually became more apparent.

FIGURE 3.4.1.2:  Map showing the approximate location of each of Thomas Francis Dillon Croker’s amateur theatrical performances between 1858 and 1870. Croker’s house is marked on the map with a black square. The base map is Colton’s ‘Environs of London’ of 1869. Original underlying map obtained with permission from the David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com, overlay information added by the author.

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On the one hand, akin to the process of mapping private theatres, the plotting of activity provided greater insight into the relationship between the amateur and the West End. Croker’s acting book contains evidence of his amateur theatrical pursuits at some of the most prominent West End houses, including his participation in a performance for ‘the Benefit of the Widowed Mother of the late Paul Gray’ – an artist who produced illustrations for the periodical Fun – at the Haymarket Theatre on 6 July 1867. The previous year, he had performed impressions of ‘several wellknown Celebrities of the Stage’ in the form of ‘an imaginary conversation’ as part of an amateur theatrical event at the Polygraphic Hall, near Charing Cross, in aid of the Society for Establishing Sailors’ Homes. Croker’s volume also comprises material traces from some of the smaller public theatres and entertainment halls where amateur dramatics were part of the regular fare. These include several venues already highlighted in this chapter, including St George’s Hall, where he acted for the benefit of a Mr Warboys in May 1872, and the Cabinet Theatre in King’s Cross, where an event was hosted for the benefit of the theatre’s leading lady, Mrs Malcolm, in June 1865. Additionally, Croker had appeared at the New Royalty Theatre, in Dean Street, Soho, in April 1862 for the benefit of the ‘celebrated polyphonist’, Mr Love (‘Thomas Francis Dillon Croker’). This venue was built by the actress Fanny Kelly, and first opened its doors in May 1840 as the home of her dramatic school. After the school’s closure in 1849, the theatre maintained a strong association with amateurs, which is evidenced in the boxes of ephemera relating to this venue in the V&A Theatre Collections (‘Royalty Theatre Building Boxes’). On the other hand, and arguably of far greater significance, the mapping of performances listed in Croker’s acting book provides insights into the provision of amateur theatrical entertainments across the wider geography of London. The majority of Croker’s performances take place on the outskirts of the city, including in Greenwich, Hackney, Clapton, St John’s Wood, Chelsea, Peckham, Blackheath, Islington, Southwark, Fulham, Walworth and Enfield. He also performs further afield in the suburbs, including Highgate, Mitcham and Bromley, with a number of performances taking place far beyond London, including Ventnor, Ryde, Ringwood, Scarborough, Tenterden and Cork. The acting book and its accompanying map are a stark reminder that Britain’s cities are themselves made up of ‘regions’, many of which have not featured in existing theatre histories. The type of venues where amateur theatricals took place in these regions are in desperate need of further scholarly attention. The volume contains material traces of performances in literary and scientific institutes, lunatic asylums, church schoolrooms, coaching inns, town halls and assembly rooms. These spaces were multipurpose, with amateur theatricals being produced between political meetings, religious gatherings, club and society events, lectures, exhibitions and social functions. The number of venues in the city functioning on these lines thus challenges our perceptions of where – and in what form – the majority of Londoners might have encountered performance in this period. The map of Croker’s activities also challenges our understanding of how amateur theatre may have functioned. It is all too easy to assume that amateur

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theatricals have always been localized, drawing on local talent to perform and local communities to make up the audience. Croker’s home at 9 Pelham Place, Brompton, to the south west of the city, is marked on the map: and although he occasionally takes part in amateur theatricals close to home at the Chelsea Vestry Hall – often as part of the series of entertainments offered by the Chelsea Literary and Scientific Institution – the completed map highlights the geographical scope of his amateur theatrical career. This career takes Croker to all corners of the city, and beyond it, stressing the mobility of the amateur theatrical performer in the second half of the nineteenth century. This new knowledge, established through mapping, provides fresh understanding of those dramatic societies whose names perhaps reflect their itinerant status, such as the Romany Amateur Dramatic Club, the Strolling Players and the Wandering Thespians. In plotting Croker’s career onto Colton’s map – which includes railway lines and stations in and around London – a further ‘digital discovery’ was made. Croker’s performances in the suburbs of London take place in locations that are close to these lines, suggesting that he used the developing rail network to engage in amateur theatricals in an ever-widening geographical region. In turn, this discovery raises questions about the mobility of amateur theatrical audiences in the period. While existing theatre histories frequently acknowledge the development of the railways and their ability to bring new theatre audiences into the centre of London and the West End, my mapping of Croker’s amateur theatrical career gives the impression that theatrical tourism may have been two-way. On closer investigation of Croker’s acting book, there is evidence to support such a claim. In 1866, he appeared in an annual entertainment in Bromley Town Hall which was produced by the Bromley Cricket Club and attracted a fashionable crowd. The annual playbills announce that in order to ‘suit the convenience of Visitors from London, a SPECIAL TRAIN will leave the Bromley Station for Victoria half-an-hour after the conclusion of the Performance’ (Thomas Francis Dillon Croker).

CONCLUSION: DEEP MAPPING The design of Colton’s map makes it possible to link the rapid development of the rail network with the location of amateur theatrical activity in the suburbs of London, as well as with the mobility of the amateur actor and their audiences. This almost accidental discovery, made through the overlaying of a particular map edition with amateur theatrical data, highlights the need for this enquiry to be expanded in new directions to enhance our understanding of the history of amateur theatre in London. A possible solution might be deep (or thick) mapping, which Bodenhamer et al. have proposed ‘is the essential next step for humanists who are eager to take full advantage of the spatial turn’ (2015: 1). Although Tiffany Earley-Spadoni has pointed out that there ‘is no scholarly consensus on what a deep map is or what the process of deep mapping entails’, a number of their qualities, described by some of its strongest advocates, would appear to enrich this investigation (2017: 96). Attempting a catch-all definition, Earley-Spadoni writes that a ‘deep map is a multi-layered, digital cartographic representation that allows map creators to

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annotate and illustrate geographical and social space in various ways, often using multi-media elements, commenting and super-imposable layers’ (2017: 96). For Les Roberts ‘deep mapping […] is as much a process of archaeology as it is cartography’ (2016: 3), with Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks proposing that a deep map could encompass ‘everything you might ever want to say about a place’ (2001: 65). The creation of multiple layers of seemingly disparate information that can be produced through deep mapping can be digitally juxtaposed to find new meanings, and changes over time can be more easily understood. Roberts goes on to say that ‘very little of what deep mappers are doing is in fact oriented towards the production of maps so much as immersing themselves in the warp and weft of a lived and fundamentally intersubjective spatiality’ (2016: 6). Building on the initial findings of this essay, a project that develops a deep map of a very small area of London’s West End would highlight the value of this methodology to theatre historiography. Such a project could dig deeper into the construction of the West End, relating its development as theatreland to a wide variety of other histories in the same geographical area which until now have seemed unrelated. Just as Earley-Spadoni has suggested that deep maps ‘allow for dissent and discussion of contested geographies, and […] permit multi-vocality’ (2017: 97), a deep map of an area of the West End would complicate the dominant discourses of the region and its associations with the development of professional British theatre, revealing its multifacetedness and enabling hidden histories, such as that of amateur theatre, to be viewed on equal terms.

NOTES 1. These two named areas for growth were directly influenced by academic activity. On 2 March 2016, in an email correspondence, Jo Elsworth, Director of the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, wrote that the new policy would include areas that ‘I feel are woefully underrepresented in UK archives and that I might try and put in in order to build up a record’. She wrote that my research had highlighted that ‘apart from Country Homes and maybe Record Offices there is no logical place for collecting this material’. Katherine Astbury’s work on French prisoner of war theatricals was likely the influence for future collecting in this area. 2. This restriction would only be relaxed with the passing of the Theatres Act of 1843, which removed the privileges of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. The Theatres Act made amendments to the Licensing Act of 1737, based on the recommendations put forward by a Select Committee on Dramatic Literature of 1832. 3. Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson were partners and keen collectors of theatrical ephemera. During their lifetimes they amassed an enormous theatrical collection, which they used to publish several books on British theatre history. After Mander’s death in 1983, a charitable trust was established to protect the collection. The collection had a number of homes before being transferred to the University of Bristol in 2010.

CHAPTER 3.4.2

Between Back Province and Metropolis: Actor Autobiographies as Sources to Trace Cultural Mobility KATHARINA WESSELY

Looking back remembering all the towns and villages where I performed, my memories take on the impression of a railroad courier, with all the towns and villages resembling stations of longer or shorter stays. Every time I set forth and mounted the iron horse, well equipped with valise and hatbox in my right, holding Schiller, Goethe and Shakespeare firmly in my left, a faithful travelling companion set out on the journey with me: the thought that I am one of those who die on the road. (Liebhardt 1884: 33–4; all translations author’s own unless otherwise noted) Academic writing concerned with the German-speaking theatre in the nineteenth century has often emphasized processes of stabilization, concentrating on the development towards artistic modernism. This perspective led to the privileging of individual ‘great men’, single institutions and buildings (see, for example, Brauneck 1999; Fischer-Lichte 1993). As soon as we shift the focus from these to the often marginalized actors and actresses whose labour underpinned those individual institutions and stars, the whole picture literally starts to move. Theatre history suddenly seems to be more about space and mobility than about one important place. Actors’ and actresses’ autobiographies have long been regarded as too unreliable to be of much use to theatre historians. But taking into account recent theories on autobiography that understand them as performative acts by which the authors construct their identities, these texts become valuable sources for theatre historians. The focus on autobiographies of actors/actresses and on their mobility sheds new light on liminal theatre cultures and challenges assumptions about the relation between centre and periphery, uncovering alternative paths into modernity. This essay is based on the results of the research project ‘Between Back Province and Metropolis. Actor Autobiographies as Sites to Negotiate Cultural Identities’

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that analysed around thirty autobiographies of actors and actresses who worked at German-speaking theatres throughout the Habsburg monarchy in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.1 We wanted to find out how actors and actresses portrayed their careers and thereby constructed their individual as well as collective identities, and to examine the construction of the theatre landscape of German-speaking countries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a temporary contract at a provincial theatre was considered an unavoidable but necessary step for actors/actresses to train their skills and gain a position at a prestigious theatre in Vienna or Berlin. At the same time, a teleological idea of an ideal acting career developed: the provincial and fringe theatres were considered sites for learning the art from scratch, and a few metropolitan theatres were seen as the peak of an actor’s or actress’s life. In their autobiographies, actors and actresses not only narrated and thereby constructed the stories of their artistic and psychological development, but at the same time construed an imaginary theatre landscape where every geographical spot that hosted a theatre corresponded with a location in a hierarchically structured network of theatres, and with this a step on the employment ladder. Since acting careers implied a constant change of workplace, these autobiographies can be read as crossing points of the time-centred narration of personal development from devotion to success, and the space-centred narration of artistic ascent from provincial ham-acting to the Viennese Burgtheater. It is important to appreciate these texts as performative acts: in writing, the authors are (re-)constructing their lives; in publishing, they are part of the construction of the collective memory regarding the theatre history of this space (see Bratton 2003; Corbett 2004; Gardner 2007; Postlewait 1989; Seifener 2005). Building on the findings of memory studies, this essay does not read the texts as reservoirs of historical facts – it has been pointed out time and again that autobiographies in general, and those of actors and actresses in particular, are too unreliable as far as dates and facts are concerned (Postlewait 1989: 252). Instead, such texts constitute a valuable body of writing that is of interest exactly because of its constructed character. Autobiographies form important intersections between the shared memories of individuals and the cultural memory preserved in texts and monuments. Thus, the various topoi developed and used in these texts can be regarded not so much as true reports, but rather as interpretations of both individual pasts and collective experiences of actors/actresses in relation to their professional lives. This essay concentrates on two intertwined aspects of autobiographies: the depiction of the space of the theatre landscape and the narration of mobility through this space. The fact that mobility is a constituent factor of theatre life even in the supposedly stable time of the municipal and court theatres of the nineteenth century is increasingly acknowledged by scholars (see, for example, Marx 2006a: 120); however, this focus raises a number of historiographical questions. Which methods can we apply to analyse the autobiographies and how do these form our questions and inform our research? Whose stories can we tell with the material at our disposal? What is left out of the texts and how can we tackle these issues? How do mobility and space complement the notion of place and how can theatre historiography account for that? With these questions in mind, this essay suggests a way of analysing autobiographies – adopting,

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on the one hand, approaches from narratology to trace the actors’/actresses’ mobility and, on the other hand, working with the concept of the ‘mental map’, developed by cultural geographers and historians, to depict and analyse the German-speaking theatre landscape constructed in the autobiographies. My reading of the texts as performative acts thus means that their analysis will not tell us much that is new about specific theatres; instead it will help us to trace the ‘mental map’ by which the German-speaking theatre landscape was perceived at the turn of the twentieth century.

PROVINCIAL THEATRE LIFE Before turning to the individual biographies, I briefly sketch the theatre situation in German-speaking countries in the nineteenth century as far as it relates to this essay (for a fuller history, see Martersteig 1904; Fischer-Lichte 1993; Mennemeier 2006; Marx 2006b, 2007; Haitzinger and Jeschke 2007). Theatre life in the German empire and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was characterized by close connections between the centres and the peripheries – not only actors but also theatre managers usually started their careers in the provincial theatres, slowly working their way towards the centre (Charle 2012). Regarding repertoire and acting styles, the Viennese Burgtheater and later also the Deutsches Theater in Berlin were the reference points the provincial theatres tried to emulate or even overtake. At the same time, Viennese and Berlin theatre agents usually scouted for new talents in the larger provincial theatres, whose managers and secretaries in turn watched the smaller provincial theatres for upcoming actors and actresses. So, an actor or actress would progress from, say, Olmütz/Olomouc in Moravia to Graz in Styria and from there to Vienna – or at least that is what was perceived as the ‘logical’ career path. Mobility was not only a constituent part of the careers of actors and actresses but also vital for theatre life in provincial towns, where audiences often longed for new faces on stage. Before television, radio and cinema, theatre in provincial towns was the major entertainment for the educated upper and middle classes, who often held a subscription to a seat in the theatre (Bayerdörfer 1992). This meant that during the season they attended performances at least once a week. They saw every production the theatre staged, some even several times (Wessely 2011: 228–30). This in turn meant that the audience saw, for example, the juvenile lead or the ingénue in different roles over and over again. Thus, after one, two or three seasons, they were longing for a new face. For the actors and actresses it was therefore better not to stay too long but leave a theatre when their parting was regretted by most of the audience, instead of staying until the first audiences grew tired of their style and critics started to articulate their shortcomings. Though the mobility of actors and actresses was highly important both for the vitality of provincial theatre life and for the actors’ and actresses’ careers, it was also perceived as problematic at two different levels. For the theatre life of a provincial town, the constant flow of actors and actresses meant that each autumn a ‘new’ ensemble started to work together (even if only a part of the ensemble was actually new, the way the individual actors and actresses interacted had to be established anew). But towards the end of the nineteenth century with the rise of the stage

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director, it was more and more the interplay of the actors and actresses forming a rounded performance, and not so much the achievements of individual actors or actresses, that was regarded as pivotal for the performance as a work of art (Matzke 2012: 168–9). Therefore, this new start at the beginning of every season was increasingly seen as problematic; provincial theatre critics often complained that it took the first half of the season to build an ensemble, which then acted together for only a few months before it was torn apart again. This tradition certainly enabled individuals to learn and grow artistically, but it hampered the continuing artistic evolvement of the specific stage that was now demanded by critics and audiences. For the actors and actresses, on the other hand, the main problem was the necessity to be constantly on the move. Friendships and family relationships were difficult to maintain, and often it took actors/actresses years before they would establish their own household. They usually lived in hotels or guesthouses, sometimes in readyfurnished flats, at times even sharing a room. Usually, their contracts were only for the months when the theatre was open, so they had to either look for a summer engagement in one of the many theatres in spa towns or leave the town and take cheaper lodgings during the summer months, even if their contract was renewed for the next season. While young actors and actresses often embraced this ‘bohemian lifestyle’ as fun and adventurous, after several years of moving around most actors and actresses grew tired of the discomforts and inconveniences. So, how was this mobility of a whole profession depicted in autobiographies? Which aspects were highlighted, which were only briefly touched upon, which were completely left out? How was the necessary mobility interpreted and how was it seen in relation to one’s career? What did the ‘mental map’ that resulted from this mobility look like? To answer these questions, I will now discuss three specific actors and take a closer look at their mobility in relation to the various stages of their careers.

NARRATING MOBILITY The following analysis concentrates on three autobiographies that cover the same time frame, which makes it possible to compare the presentation and narration of a shared theatre practice. They were all written in the 1910s by actors who were born between 1842 and 1859 and worked on stage from the 1860s to the 1920s. The form of mobility in their professional lives is to some extent different in each case, but together they provide a good depiction of actors’ and actresses’ mobility in the latter third of the nineteenth century. The focus on actors is necessitated by the available evidence: there are notably fewer autobiographies written by actresses than by actors in this period, and those who wrote books tend to be more widely known than their male author colleagues (for example, Wilbrandt-Baudius 1919). Furthermore, while the itineraries of actors and actresses were more or less the same, in contrast to their male colleagues, the published autobiographies of actresses tend to focus on their later period of success. More research would be necessary to trace the similarities and differences between texts by male and female authors. Over the course of the nineteenth century, more and more actors and actresses did not come from theatre families, as had hitherto been the most common way to enter the

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profession (Ebert 1991; Schmitt 1990). Our three protagonists all came from middleclass families, their fathers being, respectively, an accountant, a brewer and an official broker (Eisenberg 1903; Kosch 1953; Prechtler 1914; Schweighofer 1912; Wohlmuth 1918). Alois Wohlmuth and Felix Schweighofer were born in Brno in the 1840s, and because their parents were strictly against a theatrical career, they both eloped to the stage in their late teens. Heinrich Prechtler, born in Vienna in 1859, also started his career running away from home – but in his case this adventure only lasted a day (Prechtler 1914: 1–10). With the help of a theatre agent, he and a friend got a contract in the provincial small-town theatre in Krumau, Moravia, some 200 kilometres from Vienna. But when the sixteen-year-olds arrived there after the end of their school term, the stage manager realized that they were not suitable for his stage and sent them straight home again. There, the whole story soon came out, made worse by very bad school grades as well as a fine from the agent for breach of contract and for receiving travel money. Understandably, the whole family was in upheaval for some time, but after a few weeks Prechtler’s father organized acting lessons with an actor from the Burgtheater and Prechtler could start his stage career with some form of education. Since formal acting schools did not exist at that time, for persons from nontheatrical families this was one of the two possibilities for entering the profession. Wohlmuth and Schweighofer took the other one: they joined travelling troupes that toured the countryside. These remnants of the former travelling theatre were usually family businesses with a handful of complementary actors/actresses hired for those parts none of the family members could play. By horse carriage and by foot they travelled the small towns and villages, performing in taverns, sometimes even on a pair of wooden planks on some barrels. Before their performance started, the actors and actresses had to set up the stage, walk through the village and announce the programme, and find lodgings for the troupe’s members. While these circumstances, together with the autocratic and paternalistic behaviour of the impresario, remind us strongly of the travelling troupes of the eighteenth century, the difference was that the actors and actresses who were not part of the family only got contracts for several months or for the season. So, around Easter they usually had to look elsewhere for a new contract. In his autobiography, Wohlmuth recounts several occasions in his youth, when he was walking from village to village because he had heard that there was a theatre troupe in the area, often sleeping in the fields or meadows and eating stolen fruits, sometimes even accepting money from strangers. Nonetheless, both Wohlmuth and Schweighofer portray their times at the travelling troupes in a humorous tone, mocking their former impresarios, colleagues and audiences and even their own hungry former selves. All the inconveniences and hardships notwithstanding, both cherished their time of apprenticeship. These accounts are full of anecdotes, similar to those that Jacky Bratton suggests often form an important narrative structure in theatrical autobiographies (2003: 102). Some of them even evolve into literary tropes employed to underline the author’s belonging to the authentic group of theatre professionals, such as descriptions of periods of hardship overcome by the will to perform on stage, or of the enthusiastic but non-lettered impresario. The next stage in all three careers is a period of approximately two decades of shorter and longer contracts in various provincial theatres in the Austro-Hungarian

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monarchy and the German Confederation/German empire. The ground the three actors covered in this period is quite impressive: it ranges from Rostock and Gdansk in the north to Dusseldorf and Strasbourg in the west and Bucharest and Odessa in the south-east, including for example Meiningen, Dresden, Czernowitz and Lemberg, as well as private theatres in Vienna and Berlin. Though many of these towns were by that time connected by railway lines, the journeys were still sometimes cumbersome, and horse carriages were not yet completely obsolete. Thus, Schweighofer recounts the story of when he and his wife, together with the theatre’s musical director and his wife, rented a carriage after the end of their contract in Odessa to get to Czernowitz, a distance of some 400 kilometres. During the nights, he walked behind the carriage with his revolver, since he was afraid of thieves – which resulted in a severe cold that he only barely survived (34). This part of the actors’ careers is characterized not so much by the constant movement of their earlier years which was confined to a small region, but by an annual or biannual change of workplace throughout the German-speaking regions (including regions with a German-speaking minority). For Prechtler, who had skipped the apprenticeship with the travelling theatres, this was the most mobile part of his life. In Breslau, he had met his future wife, the actress and soubrette Ferdinande Schmittlein, but it was a long time before the two of them were hired by the same venue. While he had a contract in Dresden, she was working in Weimar, where she continued to stay when he moved on to the Lessingtheater in Berlin. Given that these distances were not too great, he spent most of his days off on the train visiting her. In his autobiography, he recalls that during this time he became good friends with the conductors, closely following their promotions and carrying their compliments to his wife (88–9). After fourteen years of marriage, the couple finally managed to get contracts in two Berlin theatres, which reminds us of a further factor that made the metropolises with their many theatres attractive to actors and actresses: they enabled them to change between theatres without constantly having to move their whole household, and couples could live together even if they were employed in different theatres. At the age of around forty, all three actors had reached a point that in hindsight appears as the high point of their achievements. For Wohlmuth and Prechtler this also meant settledness – though when you take ‘becoming a famous (court) actor in Vienna or Berlin’ as the ultimate achievement of an actor/actress, both of them only accomplished half of this goal. Wohlmuth became a celebrated character actor, playing all the roles he ever longed for: Nathan (in Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing), Richard III (in Richard III by William Shakespeare), Iago (in Othello by William Shakespeare), Shylock (in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare), Marinelli (in Emilia Galotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing), Mephisto (in Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), among others – but this was in Munich: a well-esteemed court theatre, but still neither of the two capitals. Prechtler, on the other hand, was appointed at the Viennese Burgtheater, but he mostly played minor roles and was never very famous. In contrast to these two actors, the peak of Schweighofer’s career was at the same time the most mobile part of his life, as the title of his autobiography, Wanderleben (itinerant life), reflects. After several artistically successful contracts in Viennese private theatres

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that nonetheless ended in conflicts, he decided to turn his back not only on Vienna, but on long-term contracts in general. For the rest of his career, he travelled through Europe (and even went as far as New York and St Petersburg), giving highly acclaimed guest performances that made him very famous and very wealthy. Early on, he bought himself a house near Dresden to where he would return between his journeys, but he never again took on a seasonal contract. All three autobiographies end around the time, or even shortly before, when the actor in question reaches this peak of his career. Schweighofer covers his most successful period in fourteen pages (out of a total of 122), out of which four are devoted to his farewell performances. Admittedly, Wohlmuth’s text carries on for thirty pages (out of a total of 193) after he obtains his position in Munich, but he only briefly mentions theatrical events. Most of this part of the text covers either vacation trips or encounters with famous Munich painters and sculptors, supporting his tacit claim to be part of the bourgeois society with their well-respected pastimes of touristic travels and interest in the fine arts. Prechtler’s text, on the other hand, ends as soon as he and his wife get contracts in Vienna, three years before they both became members of the Burgtheater – thereby somewhat contradicting the title of his book, Up to the Burgtheater. This structure is typical of those autobiographical texts that concentrate on narratives of self-development following the example of the Bildungsroman, especially Goethe’s highly influential Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96). Across the majority of the autobiographies examined for the wider project, it is thus clear that actors ascribe different meaning to their mobility according to the particular stages of their careers. Mobility’s narratological function changes in the course of the texts. At the start of a career in theatre, mobility is described as a form of apprenticeship, especially in the case of wandering troupes, the embodiment of the quasi-mythical fleapit (Schmiere). All actors seem to agree that these produced really poor theatre, but were still a very good training ground, exactly because they were so unprofessional that everybody had to do everything. Thus, a young actor or actress got the opportunity to try things out and find their own style. Despite all the inconveniences of life with a wandering troupe, most actors depict this form of mobility in a comical way, looking back at their younger selves and laughing at the naïveté of all involved, while at same time nostalgically remembering their youth. In the years of slowly climbing up the career ladder and increasing consolidation, the actors’ and actresses’ mobility slows down. In between their moves, there might even be years of rest and stability; but the example of Prechtler shows that at this stage the actor’s private life sometimes added the further necessity of travel. Overall, movement becomes slower, but at the same time its circumference becomes wider. It is this part of their careers that has the most impact on the formation and depiction of the ‘mental map’ of theatre life that I will examine in the next part of this essay. At the peak of their careers, actors and actresses usually came to a rest, finding their artistic home – or that is how it is depicted in most autobiographies, at least those up to the early twentieth century. The case of Felix Schweighofer shows that sometimes the peak of a career could be to lead the life of a touring star, but usually it meant settling, complemented ideally by a lifetime contract. At the same time this means that the intrinsic necessity of the autobiography ceases, as if mobility

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had been the main driving force of the text. In many autobiographies of actors and actresses, coming to a physical halt equals having completed the phase of learning and having fulfilled one’s artistic potential. This is often the place where the text ends. Sometimes, indeed, this is the place where the text should have ended had there been some editing, because in many cases what follows is a very unstructured and erratic assembly of recollections of single performances and individual famous artists, as if the text had lost its regulative momentum. Without the spatial movement of the actors, the order of time seems to have vanished as well, since it is the movement through space that orders the actors’/actresses’ memories in the first place and provides a structure for the text.

THE ‘MENTAL MAP’ OF GERMAN-SPEAKING THEATRE As I previously pointed out, the depiction of actors’ and actresses’ itineraries in their autobiographies in turn draws a picture of the space they are criss-crossing, thus contributing to the discursive construction of a mental map of this space, while at the same time drawing on common presumptions about specific towns or regions. Originating from cognitive psychology, where it describes how spatial orientation works, the concept of the ‘mental map’ has been adopted and further developed by cultural studies and historiography to analyse how collectively shared representations of spatial environments influence the construction of collective and individual identities (Schenk 2013). It has mostly been used to describe the construction of larger entities such as ‘the Balkans’ or ‘Eastern Europe’ (Schenk 2002), but it can also be applied to the study of smaller and more specific units, like the theatre landscape – and the autobiographies of actors and actresses are an important source for this investigation. The ‘mental map’ of theatre these three texts display encompasses the whole German-speaking world, including not only German-speaking regions in a strict sense, but every place that hosts a German-speaking theatre – even if it does so only for a few weeks. Before the episodes of ethnic cleansing witnessed by the twentieth century, Europe’s map of languages was far more diverse and dappled than it is today, with many bi- or trilingual areas forming possible locations for theatres. Thus, New York and St Petersburg with their German minorities were also part of this map, even if an ocean had to be crossed or complicated passport regulations had to be followed to get there. Notwithstanding the inclusion of these towns in the ‘mental map’, there are significant differences between what seems to be perceived as ‘inside’ the borders of German-speaking regions and what lies ‘outside’ these borders. Thus, within these autobiographical texts, the theatre life of New York and St Petersburg is perceived and depicted as differing from the familiar (and assumed familiar to the reader) circumstances inside these borders and some peculiarities of the situation are therefore described for the readers. In contrast, the political borders that run between the two states of Germany and Austria are of little or no importance to the actors. That is to say, they are, of

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course, of practical importance, for example when Austrian actors run into trouble in Germany because they lack proper documents, or especially after the start of the Austro-Prussian war in 1866, when they had to leave their positions in Prussian theatres to return to Austria. But these borders were apparently of no consequence for the actors’ perception of the theatrical ‘mental map’. Although many actors and actresses do mention differences in the mentality between Austrian and German cities or regions in their autobiographies, these were not, in general, perceived to be of relevance to the theatre itself. There also seems to have been no fundamental difference experienced by the actors between working at a theatre in say, Lübeck compared to one in Lemberg. Since neither Germany nor the Austro-Hungarian monarchy had a theatre law, each theatre had its own set of regulations and the variations within one state could be as large as those between them. Even in Moscow and New York there did not seem to be language barriers that restrained the actors – the only example of linguistic problems is narrated by Schweighofer in relation to his experience in the Russian town of Kremenchuk, where the troupe employed an interpreter to translate the jokes of their performances for the Russian-speaking audience (51–3). Generally speaking, there seems to be quite a non-reflective assumption at work in these three texts that implies a ‘German cultural sphere’ residing everywhere where the German language is spoken, or, even wider, where there is a German theatre. There is no space here to go into detail regarding the connections between these assumptions and either German or Austro-Hungarian cultural politics, but suffice it to observe that these actors apparently took for granted the cultural political stance of a more or less uniform ‘German cultural sphere’. This corresponds with the strong connection between language and culture that was stated by nineteenth-century philosophers such as Herder (Wodak et al. 1998: 22; Hobsbawm 1991: 75–7). With the intensifying national conflicts, especially in the multicultural towns of the Habsburg monarchy, these assumptions become increasingly problematic towards the end of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, the theatres in these towns became agents in the conflicts between different ethnic groups and accordingly these conflicts start to emerge in the autobiographies of actors and actresses. Most of the time though, the texts simply narrate individual incidents affecting the theatre, without reflecting the theatres’ (and the actors’ and actresses’) own agency in these conflicts (see, for example, Prechtler 1914: 516). Generally speaking, this reflection only starts after the Second World War, and even then it does not become common in the autobiographies of actors and actresses. One of the few authors who explicitly address the situation of German-speaking theatres in non-Germanspeaking surroundings is Franz Reichert. Referring to German-speaking theatres in Czechoslovakia between the wars, his older post-war self states its bewilderment at the naïveté with which the actors and actresses took the existence of these theatres for granted (Reichert 1986). In retrospective, this naïve taken-for-grantedness also applies to the actors and actresses of the nineteenth century: the other theatre cultures existing alongside an assumed German cultural sphere are more or less invisible on the ‘mental map’. Furthermore, while these actors travelled hundreds of kilometres and worked in very different surroundings, they only rarely had eyes and

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ears for the peculiarities of specific places and for the differences between various places – or at least they only rarely address these peculiarities and differences in their texts. The German-speaking world thus becomes an astonishingly uniform space, given its wide geographical expansion. What sets the individual places apart in this landscape are not so much the social, cultural or ethnic peculiarities of a certain town or region, but the conditions and circumstances at the theatre – and, as these autobiographies make clear, these depend first and foremost on the impresario or director. The theatre landscape of these texts from the turn of the century seems to constitute a layer of reality that is only loosely connected to the ordinary cultural and political map of the same geographical space.

CONCLUSION Through portraying different forms of mobility, the authors of these autobiographies amplify a teleological idea of a coherent career path. They use the narration of their movement through space to give meaning to parts of their lives that might otherwise be perceived as pointless meandering. Though all three authors evaluate the significance of their years of travel slightly differently, they agree that it was a vital time for their personal and artistic development. In order to give this impression of a coherent ascent, the actual geographical space that had to be covered until they reached their goal seems to have been stripped of its political and sociocultural peculiarities, thus creating a ‘mental map’ of the German-speaking theatre landscape that has little to do with other ‘mental maps’ of the same space and whose structure seems determined solely by inner-theatrical circumstances. During the course of the twentieth century, this map would increasingly become linked to the general perception of specific regions as well as to differentiations between German and Austrian towns and specific ethnic structures of particular towns. The autobiographies of actors and actresses show the importance of mobility in the history of theatre. At the same time, working with these texts raises the question of whose stories we tell and especially whose stories we cannot tell with the source material we as theatre historians are using. This should not stop us from using these sources, but we have to be aware of their constraints: not every actor or actress wrote an autobiography, and those who did wanted to tell a specific story. The focus of these texts is a limited one, as they can only reflect their authors’ own understanding and interpretation of the bigger picture. More research is needed into the practices of this mobility, into its routes and logistics. However, acknowledging the relevance of space and mobility in theatre history enables us to more accurately portray a theatre culture full of inter- and transnational connections, movements and circulation of people, texts and ideas, forming an interconnected space of only seemingly static theatres.

NOTE 1. Funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and conducted at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History at the Austrian Academy of Science.

CHAPTER 3.5

Place and the Performance Event: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

In his essay ‘Space and Theatre History’, Marvin Carlson suggests that ‘looking beyond the spatial assumptions of the European literary theatre encourages the theatre historian to be conscious of performance spaces more prominent in other cultures and of their very different histories and associations’ (2010: 206). He thus emphasizes the importance of looking at the whole social and physical context of the theatrical event. Our paired essays in this section provide just such encouragement for the reader through studies that link place and event in very different locations and times. Both, however, also highlight the challenges for the theatre historian of reaching back through time and space to understandings and practices of place that have long disappeared. Situated at what she identifies as the moment of ‘invention’ of modern theatre in the Italian Renaissance, Clelia Falletti’s close examination of the performance of Eutichia that took place in Urbino in 1513 draws on insights from cognitive neuroscience to link that performance – and the complex, three-dimensional perspective scene that was built for its containing festa – to a moment of change in the perception of the world and of ourselves ‘induced by the broad and rapid dissemination of the artificial perspective vision in the fifteenth century’. Thus, the speech of the drunken clown Gastrinio that guides his audience to understand and enjoy the new possibilities of this scenic space also alerts Falletti’s readers to a moment of change in relationships between theatre, society and cognitive perception, highlighting that the spatial assumptions of European theatre are not, and have not been, stable and immutable across time. The evidence of place and its practiced usage thus opens up new understandings of performance within and – in the paired essay by Xiaohuan Zhao – well beyond the European context. Where Falletti is able to draw on detailed descriptions of the perspectival scene written by court insiders in addition to her careful reconstruction of the spatial dimensions of the throne hall, Zhao’s research into the temple theatres of the Huizhou region of late Imperial China highlights the paucity of available evidence, even where, as with the Yuqing Tang shrine which forms the central case study of his essay, the site – protected from war and revolution by its location in a remote, forested mountainous region – still functions as both a sacred place for ritual

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performance and a secular place for theatrical entertainment. Zhao has to weave together fragments of evidence from administrative records, eyewitness accounts and other documentary sources to supplement and interrogate the palimpsestic architectural evidence that remains. That the term ‘temple theatre’ functions both as descriptor of site and performance practice highlights the closely imbricated relationship between place, performance event and social function that Zhao’s essay explores, and through which he situates the temple as ‘a turning pivot on which various forms of Chinese theatre have evolved, revolved, resolved, dissolved and revived’.

CHAPTER 3.5.1

History versus Historiography: A Renaissance Case Study Revisited CLELIA FALLETTI

Dorothée Legrand and Marco Iacoboni suggest that ‘the way one perceives and acts in the world is modified according to how others perceive and act themselves in the same shared world. […] One’s being in the world depends on others and on their own relation to the world’ (2010: 235). Taking up the challenge of such insights, this essay focuses on an intriguing case study from the early Italian Renaissance theatre as the starting point from which to address a key topic of theatre historiography: vision and perception. Today, this theme can – and should be – explored by incorporating the new insights of cognitive neuroscience research, which have produced a number of important publications. In particular, the recent book, Architecture and Embodiment, by the architect, scholar and historian Harry Francis Mallgrave (2013), a pioneer in the application of neuroscience to architectural theory, supports a new approach. It allows us to stop looking at the construction of spaces and instead start looking at the emotional effect that spaces have on those who look at or live in them, thus placing the body and the creative and artistic capabilities that are specific to human beings at the centre of our research. The core of my essay is the Italian Renaissance as it is understood as the affirmation of a new vision of the human being and the world, with a focus on the ‘invention’ of the theatre, particularly of the perspective scene. Since perspective is a cultural construct, a spatial technique, rather than an objective reality, I argue that its dissemination in everyday life through the fifteenth century – due to the work of painters and woodcarvers – and then also via the theatre during the sixteenth century, brought about the creation of a new paradigm: a new interpretation of the world and of the human being, that would spread throughout Europe starting from Italy, where the mathematical laws of perspective were invented and the use of perspective became pervasive. Perspective vision meant putting the human being at the centre, giving him dignity, measuring and organizing every reality according to the human

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body. All of this resulted from a change in the way the world was conceived; hence, the way we began to perceive the ‘real’ world around us also changed.

A DRUNK SPONGE IN WONDERLAND There is a scene from an early-sixteenth-century play that keeps coming to my mind, and that I turn to read time and again to further understand what exactly it is trying to suggest, beyond what I have grasped so far. It is a comic part, with a drunkard who enters the stage unsteadily. He rests teetering against the buildings in the scenery. He admires them, names them stuttering and hugs them so as not to fall, trying, but not managing, to find the exit in the process. His name is Gastrinio (a parasite and sponge), and he is a secondary character in the play Eutichia by Nicola Grasso ([1978]), that was acted on a scene built in perspective in the throne hall of the duke’s palace in Urbino during the carnival of 1513. Apart from Eutichia, that same carnival saw the first representation of the more famous Calandria by Bernardo Dovizi of Bibbiena, and of a third play about which little is known. This was an illustrious event much studied by theatre historians: a court festa in which the small but eminent duchy held a superlative self-celebration, regardless of expense, aimed at projecting an idealized image of itself while also sending a political message in a period of precariousness caused by the annexation policies of Pope Julius II. The discussion of perspective in early Renaissance theatre remains unresolved, and is too vast to be exhausted in this essay. Fabrizio Cruciani, the distinguished Renaissance scholar to whom we owe the reinstatement of Italian Renaissance theatre within the anthropological dimension from which it emerged (i.e. the court) – provides some revealing images. Cruciani spoke of the ‘invention of the theatre’ to define the sudden appearance of modern theatre immediately at its adult stage, as Minerva is said to have been born from the head of Jupiter. With Ludovico Ariosto, Bernardo Dovizi of Bibbiena and Niccolò Machiavelli among the very first authors, the play as a mature genre emerges in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Cruciani places the theatre event within the ‘festa of the court’ container, pointing out that it is that framework that needs to be studied, case by case, in its manifestations, its cultural contexts and elements, among which emerge those that would later become ‘the theatre’. As what he terms an ‘epiphyte theatre’ – one that, similar to an epiphyte plant, does not have roots of its own, but derives its nourishment ‘from the culture it forms part of and which it expresses’ – Cruciani suggests that the main feature of Renaissance theatre history is perhaps the cultural complexity of which it is ‘a coagulate and a carrier’ (1991: 127–8; Cruciani and Seragnoli 1987: 11). However, the invitation to study the ‘origins’ of scenography by immersing it in the complexity of which the scenic device is the carrier has not produced any definite results. As Cruciani argues: Studies on Renaissance scenography have been heavily conditioned by a teleologic vision and are actually still an open field of research; it is necessary to redefine the same documentation material within a unity that spans from painting to architecture, and that, we believe, should base itself on the history of the culture and the people who have concretely ‘invented’ the scene. (1987:14)

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What is this perspective scenery in early Renaissance Italian theatre? Scenery is a multifaceted entity that is hard to define as one thing. It is a backdrop painted using perspective technique, that would eventually be – but is not as yet – documented; it is an architectural backdrop, such that those who plan the festa intentionally refer to classical theatre (via researches that span from the theatre of the Roman festas of 1513 to the Teatro Olimpico designed by Palladio in 1580); it is the assembly of buildings erected upon a platform, taking Ferrara for example; and … it is many other things, including the ideal city that took shape in the false perspectives and temporary architecture of streets set up for the celebrations, and the triumphal entries of distinguished guests and so on. It is all of this. What it is not: it is not the place designed for the characters from a play text; yet it is present in the same space-time (the container festa of the court) in which acting takes place. It is not related to the plays but to the celebration: it is the ‘ideal city’. The first clearly documented evidence of perspective scenery depicting a city relates to the plays acted in Urbino in 1513. Of this setting, we have neither preparatory designs nor sketches made by any of the spectators present. Nobody was so impressed or short of words to the point of producing correspondence in the form of a drawing as did the Dutch traveller Johannes de Witt who, in 1596, unable to capture his impressions in words, instead produced an ink sketch of London’s Swan Theatre for his correspondent. The spectators present at Urbino, from the dukes to the lowest servants and cooks, were already accustomed to perspective reproductions of city streets and buildings – they could see them even in the intarsia panels of the duke’s studiolo, or the room doors, or the choir stalls in the churches. Here, the big novelty was finding a three-dimensional and walkable perspective sight in front of them, in the focal point of the hall that was set up for the festa, on a platform placed at one end. The entire hall was transformed, to the extent that even the white ceiling could no longer be seen, covered as it was by a multitude of huge balls made of greenery illuminated from below by the hanging chandeliers, thus making it look like a ‘cloudy sky’ at dusk: this was new indeed! We have two detailed descriptions of the setting by Baldassar Castiglione and Urbano Urbani: two important reports, considering that the literate and diplomat Castiglione, the ideator of the festa, produced a description for Ludovico da Canossa (ambassador of the Duke of Urbino to the pope in Rome), whereas Urbani was secretary to the Duke of Urbino who commissions the festa, and historian of the duchy. They emphasize the perspective scene framed by two moat towers that Franco Ruffini identifies as the two slender towers of the city of Urbino (1986). The scenery represented the ideal city to the exploratory gaze of those present: it was a kind of mirroring between the festive perspectiva artificialis and the real situation, that was festive as well. Had there been any precedents? Ferrara comes to mind. At the time of the festa at Urbino, it had been four years since the last plays had been staged in the Sala Grande of the palace in Ferrara. There, the stage was placed along the windowed side of a rather long and relatively narrow hall that was actually an artificial upper loggia that skirted the external long side of the palace facing the Duomo. This stage, in 1508 and 1509, could easily span the width of 50 feet, effortlessly holding five small house sets which were similar to the mansions of a medieval stage. It is described by

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all contemporary witnesses as a wonderful scene, known by all: this would later be the theatre of Ludovico Ariosto. In contrast to the hall of Ferrara, the throne hall at Urbino is a regular rectangle, the short side of which measures about 46 feet and the long side 111.5 feet.1 The width could have provided enough space to reproduce the Ferrara setting with its small but accessible houses, and the depth, that Ruffini’s analysis suggests could have measured 16.50 feet from back wall to the fireplace, could also have sufficed. They did not, however, reproduce the Ferrara scenery. We know this from the Urbino reports that describe the stage, all of which definitely confirm a perspective set-up, not a linear one. Castiglione in particular provides generous details in his descriptions of the Calandria’s mythological intermezzos – which he himself designed – thus offering illuminating insights that enable us to envision the challenges raised by their realization in that space and the possible solutions that may have been applied, all of which dictated a particular construction for the stage. The importance and spectacularity of the intermezzos with their bulky wagons, moving upstage in a probable straight line (because both the opposite doors on the long sides of the hall are detached from the back wall by only about one yard), dictated the grouping of the houses and buildings, and their arrangement on the sides, in order to leave a clear view of the wagons and the allegorical apparitions that gradually advanced beyond them. The floats that entered, presumably through the triumphal arch, represented the triumphs of Venus, of Neptune and of Juno. Therefore, the buildings clumped together, leaning one against the other to produce the wings in perspective, with emerging elements in high relief, mid-relief, low and shallow relief, some jutting out considerably (such as the small octagonal temple that reached almost the centre of the stage) and others less protruding; and there were other entirely rounded elements. The scenery represented four months’ work by ‘woodcraft masters’, according to Castiglione. All in all, we can imagine this scene as a scale model, albeit a very particular one because set in perspective – a conglomeration of plastic masses set in perspective with the help of drawing and painting (not on canvas, but on three-dimensional shapes). The novelty of having the scenery framed by the two towers was also inevitably dictated by necessity: to hide the frames of the opposite doorways and cover the problematic entry of the wagons via ramps that had to advance some way onto the stage to make up for the limited height of the doors that were rendered even lower due to the stage’s elevation. As we know, in the first intermezzo of Calandria, from underneath the stage emerged armed men who fought against Jason. Thus, the stage needed to be about 6 feet high, while the hall is about 50 feet at its highest. As Castiglione describes it, The scene was made to simulate a faraway quarter between the city wall and the last houses. From the platform to the ground a truly naturalistic replica of the city wall with two towers, at the ends of the hall: on one stood the piffaro players, on the other the trumpeters; in between there was another flank of beautiful appearance. The hall found itself located as if it was the city moat, crossed by two walls as to retain water […]. The scene then simulated a most beautiful city, with streets, palaces, churches, towers, and real streets: all in relief, but

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rendered further by quality painting and well understood perspective. Among other things there was an eight-sided temple in mid-relief, so finely finished, that with all the workforce in the State of Urbino it is impossible to believe that it was made in four months: all worked in stucco, portraying wonderful stories, with fake windows in alabaster, all architraves and frames finished in gold leaf and ultramarine, and in some places, fake glass made of pieces of jewellery, that looked so real; free-standing statues all around, in fake marble, finely worked columns. ([13–21 February 1513] 1769: 74) Noting that ‘it would take too long to describe every single thing’, Castiglione nevertheless provides further substantial detail to his correspondent, the Duke of Urbino’s ambassador. The second document by the secretary Urbani is more concise in its description of the set-up, but – with that ‘cloudy’ sky – it communicates an emotion: The setup in Urbino was wonderful, the scene rich and ingenious, inasmuch as it was a beautiful architecture of palaces, porticos, temples, streets and triumphal arches, with lovely paintings, and other decorations in ingenious perspective. He had it realized in mid-relief and had the front part stretched out like a rammed earth wall, so as not to obstruct the people’s view of the scenery, with two Towers at each head of the scene, in one of which there were many excellent trumpets, and in the other pifferi, horns and trombones. […] Beautiful indeed was also the decoration of the hall. […] At the white high ceiling of the Hall, he lifted some big balls made of asparagus fern, between their dark green and the whiteness of the vault, the lights of the many torches made it look like a rather cloudy sky at dusk. (1514: c. 193v) However, both these descriptions are simply reports produced for distant or future readers: the document which allows us to enter inside the scenery is the first play that was staged there during the carnival of 1513, Eutichia. The drunkard character Gastrinio, using a low comic register, conducts the onlooking spectators, and in turn us readers, by the hand into a fascinating built-up environment, almost a miniature compendium of a city that is rich in monuments, streets and balconies, to touch those shady realistic windows that are only paintings (‘I would pok-pok-poke my finger nails through those cl-cl-clothed windowpanes’) (Grasso 1978: 79), to admire the horse that tops the triumphal arch (reduced to a flying donkey), like him to trace with our fingertips the rich decorations of the buildings, the columns, the wooden little temple, stucco and painting that look like marble, all to accomplish an illusion of the senses. Besides the usual invitations to keep quiet, besides the expected customary information on the setting (‘This place today let us imagine to be Mantua, another day let it be that which suits you best’) (1978: 54) and the comic compliments to the ladies, the prologue addresses the women who occupy the benches on the side of the windows with a direct request that introduces the concrete reality of that situation: ‘Be happy that the windows are locked well, that if by bad luck it were to rain the theatre would not be contaminated, as we have to stay here a long time’ (1978: 55). What the reporters view and describe with admiration is the perspective: a system of relationships, governed by geometry and the rules of mathematics – the

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FIGURE 3.5.1.1:  Reconstruction of the throne hall, set up for the 1513 festa. The documents linked to this festa allow us to conclude that there were neither banquets nor dances on the evenings of the plays. I have thus placed the second wall at the furthermost point from the stage, obtaining the effect of unity for the adorned hall and an orderly entrance for the men and women. The external upper loggias highlight the role of the doors with the ramps that penetrate the (raised) stage and the pathway of the wagons; the outer areas that were necessary for scenic movement are also signalled.

space into which the comedy sponge Gastrinio leads the spectators (Figure 3.5.1.1). The audience was fascinated.

THE ONLOOKERS’ EMBODIED RESPONSE TO ENVIRONMENT Cruciani used to say that we do not produce a history of the theatre but that we can only research theatre in history. He therefore warns us not to let the theatre we have in mind influence us, but each time to place the theatre in its context. He adds, moreover, that while studying theatre in history, we should not forget the theoretical framework available to us in the present (1989a, b). It is for this reason that it is not only right, but also necessary to ‘tell’ and ‘retell’ history, now and again: instruments are updated and perspectives change (Falletti 2013). To understand the kind of fascination the Urbino Court experienced and how deep it could be, I draw on Mallgrave’s Architecture and Embodiment (2013), which builds on his own earlier The Architect’s Brain (2010). This latter work ranges from Vitruvius and the humanist architects and theoreticians up to those of the new millennium,

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reconsidering their work in the light of the advances made by cognitive neuroscience and exploring the extent to which architects and neuroscientists might collaborate. Mallgrave’s point is that architecture is an embodied practice, not a conceptual abstraction, and that an architectural space is primarily constituted via an emotional and multisensory experience. The book’s theme, therefore, is the relationship between the body and architecture, which the author addresses historically, referring to several fields within the humanities, anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and phenomenology, ultimately seeking a foundation in biology and the contemporary discoveries on mirror neurons by the neuroscientific team of Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2007), and the studies on embodied simulation by Vittorio Gallese (2005, 2013, 2016, 2018). In a work that invites new reflections on apparently disparate disciplines, Mallgrave dedicates most of his introduction to a ‘retelling’ – and a fascinating analysis – of the famous experience of the German garden city of Hellerau, well known to theatre practitioners and historians for its celebrated School of Eurhythmics that Émile Jaques-Dalcroze founded there in 1910 (Sadler 1913). Mallgrave describes Hellerau as a metaphor showing how we are ‘embodied beings whose minds, bodies, environment, and culture, are interconnected at sundry levels’ (2013:10). As Mallgrave says, when placed inside or in front of an architectural space, the human being interacts with it and explores it with all of his corporeality, his sensoriality, movements and emotions. And because we respond to the environment through multiple corporeal senses, neurologically interconnected, emotions are deeply embedded in every architectural experience from the start. They initially code whether an environment is pleasing or not, regardless of whether it appears within a traditional or avant-garde dressing. (2013: 13) Vision, according to Gallese, is ‘a multimodal process implying the activation not only of “visual” but also of sensory-motor, viscero-motor and affective cerebral circuits’, and he points out: ‘Embodied simulation, moreover, is also activated when the actions, emotions and sensations perceived are portrayed as static images’ (2013). When observing the world, we carry with us our subjective experience and our affections, and thus we see it from a perspective that is situated in time and in space, constituted by the body’s motor potentials, always affected by the relationship with the world, that is characterized by an experience that has a certain emotive colouring, that is more or less gratifying, and accompanied by variable conditions within the body, such as heartbeat and respiration, blood pressure, hormonal response to stress, etc. (Gallese 2015: XIII) Architecture, according to Mallgrave, requires the observer to anticipate the intention of moving within it. A building, a city, invites movement: ‘Stairs: I want to walk on them. Niche: I want to sit in it. Column: I want to lean against it’.2 Mallgrave welcomes Gallese’s theory and updates the terminology: thus Einfühlung, and then empathy, now becomes embodied simulation, emphasizing the interaction

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with the other, and motor and affective resonance. By means of this embodied simulation ‘we animate the inanimate physical environment with which we come into contact’ (Mallgrave 2013: 14). An architectural environment is ‘multisensory in its myriad impressions’ and involves ‘all of the senses over a temporal span, and specifically through our movements within and around three-dimensional forms’ (2013: 139). This is the case with regard to a painting or constructed scenery as much as it is with a real space, even more so if it is situated within an ‘enriched environment’, like a court festa. We, as living organisms, engage the world through our senses and internal bodily sensations – that is, through the different sensory areas responding to the visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and kinesthetic stimuli of our environments. Moreover, these sensory experiences are always multimodal or cross-modal, in the sense that we perceive our environment through all of our senses simultaneously and in parallel. […] Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated […] that with every material we apprehend through vision we also touch in an embodied act of tactile simulation. (2013: 139–40) Brain imaging techniques that use a scanner in which the subject must lie motionless are unable to ‘capture’ our multisensory and three-dimensional experience of a constructed environment. Nevertheless, certain innovative non-invasive technologies allow us nowadays to look into the brain at work and therefore to experimentally verify the kind of emotive and sensory-motor impact that architectural spaces have on their users.

CHANGING OUR ENVIRONMENT, WE ALSO CHANGE OUR BRAIN Knowledge changes, as does the way we see ourselves. This is what we are addressing here: the modification in the perception of the world and of ourselves induced by the broad and rapid dissemination of the artificial perspectival vision in the fifteenth century. It is artificial, but it is perceived as being natural, more real than reality itself. In relation to the digital age, Mallgrave notes that: ‘we are continually reconstituting ourselves within environmental fields of stimuli that are sculpting or re-engineering our biological systems with ever quicker speeds and with multiple layers of depth and complexity’ (2013: 8). However, I suggest that we can also apply this reasoning to the age when, in Western culture, artists and common people started representing and organizing their perceptions according to the geometrical laws of perspective, an age that has deeply sculpted and re-engineered us through the generations (Richerson and Boyd 2005). In this speedy – and a bit cluttered – excursion between theatre and cognitive neuroscience, perhaps the drunkard scene in Eutichia ultimately finds its raison d’être, in between the lines and beyond literal meaning. The multisensory and multimodal experience triggered by the fake perspectival setting of Eutichia is reiterated and made real by the intervention of the drunkard on the stage. By means of the sponge’s body and thanks to his exploratory movement, with the combination

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of touch, vision and commentary, the onlooker, who shares the totalizing space of the festa, undergoes a vicarious experience. The actor’s body becomes an extension of his/her own body (Falletti 2016a): a touching with the eyes that is intensified and actualized by a real touching onstage (Pitozzi 2008; Gumbrecht 2004). This sensation is enhanced by the disorientation of the drunkard, which resonates with the disorientation of the people present, bewildered by being thrown into an environment that has been transformed for the festa. It is a useful methodological indication for the scholar to change his/her own point of view, to gradually seek or construct the tools with which to approach the particular question that a historical study of the theatre posits, especially when the solutions that belittle the problems, merely arranging the facts along a pacifying evolution, leave us disappointed. In this way, we can question known facts without the burden of the prefabricated stories and answers already given, seeing with the eyes of those who behold for the first time, having reinforced our batteries with new ammunition, different weapons and strategies. We allowed ourselves to be carried by the emotion produced by the skilful decoration of the ceiling, which the reporter Urbani records and transforms in a sensation that involves everybody: like finding oneself below a cloudy sky at dusk. This sensation is immediately restated and proved real by Eutichia’s prologue, addressing the women in the hall by referring to the windows that need to be closed, the imminent rain and to the event that brought them together. It is the first day of those carnival celebrations, and it is the first time that the spectators – or to call them more properly, the inhabitants of the court – upon entering the decorated hall, find themselves transported in a new and enigmatic dimension. They are taken care of by the first inhabitants of the stage (that is the actors/characters of the comedy Eutichia, starting with the prologue and then Gastrinio) who – as Gabriele Sofia suggests in his discussion of the actor as generating affordances for the spectator and co-creating the scenic space together with the spectator (2013: 144) – will guide the senses of those present to reconstruct their vision as being reality. This is why I consider the play’s author – and the words of his text – as the most important and direct source to acquaint ourselves with that unique perspective setting. The other two descriptive sources have the festive and political project in mind; while the other play we know about, Calandria, cannot give us any clues about the stage because it was written by a Bibbiena whom we know was far away from Urbino. Nicola Grasso, the duke’s chancellor, appears to have been present during the four months in which the hall was transformed and while he was writing his play, which was certainly of high political relevance as well as of great entertainment for the court and skilfully composed. Nicola Grasso best interprets the scenic set-up from the spectators’ point of view and turns that setting into an object and cue of the comedy. This play of resonances and embodied simulation also involves the scholar, who undergoes the same motor and affective resonance, and in the end decides to pay attention to it. If it is true, as Gallese writes, that the body is ‘the real protagonist of our faculty to appreciate the aesthetic characteristics of a palace, a tower, of a room or of a piece of furniture’ (2015: IX), we then ask ourselves: what could have been the effect of that visual overdrive of scenes knowingly organized according to the rules of perspective,

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the new ‘trendy’ style of the time? From the fifteenth century onward, perspective is present in the wooden inlays of cathedral choirs and the studiolos of princes, even in the door panels of the palace rooms (often the anonymous work of carpenters). It is present in the exploratory drawings of the great masters (from Brunelleschi to Paolo Uccello and so on), in the canvasses of painters and in the frescos, as well as in analyses and treatises on architecture (Alberti 1436; Sinisgalli 2011) and on painting (Piero della Francesca ms c. 1482; Nicco-Fasola 2008). But perspective, it is worth repeating, is a mental construct. It is not the way the world really is, but instead an artificial vision, a representation that is subjected to a geometric, mathematical, calculable order – ‘objectifiable’ via the device of the ‘window’ (Dürer 1525; Friedberg 2006) – that Renaissance man can dominate and organize according to his own measures. The small comic scene in Eutichia has allowed us to consider anew the ‘invention’ of theatre and especially of perspective scenic designs, together with a change in mentality that produced the way of perceiving the world that we inherited. In the festa we can find, at the highest level of excellence, the competences and skills that the court nurtures. It is, therefore, not strange to find perspective being used in the festa of Francesco Maria della Rovere (a courtly and political event). By 1513, in fact, at least eighty years had passed since the first scientific and mathematical explorations of perspective and the first definitions of its rules and calculations; years of study and application of perspective at many different levels. Perspective vision, ‘controlled by reason and clearly intelligible [...] is by now assimilated, becoming second nature to all: artists, craftsmen, commissioners’ (Bruschi 1969). In the same way it is not strange to find a play in its most complete form: in 1513, eighty years had passed since the discovery of Terence (the six plays known to us today) in codices that, apart from the plays, also contain the comments of grammarians who analysed their composition techniques, and the discovery of twelve plays by Plautus added to the eight that were already known. Eighty years, therefore, of analyses and study which caused the learned humanists to reclaim possession of the classical models of Plautus and Terence and the play structure, as their own heritage. Their coming together was inevitable within the framework of the court festa, an extraordinary place and time, an ‘enriched environment’ that dilates cognitive and learning possibilities. And it is, in fact, in the festa that Cruciani invites us to investigate the contemporary presence of elements that are not yet, but will eventually become, theatre. Translated by Victor Emmanuel Jacono

NOTES 1. It is on the first floor, adjoining the duke’s apartments. Access is via the upper loggias, through two monumental doors. Inside, on the long entrance wall, there are two majestic fireplaces, and on the opposite wall three big windows and a door that leads to the sala delle Veglie, an integral part of the duchess’ apartment and a meeting place. This door faces a second door that leads from the upper loggias into the throne hall. On the short wall between the two doors there is the entrance to the duke’s apartment. It is on this side, furnished by three passages for the plays, that Ruffini locates the stage (Ruffini 1986). 2. Mallgrave is quoting a conversation he had with the architect Steve Brubaker (Mallgrave 2013: 137).

CHAPTER 3.5.2

Of Shrine and Stage: A Study of Huizhou Temple Theatre in Late Imperial China XIAOHUAN ZHAO

This study examines the ancestral shrines and ancestral shrine stages of Huizhou in late Imperial China in order to explore their double role as a place for both ancestor worship and theatrical performance. The late imperial period refers to the last two dynasties: the Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (1644–1911). As the most popular form and platform for theatrical entertainment, the ancestral shrine theatre provides an insight into the dual function of Chinese temple theatre and opens a window onto ritual and operatic performances in the period under review, thus adding to our understanding of the dynamic relationship between ritual and drama in general and between ancestor worship and Huizhou theatre in particular. Yet, the historical documents and literati anecdotal accounts of the period reveal little information on the space and structure of Huizhou ancestral shrine stages, let alone their built environment: this essay thus highlights the importance – and the challenges – of drawing on both archaeological and architectural evidence as well as archives and historical sources to underpin historical inquiries into theatre, examining the evidence from key sites in the region in order to further understand both the architectural and the theatrical conventions of temple theatre in late imperial Huizhou.1 In doing so, this study takes up the approach demonstrated by Thomas Postlewait in his essay on the historical reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre by proceeding from ‘history-as-record’ – examining a wide range of primary sources on the building and use of ancestral shrine theatres from dynastic histories and local gazetteers to literati anecdotal and literary writings, the archaeological evidence of buildings and the cultural landscape, and the evidence of paintings, photographs and personal interviews – towards an understanding of what Postlewait terms ‘historyas-event’, which no longer exists (2009: 27). In this case, the ‘history-as-event’ is the practiced space of performance at the temple theatre of Yuqing Tang in Huizhou, which – as my analysis in this essay shows – no longer exists in its original form.

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Different from the Globe Theatre, however, Yuqing Tang does have a continuous history of use since its first construction in the Kangxi era (r. 1654–1722), albeit in a reconstructed and renovated form, and most importantly, still maintains its original functioning as both a sacred place for ritual performance and a secular place for theatrical entertainment. Examining the different kinds of evidence gathered together in this essay thus provides theatre historians with a rare opportunity to explore the interaction between ritual and drama and to address the potentials – and challenges – of reconstructing scenes of past stage performance in premodern Huizhou.

TEMPLE THEATRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEATRE IN CHINA The term ‘temple theatre’ refers both to the physical space, indoor or outdoor, designated for ritual/theatrical performance or the physical structure built on the temple premises for ritual/theatrical performance, and the ritual/theatrical performance presented during temple fairs or community and calendrical festivals. As recorded in the oracle bone inscriptions dating from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE, Chinese temple theatre originated from wu-shamanic rituals of the Shang dynasty, particularly the shamanic exorcism ritual of Nuo (Zhao 2019).2 From shamanic ritual performances gradually evolved a rich variety of performance practices from Han (206 BCE–CE 220) variety shows (baixi, literally, ‘one hundred shows’) (Xiao 2010) to the Song (1127–1279) Southern Drama (nanxi) and the Yuan (1271–1368) Variety Play (zaju) (Wang [1915] 2010). From ritual performances evolve theatrical performances, which in turn inform and reform ritual performances (Zhao 2019). The late imperial period – the period which is my focus here – was a crucial period in Chinese theatre history of transition from an elite literary theatre to a mass popular regional theatre. For about 300 years from 1600 to 1900 – a period that spans roughly the mid-Ming and Qing dynasties – Xiqu or traditional Chinese theatre developed into more than 300 regional styles (Zhongguo xiqu 1995: 1661–8). Most of them started as small-scale folk and ritual theatre, with some growing into larger-scale urban and secular genres that acquired a nationwide reputation in the nineteenth century and remain active onstage even today. Notable among them is Hui Opera (Huixi), which emerged in Chizhou, Anqing and Huizhou during the Jiajing period (1521–67) of the Ming dynasty, and is best known as the ancestral progenitor of Jingju or Beijing Opera. There has been much research on Hui Opera, as shown in Aoki ([1936] 2010: 336–46), Huixi (1959: 21–81), Dolby (1976: 164–70), Huiban (1992), Zhu (2005) and Li (2006), to name but a few. Their research has greatly deepened our understanding of the development of Hui Opera from a minor regional form to a major one that is well known all over the country; however, because their research, with few exceptions and in many cases, is almost exclusively devoted to Anhui troupes (Huiban) and their performances in urban and commercial settings outside Huizhou, we still do not know much about Huizhou theatre with regard to its stage and stage performance at the community level in rural and ritual settings. It is to this neglected regional aspect of Chinese theatre history that this essay turns its attention: focusing on ancestral shrines and ancestral shrine stages in late imperial Huizhou.

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In doing so, the study draws on two main types of primary source materials. Material evidence from archaeological and architectural sources – from a number of ancestral shrine stages built in Ming and Qing times which are still extant in Huizhou – is used to complement and corroborate archival and historical sources, particularly local gazetteers (difang zhi). Local gazetteers are to the locality as dynastic histories are to the nation (Bol 2001: 37). They are extremely valuable for the study of local culture, particularly local religion and folk belief, because of its rich first-hand materials and descriptions of demographical features, clans/families, rituals, festivals, ceremonies, temples, shrines and monasteries. The local gazetteer rose as a new type of historico-geographical writing in the Tang dynasty (618–907) and became a primary genre for describing administrative jurisdictions during the Song dynasty when an office was established in the imperial library responsible for regularly collecting from prefectures map guides and treatises on the local products, customs, household registers and territorial organization and administration (Cheng [1131] 2000: 2.95–97; Wang [1351/1883] 2007: 15.295–296). With the fall of the Song dynasty, however, the office became virtually defunct, and local scholarofficials took over and began compiling local gazetteers independently, although not as regularly as before. This tradition carried through over centuries into the Republican era (1912–49), but with a different agenda in mind: Ming-Qing editors of local gazetteers focused more on local culture, people and places of interest than administrative spatial and social data. They raised funds for compiling and printing gazetteers from local gentry elites and circulated them to local and central authorities and also to local schools and Confucian academies, booksellers and collectors, private scholars and travellers (Dennis 2015). Besides the two main types of primary source materials, references are also made to historical, anecdotal and literary accounts by Ming-Qing scholar-officials of Huizhou temple fairs and ritual/theatrical performances and to the limited existing modern scholarship on Huizhou temple theatre. In addition, my own field research conducted in the area in 2015 enabled both direct observation of sites and interview opportunities which allowed me to experience and test the material sites of performance against the documentary archives and historical understanding of performance. In what follows, I first conduct a brief survey of Huizhou in its socio-historical settings; then I examine the construction and distribution of ancestral shrine stages in Huizhou; finally, I draw this material together in a focused case study of the space and structure of an ancestral shrine stage, where architectural and archaeological evidence underpins my exploration of Xiqu staging and performing conventions.

HUIZHOU’S ANCESTRAL SHRINES Huizhou is the historical name of a prefecture with six counties under its jurisdiction – Shexian, Xiuning, Yixian, Qimen, Wuyuan and Jixi. Huizhou is famous for its long, rich theatrical tradition that flourished during the late imperial era and is also noted for its deep-rooted Confucian lineage culture as shown in its ancestral shrines that dotted the landscape. Locally called ‘ancestor-worship hall’ (citang), the ancestral shrine is a temple dedicated to deified ancestors of a family, a clan or a

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FIGURE 3.5.2.1:  A memorial archway (paifang) erected in 1578 in front of an ancestral shrine of the Hu clan at the entrance to Xidi Village, Yixian County, Huizhou, 27 January 2015. Image: Xiaohuan Zhao.

lineage. Ancestral shrines are used not only for community rituals and festivals, but also for family rituals such as initiation ceremonies, weddings and funerals. The first recorded household ancestral shrine in Huizhou dates from the Tang dynasty (Yan and Wang 2005: 308), but it is unlikely to have been built as an independent structure. Free-standing ancestral shrines made their first appearance in the early Ming, and began to be constructed on a large scale in the mid-Ming as an enthusiastic response from commoners to a 1536 imperial edict that allowed them to build lineage temples to make offerings to their apical ancestor (shizu) (Ming Shizong [1577] 1962: 193.4082; Mingshi [1739] 1974: 17.227) for the first time in Chinese history.3 The imperial decree had an immediate and profound impact on the construction of independent ancestral shrines and on the performance of community rituals and festivals in honour of the ancestors of a surname lineage (see Figure 3.5.2.1). Huizhou quickly established itself at the forefront of the construction of lineage temples. In Qimen County, for example, the registered households and registered household population at the close of the tenth year (1871) of Tongzhi numbered 23,136 and 100,249, respectively, according to Qimen County Gazetteer (Qimen [1873] 1975: 13.478), which also records a total of 197 ancestral shrines (Qimen [1873] 1975: 9.323–343). This means that there was one ancestral shrine per 111 households or 509 residents. Such a high population-to-ancestral shrine ratio could hardly find a match elsewhere outside Huizhou in late Imperial China.

ANCESTRAL SHRINES AS TEMPLE THEATRES Although the gazetteer provides no information as to how many of the ancestral shrines had a theatre stage built on their premises, it offers vivid accounts of

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numerous temple fairs and calendrical religious festivals including ancestor worship ceremonies (Qimen [1873] 1975: 5.238–241). A striking feature of Huizhou ancestral rites and temple fairs is the combination of ritual performance with theatrical entertainment in ancestral halls. ‘As is the local custom in Huizhou, people are most fond of building stages and watching operas’, noted Fu Yan, Magistrate of Shexian, in his Records of Shexian County (She ji) (1639: 8.34a) – a collection of official documents, legal regulations, judicial decisions and poems and prose essays. The ‘Record of Family Ceremonies’ of the 1574 Family Records (Jia ji) of the Mingzhou Wu lineage of Xiuning County gives a fairly detailed account of the fun and financial burden theatrical productions during ancestral rites had brought to the Wu family (cited in Tanaka 2004: 39). In the Diary from the Hall of Quick Snowfall (Kuaixue tang riji), Hu Mengzhen ([1616] 1997: 6.24b), an influential Confucian scholar-official in Jiangnan area, offered an eyewitness account of a grand ritual/ theatrical performance in Xixinan of Shexian County held during the Lantern Festival (dengjie) in early 1605. Different from the commercial performances of Hui Opera in the cities, these dramatic shows were usually staged as part of community rituals, village festivals or temple fairs to welcome gods and expel ghosts (yingshen saishe) in Huizhou, where people widely believed that their enshrined ancestors enjoyed theatrical entertainment as much as they did. This belief led to the construction of theatre stages in temples and shrines. The Shexian County Gazetteer emphasizes the long-standing nature of this practice: ‘Since the Ming dynasty dramatic shows have been presented in conjunction with temple fairs in the countryside as a local custom and have never lost their popularity’ (Shexian [1699] 1975: 159). Lineage-based villages in Huizhou competed with each other in building temple theatres and inviting troupes to stage shows to please gods and to entertain communities. Zhao Jishi ([1696] 2002: 11.127), an early Qing dynasty scholar-official of Huizhou origin who served as co-editor for the 1699 edition of Huizhou Prefecture Gazetteer (Huizhou fu zhi), quoted his grandfather as saying that a total of 109 – probably mostly temporary – stages were set up in Xiuning County in 1599 for the spring sacrifice shows, and the next year (1600), as observed by the eminent late Ming theatre critic and connoisseur Pan Zhiheng ([1628] 1988: 9.147), witnessed the erection of thirty-nine stages in the eastern suburbs of the prefecture seat of Huizhou, and troupes from the neighbouring Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces were invited to perform operas during the spring festival. Theatrical entertainment was thus very much part of the sociocultural life of Huizhou people. These performances were generally arranged by lineage organizations or ritual societies (Tanaka 2004; Guo 2005). Some villages even made covenants and inscribed rules on stelae, stipulating that anyone who breached lineage regulations or caused damage to village feng shui, ancestral tombs or temples or communal properties should provide money to stage an opera show for the whole community as a punishment for their wrongdoings – a common practice known as faxi (literally, ‘punishment opera’), which is recorded in numerous family genealogy books covering the period focused on in this essay (Tanaka 2004: 96–122) (see Figure 3.5.2.2). The village rules and lineage regulations reflect the prosperity and popularity of theatrical entertainment. Among those who were engaged in festival performances

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FIGURE 3.5.2.2:  ‘Punishment-opera stele’ (faxi bei) mounted on the eastern wall of Jufu Tang (Hall for Gathering Blessings) – an ancestral shrine built during the Tongzhi era (1862–74), Yeyuan Village, Xin’an of Qimen, 25 January 2015. Image: Xiaohuan Zhao.

were not only professional troupes but also local amateurs including members of religious communities, as described in the following verse by Wu Meidian (n.d.), a lesser literatus of Shexian who lived during the Qianlong era (1735–96): To make offerings to gods and ghosts on Spring Festival Eve, Buddhist monks put on an operatic show that proves rather naïve: Slim, soft appears a little dan, then a big jing and a sheng who’s also chou; And in full armour comes onstage a martial dan who wears a heavy make-up.4 With all four major Xiqu role types (dan, jing, sheng and chou) appearing onstage, the show was very likely to be a full-length opera that featured combat scenes and martial performances typical of Hui Opera. Significantly, theatrical entertainment was so much a part of village temple fairs in Huizhou that even Buddhist monks performed on stage before a live audience regardless of monastic codes (The Ten Precepts 2005). The Qing gentry-scholar Shen Fu provides a vivid description of his visit to a village temple festival in Jixi in 1788: There was a village, called the Benevolence Village, thirty li from the town […]. When we reached the place, we saw there was a temple, but did not know what

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god they worshipped. There was a wide open space in front of the temple where they had erected a provisional theatrical stage, with painted beams and square pillars, which looked imposing at a distance, but at close range were found to consist of painted paper wrapped around the poles and varnished over with paint. Suddenly gongs were struck and there were four men carrying a pair of candles as big as broken pillars, and eight persons carrying a pig about the size of a young calf […] expressly for this occasion to be used as an offering to the god […]. Then the theatrical performance began and the place was crowded full with people and we went away to avoid the noise and commotion. ([1808] 2011: 241–3) Indeed, there was hardly a village without a temple, and there was hardly a temple festival without a theatrical performance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jixi (Jixi [1810] 1999: 1.365), which was just part of a wider trend across Huizhou prefecture (Huizhou [1699] 1975: 2.445–6; Xiuning [1723] 1992: 3.286; Shexian [1771] 1975: 2.128; Yixian [1812] 1983: 3.240; Huizhou [1827] 1975: 2.165; Yixian [1870] 1970: 3.22). This trend continued almost unbroken throughout the nineteenth century into the Republican era (Jixi 2011: 1114) except for the short period from 1855 to 1864 when southern Anhui including Huizhou became a major battleground in a bloody civil war between the rebel Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851–64) and the ruling Manchu Qing dynasty (Jia 2008). Jixi was a tiny county with a population of 93,037 according to a census taken in 1904 and recorded in the Collection of Important Policies and Documents of Anhui Province (Wanzheng jiyao ([1910] 2005: 15.126–9) compiled by Feng Xu, governor of Anhui Province, but it had a disproportionally high number of theatres. A survey conducted by the local government in 1950 shows that there were seven theatres (three non-ancestral shrine theatres and four ancestral shrine theatres) in the urban centre of Jixi and fifty-six theatres in its rural areas, and that they were all built before the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 (Jixi 2011: 1114). This results in a theatre to population ratio reaching as high as 1:1,477. Two thirds of the village theatres were built within ancestral shrines with the rest of them mostly within temples dedicated to non-ancestral deities such as Lord Guan, Chenghuang the City God and Lord of the Soil. However, none of them survived beyond the Mao era (1949–76) except the Dashimen Temple Theatre in Dashimen Village and the Shangshufu (Official Residence of the Minister of War) Household Theatre in Longchuan Village. Some of the temples and shrines were converted into schools in the 1950s, but most of them were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) as ‘the Four Olds’ (sijiu).5 What has happened to the ancient theatres in Jixi has also happened to those in other counties of Huizhou – with the notable exception of the county of Qimen. Qimen is a small county that lies in the south-west of Huizhou, and is the most forested county in Anhui Province, with over 90 per cent of its geography made up of hills and mountains covered in untamed forest. This is particularly the case with the township of Xin’an, which alone boasts half of the temple theatres still extant in the region of Huizhou. Located in the thickly forested Guniujiang National Nature Reserve and Guniujiang National Geological Park, Xin’an is 75 km away

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from Qishan the county seat of Qimen. The sheer cliffs, rugged terrains, precipitous ridges and deep valleys, rivers and creeks in this mountainous area prevent easy access or influence from outside even today, let alone in premodern times, and at the same time provide a natural shield to protect its ancient architecture, theatre and culture from being destroyed by war and revolution. It thus represents a unique opportunity for the theatre historian seeking to draw on architectural and archaeological evidence to expand our knowledge of historical theatre practice. There might be more, but to the best of my knowledge and based on my extensive fieldwork in Huizhou in January–February 2015, only eighteen pre-1911 stages are still extant today, four dating from the Ming dynasty and eleven from the Qing dynasty, and they are all temple theatres apart from three household theatres including one private garden pavilion theatre. Among the fifteen temple theatres, eleven are located in the rural townships of Xin’an and Shanli of Qimen County, and they are all ancestral shrine theatres. Surprisingly, their double role as a place for both ancestor worship and theatrical performance survived the Cultural Revolution and has been fully restored in recent years thanks to the support of local governments.

YUQING TANG Of the eight surviving ancestral shrine stages in Xin’an, most representative is perhaps the one in Yuqing Tang or ‘Hall of Superabundant Blessings’, which is located in Zhulin, a small village where the Zhao clan lives in compact communities. At the centre of the village stands the hall. First built during the Kangxi era (r. 1654–1722), Yuqing Tang was rebuilt on burnt ruins in the fourth or fifth year of Xianfeng (r. 1850–61) and renovated in 2011 by the local government, according to Zhao Jinde, the village administrator of cultural relics who manages Yuqing Tang (interview information, 2015). It is unclear exactly what the original temple looked like, but we may infer with some certainty from the Ming-Qing ancestral shrines still extant in Huizhou that its ‘three-row-and-two-yard’ (sanjin liangyuan) layout and its timber-framed structure remain unchanged. ‘Yuqing Tang as a whole had since been kept in very good condition’, noted Zhao Jinde (2015), except for the partition wall and the blank door on the stage, the flying rafters (feichuan) of the stage roof and the roof sheathing (wangban) of the opera-watching tower (guanxi lou). These were all made of wood, rotten or worn out beyond repair, and so they had to be replaced in the renovation. ‘Actually, the local government allowed no changes whatsoever to be made to the original form, structure and style during the renovation’, he said, ‘so what you’re seeing in here is pretty much the same as the original’. Yuqing Tang is a three-row-and-two-yard compound typical of ancestral shrines in Huizhou. Arranged along the east–west axis are, in turn, the first row, that is, the gatehouse with a stage built over its gateway; the front yard or front skywell (tianjing) with an opera-viewing tower erected on its northern and southern sides; the middle row, that is, the sacrificial hall (xiangtang); the rear yard or rear skywell; and the rear row, that is, the sleeping hall (qindian) with enshrined spirit tablets for ancestors facing the screen door on the back of the sacrificial hall across the rear yard (Figure 3.5.2.3).

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FIGURE 3.5.2.3:  Yuqing Tang stage viewed from the left-sided opera-watching tower, 29 January 2015. Image: Xiaohuan Zhao.

The front section of Yuqing Tang is designed as a temple theatre with the stage oriented towards the sleeping hall across the sacrificial hall so that the ancestor gods can watch operatic performances once the screen door of the sacrificial hall is opened. The stage is conjoined on either side with a timber-frame theatre box, locally called guanxi lou or ‘opera-watching tower’ that extends westward to the sacrificial hall, thus forming an enclosed space for staging and watching performances. In premodern China, women were segregated from men when watching performances (Zhuang ([1133] 1983: 21–2), particularly nightly shows that often featured ‘ribald performances’ (hunxi) (Zhongguo xiquzhi 1990: 143, 1994: 350; Wang and Wang 1993: 64, 101). The opera-watching tower was thus reserved for women and children only, while men would stand or sit in the skywell or under the tower watching. The centre front of the skywell was usually reserved for village elitepatrons and distinguished guests from neighbouring villages and towns, for whom chairs were arranged and tea was served together with nibbles such as sunflower seeds and tofu or rice cakes, which is still the case today (Zhao 2015). The stage is typical of guolu tai (literally, ‘passage stage’) – a popular form of temple theatre stage built on a raised platform with a passage under it for people to enter the temple from the main entrance gate. Five-bay (jian) wide and three-bay deep, the stage stands out among its peers in size and shape, which bears testimony to the affluence and influence of the Zhao clan in the old days. The central bay is designated the performance area. The two secondary bays are each used as a music room. In line with the standard of Chinese traditional theatre, the room on the right, called wenchang (literally, ‘room for civil music’), is used by musicians of string and woodwind instruments which are played to provide a melodious accompaniment to

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the singing, whereas the room on the left, called wuchang (literally, ‘room for martial music’), is used by musicians of percussion instruments such as cymbals, gongs, drums and clappers which are played to provide a rhythmic accompaniment to the acting. In the middle from the front edge to the back wall of the stage is a wooden screen wall, which is also referred to as a partition wall for its function to divide the stage into two parts, that is, the front stage and the back stage. Next to the screen wall on either side is a one-bay corridor through which actors make their entrance/exit. At the end of the corridor is a two-leaf lattice door. The door to the right of the screen wall is called shangchang men (entry door) and the door to the left is called xiachang men (exit door). The stage protrudes outward beyond the proscenium to provide an apron for actors to confide in the audience and address them directly, as is commonly seen in Xiqu performance. In contrast to the conventions of realism and naturalism that dominated Western theatre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Xiqu emphasizes theatricality and acknowledges the theatre as theatre: the stage is thus largely bare and empty of set designs, for the primary purpose for Xiqu performance is not to imitate reality but to impress the audience. ‘A table and two chairs are about the only two “constructions” which a Chinese traditional theatre needs for its stage’ (Chen 1949: 28), as shown in Figure 3.5.2.3. This is because a setting for a dramatic plot or a spatial and/or temporal change is usually revealed and realized onstage through the arrangement of these three pieces of furniture in traditional Chinese theatre. For example, a chair placed in front of the table may indicate a hall, a lounge or an antechamber, and a chair with embroidered cushions placed behind the table may stand for a study, a bed or a bedroom, whereas a table can serve as a boat, a hill, a gate tower, a royal palace or a magistrate court, and the audience should have no difficulty identifying the symbolic references of ‘one table and two chairs’ through the stylized verbal action and body movement of the actors on stage. It remains unclear, however, as to when the stage set of ‘one table and two chairs’ for Xiqu performance was established, due to poor documentation. The earliest material (visual) evidence known to me is a sixteenth-century silk painting, 44×350 cm, entitled The Scroll of Scenery from the Prosperous Southern Capital (Nandu fanhui jingwu tujuan), which, now kept in the National Museum of China, depicts in its lower left corner a raised stage with spectators standing on three sides watching a Kunqu actor playing in front of one table and two chairs, The Heavenly Official Bestows Happiness (Tianguan cifu) (Nandu 2018) – a ritual playlet that was usually staged as a prelude (kaichang xi) to main operatic shows (zhengxi) in premodern China. Although there is more such occasional evidence from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, it is safer to say, however, that not until the mid- to late-Qing dynasty had this stage set of ‘one table and two chairs’ been well established as a scenographic convention, as abundantly evidenced by numerous Xiqu paintings, woodcuts, papercuts and wood and stone carvings produced in the nineteenth century (Liao and Zhao 2015; Ye, Liu et al. 2015). The evidence of the bare stage, then, suggests that Xiqu actors perceive the stage as a platform on which to demonstrate their four performing skills: singing (chang), speaking (nian), dancing (zuo) and combating (da) rather than create an illusion of

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reality or verisimilitude; in parallel, the spectators see actors as actors rather than characters they pretend to be on the stage (Zhao 2007). For the audience and the actor, the stage is an open space for performance. Devoid of specific scenery and set pieces as it is, the stage in Yuqing Tang is in another sense very far from bare: it is richly decorated with carvings of famous dramatic figures and scenes, and birds, beasts and flowers on wooden structural components such as the architraves, diagonal brackets, filler boards, eave column heads, cross-beams, tie-beams and crescent moon–like beams on the stage. Notable among various decorations on the stage is a zaojing (literally, ‘chlorella well’) – a multilayered octagon caisson set into the centre of the stage ceiling. Also referred to as tianjing (skywell) in ancient texts, the zaojing was originally ‘intended to be a replica of the Eastern Well [dongjing] Consternation’ and for this purpose, ‘water chestnuts (ling) were carved on it as a talisman against fire’ (Ying [CE 195] 2010: 575). Water chestnuts grow from water, and a water chestnut–like caisson is thus believed to have the magic power over fire, which is very important to timberframe buildings. In terms of a potential role in performance, the zaojing so designed has recently been proved to be able to amplify sounds and produce an echo-andresonance effect for stage performance (Wang 2015). It is not clear as to whether theatre builders in late imperial Huizhou were aware of the acoustic properties of the zaojing, but one thing is certain that the installation of a zaojing for theatre stages in Huizhou was no earlier than the Qianlong era. Of the eighteen extant pre-1911 stages in Huizhou, only those that were (re-)built after this period of time have a zaojing ceiling, and Yuqing Tang Stage is one of them. The presence of the zaojing ceiling in Yuqing Tang of course raises an issue about the palimpsestic nature of architectural evidence, not least when, as we have seen, locals (re)constructed the temple and the temple theatre in accordance with their spiritual needs and wishes and to the architectural and theatrical conventions of the time as well.

CONCLUSION FROM ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND ARCHITECTURAL EVIDENCE This essay has sought to bring together a variety of evidence to explore the performative history of Chinese temple theatre as it has developed across the centuries, preserved through the serendipity of mountainous, protecting landscapes and evidenced in local and family histories as well as performance practice and archaeological remains. Each element of evidence – ‘history-as-record’ in Postlewait’s terms – needs to be weighed alongside others in the attempt to approach ‘historyas-event’ (2009: 27). In the dynamic process of theatre history in China, the temple serves as a turning pivot on which various forms of Chinese theatre have evolved, revolved, resolved, dissolved and revived, and it is likely that the architecture – and its use in performance – may have evolved and altered across time too. As the dominant venue and form for theatrical entertainment in rural and mountainous Huizhou, it is no exaggeration to say that the history of Chinese temple theatre is largely a history of Chinese theatre. In here lies the historical value and significance

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of the ancestral shrine stage as archaeological and architectural evidence for ritual and theatrical performance in late imperial Huizhou.

NOTES 1. This study is graciously funded by the University of Sydney FASS Research Incubator Scheme 2015. The author wishes to thank Liu Yingwang, Zhao Jinde, Chen Genmao, Chen Huixing, Hong Xuanfa, Fang Anqing, Wang Qian, Wang Xiaoyang, among others, for their support and assistance during his field and archival research on Huizhou ancestral shrines and ancestral shrine stages in early 2015. 2. Oracle bone inscriptions are divination texts inscribed on tortoise shells and animal bones during the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BCE). Oracle bone script (jiaguwen) is the earliest known form of Chinese writing – the world’s oldest writing system in continuous use as a living language. 3. The imperial decree was issued as a reply to a memorial submitted in 1536 by Xia Yan ([1575] 1638: 11.74a–75b), minister of rites, to the Jiajing emperor of the Ming dynasty, recommending that commoners be granted permission to build ancestral shrines and to offer sacrifices to their first ancestor as well as their four immediate ancestors. For an insightful discussion of the historical context of the imperial decree and its impact, see Chang (2001). 4. A word-for-word translation of the original sentence (盔甲裙钗粉墨妆) looks like this: 盔(hel​met)甲​(armo​ur)裙(​skirt​/dres​s)钗(h​airpi​n)粉(p​owder​)墨([c​olour​ed] ink)妆(make-up). Obviously, the character is a heavily armoured and made-up warrior woman played by wudan or (martial dan) – a subcategory of the female role–type called dan. N.B.: 盔(helmet)甲(armour): metonym for soldier/warrior; 裙(skirt/dress) 钗(hairpin): metonym for beautiful woman. 5. ‘The Four Olds’ refers to ‘Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas’, which Mao’s Red Guards and revolutionary masses were determined to eradicate for China to progress from socialism to communism.

CHAPTER 3.6

Material Evidence and the Archive: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

In ‘Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian’, Carlo Ginzberg distinguishes between different kinds of historical evidence as either ‘involuntary (a skull, a footprint, a food relic) or voluntary (a chronicle, a notarial act, a fork)’. But, he makes clear, for both ‘a specific interpretive framework is needed, which must be related (in the latter case) to the specific code according to which the evidence has been constructed’ (1991: 84). The two essays paired together in this section share a focus on material evidence. In Esther Kim Lee’s essay, this derives from the make-up and make-up guides of early-twentieth-century America that delineate the characteristics of the stage Chinaman, while Ruthie Abeliovich’s essay considers an audio recording produced during the early 1950s which captures a fragment of a performance first created in 1928 in Palestine during the formative years of the Jewish national movement. In both essays, the evidence is on the one hand intensely local in its focus: less than ten minutes of voices and music in Abeliovich’s essay, while in Lee’s we see the carefully ordered lists of greasepaint that mark out the stage tones of ‘Chinese’ from ‘Othello’ and ‘Indian’ in Leichner’s greasepaint catalogue and guides to the correct look for actors. Yet, with each of these material objects, Lee and Abeliovich illustrate the historiographic potential of widening the historian’s gaze to the codes which govern their construction and reception. They pay attention both to the interpretive frameworks shaping their production, and to the interpretive frameworks which they as historians now bring to their engagement with the rereading and reframing of the material archives. Highlighting that the make-up books are an essential part of an epistemological foundation and a pragmatic methodology, needed to make yellowface known and knowable as a historical subject, Lee’s essay illuminates ‘how makeup as a form of technology has been utilized, constructed and produced to perpetuate images of Asians onstage and onscreen’, not just at the start of the twentieth century, in the context of the United States’ changing relationships with China and Japan, but up to the present day. Beyond that, as issues of identity construction and performed identities enter wider international and national debates, Lee’s close attention to this material evidence alerts the historian to the processes and frameworks that enable other forms of ‘whitewashing’ too. Abeliovich’s essay

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similarly utilizes her fragment of audio to mobilize what she terms a ‘multicultural soundscape’, where the recorded voices evidence the intersection of European oral traditions and representational modes with the traditional Sephardic Hebrew tradition, performing a complex layered relationship between identity, voice and relationship to the lands of Palestine and Israel. Thus, attention to interpretive codes shaping production and reception enable this fragment of a performance to illuminate both the moment of its 1928 creation and its 1952 recording, with the essay also providing wider frameworks for the reader to understand the potential of aural evidence as material object.

CHAPTER 3.6.1

Historiography of Yellowface: Stage Make-up, Materiality and Technology ESTHER KIM LEE

In April 2016, it was announced that the American actress Scarlett Johansson had been cast in a film adaptation of the Japanese manga series The Ghost in the Shell and that the producers of the film had experimented with computer-generated imagery (CGI) to make Johansson, a white actress, look Japanese on screen (Sampson 2016). Although the creators of the film ultimately backed away from the idea, the technological possibility prompted many to ask whether using CGI to modify the racial look of an actor would become the new frontier of yellowface. The convention of yellowface make-up, which alters the face of a non-Asian actor to look phenotypically ‘Asian’, has used the most innovative and creative technology available at any given time. And ‘Asians’ onstage and on screen were imagined fictional characters that were created by white writers, directors and actors. Yellowface has a long history, one that began in European countries during the era of colonial exploration, and it is an acting convention that began in theatre. In most cases, the skin is darkened and the eyes are covered with prosthetics or pulled back with tape to make them look slanted. The make-up is accompanied by costumes and settings that signify fantasies of the exotic and faraway land. The history of the convention can be traced back to the first representations of ‘Oriental’ or ‘barbarian’ characters on European stages, and for centuries, it has remained an accepted and even a ‘natural’ way to stage Asian characters. Unlike blackface, which has all but disappeared in the twenty-first century, yellowface regularly makes its appearance in revivals of The Mikado, Madame Butterfly and other popular shows about the ‘Orient’. As I and others have written elsewhere, the convention of yellowface was questioned and challenged in the United States when Asian American actors began to protest it in the 1960s (E. Lee 2006; Kurahashi 1999; Shimakawa 2002; J. Lee 1997). The actors argued that Asian characters should be portrayed by Asian or

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Asian American actors and framed their protests in terms of casting and employment opportunities. Those protests were the catalyst for what is now known as Asian American theatre, and the actors’ opposition to what they saw as an unfair practice has been a guiding force in the growth of Asian American theatre for the past five decades. The East West Players, for instance, was founded in 1965 by actors who wanted to showcase their acting abilities to Hollywood producers and directors, and it is now one of the largest regional theatre companies on the West Coast. However, the growth and success of Asian American theatre has not led to the total discarding of yellowface. A new generation of actors are finding themselves in the same protest that began almost sixty years ago. It is true that awareness of the problems of whitewashing and yellowface has increased throughout those decades, and Asian American actors have more employment opportunities compared to their predecessors. For them, progress and protest are inseparable. Nonetheless, what is missing in the protests and controversies surrounding yellowface is a substantive understanding of its history and historiography. Both those who argue that yellowface is a racist practice and those who claim it as an important part of European acting tradition engage with the topic with only a general and even incoherent sense of its historical narrative. There are many reasons for this lack of historical understanding, but in this essay, I identify three major historiographical interventions that can be made to both explain and explore yellowface as a historical subject. And in the last section of the essay, I provide a case study of how the interventions can be made in the construction of the history of yellowface. First, a surprisingly meagre amount of research has been done on the history of yellowface. While there are dozens of books and articles written on the history of blackface, only a few articles and book chapters have been written on yellowface. The research that has been done cites specific performers and theatrical genres in describing the representation and reception of yellowface. Sean Metzger (2014), for instance, writes about the American actor Charles Parsloe (1836–98) in his creation of the ‘Chinaman’ characters in comedic plays, and Krystyn R. Moon (2005) focuses on Chinese-American performers in popular music and performance. Robert G. Lee (1999) describes examples of yellowface in minstrel shows in the mid-nineteenth century in his monograph Orientals, which examines cultural stereotypes of Asian Americans in the United States. Such individual examples are invaluable in showing how yellowface has been used by performers in specific and anecdotal ways, but it is difficult to extract from the disparate studies a more coherent historical understanding of yellowface. More research is needed to establish the patterns and developments of yellowface as a historical phenomenon beyond the individual anecdotes. Without a critical mass of case studies of yellowface, it would be difficult to allow the plurality of contending interpretations that are essential in creating a complex and nuanced historical narrative. Secondly, I argue that the historiography of yellowface has not been coherent or clear because it has lacked what the theatre historian Thomas Postlewait (2009: 7) calls an ‘epistemological foundation’. As Postlewait notes, historical thinking ‘depends upon certain categorical assumptions and presuppositions, such as concepts of time and space, principles of causality, ideas of contiguity, models of human behavior, and cultural ideologies’ (2009: 98). Historians need these and other epistemological concepts in

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thinking about and interpreting a historical event and to organize and structure the historical discourse. In other words, an epistemological foundation is necessary in framing how a historical event can be known and understood. I posit that there is currently no well-defined framework to explain what can be known about yellowface and how we know what we know. Indeed, what is yellowface? How do we recognize and categorize it? Yes, it is a theatrical convention that involves stage make-up and costumes, and it is rooted in the past that many find troubling. At the same time, it is part of European and Euro-American acting history, which requires its own set of historiographical questions. Additionally, what does it mean for Asian American theatre to be defined in opposition to yellowface? Is yellowface a convention that simply needs to disappear? Why has it been so persistent despite decades of activism against it, and what does the persistence signify? What is the best way to explain yellowface historiographically? What framework should be used to research the history of yellowface? Indeed, yellowface as a historical subject requires an epistemological foundation built on these fundamental questions, and it should be studied from multiple perspectives with a diverse set of methodologies, which I identify as the third intervention. This intervention is an extension of the second one, but it is imperative to emphasize its importance separately. The questions of epistemological foundation are not only theoretical questions but also tied to the realities of conducting research or what Postlewait identifies as ‘the pragmatic matter of historical methodology’ (2009: 101). He emphasizes that concepts and procedures are ‘tied together throughout our historical study’ (101). How yellowface is known conceptually depends on the process or the methodology used to create that knowledge. In other words, how research is conducted in archives, databases and other sites of knowledge – both physical and virtual – determines the epistemological foundation of yellowface. As a start, there are several pragmatic challenges in researching yellowface. In the archives I have searched, for one, the term ‘yellowface’ is not a designated category, and it is not a searchable keyword for finding primary materials. As far as theatre archives are concerned, ‘yellowface’ does not exist in their catalogues, and researching it requires ‘some deep digging’ as one archivist told me. The absence of yellowface in catalogues and as a keyword in the archival databases underscores the need to make it legible both as a concept and in the research process, and the two forms of legibility are inseparable. For example, if one were to consider yellowface as a character type performed by specific actors, it would be necessary to search archival databases for the actors’ names and the characters they played. Most archives privilege the cataloguing of individual actors’ names, and the more famous ones have their own archival collections. In such collections, the researcher can find a specific actor’s images, photos, reviews and biographies, all of which can be used to construct how the actor performed in yellowface and how the performance was received by critics and audiences. To cite another example, yellowface can also be understood within the framework of Orientalism as a visual representation of how the ‘Orient’ was imagined by the West. In such a case, yellowface used in theatrical productions would be examined in conjunction with comparable representations in paintings, home decors and China dish designs within the framework of what Josephine Lee describes as ‘decorative orientalism that fuses racial fantasy with the

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consumption of commodities’ (2010: 141). In such studies, the aesthetic design of yellowface would be a central area of focus for the researcher. Another way to frame yellowface epistemologically and methodologically is to define it as an archetype, and this is the framework I will be exploring in the rest of this essay. Examining the history of yellowface as a history of an archetype can help explain how it has persisted and what that persistence means in the imagination of Asianness both on and off stage. Indeed, various iterations of yellowface can be seen in many different forms beyond the theatre: films, cartoons, postcards, jewellery, sweet wrappers, shooting targets and even Post-it notes. The simple gesture of pulling one’s eyes upward to look ‘Asian’ can be seen as a performative iteration of the archetype. In his essay, ‘The Persistence of the Archetype’, Bert O. States defines archetype as ‘the ghost of a former form, endlessly migratory, infinitely tolerant of new content, ever fresh, ever archaic’ (1980: 334). An archetype is, in other words, paradoxical because it is both same and different, both an origin and a recurrence. The archetype of the mother, for instance, remains the same while it is made different with new and ‘ever fresh’ content as exemplified by specific characters such as Hamlet’s Gertrude. Similarly, yellowface as an archetype is both ‘ever fresh’ and ‘ever archaic’. From the early modern period to the internet age of the twentyfirst century, yellowface make-up has been used by white actors to represent what they imagine as Asianness in both similar and different ways. The archetype has also migrated across historical times and geographical spaces in diverse forms and contents. For instance, the possibility of using CGI technology to transform the American actress Scarlett Johansson into a Japanese in the film version of The Ghost in the Shell is the ‘ever fresh’ take on an ‘ever archaic’ archetype of yellowface. Framing yellowface as an archetype underscores the need to differentiate what has remained the same historically and what has changed during its evolution. The differentiation is not only about the visual images of yellowface but also about the materiality and technology of producing it. As a case study of yellowface as an archetype, I have chosen to examine stage make-up books from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century because they provide solid and detailed evidence of the material and technology used in creating and producing yellowface for theatre actors. The books document what was, at the time they were written, considered new cuttingedge make-up technology in altering an actor’s face. I also aim to analyse the use of specific make-up materials and techniques in creating racial, national and gender differences onstage. During a time when race was defined in terms of colour, facial make-up for the stage was a powerful mode of representation, and the dressing room was a site of creating social stratification in which subtleties of human difference had to be negotiated with each application of colour, lines, textures and shades.

THE HUE AND SURFACE OF YELLOWFACE As documented by Krystyn Moon (2005), the invention of greasepaint in the midnineteenth century drastically changed the practice of stage make-up. Before the use of greasepaint, powder was used to alter skin colour, but with the increasing advancement in lighting technology, specifically gas lighting which was brighter

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compared to candles or oil lamps, it became imperative for actors to wear longer lasting and more natural looking make-up. Greasepaint was created by individual actors or their assistants by combining some form of grease with powdered materials such as mineral pigments. Greasepaint was used by European actors before the nineteenth century, but it became a commercial product starting around the 1870s. According to Martin Harrison (1998), commercial greasepaint was invented by Ludwig Leichner (1836–1912), a Wagnerian opera singer in the 1860s in Germany. It was then brought to England a decade later. Leichner’s greasepaint allowed actors access to ready-made make-up that was easy to apply and natural looking. It was also lauded for reducing the undesired effects of perspiration. According to Harrison, Leichner created a number system for his greasepaint: No. 1 indicated the lightest colour, and No. 8, the darkest, was reddish brown and was used for ‘Indian’ characters. Harrison notes that the highest number in the range of colours increased from eight to twenty, and by 1938 it went up to fifty-four, out of which 5 and 9 were the most frequently used shades (1998: 140). During the turn of the twentieth century, different companies in both Europe and the United States manufactured and marketed their own greasepaint kits, but the general rule of Leichner’s number system of 1 being the lightest continued throughout the twentieth century. A similar colour system is still used by cosmetic companies when they number foundation colours. In 1898, The Dramatic Publishing Company based in Chicago published Hageman’s Make-up Book written by Maurice Hageman, which was the how-to book for the set of greasepaints manufactured and sold by the company. The book lists eighteen colours with 1 being ‘very pale flesh’ and 18 being ‘East Indian’. Here, I list the entire colour system to provide a full context for analysing how the numbers were designated. No. 1. Very Pale Flesh Color. No. 2. Light Flesh, Deeper Tint. No. 3. Natural Flesh Color, for Juvenile Heroes. No. 4. Rose Tint Color, for Juvenile Heroes. No. 5. Deeper shade color, for Juvenile Heroes. No. 6. Healthy Sunburnt, for Juvenile Heroes. No. 7. Healthy Sunburnt, Deeper Shade. No. 8. Sallow, for young men. No. 9. Healthy color of Middle Age. No. 10. Sallow, for Old Age. No. 11. Ruddy, for Old Age. No. 12. Olive, Healthy. No. 13. Olive, Lighter Shade. No. 14. Gipsy. Flesh Color. No. 15. Othello.

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No. 16. Chinese. No. 17. Indian. No. 18. East Indian. (Hageman 1898: 13). It is notable that the colour for Othello is No. 15, which is lighter than that of the Chinese, No. 16. Shakespeare’s famed character Othello was often portrayed as having a ‘tan’ colour and was distinguished from the blackened faces of minstrel shows. Minstrel performers used burnt cork and other forms of make-up specific to minstrelsy in blackening their skin, and the black colour was not initially part of Leichner’s or other manufactured make-up kits. The book excludes blackface makeup because minstrel actors practiced their own trade technique and convention in transforming their face for the stage. Nevertheless, there were important similarities between blackface make-up and yellowface make-up on the nineteenth-century American stage. In describing the make-up technique for ‘Chinese and Mongolians’, which were often interchangeable in make-up books, Hageman recommends his readers to use No. 16 for ‘groundtone’. He goes on to explain the process: Sallow complexions. Small, almond-shaped eyes. Brown for lining. Eyebrows and eyelids slant upwards. High cheek bones and flat noses. Shaven crowns except the occiput, from which a braided cue descends. To have this cue rolled up on top of the head, when a Chinaman addresses you, is a sign of disrespect. When a coolie speaks to a superior, he will immediately unroll it, – at least in China. Chinamen under forty years of age do not wear any hair on the face. After that they sometimes wear a drooping, gray moustache and goatee, but always scanty ones. People of lower castes, however, never wear them. Savants, doctors and statesmen usually wear large, round eyeglasses, set in horn or brass. (Hageman 1898: 60) In 1898, when Hageman’s book was published, the most popular Chinese character on the American stage was the stage Chinaman. As Sean Metzger (2014) writes in his book Chinese Looks, the Chinaman character was best exemplified by the titular character of the frontier melodrama Ah Sin co-written by Bret Harte and Mark Twain in 1877. The comic actor Charles Parsloe developed and popularized the Chinaman character through comedic mannerism and jokes about his looks, especially his long-braided hair. Much has been said about Parsloe’s costumes, props and mannerism, but his facial make-up has not received equal amount of attention. In his examination of Parsloe, Metzger posits that ‘the application of cosmetics did not produce a transformation equivalent to blackface’ and that ‘the enactment of yellowface for Parsloe seems to have involved a slightly different process, dependent on costume and the physical actions enabled through it’ (2014: 43). Metzger puts much emphasis on the queue and argues that what he calls the ‘queue routines’ were the highlight of his enactment of the Chinaman character. I agree that the queue was essential to the comic effect, and it was the ‘ethnic signifier’ that made the character entertaining to watch. Moreover, the comedic actor was known mostly for his physical acts that were read as ‘Chinese’ by the audience. Such acts included stealing objects and stuffing them in his oversized

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sleeves, chewing on his queue or tripping clumsily. While his physical acts are significant in interpreting the actor’s performance choices, it is as important to pay attention to the cosmetic choices. While Parsloe’s yellowface was not as drastic as blackface, it is remarkable that multiple authors of make-up books published around the turn of the twentieth century made much effort to describe what they called ‘Chinese’ or ‘Mongolian’ make-up technique. In a make-up book published in 1905, the author, James Young, devotes two full pages to describing ‘The Chinaman’. Young begins his entry by explaining the prevalence of the Chinaman character: The Chinaman is a character that appears sufficiently often on the stage to justify the manufacturers of grease paint to prepare a special color for this purpose, labeling it in their catalogue, ‘Mongolian’. (Young 1905: 119) According to the images included in the entry, the Chinaman characters feature darker than average hue, and their hair and costumes are similar to those of Charles Parsloe. Figure 3.6.1.1 illustrates the type of make-up Young describes in his book.

FIGURE 3.6.1.1:  James T. Powers (1862–1943) in San Toy at Daly’s Theatre in New York City, 1900. Sarony/Museum of the City of New York. 46.246.245.

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However, there is a significant difference between Hageman’s 1898 publication and Young’s 1905 publication. Hageman’s heading for his entry is ‘Chinese and Mongolians’, while Young’s heading is ‘The Chinaman’. Young does not have a separate entry for ‘The Chinese or Mongolians’, and I can only assume that by ‘The Chinaman’, he meant all Chinese and Mongolian characters. Another difference between Hageman’s make-up instructions and that of Young is the addition of other Asian nationalities. The number system for greasepaint in Young’s book ranges from 1 to 20 and is basically the same as Hageman’s system until No. 16 for Chinese, but he adds two more categories to include additional Asian types. Also added is ‘Negro’ as the darkest tone in the new number system. ‘Negro’, in this case, refers to black characters such as Uncle Tom who appeared in staged plays or what Young calls ‘legitimate negro impersonations’ and is differentiated from ‘The Minstrel Negro’ that required burnt cork make-up (Young 1905: 85). No. 16 Chinese No. 17 American Indian No. 18 East Indian, Hindoos [sic], Filipino, Malays, etc. No. 19 Japanese No. 20 Negro Remarkably, the Japanese nationality is included as a separate category of flesh colour while ‘Hindoos, Filipino, and Malays’ are simply added to the pre-existing category of East Indian. Moreover, the colour for Japanese is listed as darker than that of Chinese or East Indian. Arthur H. Schwerin, the author of Make-up Magic published in 1939, states in his book that ‘the make-up of the Japanese is very similar to that of the Chinaman’, but at the turn of the twentieth century, authors of makeup books gave much attention to the supposed phenotypical differences between the two nationalities. And they used colour as the primary concept to singularize those differences. According to the make-up books, yellowface required flesh colours that were darker than the colour of Othello but lighter than Negroes. Within the entire spectrum of the greasepaint colour system, yellowface make-up – for both Chinese/ Mongolian and Japanese characters – belonged in the darkest colour group. During the turn of the twentieth century, China was weakened as a world power and Japan was on the rise, especially after it defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Because of this shift in power and America’s fascination with Japonism (the influence of Japanese art, fashion and decor on the West), American writers and artists made much attempt in trying to understand the difference between China and Japan. In make-up books, the Japanese is described in more nuanced ways compared to the conflation and overt stereotyping of the Chinese or the Mongolian. Both Hageman and Young include in their books a separate section on Japanese characters, which they endeavour to distinguish from Chinese characters. In his explanation of the colour system, Hageman explains that different variations of the numbered shades can be custom ordered, and the example he gives is that of ‘Japanese’: ‘Any other tint, – for instance “Japanese,” which must not be confounded with “Chinese,” as it is different in shade, can be manufactured to order’ (Hageman

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1898: 13). According to Hageman, the Japanese complexion is different from that of the Chinese: They are a cleaner, healthier and sturdier race, although below the medium height. A special grease paint (not numbered) is made for them, which came in vogue with the advent of ‘The Mikado’. Their eyes do not slant like the Chinese. Beards and moustaches are very scant, and seldom worn, except by officers and soldiers. (Hageman 1898: 60) James Young echoes Hageman in crediting The Mikado for introducing Japanese characters to the European and American theatrical stages. The 1885 comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan had a tremendous influence on the representation of Japanese culture (J. Lee 2010). Young, however, makes an important distinction between the Chinese and the Japanese characters. He states, ‘Among the many features noted in the development of the Japanese is a desire to acquire the appearance of the cosmopolite, and as far as their physical limitations will permit they have succeeded’ (Young 1905: 116). In other words, Japanese people were seen as more modernized and cosmopolitan. Unlike the Chinaman character, which was based on the white American’s view of Chinese labourers, the Japanese characters were based on the white American’s view of Japan, which was quickly embracing Westernization and modernization. After the forced opening of Japan in the 1850s, Japonism had a significant impact on European and American art and fashion, and Japanese people were seen as an advanced race in the Western understanding of human evolution. One way the supposed Japanese superiority was represented through stage makeup was the use of rice powder. Young writes, ‘The manufacturers will furnish a stick of Japanese flesh tint grease paint. After this has been rubbed in, carefully powder with soft, rice powder, as it will be more in keeping with the spirit of the part; it will remove the greasy appearance, and will not materially alter the shade of the grease paint’ (Young 1905: 118). Powder, according to Young, was to be used as ‘the beautifier’. Its function was to make the face look soft and natural. He concludes that powder represents the ‘finishing touch’ that completes the make-up. However, in his description of the make-up for the Chinaman, Young states, ‘It is not absolutely necessary to powder the face; the shine thereon imparts a more natural effect, but the powder aids in perfecting the blending of the wig, which is so important’ (120). In other words, the Chinaman character should have a shiny face, and the powder should be used only for enhancing the look of the wig. As far as I can tell, Young recommends rice powder for only the Japanese and the Chinese characters albeit for different purposes. Other ethnic characters are advised to use powder colours that match the greasepaint colour.

TOWARDS A HISTORY OF YELLOWFACE The acting convention of non-Asian actors portraying Asian characters may be as old as the first encounters between the West and the East, but each iteration of the portrayal has been based on new technology. At the turn of the twentieth century,

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greasepaint and rice powder were the cutting-edge technology, as CGI is in the twenty-first century. And like all technologies, they were tools to imagine a new reality and to educate the viewer to see things differently. The authors of the makeup books promoted their books as educational guidebooks for both amateur and professional actors and to elevate theatrical make-up as a legitimate artform. The publishers of James Young’s Making Up claim that The aim has been to produce an educational work, exhaustively treating of this fascinating subject, and they hope to convince its readers that nothing in the slightest degree approaching it has ever appeared. Not only are the materials, necessaries and methods of making up thoroughly described here, but the valuable knowledge, so inculcated, is delightfully emphasized by and embellished with costly reproductions of rare photographs of theatrical folk, both on and off the stage, which have been procured with considerable pains and outlay. (Young 1905: n.a.) The publishers’ stress on newness, accuracy, details, materiality and method underscores their promotion of stage make-up as a form of science-based technology that can be used to gain and create new knowledge about theatrical characters. They conclude their message by quoting Cardinal Richelieu: ‘Ye cannot know what ye have never tried’. The publishers ask the readers to try the make-up detailed in the book so that they may gain knowledge to play different characters more accurately and convincingly. It is this emphasis on embodied knowledge that prompts me to think about how theatre historians can use the materiality of make-up to create an epistemological foundation for yellowface and how it can also be used as a pragmatic research methodology. For the actor who heeded the publishers’ recommendation to try out the make-up, each application of greasepaint and power would have helped the actor transform into the character he or she desired to embody. More importantly, each choice of colour, texture, tone and lines would have marked racial and national stratifications on the actor’s face and indicated whether the character should be comical, inferior or beautiful. And when the actor stepped on to a stage in front of an audience, her/his goal would have been to convince the viewers that the character was thoroughly ‘real’ and that she or he was the authority in portraying different racial types. The make-up books are, therefore, an essential part of an epistemological foundation and a pragmatic methodology that are needed to make yellowface known and knowable as a historical subject. They can illuminate how make-up as a form of technology has been utilized, constructed and produced to perpetuate images of Asians onstage and on screen and why such images have persisted.

CHAPTER 3.6.2

Archived Voices: Attempting to Listen to the Theatrical Past RUTHIE ABELIOVICH

Theatre historiographers must invariably grapple with the ‘ephemerality’ of the performances they study. While the transitory nature of the theatrical event remains intransigent, the attempt to access the past is often mitigated with the claim that performance actually ‘becomes itself through disappearance’, as Peggy Phelan convincingly suggested (1993: 146). Hoping to recuperate something from the dispossessed, disappeared, experiential dimension of fleeting live events, historians cling onto any remaining relics, however fragmentary. The scarcity of visual documents renders any attempt to retrieve a performance’s sensual elements incomplete and hence speculative. Bringing the past into the present therefore demands attentiveness to invisible dimensions of ‘performance remains’ – to use Rebecca Schneider’s term – to carefully listen to the stratified timbres entombed therein (2011). This chapter submits that preserved (recorded) voices and sounds of the stage can account for such transparencies, and reveal an obscured history.1 By their ontological nature, sounds from the past are doomed to oblivion due to their fading into the eerily silent archive. However, the emergence of recording technologies at the beginning of the twentieth century made tenable the aspiration to listen to bygone iterations. Today, recorded voices pierce our present, enabling us again and again to experience particular idiosyncratic expressions. In this sense, digital technologies (that follow the analogue systems) have narrowed the previously stringent disjunctions separating material vestiges from actual experiences of a performance. They have produced new types of remains that invite us to reformulate historiographical approaches to theatre archives. This essay introduces a study of a 1952-released radio recording of the Ohel Theatre’s 1928 theatrical production of the biblical play Yaakov and Rachel. The 1952 recording, featuring the original cast of actors, transmits the voices created by the Ohel and directed by Moshe Halevy during 1928. While presenting vestiges from the voices and language in a specific oral performance, this recording also manifests the agentive potential of archival materials, enabling us to move between

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past and current iterations, and to shift between the historical and fictional dramatic realities they present. The time stretching from the 1928 theatre performance’s staging to its reproduction in 1952 as ‘disembodied’ sound instantiation renders this peripatetic historical record as oscillating between time periods and narratives: from the early 1928 Hebrew language theatrical manifestations in pre-state Palestine, to its later 1952 audio reproduction, during the State of Israel’s formative years. Here, I follow a chain of theatrical moments, and varied historical contexts, that are in play when analysing audio recordings from theatre productions: both the staged performance, its later audio reproduction and my current listening to the recording are interlocutors in the historiographical analysis of theatre sound. To demonstrate the interpretive virtues emerging from analysing theatre sound, this essay addresses two main questions. First I ask, what glimpses into past realities and imaginations might a recording we listen to in the present afford? And, second, what might attention to the aural enactment of the drama reveal about the intersection of aesthetical valence and ideology? Probing into recorded voices as archival remains, I examine how the storage medium constructs our historical knowledge. Recorded voices, I submit, reconceptualize and make apparent the temporal array considered in the framework of theatre historiography to concentrate on three intersecting focal points: the moment of the theatrical production in 1928, the moment of its recording during the early 1950s and the particular moment of replaying an archived audio performance in the contemporaneous present. I argue that recorded theatre sounds present us with the possibility to overcome the transiency of performance, by positioning the listening subject as an agent that transforms the played voices into an ongoing repertoire of gestures, and connects past aural expressions with the ways we listen in the present. While acknowledging the pivotal function of dramatic speech, theatre and performance scholarship has yet to develop a critical vocabulary that can capture and convey how actors’ voices once sounded. Regina Bendix posits musicology’s exclusivism due to its esoteric system of musical notation for studying sonic performances (2000: 33–50). Bendix argues that anyone not conversant with musicological terms and notation would hesitate to participate in its discourse, preferring to defer to an expert authority. My study aims to contribute to fashioning a language that would aptly describe and analyse theatrical aspects of vocal dramatic recitation by taking advantage of technological mediation. In this essay, I listen to past voices out of their aural remains. This quest resonates with growing theatre scholarship that aspires to theorize voice and sound in theatre and performance practices. Aiming to conceptualize the role of the voice in contemporary practice as research (PaR) and theatre and performance arts, the studies of Ben Macpherson and Konstantinos Thomaidis (2015) and Lynne Kendrick (2017) examine the voice as an intersection of body and language, a liminal expression that connects theory and praxis. Drawing largely from the theories of Mladen Dolar (2006) and Adriana Cavarero (2005), these works study voice as an object, that gains signification from its material qualities. The aesthetics of the voice, according to this point of view, cannot be separated from the cultural conditions and prevailing philosophical ethos in which it was shaped. This is where history enters the arena.

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Recent scholarship on theatre history has also investigated aurality within the theatrical apparatus. Bruce R. Smith’s pioneering book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999) addresses the sonic experience of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, by focusing on sixteenth-century manuscripts and print culture. Gina Bloom’s Voice in Motion (2007) aims to reclaim sixteenth-century aural artefacts by targeting the conditions involved in the communication of voice, in an effort to theorize the relation between voice and agency. Despite their emphasis on the materiality of the voice, both Smith and Bloom rely on literary, theoretical and historical textual evidences that, though recording sound and voice, remain silent. Peter Holland’s ‘Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick’ (2007) and Judith Pascoe’s The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (2013) are further examples of such theoretical modes of inquiry. In the absence of available audio recordings, both Holland and Pascoe draw on textual and visual sources that describe the theatrical phenomenology of the voice; these, however, lack the reflective experience of listening to Garrick’s or Siddons’ voices. In stark contrast to works that necessitate a filling of the aural void by reimagining the voices that played at the Wooden O in Elizabethan London, or to those of renowned actors such as David Garrick or Sarah Siddons, this essay presents and studies recorded remnants from a historical performance, and analyses it in its artistic, cultural and ideological contexts. The sound recording I analyse documents a 1928 performance created in Palestine during the formative years of the Jewish national movement that catalysed the endeavour to renew the Hebrew language and entrench it as the colloquial language of the Zionist enterprise. This recording was produced during the early 1950s, by the same company and with the same leading actors. Although the quality of the actors’ voices will have changed in the time span between 1928 and the early 1950s, and despite the poor quality of the recording, this recording nevertheless demonstrates how recitation style, vocal delivery and musicality of speech served as a central component in the process of decoding the sound signs connoted by the spoken language. In this sense, my focus on the Hebrew language transcends its idiosyncratic historical and cultural circumstances as it allows me to demonstrate how language performs in theatre through its phonetic and musical enactments, rather than as a semantic vehicle.

YAAKOV AND RACHEL Yaakov and Rachel is a Russian biblical play written by Nikolai Aleksandrovich Krasheninnikov (initially published in 1910 under the title Rachel’s Cry) and translated into Hebrew by Avraham Shlonsky. The play was initially staged in 1928 by the Ohel (Hebrew for tent) – a theatre troupe established in 1925 in Tel Aviv during the British mandate in Palestine, by Moshe Halevy (Figure 3.6.2.1). The Ohel was founded under the patronage of the General Labor Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine (The Histadrut).2 In its formative years, it was comprised of amateur actors, primarily immigrants of Ashkenazi origin, who arrived in Palestine in the third wave of European Jewish immigration. Focusing on a radio recording

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FIGURE 3.6.2.1:  The stage in the Ohel’s 1928 performance Yaakov and Rachel. Courtesy of the Yehuda Gabay Theater Archive.

extracted from the Ohel’s performance of Yaakov and Rachel, in what follows I wish to examine how national perceptions of displacement and belonging affect the theatrical rendering of the Hebrew language; how imagined Oriental aural sensibilities track into the artistic performance of that language. Yaakov and Rachel, a play consisting of a prologue, two acts and an epilogue, dramatizes the pastoral matrimonial encounter of Yaakov and Rachel – the third Hebrew forebear – as narrated in Genesis 29. A young migrant recently arriving in the land of Harran,3 Yaakov wishes to marry Rachel, a beautiful young shepherdess. She is the daughter of Laban, the son of Yaakov’s maternal uncle, Bethuel, and a powerful man in his tribe. Committed to his ancestors’ legacy, Laban wishes for his elder daughter, Leah – whom no man wants to marry due to an ocular defect – to wed before his younger daughter does. He accepts Yaakov’s proposal of marriage on the condition of service for a period of seven years. After the seven years pass and Laban’s firstborn daughter remains unwed, Laban decides to trick Yaakov into marrying Leah instead. He throws a wedding celebration and beneath the bridal veil replaces Rachel with Leah. Only at dawn does the dismayed Yaakov discover too late that he has actually married Leah. When Yaakov angrily protests to his father-in-law, Laban explains he acted in accordance with fidelity to his tradition. Laban then agrees that Yaakov marry Rachel after he serves an additional seven years of service. In the Zionist cultural climate in which the Ohel performed, the Bible was conceived as a paragon for the original, and hence ‘authentic’ Jewish nation, legitimizing the ideal of a national homeland (Shavit and Eran 2007: 476–7). Regina Bendix explains that at the end of the nineteenth century, as a reaction

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to the onslaught of the modern world sweeping across industrialized Europe, philosophers, literary critics, artists and authors drew upon their authentic selves in order to build a new kind of polity (1997: 25–6). This movement in part fostered the ‘discovery’ of an expressive oral culture as the poetic manifestation of authentic being, independent from social classes or cultural Others, as well as of historical documents for locating the appropriate expressive ‘folk’ culture. Within this context, the Hebrew language – the language of the Bible – provided an essential resource for reimagining Jewish nativity in the land of Palestine (Ornan in Kuzar 2001: 256).4 The radio recording presents a fragment from the Ohel’s production of the biblical story of Yaakov and Rachel. This recording documents a less than ten-minute edited version of the play’s second act. It follows the main plotline of the dramatic text, yet omits significant portions of the dialogue. It presents the act’s climax wherein Laban (played by Simcha Tzehoval) conspires and executes his scheme to trick Yaakov (played by Ze’ev Barban) into marrying Leah. In this scene, Laban forces Rachel (played by Yehudit Barkait) to hide on the wedding night as he disguises Leah’s face. During the wedding ceremony, the sequestered Rachel laments the loss of her beloved. When Yaakov discovers the deception, he laments to God for affirming matrimonial vows with the wrong woman. Listening to the recording online – via the National Library website – it is clear that it is in poor condition.5 Various metallic noises break the dramatic sequence, as do blurred voices and fluctuating volume, making it truly sound like a historical recording. Through its rough materiality, it bestows the allure of the archive, manifesting what Arlette Farge depicts as ‘a tear in the fabric of time’ – a specific moment from the past that draws us down the rabbit hole of a particular time (2013: 6). Yet, as the actors begin to recite the dramatic text, their unique, intense vocal interpretation provides a glimpse into an intriguing creative moment from the development of Hebrew culture during the British mandate in Palestine. Let us walk through this recording’s performance in detail. With a melodious recitation, Laban enters and declares his fidelity to his family’s legacy. His Hebrew pronunciation follows the Sephardic style – he utters the guttural sounds found in spoken Arabic dialects. His melody alludes to liturgical cantillations from Sephardic Jewish traditions and his vocal inflections follow Sephardic intonations, stressing word endings and lengthening some phrases while truncating others. He also varies the tone of his voice. For instance, in describing his nefarious plan to deceive Yaakov, Laban’s voice becomes quieter and deeper, whereas in elaborating his loyalty to his dynasty, he elongates the names of his patriarchs. The next vocal performance presents Laban’s dispute with Rachel over his planned treachery. Rachel speaks in a high-pitched voice, her accent clearly revealing residues of her Eastern European homeland. Thus, although she plays Laban’s daughter, her vocal performance marks her as originating in a different place and culture. Rachel’s voice can be characterized as gentle, feminine and trembling; it stands in sharp opposition to her father’s Oriental tone, rhythm and cantorial style. Rachel reacts to her father’s devious plot with a scream of horror, a loud pure interjection that immediately transforms into a lingering cry, expressing her miserable fate and desire

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to die. After vociferously releasing her emotions, Rachel succumbs to her father’s aggression and submits to his plan. The scene then fades out to orchestral music. The dramatic dialogue next continues with Laban praying in cantillation-like song, as his sons join him in chorus. This choral singing presages the celebratory soundscape of the forthcoming wedding. The choir’s rhythms allude to Yemenite songs – quivering voices that create an aural impression of the bleating of sheep. ‘Come, my bride’, they sing from the wedding poem derived from the book of Song of Songs (4: 8). These celebratory sounds are then broken by a vocal moment wherein Rachel bemoans her lost love. In a romantic, melodramatic scene, Rachel grieves in a vibrant high-pitched voice her broken heart. The orchestrated melody accompanying her lament responds to each recited phrase with musical phrases that redouble her expression of sorrow. The repetition of sorrowful sounds form musical echoes reflecting Rachel’s voice with instrumental music. Through this dialogue, the audience’s attention shifts from tribal intrigue to Rachel’s personal reverberating pain. The recording ends with Yaakov angrily protesting his father-in-law’s betrayal. Much like Rachel’s, his speech bears Eastern European residues. Neither Yaakov’s nor Rachel’s pronunciation emphasizes Hebrew’s guttural sounds in the same heightened manner as does Laban’s Oriental pronunciation. Yaakov and Rachel’s speech portrays them as immigrants. While they speak the language, they do so with less heightening of stereotypical native articulation nuances. This audio recording presents numerous problems in my attempt to listen to theatre with the aim of developing cultural insights into the early shaping of the Hebrew language on the early-twentieth-century stage. The first issue derives from the poor conservation of radio programmes aired prior to the mid-1950s on Israel’s national radio station ‘Kol Yisrael’ (literally meaning ‘the voice of Israel’) – that monopolized Israel’s electronic mass communication media until 1968. During that period, broadcasters treated their materials as mere ephemera, usually discarding them after a single airing, without preserving or archiving them. Those artefacts that somehow survived were stored in ‘Kol Yisrael’ archives in unfavourable conditions at temperatures that damaged the sound quality. The recording in question of Yaakov and Rachel is such an example. It travelled from the radio station’s storage room into the national sound archive at the National Library, where it was ultimately digitized and enhanced to improve its sound quality. My access to this brief recording raises questions about what has been lost. Does the fact that only a part of the production remains convey information about the rest of the performance’s vocal quality? Does this archival lacuna provide any indication of the archiving culture of the theatre in which the original performance was enacted? Destined to remain unanswered, these questions reveal the way in which historical narratives invariably blur the conditions and the reliability of their sources’ formats and quality of preservation. Furthermore, this recording raises many uncertainties with its missing metadata. I have not been able to learn the conditions under which the Ohel Theatre recorded this play, nor the concrete contexts surrounding its radio broadcast: Was the play recorded fully enacted before a live audience or perhaps only orally in a studio? The hand inscription on the label of Kol Yisrael’s vinyl record indicates that this

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recording was made by the Ohel Theatre Troupe on 31 January 1952. A serial number for a previous record appears on the label, indicating that it is a second part of a longer recording. I assume the first part contains the prologue and the first act of the play. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate this recording. The existing radio fragment is merely a residue from a late reproduction of the Ohel’s staged performance. I do not know how reliably this recording captures the 1928 production it aimed to document. It thus demonstrates the elusive experience of treating a recording as an authentic source, a phenomenon Walter Benjamin articulated in his analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction: ‘Precisely because authenticity is not reproducible, the intensive penetration of certain technological processes of reproduction was instrumental in differentiating and gradating authenticity’ (2003: 271, n. 4). Separation from origin thus generates a quest for a verifiable linkage to a sense of source, to an essence, in a word, to authenticity. Within this quest, as Benjamin writes, the aura is ‘the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be’ (1998: 254). In other words, the appearance of the authentic emerges out of separation of artefact from origin. In my attempt to recapture the ‘forever lost voices’ of the Ohel’s actors, I was thus compelled to place the audio recording I obtained next to conventional (visual) theatre archive materials. As I read and observed various documents, letters, correspondences and photos from the staged production, I was struck by these resources’ scarcity. The materials compiled within the archive boxes had already been handled, sorted in chronological order by an archivist who arrogated the right to decide what records would be retained and assembled as ‘historical artefacts’ and what would be discarded. Much remained absent from the Ohel archive boxes that I explored. It is still unknown exactly how Halevy ran his rehearsals, or how the actors’ language pronunciation tutorials were conducted, or the content of the lectures which the actors attended as part of their training. Furthermore, the hierarchy of documents presented in the archive can be rather confusing; the numbers of copies of documents and their classification and categorization defy any sense of prioritization or importance. While handling the archival materials, my feeling of disconcertedness further intensified, fed by the profoundly dissimilar experiences, sensations and modes being triggered by a performance of the play, live or recorded, and those provoked in the archive. Historian Carolyn Steedman articulates the embodied experience entailed in archival research, explaining how the historian inhales ‘the dust of the workers who made the papers and parchments, the dust of the animals who provided the skins for their leather bindings, the by-product of all the filthy trades that have, by circuitous routes, deposited their end products in the archives’. The archive’s materiality enters the historian through every lungful of air, generating an embodied knowledge of the historical material (2001: 1171). My study of the sound recording expands this idea by generating an additional, different kind of embodied knowledge via the aural faculty. As an analytical historical method, listening is premised on the inextricable reciprocity of subject and object. A sound recording, from this perspective, positions physical sensibility

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as a central vehicle for a historian to effectively understand a performance. Accordingly, the recording reproduces a sonic instantiation with affinity to the staged experience in the theatre. Yet, we cannot help but wonder whether we are listening to the vitality of a live performance or perhaps, the voices of the dead resounding through time. Deborah Kapchan writes that with listening, ‘method involves practice’, whereby the scholar becomes a resonating instrument letting sources enter within, akin to spirit possession (2017: 4). Listening to this recording positioned me simultaneously in consonance with the performed sounds and aloof from them. Accordingly, my listening has been generative, aspiring me not only to study a source but also to make it resourceful. I thus examined the audio recording in relation to three sites of resonance: (1) a vestige of a theatrical performance enacted in a specific sociohistorical context; (2) a sonic instantiation, manifesting distinct vocal aesthetics; and (3) an artefact permitting the study of the resonances and alterations in the vocal imagination, reverberating on the stage in pre-state Palestine during 1928 in relation to its 1952 recording as a disembodied sound reproduction created within a different medium and cultural setting.

SOUNDING SOURCE The Hebrew language, Benjamin Harshav explains, furnished the first archaeology, ‘binding the immigrants to the Bible and to the Land of Israel’ (1993: 111). Harshav’s reference to Hebrew as archaeology underscores the language’s material aspects, namely its written manifestations and oral articulations, as crucial modules for its resuscitation in modern times. Indeed, the endeavour to renew the biblical language as the main spoken language in Palestine was a central component of Jewish national self-identification. The performance of a biblical play in Hebrew, enacted by Jewish immigrants, thus evinces the ambition for an enduring connection between the language, the land and diasporic Jewry. As a central figure in the Hebrew cultural scene of pre-Israel Palestine, Avraham Shlonsky was assigned by Halevy to translate into Hebrew from the original Russian and dramatically adapt Krasheninnikov’s play. Shlonsky directly inserted biblical language, thereby drawing a closer connection to the play’s biblical source. He incorporated verses from the Bible and worked the play’s dialogue, idioms and grammar to closely resemble archaic biblical language. By translating Krasheninnikov’s play into a language as close as possible to that of the Bible and by interlacing actual biblical verses, Shlonsky in effect translated a Russian interpretation of a biblical drama into a modern Jewish drama to be enacted by Jewish immigrants, who by their upbringing were largely conversant in biblical idioms. Local newspaper reviews expressed deep criticism of the play’s language, centring around two main concerns. One critique argued that the use of biblical idioms and manners of speech did not contribute to the Hebrew language’s innovation. The second charge contended that the language included many lingual anachronisms and mixed and matched verbs from different biblical periods.6 Shlonsky’s response was that his rendering of biblical language did not aspire to historical accuracy, nor did

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it aim to represent a uniform language. With his shaping of the Hebrew language, Shlonsky maintained that he sought to evoke a folk dirge transmitted by lamenters over generations (Rokem and Admoni n.d.). Thus, by allegedly retaining a biblical vocabulary, phonology, morphology and syntax, the Hebrew of the play sought to manifest Jewish continuity. In this sense, the voice itself functions as a catalyser for constructing its social contextualization. Yaakov and Rachel represents its characters’ profound connection to the land in its scenes of lamentation. In bewailing her aborted wedding, Rachel cries out to nature. She addresses both heavenly and earthly entities as metaphors, transforming religious language into a theatrical performance of a dirge. As for Yaakov, during his despair, he cries out directly to God. In these instances, the characters’ voices and the accompanying musical score evoke Occidental melodies. As I have already argued, the recorded voices of both actors of Yaakov and Rachel evidence that they have not forgotten their diasporic European heritage. In their moments of grief, distress and sorrow, they resort to familiar modes of vocal expression. Halevy’s dramatic sonant approach thus forms a compromise between the demand to establish novel representational paradigms for the new Hebrew man and the impulse to draw expressive means from diasporic artistic sources and modes of representation. Thus, not only does history shape theatre but the theatre also manipulates the historical narrative. The Sephardic dialect as well as the emphasis on the Oriental-derived Hebrew phonology, which resemble Arab pronunciation, endeavours to express a link connecting the diasporic Jewry to the land of Palestine. However, because these sonic markers stood as a measure of authenticity, Jews could run afoul in two ways, either by being too Arabic in their pronunciation or by not being Arabic enough (Giulio 2016: 153–75). A 1925 article published in the Arabic newspaper El Jazeera claims that the immigrant Jews’ inability to pronounce gutturals proved their non-Semitic origin and that they did not belong in Palestine.7 Speech, accent and intonation serve as markers of ethnic and cultural origin and thus come to evoke indigeneity. However, the faltering ways the Ohel actors performed the Sephardic Hebrew dialect in effect staged their migration paths, tracing their origins back to Europe. The performance of Yaakov and Rachel negotiated such claims by inadvertently staging the Jewish forebears – the progenitors of Hebrew culture – as immigrants. The Ashkenazi sonic residues within the Hebrew speech of both Yaakov and Rachel reflect the specific linguistic reality facing European immigrants in Palestine. Thus, the path of Jewish return to its ‘authentic’ source positioned the ‘East’ not only as an image of an ‘other’ which might echo a lost world, but also as an inspiration in reviving this lost world in the present-day land of Palestine, so that immigrants might internalize it as their new homeland. Yaakov and Rachel managed to grab both ends of the continuum by depicting the Oriental Jew as belonging to the land while preserving his migratory character.

ENACTING SOURCES OF THE HEBREW LANGUAGE The Ohel consisted of amateur thespians engaged in an oral transfer of knowledge derived largely from personal communication, a dynamic exchange of ideas in

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the rehearsal room and shared aural associations. They required extensive lessons in language and diction in order to perform the Hebrew language in ways that sonically signified their enduring roots in the land of Palestine. Halevy explains his vocal approach to Yaakov and Rachel: I wished for the language to present an original Israeli phonology, not just by staging the correct accent and the eastern style of pronunciation of the gutturals, but in terms of the musicality of the language. In Yaakov and Rachel, I wanted to find and embody this melody. Epstein understood my intentions and assisted me in this search. However, we did more than study from him, we learned the correct and original Hebrew accent from our Oriental ethnic groups, the Yemenites and the Sephardim, and their liturgical cantillation. For example, in Laban’s command to his daughter Rachel, ‘Hurry to the tent, my child, knead three sacks of flour and make cakes’, I used the melodious cantillation of the weekdays, as the command bears a practical nature. In Yaakov’s invitation to his bride Rachel to enter his tent, an invitation that carries the nature of a festive ritual, I used the melodious cantillation of the Pentecost holiday. (Author’s translation, Halevy 1955: 125–6) The sonic reference to the Hebrew language, as heard in the recording, manifests a broad understanding of what an Arab accent is, encompassing liturgical rhythms of Hebrew recited by Sephardi and Yemenite Jewry. Some of the various sonic references that Halevy considered for the staging of the speech are listed in his personal (unpublished) diary, in which he mentions Arab, Yemenite, Shomeronite and Sephardi liturgies. Halevy drew on these ethnic sonic associations, which he perceived to mark indigenousness, as both aural images and signs of Jewish cultural rootedness. Russian-born Zionist pedagogue Yitzhak Epstein (1862–1943) conducted lessons for the Ohel actors in language and diction in 1927. Epstein worked with them on the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew words: he coached the actors to accentuate the guttural sounds in the Sephardic style, stress their speech’s oxytonal melody, emphasize the light T, pronounce the elongated Hebrew vowel ‘aaa’ differently from light ‘aa’ sound and so forth (Epstein 1933–34). However, as for most Jewish Ashkenazi immigrants, for the Ohel’s actors, articulating Hebrew in Sephardic style was nearly an impossible task. In order to overcome the immigrants’ difficulties in articulating Hebrew correctly in the Sephardic pronunciation, Epstein adopted an approach to ease the language’s delivery. If not possible to fully recover ‘authentic’ biblical Hebrew, Epstein thought modern usage should at least attempt a symbolic return. He therefore insisted on maintaining some isolated features, such as preserving two guttural sounds – the ayin and het – symbolic of a rooted Hebrew pronunciation (Kuzar 2001: 259). However, in the audio recording of Yaakov and Rachel, Yaakov and Rachel do not utter the gutturals at all. Only Laban manages to pronounce these sounds, albeit in an unnatural and inconsistent manner. His dubious imitation coincides with his duplicity in the performed drama.

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THE 1952 BROADCAST When recording a theatre performance for radio broadcast – converting staged action into only a sonic instantiation – expressed voices become fictional iterations that pass into the province of the everyday. With public broadcasting, the dramatic act enters the public sphere, where it resonates with current social affairs. The ostensible aim to reproduce an Oriental accent in the performance of a play based upon a biblical story is imbued in ideology. The diachronic emphasis on the historical narrative, with its reminder that the origins of Hebrew life and language persist in Oriental Jews’ liturgical practices, convey synchronic notions of an enduring connection to the land. This attempt to create a multicultural soundscape, in which European oral traditions and representational modes intersect with Oriental markers, exposes complex power dynamics and cultural discrepancies. We could thus say that rather than providing authentic evidence, or a trace that conjures past events and enhances rootedness, the audio recording presents us with a speculative, invariably contingent, fragmentary experience materialized though its disembodied reproduction. The transformation of the theatre performance from a live social engagement into a disembodied aural instantiation problematizes the immediacy of interaction between agents, and the way it is articulated by means of proximity, accountability and empathy. We might thereby raise the question, how might the voices’ separation from their corporal anchors effect their presence in the social soundscape? Underneath the apparent ‘east-west’ vocal integration conflating the Sephardic dialect with European accents, thereby underscoring the interlocutors’ common territorial origin, a dramatic plot of deception and fraud ensues: Laban deceives Yaakov, the Hebrew immigrant, into entering a marriage he did not desire. The emotional spectrum wavering between suspicion and trepidation was highly relevant in the simmering atmosphere in 1928, even though significant sectors of the Jewish community propounded coexistence between Jewish newcomers and local Arab populations as a realizable ideal. However, the summer of 1929 witnessed a political deterioration culminating at the end of August in the eruption of violent attacks by Arabs on Jewish communities across Palestine (Cohen 2015). Thereafter, relations would forever change between the Palestinians and the Jews. Yaakov and Rachel is a performance expressing the last moments of hope for a Jewish–Arab peaceful existence. The date inscribed on the play’s radio record is 31 January 1952. The cultural resonance of this radio performance could perhaps be presumed from the context of this 1952 broadcast. What circumstances engendered this recording? Who was in charge of it? With no source to account for the broadcast date of this recording, I am left with hints from Moshe Halevy’s personal diary, which I found in his archive. Among his correspondence, I found a 1950 letter from radio broadcaster Ephraim Di-Zahav (Goldstein) mentioning a radio programme he conducted dedicated to the musicality of the Ohel’s performances. Himself a synagogue cantor, Di-Zahav broadcast Jewish liturgy from different traditions. If he indeed played fragments from Yaakov and Rachel on his radio programme, he likely did so for their reflection of Yemenite and Sephardic cantillation. Under such circumstances, the Arabic–Jewish intoned dialogue, the art of conversation, would likely have been de-emphasized.

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The political context of 1952 affirms this proposition. That year marked four years after the State of Israel gained its independence following a bloody war that produced a massive wave of Palestinian refugees (whose dispossession is known as al-Nakba, literally meaning the Catastrophe) and three years after Operation Magic Carpet brought a massive number of Yemenite Jews to the new State of Israel; it also followed years of routine violent encounters between Jews and those remaining Palestinians. In its broadcasting context, the resonance of the Ohel’s 1928 voices within the cultural realpolitik radically changed. From this perspective, the ability to authentically experience a vocal performance appears even more elusive. In its 1952 context, the broadcasting of the radio fragment of Yaakov and Rachel presents a mourning over the fading presence of the local indigenous Arab culture. From this perspective, the archival impulse to preserve ephemeral oral culture participates in the transformation of practiced traditions into commodified performances. When circulated as historical sources, these records serve to narrate the Zionist mobilization of Jewish biblical origins via modern forms and technologies. The stratified sounds of the audio recording enable us, today, to listen to voices of the past, to enrich the present with beings from another place and time and to acknowledge the ways by which our listening shapes social fictions that construe both experience and understanding of cultural and historical sources.

NOTES 1. Another version of this essay has been published in Abeliovich (2019). 2. The establishment of the Ohel Theatre was part of the Labour party’s wide network that included libraries for workers, an organization for cultural events, an institute for workers’ lectures, Davar daily newspaper and Sifriat Hapoalim publishing house. Ten years after its institutionalization as a drama studio, in 1935, it received the title ‘The Workers’ Theatre of Eretz Israel’. For more on the Ohel Theatre, see Yerushalmi (2014) and Shoham (1988, 1989). 3. Harran, literally meaning ‘crossroads’, is an ancient city located on the route leading from Nineveh in the east to the ford on the Euphrates River at Carchemish. 4. In the current discussion, the Bible refers only to the Old Testament written in Hebrew. 5. To listen to the recording in the National Library website, go to: http://beta.nli.org.il/ he/items/NNL_MUSIC_AL000251840/NLI. 6. See, for example, performance reviews from Haaretz on 3 and 7 February 1928. 7. This article is discussed in Elmaliach (1925).

CHAPTER 3.7

The Imperatives of Local Difference: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

At the heart of this book is a recognition of the deleterious effects of asymmetric ignorance between continents and cultures, but the pursuit of some mitigation raises vital questions about the importance of the specificities of local knowledge – what Rashna Darius Nicholson dubs ‘the complexities that matter’ in the first of the essays paired together in this section. That, in turn, raises other historiographic questions about the deployment of ‘facts’; about the extent to which detailed analysis of a key moment or process in the past assists or conversely blurs and obfuscates understanding. How much do we need to know and how much can we know? The essays by Nicholson and Hyunshik Ju both focus on cultural difference from positions grounded within environmental familiarity. Both, in terms of their individual heritage, are cultural insiders. In trying, however, to access an understanding of the lived experience of the past, the complexities of temporal change inevitably erect barriers. Ju opens his essay with a vivid account of his physical and emotional reaction to a performance of the Yangju Byeolsandaenori, a form of traditional Korean masked dance drama, but immediately, as a twenty-firstcentury audience member, acknowledges his distance from his eighteenth-century forebears and the religio-political factors instrumental, he argues, in the formation of feeling and audience response. Ju’s creative exploration of otherness balances long-established Western thinking on performance affect alongside a socially nuanced historical rationale for an entirely different response within the East Asian context. For him, a study of ‘emotional entanglements as historical variation’ offers ‘an exciting cross-cultural historiographic enquiry’ which augurs well for similar exercises in international rapprochement. In her essay, Nicholson is similarly alert to the nuances of local knowledge, adopting an unapologetic stance in her challenge both to the Western academy and Indian theatre historiography that is stimulated by her concentration on the ‘outwardly insignificant choices and seemingly trivial disputes between dots, accents and vowels’ in the writing that documents and describes Parsi theatre history. In her essay, she situates herself between the ‘then’ of the nineteenth-century Parsi community contending with nationalist supremacists and the erosion of a historic language, and the ‘now’ of Western scholarship that masks ignorance of meaning-making linguistic

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specificity with ‘the cosmopolitan smoothing out’ demanded by academic writing conventions. Nicholson’s argument that orthography – ‘spelling’ as it appears on the page whether read in nineteenth-century Gujarati journals in Bombay, or in twenty-first-century, internationally circulated academic histories – has an ideologically inflected capacity for multiplying distortions of what we think we know of the past. Her very precise deployment of the facts as she has seen them in the documents she has researched – tracing in detail what for her is an identifiable genealogy of orthographic change – places this dimension of her essay in Postlewait’s historiographic category of ‘history-as-record’ (2009: 27). It depends therefore on scholarly diligence in ‘pursuit of truths about the past’ which we, following Postlewait and Charlotte Canning (2010: 11), consider to be foundational to the work of the historian. Even as these linguistic ‘truths’ are opened to debate and the facts perhaps rearranged, the necessary attention to local specificities and local knowledges remains vital to a more equitable historical understanding.

CHAPTER 3.7.1

What’s In a Name? The Performance of Language in the Invention of Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Theatre History RASHNA DARIUS NICHOLSON

INTRODUCTION The social history of South Asian colonial theatre and cinema is intimately bound with the Parsi community. The Parsis, followers of Zoroastrianism, emigrated to the coast of Gujarat between 8 and 10 CE following the Arab conquest of Iran. Under British rule, they prospered as compradors, the wealth accrued from the cotton and opium trade inadvertently stimulating the coterminous development of the Parsi religious and social reform movement and Bombay’s first vernacular presses and theatres.1 The Parsi theatre that emerged in 1853 initially portrayed Persian mythological themes and topical farces for the community’s ‘moral’ improvement. However, within forty years it had grown into the subcontinent’s primary form of visual entertainment, catering to the growing needs of a new South Asian middle and industrial working class. Subsequently, Parsi troupes not only toured South East Asia extensively, inspiring indigenous imitation Parsi theatre in Burma, Batavia and beyond, but also directly contributed to the advent of Indian cinema. Due to this expansive geographic and temporal scope, historical analyses of Parsi drama that was variously performed in Gujarati, Hindustani, Farsi and/or English augur several methodological problems. This essay takes up one of these: the issue of orthography. As South Asian languages were in the early stages of standardization during the theatre’s heyday, the names of actors, managers, plays and troupes took on lives of their own, transmogrifying according to the cultural conduits of their

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times. Hence, for example, Gujarati, the mother tongue of the Parsis, underwent a rapid and violent process of codification through its Sanskritization in the nineteenth century. The Indian census of 1871 not only created a communal anxiety of Parsis’ position as a minority but also bolstered Ahmedabad upper-caste Hindus’ claims of the universalization of ‘their’ Sanskritized Gujarati as the ‘standard’ since a language could only acquire official sanction if it was claimed by the greater majority of speakers. Having lost at this competitive demographic game, the Parsis’ version of Gujarati known as ‘Parsi Gujarati’ underwent a linguistic death through its political delegitimization, becoming an ostensibly antiquated, unscientific and impure dialect. Significantly, this was not an isolated development. The standardization of language corresponded with that of culture, religion and race, processes that intimately impacted the theatre. Outwardly insignificant choices and seemingly trivial disputes between dots, accents and vowels provide a meta-commentary on inter-group cultural capital, political legitimacy and social inferiority. The urge to police the apparent deviancy of the Parsi language is, however, not merely characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sanskritization of Gujarati orthography during the heyday of Indian nationalism parallels the cosmopolitan smoothing of non-mainstream colloquialisms in contemporary history writing. By devising ostensibly value-neutral spelling due to the prerequisites of publishing and/or for the sake of clarity, South Asianists overlook the complex history of what ‘sounds right’. My argument here is that the privileging of a meta-pragmatics of legibility discounts how visual conventions of writing – hyphenations, spellings, word breaks and punctuation – inevitably align the historian with contending sociopolitical schemes. The language of history writing thus becomes the performance of a value standard. Furthermore, this double movement between a past and present linguistic standardization reflects the unceasing relegation of orthographic variation to the periphery, an interminable minoritization of the minority. This essay traces the political factors that lead to the recognition of a particular Gujarati spelling as normative or standard in order to ask what a more plural reading of South Asian theatre history could look like. By drawing attention to the graphic nature of the visual signs of historical narratives, to linguistic heterogeneity and the overlooked disjunctures, discrepancies and anomalies of language, it invites a conversation on the prevalent parameters of our field and on the (im)possibilities of including the complexities that matter.

THE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL History can only be perceived as such when it becomes recapitulated, when we create some form of discourse, like the theatre, on the basis of which an organized repetition of the past is constructed, situating the chaotic torrents of the past within an aesthetic frame. This is probably true of the more conventional forms of historiography too, as practiced in history books. (Rokem 2000: xi) By bringing together the historian’s recapitulation of the past with that of the actor performing history, Freddie Rokem briefly alludes to a common ‘aesthetic frame’

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between the two. Over the last decade, philosophers of history have gradually shifted their focus from the historian’s published output to the repetitive actions of reading, analysing, deliberating and transcribing, the creative processes involved in explorations of physical and imaginary archives, the historian’s ‘doings’ between library shelves and online repositories and, perhaps most significantly, in the performative work of writing (Paul 2011). Performing history, ‘situating the chaotic torrents of the past within an aesthetic frame’, obliges a commitment to particular formal requirements. In the theatre, this takes the form of visual icons: costumes, props and/or sets that serve not only as symbols of the technical practices of the theatrical trade but also as implements supporting or, less often, providing a meta-commentary on the story’s thesis. Not dissimilarly, history has traditionally defined itself through a commitment to particular graphic standards. Annotations and punctuation, citation style and indentation typically serve to convince readers of the accuracy and authority of historical narrative. Yet, just as the drama’s scenographic design not only supports the suspension of disbelief but also evinces the staged reality of the performance, so also the visual icons of history possess a humanizing force that can reveal the performative workings of scholarship, the marginal stories obscured through meticulous stagings.

PARSI GUJARATI One of the most potent visual icons that provides a reflexive commentary on historical scholarship is orthography and nowhere is orthography more contested than in South Asia, ‘a proverbial Tower of Babel’ (Kachru, Kachru and Sridhar 2008: 1). Thus Gujarati, the mother tongue in the nineteenth century of the Vanias, Shravaks (Jains), Rajputs, Lohanas, Bhatias, Kolis, Borahs, Memons, Khojas and Parsis, first became embroiled in controversy in the 1850s.2 While colonial education established the pre-eminence of English, prompting the development of an English-speaking (and thinking) class, it also encouraged this class to develop a strong interest in their mother tongues. Consequently, English-educated intellectuals, known as the reformists, began to reformulate not only their histories, religious observances and customs but also their vernacular literature and language according to the English model. The Parsis, compradors in the colonial trade, were foremost in this process. The rise of the modern mercantile Gujarati script (as opposed to Devanagari) was largely due to Parsis’ early monopoly on Gujarati printing (Isaka 2002: 11).3 The Mumbai Samācār established in 1822 was followed by the radical Mumbai Vartamān in 1830, the traditionalist Jāme Jamśed in 1832 and numerous other journals so that, by 1858, Bombay boasted of sixteen Gujarati periodicals (‘Mumbai madhe…’ 1858: 311–12). By the 1850s, Parsi newspapers divided between traditionalist and reformist factions increasingly decried each other’s language. Thus, on 27 June 1858, the Rāst Goftār, the reformist organ of the Parsi community, denounced the Bāge Naśīhat, Surīa Prakāś and Samśehar Bāhdur both for the content of their reportage as well as for their ‘impure’ writing. The article went on to accuse distinguished journals such as the Mumbai Samācār of confusing dental and retroflex characters such as દ/da and ડ/ḍa, ત/ta and ટ/ṭa and lacking consistency in joḍṇī (grammar). This preliminary yet pivotal move towards what would become the movement for the standardization of Gujarati was not an

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isolated process. The Rāst’s criticisms of ‘impure’ writing style involved iconization – ‘a transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked’ (Irvine and Gal 2000: 37). Through the association of ‘impure’ graphic icons with Parsi traditionalists’ writing, the reformists sought to undercut not only the substance of inimical journals’ reportage but also how this was perceived. ‘Impure’ spelling in the Rāst’s purview constituted a graphic emblem of the traditionalists’ advocacy for the conservation of Parsis’ ‘impure’ customs ‘borrowed from the Hindoo and Mahomedan religions’. ‘Incorrect’ orthography was thus a meta-commentary on the abhorrent ‘prevailing belief in ghosts, devils, spells, enchantment, sorcery; casting nativity, predicting destiny […] and ceremonies not enjoined by the religion of Zoroaster’ (‘The Lights…’ 1863: 561–2). Significantly, the Parsi theatre was both a witness and an active participant in the reformists’ undermining of Parsi traditionalist modes of conduct. The Rāst and the newly founded Parsi theatre of the 1850s as sites of identity performance jointly denounced customs antithetical to Victorian moral norms while inventing new social and religious mores through sequential narratives of Persian history. Accordingly, plays such as The Alchymist depicted ‘native superstitions’, Nādarśā nā Lagan (the Marriage of Nādarśā) ‘the extravagance on these occasions that generally leads to ruin’, Deśī Pantujīo (Native Teachers) poor pre-colonial education systems and Bāl Vīvā (Child Marriages), themes that were comprehensively expounded on in the Rāst’s pages. A power struggle over discursive representations of the self, both narrative and visual, thus lay at the heart of the development of the Parsi public sphere whose orthography still lay at ‘thresholds of normativity’ (Agha 2007: 126). Simultaneously, a parallel movement for the reformation of the Gujarati language was initiated through the British administrator Alexander Kinloch Forbes’ establishment of the Gujarati Vernacular Society on 26 December 1848 in Ahmedabad. Spearheaded by the renowned poet Dalpatrām Dāhyābhāi who was a close associate of Forbes, the society established a public library, the newspaper Vartamān and the periodical Buddhiprakāś (Light of Knowledge). Consequently, even as a protégé of the society, the then young Gujarati poet and Sanskrit scholar Narmadāśankar Lālśankar Dāve published the first issue of his Narmakoś (Dictionary) in 1861, Parsi reformists such as Nāhānābhāi Rūstamjī Rāṇīnā, Ardeśar Farāmjī Mus and Shāpurjī Edaljī published Gujarati English dictionaries in the early 1860s. A small yet powerful coterie of Parsi and high-caste Hindu intellectuals thus concurrently began to regulate Gujarati orthography even as calls grew louder for a unified script across Hindustan, typifying what was a prescriptivist phase in the subcontinent’s linguistic history (‘Hīndusthānne Māṭe…’ 1860: 51–2). Despite these concomitant efforts, Parsi and Hindu lexicographers were divided on the critical issue of what constituted pure Gujarati, the latter often recasting their efforts as attempts to restore an ‘original’ Sanskritized form. Comparative philology with its conviction in a global network of Indo-European or Aryan languages that provided a key to the beginnings of civilization, had palpably taken root. Its invention of language trees and unchanging tongues (closely linked to the development of both scientific racism and modern linguistics) and its privileging of Sanskrit as the definitive referent for the standardization of South Asian languages were contingent on deeply exclusionary methods. According to Riho

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Isaka, the British considered high-caste Hindus closely associated with the Sanskritic tradition as best suited to standardize Gujarati. Consequently, Parsis (despite their staggering influence in education, local governance and the press) were excluded from significant linguistic interventions such as the development of school textbooks known as the Gujarati Reading Series (Isaka 2002: 9). During this watershed moment in the birth of modern Gujarati, in February 1860, all the Parsi candidates for the Bombay University entrance examination were dismissed due to their ‘imperfect, or rather no, acquaintance’ with ‘Hindoo’ Gujarati.4 Parsi newspapers’ criticisms of ‘the current [Sanskritized] language considered by crotchety Government officials as the beauideal of pure and genuine Gujrati’ resulted in calls for the recognition of Parsi Gujarati as an accredited language distinct from Gujarati on the grounds of inflexion (ચ/ca vs. છ/cha), vocabulary (Persian and Urdu words vs. Sanskrit words) and orthography (‘The Vernacular of the Parsees’ 1860: 65–6). The Parsis’ economic and political clout, based on their monopoly of Bombay’s raw cotton exports and joint stock companies, prompted not only a government proposal to add a Parsi to the staff of Gujarati examiners but also the belief that the majority would eventually come around to a non-Sanskritized Parsi style of writing (‘Pārsī Gujrātī’ 1860: 83). The share crash of 1865, however, led to a swift reversal in Parsi fortunes. Even as Parsi millionaires ‘begged for work’ and English newspapers condemned the ‘immorality’ of the Parsi mercantile class (‘Distress among Parsees’ 1874: 608–9), Varajlāl Kālīdās, a Sathodara Brahman member of the Gujarati Vernacular Society, won the Parsi Sorābjī Jamśedjī Jījībhāi award of Rs 100 for his essay on the history of the Gujarati language (‘Gujrātī Bhāśāno’ 1866: 457). According to Kālīdās’ text, with the Muslim invasion of Gujarat in 1356, Persian terms ‘infiltrated’ Gujarati in the way English words ‘entered’ Gujarati through colonialism. The pamphlet therefore called for Sanskrit terms to replace the Persian khubsurat (beautiful), taraf (towards), gerhājar (absence) and foj (army). The Rāst fervently rebuked Kālīdās’ suggestions, arguing that foreign, aśudha (impure) words added life to Gujarati and were widely used (‘Gujrātī Joḍṇī’ 1866: 548–9). Nevertheless, the Parsis’ appropriation of the distinction between śudha (pure) and aśudha (impure) Gujarati based on the deployment of Persian and English words articulated a historical consciousness contingent on concession to the superiority of Sanskrit. Following the publication of Rev Joseph van Someran Taylor’s Gujarati grammar in 1867, Parsis increasingly conceded to the belief that Gujarati was the ārīyakulnī, sanskrutnī putrī (daughter of Aryanism and Sanskrit) by equating Parsi Gujarati with the ‘low’, colloquial nīḍar ḍaṭc (Niederdeutsch) and Hindu Gujarati with the standard, erudite, hoc ḍaṭc (Hochdeutsch) (‘Pārsī Gujrātī’ 1873: 214–15; ‘Revareṇḍ Mī.’ 1867: 293–4; ‘Gujrātī Bhāśā’ 1869: 628–9). Increasingly, Parsi writers abandoned Parsi Gujarati orthography now branded as khoṭī (wrong) or kacrā Gujrātī (garbage Gujarati), to follow the model of the Gujarati Vernacular Society’s frontrunners Narmadāśankar Lālśankar and Dalpatrām Dāhāyābhāi by substituting ર (ra) with ડ (ḍa) and ણ (ṇa); શ (śa) with સ (sa); and હ (ha) with શ (śa) (‘Parsee Guzrati’ 1875: 646). Consequently, the deployment of śa as in the Pārśī Nāṭak Maṇḍalī (Parsi Theatrical Club), Pārśī Gentlemen Amateurs Club and Pārśī Elphinstone Club conceded to the sa in Pārsī Stage Players. Read within a larger matrix of institutionalization, identity and power, the gradual elimination of Parsi

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orthography in theatre troupes’ names served to both de-parochialize the Parsi theatre from its Parsi moorings and correspondingly appeal to a wider public. By the 1870s, Parsi troupes had crossed Bombay’s shores to tour the subcontinent and beyond and had consequently increasingly begun to brand themselves through content and form as a pan-Asian theatrical phenomenon. Shifts in repertoire from Ancient Persian mythology to Arabian Nights tales that had broader appeal, paralleled the theatre’s shift in language (from Gujarati to Hindustani) and audience. Increasingly, the Parsi theatre catered to a new class of patrons; the wealthy Parsi merchants and Englisheducated reformists having given way to a growing industrial workforce for whom the theatre provided respite after the tedium of the working day.

SANSKRITIZATION It was in these circumstances that the Rāst’s editor Kekhuśro Navrojjī Kābrājī founded the Nāṭak Utejak Maṇḍalī (Society for the Amelioration of the Drama) that prohibited domestic help in ‘first class’ and excluded ‘troublemakers, children below the age of seven, and shoddily dressed individuals’ from its theatre, demonstrating the significance of class in the society’s establishment (‘The Guzrati Drama’ 1875: 177; Paṭel 1931: 161).5 In addition to these by-laws and its illustrious list of patrons, the society sought to distinguish itself from other ‘low’ Parsi troupes through its repertoire and language. Accordingly, on 3 November 1875, the society performed Harīścandra from the Hindu mythological Mahābhārata that had been adapted from Sanskrit to ‘pure’ Gujarati by Raṇchoḍbhāi Udayrām, the first non-Parsi playwright of the Parsi theatre. This first ‘perfect’ literary specimen of ancient Hindustan, ‘the birthplace of theatre’ and ‘pure’ Gujarati with its deployment of ‘correct’ orthography through for instance ળ (ḷa) as opposed to લ (la) was performed at the respectable Framjee Cowasjee Institute that had previously been used for scientific lectures and exhibitions (‘Mr Runchordbhai’s’ 1876: 465–6; ‘Harīścandra Nāṭak’ 1875: 714–15; ‘Harishchandra at’ 1875: 746–7). After months of training, ‘the first instance of the Parsees with their poor Guzerathi appearing in a vernacular much more correct as well as difficult than their own, and in styles and fashions as regards dress and manners quite foreign to them’ transpired to great acclaim (‘A Hundred’ 1975: 8). Although the actors were alleged to have confounded āne with āe (and), cha with ca (is), āvyũ with āvīũ (came) and āpyũś with āpīũ (gave), Harīścandra set a benchmark in Parsi theatrical repertoire, and was produced approximately 150 times on the Parsi stage. Udayrām and Kābrājī thus articulated not only a new Sanskritized Gujarati theatrical form but also new modes of cultural and religious consumption, inadvertently spearheading the Hindu mythological repertoire of Gopīcand, Naḷ Damayantī and Cītrasen Gandharva Nāṭak. Performed by such troupes as the Ārya Gurjar Nāṭak Maṇḍalī, the Ārya Nāṭako Tkarsh Maṇḍaḷī and the Āryagurjar Harīścandra Nāṭak Maṇḍaḷī, these plays would contribute in turn to Dayānand Sarasvatī’s enunciation that the Hindus be termed as Āryo and Hindustan as Āryavrut (‘Harishchandra …’ 1876: 5; Paṭel 1931: 290; ‘Aryans’ 1882: 680). The notion of Aryanism had thus transmuted from a nebulous Indo-European region to an unambiguous landlocked location, the ‘original’ home that was ‘inherently

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limited and sovereign’, of an ‘original’ Aryan people. The Parsis, foremost mediators between the rulers and the ruled, had thus unintentionally generated the space for a union predicated on ‘cultural artefacts of a particular kind’ (Anderson 2006: 4). In 1878, Udayrām, questioning his dependence on Parsi companies for the performance of his mythological adaptations, established the Gujarātī Nāṭak Maṇḍaḷī to expressly cater to the Gujarati Vania community. Consequently, at the company’s first performance of Lalītā Dukh Darśak at the Original Victoria Theatre, sanctimoniously correct refreshments such as milk were served by a Brahmin to gratify his company’s devout Hindu patrons (N.t. 1878: 301). Not dissimilarly, the Nāṭak Utejak Maṇḍalī announced in its advertisement for Sītāharaṇ on 27 October 1878, that its first- and second-class seats would be reserved solely for Hindus (N.t. II 1878: 735). Increasingly, the લ/la in Pārśī Nāṭak Maṇḍalī and Victoria Nāṭak Maṇḍalī gave way to the Sanskritized ળ/ḷa in Irānī Nāṭak Maṇḍaḷī, Zoroastrian Nāṭak Maṇḍaḷī and Victoria Nāṭak Maṇḍaḷī. These subtle cultural changes did not take place without resistance. When the Nāṭak Utejak Maṇḍalī performed Udayrām’s Lalitā Dukh Darśak, the Parsi press praised the undertaking as ‘far better than that of their Hindu peers’ while castigating the recent Hindu turn in genre. We used to have numerous plays such as Ghareṇā Pehrāvvānā Gerfāydā, Sāvakśānā Lagan, Pantujīnī Nīśāḷ, […]. In those days the Parsi theatre comprised of Parsi actors alone and its plays were expedient to Parsi matters. […] Those troupes that have foregone these domestic subjects for tales of gods and goddesses and fairies and monsters as these are popular amongst veśyo Hīndu prajā (low class/ mercantile Hindu publics) and therefore yield greater profits should be strongly castigated. (‘Social Plays’ 1883: 142) The distinction between Hindu and Parsi culture and the declamation of the perceived loss of the latter was preceded by a significant historical event. Following the implementation of the communal census of 1881, the miniscule size of the Parsi population exercised a tight grip on communal self-definition, provoking an increased consciousness of the community’s position as a minority in Hindustan. Simultaneously, numerous ‘anti-colonial Hindu newspapers’ such as The Gujarati began to criticize the Parsis for their ‘blind loyalty’ to the crown and for usurping all paid positions in the civil service (‘Race Animosity’ 1887: 434–5; ‘Increasing Antipathy’ 1889: 826–7). Branded as ‘Anti-Parsee Attitude’, these proclamations were not only fundamental in aggravating Parsi fears that they would lose their prized sociopolitical advantages due to their diminutive demography but were also signs of a slow yet seething revolution (‘Anti-Parsee’ 1888: 1332; ‘The Prevailing’ 1888: 1393).

ANTI-PARSEE ATTITUDE AND THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS As edicts for the right to self-rule grew progressively shriller and as disquiet turned to dread at the consequences of a Hindu nation, the Parsi press enunciated the controversial proposition that they follow the Muslim example of boycotting the ‘disloyal’ Indian National Congress (‘The Mahomedans’ 1888: 925).6 In the 1888

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Congress in Allahabad, one Hindu stood on behalf of 1,60,200 of his co-religionists. According to this model of electoral representation, half a Parsi could represent the 85,000-strong community. Instead, the Congress included seven Parsi representatives (‘Only “half ” …’ 1889: 711–12). This scheme of representative politics had a domino effect, transforming fields such as journalism, education, linguistics and the theatre. Accordingly, the year 1888 witnessed not only cries of ‘the Indian languages for the Indians’, a natural consequence of the cry of ‘India for the Indians’ but also a protracted conflict between the Gujarati Vernacular Society headed by the Nagar Brahmin Mahīpatrām Rūprām and the Parsis headed by the Rāst when the former accused the latter of spoiling the Gujarati language (‘The Battle’ 1889: 736–8; ‘Uncharitable Attack’ 1888: 217; ‘Parsee Authors’ 1888: 243). Our Hindu brethren [...] are moving heaven and earth to bring about a revolution in languages, just as, if allowed to have their own way, they would, we are afraid, bring about some sort of revolution in government. [...] [The Parsis] have not forgotten how badly they fared at the hands of their Hindu examiners in Gujarati during what may be called the pre-classical days of the University, and it has been the sad experience of scores of Parsee scholars to see all their attempts to distinguish themselves as Gujarati authors foiled by the implacable hostility of the purists of Guzerat who pique themselves on their superior attainments, and […] run down the language of the Parsee authors as a barbarous jargon. (‘The Battle’ 1889: 736–8) The disempowerment of the Parsis in politics thus paralleled their disempowerment in culture including linguistics. Hence, while Brahmin writers such as Manilal Dvivedi and Mansukhram Suryaram Tripathi increasingly satirized Parsi Gujarati, Hindu troupes such as the Ārya Subodh Nāṭak Maṇḍaḷī reprimanded Parsi troupes for their poor plots, songs and language that were ‘no better than garbage’ as they were mere mimics of the English (‘Native Drama’ 1888: 615–16; ‘Pārsī ane’ 1888: 646–7). As the Pakhvāḍiyā̃ nī Majhā (Weekly Entertainment) described, The Parsi thespians behave like Muslim servants in order to earn a living. […] Although they are Parsi by race, language and custom, these poor souls have to wear Muslim costumes each night to visit Parīstān (fairy lands) and Kabrastān (funeral grounds). The theatre is a tool for reforming the idiot, instead it has now become a tool to make idiots of the reformed. (‘Pārsī-Musalmān’ 1889: 343) The correlation of Parsi actors with variously Englishmen or Muslim servants epitomized the territorialization of theatre within increasingly fixed religious, racial and national boundaries, a process that would be palpably felt within the microcosm of the Alfred Nāṭak Maṇḍalī's playhouse.

S´  R ¯ I K RUHN . A VIJAY In 1885, the Alfred Nāṭak Maṇḍalī under the leadership of its enterprising Parsi manager Kāvasjī Pālanjī Khaṭāu followed the Nāṭak Utejak Maṇḍalī’s lead in performing Hindu mythological plays in ‘pure’ Gujarati. Nevertheless, on 8 February 1890, their Śrī Krushṇa Vijay, adapted from ‘Hindu legend’, was called off half way

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through its second performance. Although a police force manned Bombay’s Gaiety Theatre, a large crowd of ‘Hindus’ collected outside due to a requisition including 300 signatures advocating for the play’s injunction. The requisition, disseminated at a private meeting of several Gujarati Bhatia Hindus, censured the enactment by the infidel Parsis of their god Krishna. Consequently, although Śrī Krushṇa Vijay had been composed by ‘a famous and pious Hindu’ and had been privately performed before numerous ‘respectable Hindu men’, who ‘found nothing untoward in the representation’, Khaṭāu called off the play, sustaining major losses. Eventually, Khaṭāu publicly denounced ‘the manner in which, a number of staunch Hindu Vaishnavs [were] out to worsen the already strained relations between the Parsis and Hindus’ (‘The Drama’ 1890: 210). Nevertheless, like the Gujarati language, the Parsi theatre had incontrovertibly become entrenched in assertions over cultural property. By disallowing the Parsi actor to embody a Hindu mythological figure, to become the storyteller of a particular past, to perform as a witness to what had become a particular community’s history, the South Asian theatrical public sphere had begun contending with a compelling ethnic, religious and linguistic power struggle. In these political climes, Parsi dramatists voiced fears of their cultural delegitimization through plays that romanticized a long lost rural idyll. The juxtaposition of the virtuous Parsi village girl and her wicked, Anglicized urban sister would become the predominant theme in the Pārsī Sansārī Nāṭak (Parsi Social Play), a genre that enjoyed great popularity among Parsis in the late nineteenth century. Plays such as Bahmanjī Kābrājī’s Gāmrenī Gorī rebuked characters such as the fashionable, quick-talking Kāus who had forgotten their mother tongue. Instead, spectators showed their praises for pastoral characters such as Tehemuldārū who communicated in the now colloquial twang of Parsi Gujarati with its replacement of ca with śa and o with ā̃.

HISTORY WRITING Concurrently, during this period of high nationalism, an increased fervour for regional and national history writing prompted a stream of chronicles on the Parsi theatre and the Gujarati language. Hence, for example, Krishnalal Mohanlal Jhaveri in his Further Milestones in Gujarati Literature averred that many Parsi plays were ‘played in Urdu, which sounded better in the mouth of a Parsi actor than his habitually faulty Gujarati’ (Jhaveri 1924: 185). Additionally, he commended Kekhuśro Kābrājī’s attempts to ‘lean towards pure or Hindu Gujarati’ even as his brother Bahmanjī was ‘without that redeeming feature’ (Jhaveri 1924: 266). Subsequently, the theatre historian Hemendra Nath Dasgupta declaimed: Dramas not being taken by Gujrati authors, the Parsi authors in search of pure artistic expressions for their dramas began to use Parsi-Gujrati as distinguished from pure Gujrati and the Gujrati language thus received a set-back although the pure Gujrati was now and again resorted to in amateur theatres in Gujrat. […] The Parsi shows again differed a great deal from the traditions of the Gujrati stage. Their gaudy and dazzling scenery and the vehement acting did not suit the tastes of the Gujrati people. (Dasgupta 1944: 178–9)

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Such views on the Gujarati language and the Parsi theatre had a strong effect on the cultural and linguistic policies of the burgeoning Indian nation state. According to V. Sebastian, although Gandhi did not approve of the extreme Sanskritization of Gujarati, the Gujarati Vernacular Society’s negative views on Parsi Gujarati heavily informed his efforts to standardize the language (Sebastian 2009: 98). The Gujarat Vidyapith, a university set up by Gandhi to boycott British institutions, published the Gujarati dictionary Jodanikosh that was eventually deployed by the state government as standard Gujarati. This standard was grounded in Gandhi’s attempts to develop a cosmopolitan form acceptable to all sections of Gujarati-speaking society, that is non-Hindus, even as it privileged the orthography used by Ahmedabad’s high-caste Hindus. Consequently, Gandhi’s invention of an ostensibly neutral orthographic norm through the Jodanikosh functioned in practice as a blueprint for the exclusion of particular authors, periods, localities and histories, thus limiting the geography of how one wrote of and in Gujarati and reproducing visual systems of discrimination. Uncoincidentally therefore, Parsis were increasingly disparaged or excluded from regional and national theatre histories. Indian anthologies such as Chandra Bhan Gupta’s The Indian Theatre (1954), Sisir Kumar Das’ A History of Indian Literature (1991) and Hasmukh Baradi’s History of Gujarati Theatre (2003) among innumerable others posited notions of cultural purity and impurity contingent on the deployment of Sanskrit, ‘the combination of Indian and European [… having to] be discarded’ for a national theatre to reach its ultimate consummation (Das 1991: 176). The exclusion of Parsis and Muslims in Indian theatre histories through the ‘communalization of knowledge’ has been traced by Somnath Gupt and Kathryn Hansen. As Hansen remarks, When one goes to study the history of the Parsi theater, however, the picture derived from the secondary sources in Indian languages (and works in English based upon them) is highly distorted by communal sentiments reflecting religious and linguistic alignments that postdate the heyday of the Parsi theater in Bombay. […] A selective presentation of data characterizes almost all of the accounts, impeding a correct assessment of the composite character of the Parsi theater. (Hansen 2001: 44–5) Despite or perhaps because of this significant intervention in redefining Parsi theatre as a shared site of Hindu, Muslim and Parsi involvement, Hansen, possibly translating from Hindi sources, reduces orthographic variation in favour of what at first glance appears to be a depoliticized orthography (see Hansen 2003). Thus, although the alleged father of the Parsi theatre, Kekhuśro Navrojjī Kābrājī delineated his own name in English as Kaikhosro N. Kabraji and although his descendants still take the surname Kabraji, Hansen, interpreting the ji as a suffix denoting respect, refers to him as Kaikhushro Navrojji Kabra. The elimination of the ‘ji’, an act that gains in force through repetition by other scholars, thus transmutes the name of a seminal figure in subcontinental theatre history. Similarly, Edaljī Jamśedjī Khorī, transcribed as Edulji J. Khory by himself in English is rendered into Edalji Khori, Behrā̃mjī Fardunjī Marzbān into Behram Fardun Marzban, and Kāvasjī Pālanjī Khaṭāu, denoted in English as Cowasjee Khatow (an Anglicized orthography retained

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by his descendants) into the Indianized Kavas Khatau. In keeping with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic principle that all words bear histories of their past usage (1986: 89), Hansen’s orthography paradoxically re-enacts the nationalist normativization of orthography that reduces Arabic, Persian and/or English to foreign influence. The tripartite minoritization of Parsis in the theatre, theatre history and nationalist politics thus mirrors their minoritization through forms of linguistic address, performative acts that gain strength through citationality. Orthography as meta-commentary reflexively demonstrates the impossibility of historical neutrality or in other words, the subjectivity of the narrative to which the historian bears witness. The mediated reality of the staging of history is thus obscured through the illusion of orthographic continuity, semantic uniformity and a deep-rooted, instinctive ‘common sense’, the accumulated sediments of years of laboured rehearsal. If a commitment to the publishing imperative of lucidity sequesters minor speech from history, tumultuous questions surface regarding the performance of history writing. Can writing history reflexively, a faltering, stumbling writing that privileges doing over denoting and bears witness to the indeterminacy of language, provide a more plural account of the staging of the past or are the endless mediations that compose the relationship between the speaker and those spoken to impossible to contain in linguistically reflexive theatre histories? Is it possible to interrogate how letters appear on the page, the bricks and mortar of writing that inevitably barricades other people and other worlds or are we contractually bound in the making of a science to a selective cleansing of chronicle and memory?

NOTES 1. Formerly a Portuguese word, a comprador is a collaborative agent mediating between European colonial business houses and the local population. 2. The Gujarati alphabet is one of several local variants of Nagari. Developed from the tenth century onwards, it established itself during colonial times as a regional script for literary reproduction. 3. For example, Fardunji Marzban, the founder of the first Gujarati newspaper Mumbai Samācār, bought a wooden press and enlisted the help of Behramji Jeejeebhoy who had moulded the first Gujarati types for the English Bombay Courier. Dalal, Hormazdyar Shahpurshah. Adi Marzban – A Gentle Genius, 9–16. 4. The Director of Public Instruction stated that several Parsis of ‘great abilities’ had failed the matriculation examination for ‘want of a proper acquaintance with “Hindoo” Gujarati’ (Isaka 2009). 5. Theatre tickets were usually divided between box, stalls, gallery and pit or alternatively between first, second, third and fourth classes. 6. Then merely an organization fighting for greater representation of Indians in government.

CHAPTER 3.7.2

Korean Masked Dance Drama and a Historiography of Emotions HYUNSHIK JU

INTRODUCTION When I entered the open-air theatre created for the performance of Yangju Byeolsandae Nori, a form of Korean masked dance drama, in September 2009, it was drizzling. It began to rain more heavily as the actors played the roles of a grandfather (Shinhalahbi) and a grandmother (Miyalhalmi). The scene presents a dying old woman abused by her violent husband; a ritual follows to comfort the spirit of the unjustly killed Miyalhalmi. Miyalhalmi does not speak any lines in the performance; it is as though she is dumb. Her silence coupled with the heavy rain allowed me to perceive her pain more powerfully. This perception may also have been a response to her anguished body, her distressed mind and the sad mood of the setting amid the rain. Altogether, I experienced a series of manifestations of Miyalhalmi’s inexpressible suffering. However, this experience was directly linked to my feeling as a member of a modern, twenty-first-century audience. In the eighteenth century, the scene would have been followed by a festival, making Miyalhalmi the catalyst for celebrating well-being and abundance in the community. Thus, the past performance of Yangju Byeolsandaen Nori aimed to provide participants with a sense of solidarity and unity through this scene of a dying woman, in contrast to the sense of compassion I felt for the dead through the modern performance. Emotion is culturally constructed and temporally determined. External social factors influence the way affect works physically and cognitively and, simultaneously, affect can produce a new cultural emotional pattern. During the eighteenth century in Korea, masked dance dramas were performed at what this essay shows was a particular moment of social and political pressure for transition and change. Understanding this perspective through the lens of an emerging cultural emotional pattern could inspire a fundamental reappraisal of premodern Korean

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theatre’s history, challenging the prevailing view that situates historiography within chronicles of the ‘facts’ of historical subjects’ recorded actions. To my knowledge, previous research has not paid particular attention to the history of emotions within studies of Korean masked dance drama. Drawing on numerous aspects of the drama’s affects, emotions and atmosphere may provide a clearer picture of the new historiographic narrative. Erin Hurley notes: Questions of feeling have always been central to theatre, from the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s identification of catharsis as the central aim of tragedy in his Poetics (fifth century BCE) to the twentieth-century German playwright, director, and theorist Bertolt Brecht’s technique of interleaving emotional response with rational or analytical response in his Epic Theatre. Feeling runs like a red thread through the history of theatrical production. (2010: 2; emphasis added) If we accept that emotions are vital to the production of theatre – where the aim is to affect, move and sensitize the audience – a history of emotion tied to the times, and to the place, is necessary to understand the past, present and future of premodern Korean theatre. This historiography will pave the way for articulation of the descriptive backbone of the Korean theatre, with its own distinctive aesthetics of catharsis, emotional memory and alienation effects.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND A historiography of emotions in Korean masked performance has not been properly addressed in published studies of the dramas. Most Korean theatre scholars have merely overemphasized laughter or humour and little attention has been paid to the meaning of sorrow and tears. However, emotion is currently being investigated by many Korean researchers in other disciplines for the sociocultural dynamics that it implies. Current research focused on emotion within the Honam Study Centre at Chonnam National University in Korea highlights that ‘emotion has been regarded as one distinctively associated with an individual or a natural impulse. However, we need to note the historical and social aspects of emotion’ (2017: 12). Social interaction among people begets emotion, thus emotion should always be defined as being relational and oriented in the context of interactivity (12). The centre claims that even when emotion could be apprehended as an individual and a natural impulse, it is social, thereby presupposing a social nature as its occurrence condition. Nevertheless, this sociality of emotion is not necessarily harmonious. Rather, the sociality of emotion is based on the realization of a dynamic sociality engaged with an ever-changing social life both in compatibility and conflict with others (14). As a result, the historical event may be read not as ‘a relatively uniform and homogeneous mass but as the assemblage of microscopic and heterogeneous events’ (88). Emotion is classified as both structured and structuring, a product and producer of historical social worlds. The view that cultural emotions have their own history correlating to their context in space and time aligns with recent Western scholarship. As the North American philosopher of theatre Darren Gobert states: ‘critics in different times and places have meant different things when they have written of the emotions in

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general or pity and fear in particular – even if they have been unaware that their presuppositions about these terms were constituted’ (2012: 110). Furthermore, a history of emotions is as much about emergent social power and counter-power as it is about cultural codes of emotions. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘structure of feeling’, Lisa Peschel makes a convincing argument to infuse a history of emotions with change in social structure: ‘Structure of feeling’ not as a term but as a methodology: as a way to isolate and identify certain characteristics of the affective experiences they are trying to analyze. […] By [Williams’s] own definition, structures of feeling are generated by emergent social formations such as new social classes. […] Therefore, the structure of feeling exists in an alternative or oppositional relationship to hegemonic structures of power. (2012: 161–2) How then does the structure of feeling in the emergence of a transitional historical phase configure theatrical affective experiences for participants? Do actors and audiences in theatres and performances simply share a similar affect through changes in social experience? To answer these questions, we must consider ‘emotion as the performative’. Benno Gammerl situates emotions as ‘liminal phenomena […] between the individual and the social, inside and outside, the actor and objective dimensions, norms and experiences’, thereby discussing ‘the diachronic sequence of different sequences of different emotional styles, thus holding one style to be characteristic for a particular period’ (2012: 162). The subject is in ‘problematic opposition between autonomy and social constrictions’: in other words, the ‘subject’s decisions are neither completely free nor completely determined. Instead, each person has at her disposal a scope of agency that is confined or widened to varying degrees depending on the specific context’ (167). This perspective presents the concept of performativity as primary, as agency not only imitates normalized emotional styles but also invents them: If such performances happen, as we assume, they do, while a multiplicity of emotional styles can potentially be applied, then they can not only reproduce but also transform one of them or mingle several, and thus produce hybrid emotional patterns and practices. (Gammerl 2012: 168) In sum, in theatre with a special mood as the background, unarticulated affects occur in our bodies. The effects on theatrical participants can be interpreted as manifestations of cultural emotional styles correlating to the social space outside the performance space. Simultaneously, innovative emotional styles stem from new value through alternative social formations. I wish to note these emotional styles’ liminality – as they vary with the times in theatre history, involving the relationship of intertwined bodies and minds, nature and culture, and potentialities and passivity.

THE PERFORMANCE CONTEXT Korean scholars assume that Korean masked dance drama originated in ancient religious ceremonies involving masks, singing and dancing (Kim [1933] 2003: 59).1 According to historical records, from around the first century CE, the start

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of the epoch of the three kingdoms (a period of Korean history involving the three kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla), Geommu, a sword dance, and Cheoyongmu, an exorcism dance to drive out demons and pray for peace at the annual court banquet, were performed by masked individuals (Kim [1933] 2003: 65–94). In the early Goryeo dynasty, which in 918 at the end of the Silla era unified the divided kingdoms of the Korean peninsula, Narye, called GyedongDaeNarye, a ceremony to defeat wicked ghosts at court, was introduced from China.2 Narye consisted of two elements: first, a ritual to expel all the evils thought to be the source of catastrophes and disasters, and second, Nahee, which involved singing, dancing and multiple plays, all performed simultaneously. In 1694, performances of this ceremony were officially ended (Hwang 2015: 104). However, SandaeNarye began to appear at the end of the Goryeo dynasty and developed during the Joseon dynasty, persisting beyond the official abolition of GyedongDaeNarye (Lee 2015: 251–2).3 During the Joseon dynasty, sandae, a kind of stage or platform, was erected on the way to Hanyang – the old name for Seoul, the present capital of South Korea – and performances were ordered to welcome Chinese ambassadors. These were called sandaenori (sandae plays) or sandaegeuk (sandae theatre). The Joseon dynasty additionally established SandaeDogam, a government office to manage the performances and supervise the performers (Kim [1933] 2003: 103–12). After that time, sandae theatre or plays were mainly performed to entertain important foreign visitors or as celebrations of court events or seasonal holidays. SandaeNarye was a large-scale national event that extended beyond the royal family, reaching the common people; however, it was officially stopped with the abolition of SandaeDogam in 1784 due to its unfeasibility and excessive costs (Hwang 2015: 105). In the eighteenth century, after the abolition of SandaeDogam and SandaeNarye, performers settled in the various regional areas of Korea, facilitating the formation of masked dance drama that has continued into the twenty-first century in its respective regions (Lee 2007). The performers, called Gwangdae, Suchuk, Jaein and Sadang, preserved sandae theatre and simultaneously developed it according to the characteristics of each region (Jeon 1998: 82). I focus here on the Yangju Byeolsandaenori drama of Gyeonggi-do province. Korean scholars believe the no longer practiced sandae theatre of Aeogae and Sajik in Seoul, to be the original sandaenori; they thus named it bon (original) sandaenori. The sandaenori of Yangju, a region in the north of Seoul, is believed to preserve the original features of bon sandaenori. Scholars added the letter byeol to Yangju Sandaenori, meaning a line in Korean (Lee 2007: 83). I examine Yangju Byeolsandaenori in creating a historiography of Korean masked dance drama because through the Nori, we may easily determine how sandae theatre’s prototype has been preserved and altered since the eighteenth century.

YANGIU BYEOLSANDAENORI The drama was originally performed at Sajikdan, an altar for village rites below Bulgok mountain in Yangju and later on the lawn in the mountain’s pine forest (Jeong 2000: 30). Performances were held primarily on Buddha’s birthday in April, on Dano – the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar year – and on seasonal holidays (Lee 2007: 33).

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FIGURE 3.7.2.1:  Yangju Byeolsandaenori’s masks, 2015. Clockwise from top left: Omjung, Mokjung, Waejangnyeo, Wanbo, Miyalhalmi, Shinhalahbi, Chwibari and Nojang. Courtesy of the National Folklore Museum, Korea.

Stock characters include a number of monks or religious figures such as Sangjwa, Omjung and Nojang; a female bar manager, Waejangnyeo; a prostitute, Aesadang; a young female shaman, Somu; Yangbans, who were members of the privileged class of Joseon society, such as Sannim and his sons; the Yangbans’ servants, Maltuki and Soettugi; a doctor, Shinjubu; a dealer in shoes, Shinjangsu; a military officer, Podobujang; a grandfather, Shinhalahbi; a grandmother Miyalhalmi; the children of Shinhalahbi and Miyalhalmi, such as Doggi and his sister; and a monkey (Figure 3.7.2.1). Structurally, the drama is divided into episodes called madangs denoted by the characters’ names, for example: the Nojang Madang, the Sannim Madang and the Shinhalahbi and Miyalhalmi Madang. The episodes typically deal with the corrupt monk Nojang; satire on the Yangbans; or domestic tragedy as seen in the Shinhalahbi and Miyalhalmi Madang. Before beginning the dramas, participants traditionally celebrated a temple ritual offering food to their ancestors’ spirits to avoid misfortune and bring good luck. A street parade with musical instruments and dramatic sketches shifted the action to the performance space. Following the madangs, the townspeople – both performers and audience members – held a festival. Thus, the entire event lasted from evening to dawn of the following day (Lee 2007: 56–165).

HEUNG, HAN AND MUSIM: EMOTIONS OF YANGJU BYEOLSANDAENORI Yangju Byeolsandaenori’s treatment of the emotions of heung, han and musim can be extended to the emotions of other regions’ dance dramas. The question of how the Nori presents these three emotions, codified into the Korean cultural context of the late

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Joseon period, is thought-provoking in the historiography of emotions in this period. A premodern Korean mask dance drama is thought to have been a truly exciting, exhilarating performance.4 The audience does not feel fear or pity in the Aristotelian sense when tragic scenes are performed. Rather, they find it amusing and fun. This is one of the essential characteristics of Korean mask dance dramas, a joy described by Koreans using the word heung. Heung is thus a mix of emotions including excitement, cheer and happiness. However, these words do not fully explain the aesthetic connotation of heung. As noted by Korean literary scholar Shin, the principal, inherent aesthetic of heung involves rising emotion, interest in the mundane world, playful elements and comfort without conflict or tension (1999: 98–124). Folklorist Kim’s opinion that ‘there are various farcical elements in the Korean masked dance dramas’ (2001: 87) makes an argument for considering heung one of the main emotions in the drama, noting that the dramas offer copious descriptions of farce ‘dependent on the characters’ actions and full of mistakes […] raw emotional expression […] exaggeration and distractions […] in an unrealistic and accidental situation’ (83–6). Yangju Byeolsandaenori incorporates such farcical scenes, particularly in the Nojang Madang and Sannim Madang. The character Nojang is a Buddhist high priest. In the madang, two Somus, young female shamans, appear and begin dancing around Nojang. He is enticed by them and approaches, hiding his face behind his fan, attempting to see their faces and seduce them; however, they reject his advances. He is angry at this, takes off his Buddhist robes, goes gambling and loses his money. The Somus take pity on him, give him his robes and accept his advances. Delighted, Nojang does a dance with them. After dancing, the shoe dealer Shinjangsu suddenly appears with a monkey on his back, bargains with Nojang over the price of shoes for the Somus but fails to sell his shoes. Angry, Shinjangsu lets his monkey tempt Nojang’s Somus, and it rubs itself against the women’s bodies. Shinjangsu rebukes the monkey for its obscene act, and it and Shinjangsu disappear. A Chwibari, a type of monk, then appears and attempts to seduce the Somus. Taking off and throwing his robes away, Nojang hits the monk with his fan to keep his women. However, in the fighting, the Chwibari overcomes Nojang’s resistance, hidden between the Somus’ legs; he wins one woman, and Nojang disappears offstage. After that, the Chwibari and Somu have a son, indicated by a small doll, and they raise the child (see Figure 3.7.2.2). Despite the potential of this scene for satirizing a corrupt Buddhist monk, the aim of the performance is not to criticize Nojang for violating religious norms. Rather, the scenes are staged with bodily exaggeration, sudden changes of time and space and tangential actions performed under unrealistic circumstances by the stereotypical, funny characters. This reduces the weight of external reality and allows the participants to enjoy the performance. The bodily actions of the scenes are not elaborate or in depth; rather, they are rough and intrusive, showing a playful instinct combined with freedom from morality. This state, similar to ‘painting the town red’, creates a vivid picture of heung’s highly contagious, extended sense of excitement and joy. In the Sannim Madang, the Yangban characters – members of the privileged class of Joseon society – are compared to animals and housed in a pigsty, undermining the authority of privilege. Thus, the onlookers, who were primarily the general public, could express and resolve their complaints. However, the criticism does not appear

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FIGURE 3.7.2.2:  Chwibari, his baby and the audience members, Society for Preservation of Yangju Byeolsandaenori, 2009. Image: Hyunshik Ju.

sharp because ‘the distorted, exaggerated, and unreal figures of the Yangbans tell the truth […] that although they wear gentleman’s robes and an official hat, the upper classes are naked humans and penniless people as well’ (Kim 2001: 166). The satire was naturally linked to ‘actively revealing and opening the self to others […] creating an active relationship with others’ (Shin 1999: 108) regardless of social hierarchy. Thus, the emotional trajectory of participants’ high spirits – namely the rising heung – may function to facilitate active self-awareness and openness and at the same time collectively enhance the ludic spirit. The second emotion, han, relates primarily to sorrow, but also implies a variety of associated emotions, such as resentment, remorse, regret and resignation. Unlike

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each individual, simple emotion, according to Shin, han is necessarily accompanied by the ongoing experience of pain (1999: 257). Therefore, pain is an essential element for han. Pain as a negative emotion appears to be internalized indirectly, compressed and condensed. This is in contrast to heung, a positive emotion expressed directly, that is extended and divergent. The Shinhalahbi and Miyalhalmi Madang introduced at the beginning of my essay unpacks this complex emotional state of han. As I watched a modern performance of this Madang in September 2009, while her husband Shinhalahbi hurled a bone at her, Miyalhalmi was dying in the rain. Her grunt of pain and silence in the heavy rain caused her emotions to fall and withdraw; nevertheless, the audience felt her pain more actively. Miyalhalmi represents the Korean woman obedient to her husband; at the same time she is abused by him due to her old age and her loss of sex appeal. Her pain is neither temporary nor fleeting, because she has obeyed and been oppressed by her husband for decades, all her life. Her groans, heard over the rain, represent han, a pain endured over a long period of time. Nevertheless, han is not only repressed emotions but also the dissolution of these repressed emotions. This experience of dissolution is not to be confused with the state of mind in which the causes of han have been resolved. In this momentary experience of dissolution, the causes of han still remain, that is, there has been no alleviation in pain. Rather, the experience of dissolution is felt after the pain has maximized. When this pain is at its maximum, emotion becomes dissoluble and a kind of vacuum of han is created. As Shin explains, this emotional experience is a denial or reaction to the repressions and leads to disappearing self-consciousness (1999: 259–64). Therefore, paradoxically, the emotional state could be the point where, in the eighteenth century, the scene would have been followed by a festival for the regional community. In other words, the emotional state of han is the one that leads most naturally to the religious festival, as taking the participant to a different state of consciousness. Finally, musim refers to the emotional state of a dispassionate observer. It is based on the loneliness of one separated from his or her world and reality. However, this emotional loneliness is transformed into a mystic union with Mother Nature. This is similar to the emotional state of the sublime. As Shin notes, ‘musim, rather than expressing emotion directly and instantly, tries to transcend all sorts of human emotions. […] Musim is a kind of mental condition beyond distinction of the ego and non-ego or self and external objects as much as possible. […] It is experienced in an isolated personal dimension’ (1999: 482–3). In the Mokjung Madang, hope for living in Mother Nature is conveyed through the song entitled Baekgu Taryeong (a classic Korean ballad for a white gull), sung by Wanbo and Mokjungs: A white gull, do not fly in a jumping way I am not going to catch you My king wants you, then I have followed you Beautiful five willows and a view of spring Riding a white horse, do I go flower-viewing? (Lee 1997: 27; translation by author)

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Contrasted with heung’s vibrancy and han’s desperation, this scene invokes a peaceful and stable emotion by identifying the singers themselves with the gull. The gull is a symbol of yielding oneself to nature; the performers thus convey a sense of freedom to live with objects outside themselves, rather than remaining trapped in the mundane world. By uniting subjects into objects, the scene presents another sort of emotional state in the drama: stillness, tranquillity, serenity and idleness, similar to the philosophy of Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism.

UNDERSTANDING AFFECT IN KOREAN MASKED DANCE DRAMA The three emotions of heung, han and musim – and the intersection between them – play a key role in understanding Korean mask dance dramas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Heung is based on the emotions of pleasure, joy and excitement; musim of aloof detachment; han of pain, sorrow and resentment. Whereas heung and musim are linked to positive emotions, han is linked to negative emotions. That is, heung is grounded in the mundane world and the enthusiasm to openly build relationships with others; musim involves the positive emotions of living with Mother Nature; and han conveys avoidance of seeking relationships with others in response to frustrating reality. Heung is therefore representative of open emotions, musim of subliminal emotions and han of repressed emotions. More importantly, drawing upon Shin’s insight, ‘the three emotions have a flexible relationship in that they cross each other’s territory’ (1999: 593). At the point where han is maximized, we can see the aspect of positively affirming reality according to resigning oneself due to the maximization of han, and such acceptance of reality is easily transformed into an amusing tendency. There is heung in the centre. […] Also, at the point where heung is maximized, the ecstatic state of heung’s excitement can encounter the self-surrender of musim. Further, even when han is maximized, it can encounter the state of musim, the absence of worldly desires. (594) Ultimately, then, heung, han and musim are not independent emotional areas, but parts of an undivided whole that cannot be separated into specific, limited emotional expressions. Why is this important? Korean masked dance drama has been performed since the eighteenth century, following the abolition of SandaeDogam in 1784 and the two major wars that revealed the incompetence of the privileged class of the Joseon dynasty: the Japanese invasion of Korea from 1592 to 1599 and the Manchu invasion of Korea from 1636 to 1637. Due to the transformation from a government-led performance to an independent performance by and for participants disappointed with state leadership, the drama grew more secular. Originally, sandae theatre, thought to date from the end of the Goryeo dynasty into the early phase of the Joseon dynasty in the fourteenth century, was believed to focus on monks violating Buddhist commandments, as in the Nojang Madang. Buddhism, the national ideology of the Goryeo dynasty, was a natural target of criticism during the Joseon dynasty, whose

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ideology was influenced by Confucianism. The travesty of monks was introduced and prioritized in the drama. Thus, sandae theatre contributed to the growth beyond religious drama of Narye, a ceremony to defeat wicked ghosts at court. As a reaction to the two major invasions of the Joseon dynasty, the critical focus of sandae theatre is believed to have widened from monks to social figures, especially the privileged Yangbans group or patriarchal husbands. In fact, full-fledged social and domestic scenes, such as the Sannim Madang and the Shinhalahbi and Miyalhalmi Madang, were added at this time and have been further developed since the eighteenth century, establishing the drama in the form preserved to the present time. What were the times like in the eighteenth century? In the late Joseon period, political and social changes were extreme. During this era, ‘slaves revolted against the dynasty, middle class people including businessmen appeared as an alternative class, the Yangban class suddenly fell, and drifting people deprived of their homes were abundant’ (Yu 1997: 72). In a climate of historical change in Joseon society, art forms such as Pansori (classic Korean opera), Kkokttugakssigeuk (classic Korean puppet theatre), Sasulsijo (a form of Korean classic poem with no restrictions on length of the first two verses) and Korean masked dance drama flourished. However, despite mounting resistance against the upper class, performers needed sponsors for their performances due to their poor financial situation. Independent actors known as Gwangdae, who wandered the nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were patronized by the palace, local governmental offices and Yangbans (Lee 2007: 131). Yangju Byeolsandaenori was no exception: although the townspeople participated as actors and audiences, they had to ask Yangbans for help to hold the village festival, which involved heavy costs. How then could performers present their dramas under these circumstances? In the Sannim Madang, Sannim, a privileged man, eventually brings Maltuki, his servant, to trial for insulting him; Soettugi, the servant’s friend and himself a servant, bribes the privileged man, and the servant is freed. In the Shinhalahbi and Miyalhalmi Madang, a ritual for the dead woman performed by her children leads participants to a cheerful town festival. In short, heung indicates an energetic and happy state, but does not necessarily imply that the drama contains exclusively bright and light aspects. The han elements of sorrow, pain and resentment are implicit in the heung of the drama. Han in the drama undergoes a similar transformation. Participants feel the severe sadness in the depths of their mind, but it triggers exaggeratedly eruptive emotions, including heung. Furthermore, a state of musim, conveyed with Baekgu Taryeong, might not be simply a desire for life in Mother Nature, because such desire for serenity implicitly embraces emotions, and is entangled with suffering from disillusionment with reality and, possibly, faked excitement in reaction to it. In short, participants may be simultaneously joyful, sad and uninterested, sometimes pleased but frustrated and sometimes maintaining stillness to forget their pain. Let us consider the state of the period and how performers sponsored by the Yangbans could challenge or overthrow the society of the upper class with their drama, or how participants suppressed by the incompetent, unjust Yangbans could endure their cumulative sadness. The intersection of the three emotions is necessary to fully understand the emotions of the times. The converging feelings of joyfulness

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and stress, disinterest and passion, excitement and tranquillity may have been the emergent structure of feeling, or the performative, constructed emotional style, as a bodily, affective reaction to the chaotic era and its new social formations. Borrowing the Honam Study Centre’s viewpoint, the converging feelings represent a kind of emotional field facilitated by the public sphere at that time, when people stood against authoritarian power (2017: 46). The emotional landscape of the late Joseon period thus provides an illuminating discussion on ‘the emotional modernity’ (Honam Study Center 2017: 16), displaying the lower classes’ enlightenment in terms of an emotional practice for questioning the existing social cultural norms, prioritizing freedom and formal equality.

AFFECT AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE Robin Bernstein’s discussion of integrating theatre history and affect studies through an exploration of the concept of ‘shame’ highlights a key cultural difference in the Western approach to individual affect, especially as represented through methodbased realism. Bernstein suggests that actors worry about mistakes in performance and ‘are all too aware that audiences may laugh inappropriately, heckle, kvetch, cough, snore, fight, make out, eat, drink, drug, text, get bored, get offended, walk out quietly, or walk out unquietly’ (2012: 215). In the final section of this essay, I briefly compare and contrast the shame-avoiding emphasis of Western theatrical realism (2012) and the heung, han and musim-focused Korean masked dance drama, suggesting that in doing so we can approach an exciting cross-cultural historiographic enquiry: emotional entanglements as historical variation. As I have previously explained, the disappearance of the self at moments of heung, han and musim are different from each other (Shin 1999: 590–1). However, the disappearance of the self which is the common ground of the three emotions is more possible when they become entangled. This performative effect of undivided emotional practice may be contrasted then with the concept of catharsis based on the individual awareness of self-consciousness as a citizen and not on the disappearance of the self. The disappearance of the self is contrasted with method-based realism based on shame. In Korean masked dance dramas, the intentional acting mistakes of performers – to make an audience laugh and boost community participation – are encouraged rather than regarded as shameful incidents. Moreover, because the emotional practice of shame during the Joseon dynasty was influenced by the Confucian culture’s role as state ideology, Korean masked dance dramas’ questioning of the ruling power was implicit in a process of disengaging shame from theatrical practices. In Korean ethicist Kim’s words (2017), an individual’s identity in the dynasty could be defined by the relationship with the groups to which the individual belonged. That is, according to Confucian thought, selfhood is a part of one family, and a family system is a part of one dynasty. As a result, parents are to children as husband is to wife and king is to subjects. The fundamental concern of the Confucian culture is in how we can become a true human being in such a relational network. This thought focuses not on opposition or confrontation but on moderation or harmony between things. Therefore, if one person violates the normative

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moderation and harmony for maintaining community, he or she feels shame and is blamed by others. In sum, the emotional practice of shame during the communitycentred Joseon dynasty could be employed as a political means for controlling private morality (Kim 2017: 224–7). This is different from the emotional process of shame which Western realism associates with its theatricality. Not engaging but disengaging in a feeling of shame is the motivating power of theatricality in Korean masked dance dramas as it functions in tension with prevailing ideologies such as Confucianism. In conclusion, the dramas’ performers and audiences forget being themselves through heung, han and musim and their entanglements, thereby creating a space where the audiences play along with the performers in spaces beyond reality. It counteracts the effects of feeling shame for supporting the dominant power of the Joseon dynasty. Such a historiographic hypothesis of the affect created by the intersection of emotional entanglements might be key to understanding the acting style of these Korean performances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These days, the orientations of freedom from the structure of feeling, the intersection of heung, han and musim, no longer pulsate with life. How can we re-pulsate such an emotional style? Above all, I am sure that the time will come for us to recognize a newly appearing social power or the potentiality and constriction of agencies: it will be another starting point in the history of Korean masked dance dramas with a refreshing emotional style.

NOTES 1. The content and titles of all Korean books and articles referenced in this essay have been translated into English by the author, and Korean words have been transliterated according to the official Korean language Romanization system released by South Korea’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2000. However, it is important to remember that many Korean words have no exact English equivalent. 2. This date is given from the Western Gregorian calendar. The Goryeo dynasty lasted from 918 to 1392. 3. The Joseon dynasty lasted from 1392 to 1910. 4. According to an interview with Sung-tae Kim, who was present at the scenes of performance of Yangju Byeolsandaenori from 1913 to 1914, when he was six or seven years old, all people in Yangju exulted in the performance (Seo 1987: 50). While this is evidence from a much later period, it might suggest the emotional state the performance aroused in the townspeople of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER 3.8

Rhizomes and Palimpsests: Theatre Histories across Cultures: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

Envisaging new models of historiography through the dual concepts of the rhizome with its subterranean roots and shoots, and the palimpsest – the artefact created from the process of inscription, erasure and reinscription – offers ways of addressing what Khalid Amine, in the last of our paired essays, contends are ‘rising demands for further democratizing theatre historiography as an academic discipline’. Both Amine in his ‘Decolonizing Theatre History in the Arab World (The Case of the Maghreb)’ and Magnus Thor Thorbergsson in ‘Erased Trails: Investigating Icelandic-Canadian Theatre History’ draw attention to theatre cultures which have been effectively unhistoried, in the latter case perhaps in part because the spread and complexity of the experiences interwoven within these theatrical exchanges and movements resist neat categories of nation and culture. Amine’s essay emphasizes larger political questions about the unequal relationship between the West and the postcolonial ‘Global South’. But further democratizing international scholarly opportunities for the dissemination of ‘peripheral’ and ‘minor’ theatre cultures raises other thorny issues about the academy and academic publishing and the economics of what is or is not permitted to enter the wider public sphere. Both authors are consciously local in their focus, but at first sight at least, the essays operate at different scales. From his Moroccan standpoint, Amine contemplates the landscape of the Maghreb – configured now as five countries spread out over North Africa – with millennia-old histories of invasion, settlement and reconquest. Thorbergsson’s Iceland is a small island nation in the North Atlantic, also disrupted by invasion, but with a population and cultural economy significantly vulnerable to geological and meteorological turbulence. His historiography shapes a theatre history driven by these environmental factors so that spatially the ‘local’ is never fixed and identity is in a constant process of renegotiation, as patterns of migration create the transitory, communal and peripheral hybrid of Icelandic-Canadian theatre. As he points out, this means that the standard toolkit used by writers of national theatre histories seeking evidence of centralized institutions, artistic

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innovation and progress and dramatic canons has to be set aside. Like Wessely and Coates, he deploys mapping as a methodological strategy, exploring movements of audiences, performers and repertoire across territories in patterns that arguably suggest historical models more representative of the multivalence of theatre cultures even within fixed national borders. Amine offers challenges on more than one front: inwards to the academy of the Maghreb to combat the ontological and epistemological resistance to the impossibility of constructing histories of a wholly un-Westernized, authentic Arab theatre, and externally to confront internationally reiterated and unexamined cultural assumptions exacerbated by the lingering colonial legacies of political and economic subordination. While Amine wishes to lift the burden of the ‘Western text’ as the exemplar of all writing along with the historic imposition of Western theatre styles, he also offers a view of Western theatrical models which persuasively speaks for all theatrical locals whether East or West, North or South. They ‘are more than dramatic/theatrical spaces: they are cultural and discursive ones as well, and are in fact multifold, heterogeneous, local and variable from one Western country to another, and most importantly, from one European theatrical age to another with all the ruptures and epistemic breaks between them’.

CHAPTER 3.8.1

Erased Trails: Investigating Icelandic-Canadian Theatre History MAGNUS THOR THORBERGSSON

In early July 1951, an amateur theatre group from the rural Geyser district in the Canadian province of Manitoba gave a performance of The Letter-Box Rattles by the Scottish playwright James Bridie in Winnipeg’s First Federated Unitarian Church. At first glance, an amateur production of Bridie’s comedy, originally written for a 1938 amateur dramatic contest organized by the London-based paper News Chronicle and performed in a church hall in the prairie city of Winnipeg, may not seem of great relevance for any theatre historian. Nonetheless, the performance indicated a certain turning point in one of the multitudes of histories of theatre in Canada. The play was performed in Icelandic and was one of the last known performances given by an Icelandic-Canadian amateur theatre group in their original language, marking the end of seventy years of Icelandicspeaking theatre in North America. During this period, numerous amateur theatre groups had emerged in various locations across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, with a few as well in the US states of North Dakota, Minnesota and Washington. Geographically, culturally and linguistically in-between, immigrant community theatre is difficult to place within traditional narratives of modern theatre history that tend to prioritize national developments of theatre, processes of centralized professionalization and institutionalization, as well as the importance of avant-garde movements and artistic innovation. As Marvin Carlson points out in his recent reflections on a global theatre history, research on theatre history throughout the last century has, in general, been geographically organized, highlighting the developments of theatre according to modern (predominantly Western) nation-state borders. However, as Carlson notes, gradual acknowledgement of other theatrical traditions as well as other geographically configured areas has in recent decades challenged this emphasis. Carlson argues that many important, past and present dimensions of theatre cannot be investigated within the paradigm of the national theatre history. This includes ‘theatre and performance created by constantly evolving and shifting communities created by populations voluntarily or involuntarily moved from their origin locations to establish new communities, such as immigrant enclaves, and refugee camps’ (Carlson 2013: 155). Not easily integrated into a governing

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narrative of a national theatre history, amateur immigrant community theatre has thus often tended to be marginalized, given a secondary role or even excluded from the dominant theatre history, for example through labels such as ‘multicultural’ or ‘ethnic’ as distinct from ‘national’, or simply erased. Histories of immigrant theatres in Canada offer a multitude of examples where the limitations of a focus on theatre histories defined by nation-state borders and teleological narratives of institutionalization and artistic innovation become evident. Immigrant community theatres, usually operating on an amateur level, tend to stand outside of any national framework, rather emphasizing transnational connections: not only between the immigrant community and the homeland but also between diasporic groups in different places. Such transnational theatres and performance cultures are difficult to place within national borders but call for a more fluid approach to mapping and network tracing, one which, in the case of Icelandic immigrant theatre in North America, this essay begins to test and explore.1 The seventy years of Icelandic-speaking theatre in Canada (and across the border to the United States) provide an example of such a performance tradition outside of the model of national theatre histories. Lacking any centralized structure or institution, without any signs of development towards professionalism or a star system of actors or companies, deprived of anything resembling a canon of published plays, the historian is forced to put aside her or his traditional toolkit. What is the most fruitful method of approach to investigating a theatre history that evades integration into a teleological narrative of a national theatre history, rejects being labelled ‘ethnic’ and has seemingly no centralized structure or trajectory of development? Already in the first steps of venturing into this unknown land, the historian is confronted with serious questions regarding the possibilities and limitations of emphasizing national theatre histories as well as issues concerning processes of narrative, presence and erasure in theatre history.

FROM ICELAND TO CANADA Sveinn Einarsson, historian of Icelandic theatre, claims that the first production of Icelandic-Canadian theatre was probably the Icelandic play Sigríður Eyjafjarðarsól (Sigrid, Sun of Eyjafjörður) by Ari Jónsson, performed in Winnipeg in January 1880 only five years after the establishment of the first formal Icelandic settlements in Manitoba (Einarsson 2016: 489). The status and extent of theatre activities among the Icelandic immigrants in the following decades are quite remarkable, particularly considering the background of the first generation of immigrants and the relation to developments of theatre in the homeland. In a brief essay on Icelandic-Canadian theatre, Lee Brandson boldly states that from the early immigration to the middle of the twentieth century, ‘most members of Icelandic communities were involved with amateur drama productions in some capacity’ (Brandson 1994: 91). Although Brandson’s claim may be overly enthusiastic, lacking stronger support and documentation, evidence indicates that amateur theatricals can be found in nearly every settlement of Icelandic immigrants in North America. Before attempting to follow the disappearing traces of the network of Icelandic immigrant community theatre, some background information on the Icelandic

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diaspora is necessary. In the years between 1870 and 1914, it is estimated that a minimum of 15,000 Icelanders immigrated to North America, amounting to approximately a fifth of the Icelandic population in the period. At the time of the immigration wave, Iceland was still a predominantly rural society, the largest city being the capital Reykjavik – whose inhabitants increased from 2,000 in 1870 to 6,000 around the turn of the century. The majority of immigrants originated from the rural areas in the north-eastern corner of Iceland, which had endured serious hardship in the years leading up to the emigration period. In general, weather conditions were hard in Iceland in the late 1860s and early 1870s, with long winters and cold summers, which not only resulted in crop failure and the death of livestock but also caused an almost complete isolation of the north from the rest of the country as the sea stayed frozen and pack ice blocked sailing routes and prevented ships from reaching shore, in a region lacking roads. A further reason for the mass emigration in the late nineteenth century was that while the population of the country had grown substantially from the early nineteenth century, industrialization and modernization had not reached Iceland, which severely restricted the possibilities of working elsewhere than in the field of traditional agriculture. However, farmland was limited in many areas of the country, such as the north-east, and the fishing industry was underdeveloped. Moreover, an eruption of the volcano Askja in 1875 limited the possibilities of cultivating land in the north-east region even further, destroying crops and driving many farmers off their lands. Many Icelanders thus saw new opportunities in relocating to America, where land was being offered for free to new settlers. The majority of the immigrants during the period 1870–1914 settled in Canada, especially in Manitoba, but also in Saskatchewan and south of the border in North Dakota. The first Icelandic settlement in Manitoba was established in 1875 in Gimli, in the district known as New Iceland. In spite of hardship, diseases and a climate dramatically different from their homelands, more immigrants followed, establishing further settlements along the coast of Lake Winnipeg (Eyford 2016: 73–95). According to an article by Árni Sigurðsson published in the journal of the North American Þjóðræknisfélag Íslands (the Icelandic National League) in 1946, providing an overview of theatre activities among the Icelandic Canadians, the smaller settlements along Lake Winnipeg had already begun to use newly built community centres and assembly houses, or simply the largest house available, to stage theatre performances in the early 1880s, as did groups of immigrants settling in the city of Winnipeg (Á. Sigurðsson 1946).2 The article mentions around 200 productions performed in various settlements into the 1940s, indicating that there may have been a few hundred more taking place, while Lee Brandson guesses that ‘probably thousands’ of performances were staged in the Icelandic communities (Brandson 1994: 92). The high number of performances is surprising, particularly in the early decades, as there was almost no theatre tradition in Iceland during this period. The first public theatre performances were offered in Reykjavik in the mid-1850s, but by the time people started emigrating to Canada in the 1870s, no formal theatre companies had been established in Iceland, although irregular performances had taken place, both in Reykjavik and in the northern village of Akureyri (H. Sigurðsson 1992). Plays were occasionally performed in rural districts near the end of the nineteenth century, for

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example in the Eyjafjörður region near Akureyri. Indeed, many of the titles performed in the early years of Icelandic-Canadian theatre were originally staged in the 1870s and 1880s in the larger farms of Eyjafjörður, where the early Icelandic immigrants in North America presumably had their first experiences of theatre. The play Sigríður Eyjafjarðarsól is a case in point: originally performed in 1876 on the farm Grund in Eyjafjörður, the play was staged on numerous occasions among Icelandic Canadians but never performed in Iceland outside the Eyjafjörður region. Limited to the period between 1880 and the early 1950s, the history of IcelandicCanadian theatre seems not to follow any sort of teleological narrative – in contrast to the history of theatre in Iceland itself which, from 1897, shows a clear dominance of Leikfélag Reykjavíkur (the Reykjavik Theatre Company, est. 1897) over other groups and societies in the country, serving as a model in terms of repertoire. Even though some more formal structures emerged in the territories of New Iceland, such as individual groups and societies, no development towards institutionalization, professionalization or the building of proper theatre venues is to be seen. Although Winnipeg may have been the site with the highest number of performances, the spread of theatre activities across the Canadian provinces and south of the border to North Dakota does not show much sign of a centralized structure. The theatrical activities of Icelandic Canadians, however, do reveal an effective network of more or less formal groups, connecting places spread across the Canadian prairies and over the border to the upper-Midwestern United States via routes that allowed the movement of plays and people within the network. The operations of this network can be witnessed in three sets of examples. First, plays and manuscripts clearly circulated among individual amateur theatre groups. Not only are there cases of published plays, such as Sigríður Eyjafjarðarsól, which was printed in Iceland in 1879, but there are also indications of handwritten manuscripts being passed around and distributed for performances in different districts. Árni Sigurðsson mentions, for example, around twenty plays by J. Magnús Bjarnason, a schoolteacher in the Geyser district, staged in various settlements. These plays were never published and Árni presumes the manuscripts went missing somewhere along the routes of the network (Á. Sigurðsson 1946: 92). Secondly, there are reports of individual groups touring between different settlements as early as 1890. Árni Sigurðsson mentions a number of cases where particular productions were taken on tour between the regions, particularly by groups touring from Winnipeg to North Dakota and vice versa. The best documented cases of such tours were separate visits from leading actresses of the Reykjavik Theatre Company. In February 1913, the actress Guðrún Indriðadóttir was asked to come to Manitoba to perform with local amateur actors in the play Fjalla-Eyvindur (Eyvindur of the Mountains) by Icelandic playwright Jóhann Sigurjónsson. The visit included performances in Winnipeg and a few towns in the New Iceland region as well as a tour to North Dakota (Á. Sigurðsson 1946: 103). In the autumn of 1920, the other leading actress of the semi-professional company, Stefanía Guðmundsdóttir, received an invitation to Canada. During the following winter, accompanied and assisted by her 24-year-old son and her two daughters, aged seventeen and nineteen, she performed on numerous occasions throughout Manitoba, touring twice to

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Icelandic-Canadian settlements in Saskatchewan and three times to North Dakota. A list of her travels and performances, printed in Jón Viðar Jónsson’s thesis on Stefanía Guðmundsdóttir, indicates that she performed in at least twenty locations from October 1920 to August 1921, and that members of local amateur theatre groups participated in her performances (J. V. Jónsson 1996: 295–7). The two leading Icelandic-Canadian newspapers, Lögberg and Heimskringla, followed her travels with enthusiasm and the performances were well attended throughout. These visits not only show that in the early twentieth century, there was an active network of Icelandic-Canadian community theatres in place, but also that the communities had the resources to invite the actresses to visit. Stefanía Guðmundsdóttir was hired on a professional basis, with a promise of a fixed salary of 500 Canadian dollars for a five-month period, as well as 40 per cent of the income of every performance (J. V. Jónsson 1997: 302). A third indication of the effective network of Icelandic-Canadian amateur groups in the period can be noted in the organization of their own amateur drama festival in Winnipeg as well as participation in competitions that included amateur theatres from other ethnic and migrant groups in Manitoba. The competition between the Icelandic-Canadian groups was launched in 1927 by members of the Good Templar order, when three groups – from Glenboro, Arborg and Winnipeg – took part. A second group from Winnipeg as well as a group from Wynyard, Saskatchewan, had announced their participation but needed to withdraw. The contributions were evaluated according to ten categories, from literary merit and understanding of roles to coordination of playing and memory, each of which offered up to ten points. Ten points were awarded for a play in Icelandic but five points for a play in English. In this first competition, one of the three contributions was an original play performed in English, The Parrot by Jóhannes P. Pálsson, who had been active in the IcelandicCanadian amateur theatrical in the previous two decades, writing a number of plays in Icelandic (Lögberg 1927).3 The competition was repeated the following year, hosted by a newly founded Association of Icelandic Drama Societies, and received contributions from Arborg, Winnipeg, Wynyard and Geyser. In 1929, on the other hand, not enough groups applied to compete. Icelandic-Canadian amateur groups, however, took part in some of the first drama competitions held by the Manitoba Drama League established in 1932, one of which was held in the Winnipeg Little Theatre, where an Icelandic-Canadian group from Arborg received the first prize, the Free Press Silver Shield. The foundation of the Manitoba Drama League must also be seen as an important factor in connecting different networks of amateur theatres in the region. Within a year, the league already had a total membership of 184, consisting of 122 groups and 62 individual members in an extended network across the whole province of Manitoba (Craig 1956). A brief glance at the activities of Icelandic-Canadian amateur theatres during the period 1880–1950 thus shows that they operated as an extended and effective network, creating routes and paths that enabled people, plays and groups to move between different locations across provinces and state borders. This network also crossed paths with other similar networks in initiatives such as the Manitoba Drama League and its provincial drama competitions, creating points of intersections with other immigrant

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theatre groups and performance cultures, forming a platform for exchange. Such initiatives and networks may be seen as generating possibilities of cultural interweaving in the utopian sense proposed by Erika Fischer-Lichte (2014: 11) through multicultural exchange. Without ignoring the complexities of the concept of interweaving as outlined by Cochrane and Robinson in the Introduction to this volume, in this case, for example, regarding the linguistic dominance of English, the network and intersections of theatre cultures certainly create a field for mutual exchange.

THE PLACE OF THEATRE WITHIN RESEARCH ON ICELANDIC-CANADIAN CULTURE The last couple of decades have witnessed a growing interest in research on the history and culture of Icelandic Canadians. Recent publications have, for example, focused on the history of Icelandic settlements in Canada (Thor 2002; Eyford 2016), literature (Baldvinsson 2006; Neijmann 2007) and language (B. Jónsson 2005; Arnbjörnsdóttir 2006), but despite the evident importance of theatre in the cultural life of the communities of Icelandic immigrants in Canada, practically no research has been done on the subject. The article by Árni Sigurðsson in the journal of the Icelandic National League from 1946 is by far the most detailed overview of Icelandic-Canadian theatre activities yet published (Á. Sigurðsson 1946). As an account composed by one of the key figures of Icelandic-Canadian amateur theatre, his article is a valuable source of information on the subject. Nonetheless, it is not based on scholarly research nor does it attempt to provide any in-depth analysis of the development or spread of Icelandic-Canadian theatre. In his first of three volumes on Icelandic theatre history, theatre historian Sveinn Einarsson dedicates a couple of pages to the beginnings of theatre among Icelandic Canadians, based largely on Árni’s 1946 article (Einarsson 1991: 343–5) and his third volume includes a ten-page appendix on Icelandic-Canadian theatre in the twentieth century (Einarsson 2016), focusing primarily on plays mentioned in Árni’s article or in lists of plays written in Icelandic published in 1946 and 1950 (Sigurbjörnsson 1946, 1950). The Icelandic-Canadian playwright Guttormur Guttormsson has received some attention (Neijmann 1995; Einarsson 2015; Bjarnadóttir 2016) particularly in connection with the recent bilingual publication of ten of his plays (Guttormsson 2015). However, no research has been conducted into the development and practicalities of Icelandic-Canadian stage activities. The placement of the account of Icelandic-Canadian theatre in Sveinn Einarsson’s three volumes on Icelandic theatre history reveals the difficulty of situating immigrant theatre within the narrative of a national theatre history. In the first volume, Sveinn devotes a couple of pages to the earliest theatre activities of Icelandic Canadians, which he includes in a chapter on theatre in the rural regions outside the capital Reykjavik (Einarsson 1991: 343–5). To some extent, this is a logical placement, as the first Icelandic settlers along the shore of Lake Winnipeg considered their settlement a part of Iceland rather than Canada, a notion strengthened by the fact that the area designated New Iceland was between 1875

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and 1897 reserved for Icelandic settlers (Eyford 2016: 7). Early Icelandic-Canadian theatre is therefore integrated into the category of regional Icelandic theatre, where Sveinn actually uses the Icelandic word útibú (branch) of Icelandic theatre history and claims that the programme of the Icelandic-Canadian amateurs seems to have been strongly influenced by what was staged in the early theatre activities in Iceland. In the third volume, covering the period 1920–60, Sveinn on the other hand seems to have had problems integrating Icelandic-Canadian theatre into his narrative of Icelandic theatre history, as he provides an account of Icelandic-Canadian theatre of the period as an appendix at the end of the book (Einarsson 2016: 489–97). In short, the theatre of Icelandic Canadians seems no longer to fit into the narrative of Icelandic national theatre history. Marginalized as regional theatre in the early years, Icelandic-Canadian theatre is subsequently practically pushed outside of the frame, albeit still visible.

BUT IS IT CANADIAN? While the history of Icelandic-Canadian theatre has been little researched and seems difficult to place within studies on Icelandic theatre, it has been almost completely invisible in the history of theatre in Canada, adding to the group which Alan Filewood has called ‘the cohorts of the culturally disappeared’ (Filewood 2004: 123). The only exception where the theatre of Icelandic immigrants receives attention is E. Ross Stuart’s History of Prairie Theatre, which dedicates a four-page subchapter to ‘Small-Town and Ethnic Amateur Theatre’ (Stuart 1984: 85–9). Despite citing a 1930 Canadian Forum article by Canadian art critic Robert Ayre, who asked ‘how could Canadian drama be complete, ignoring the Icelanders of Gimli?’ (89), Stuart’s discussion of theatre in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta does not include any further discussion of immigrant theatre, in fact not only ignoring ‘the Icelanders of Gimli’ and other communities, but also amateur theatre of other immigrant groups. Icelandic-Canadian theatre is but one example of the multitude of immigrant community theatre, which has served as an important site to stage and probe notions of communal identity and tackle issues of migration and encounters with foreignness (Cox 2014). As a venue where members of the society gather to watch and perform representations of themselves, amateur community theatre enables members of the community to be on both sides of the fourth wall, as performers and audience. Not surprisingly, theatre has been considered of great importance for immigrant groups, for example in maintaining and performing ethnic identity and preserving language, culture and ties to the homeland. In a recent entry on multicultural theatre in the online Canadian Encyclopedia, this is defined as the driving motivation of much theatre performed by immigrant communities. The article provides an extensive overview of the diversity of ethnic theatre in Canada, yet it is somewhat surprising to read the following statement in the first paragraph of the article: ‘Some of the earliest ethnic theatres were formed in the 1930s, creating theatre exclusively for their own communities’ (Berger, Yoon and Grajewski 2011). Further down, however, the article does mention that ‘Ukrainian theatre began in Canada as early as 1906 in the mining areas of Sudbury basin and in Manitoba’, and adds that

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‘black theatre groups have existed since the early 19th century in Vancouver and Halifax’, but states that the ‘first major breakthrough’ did not happen until 1942. The article gives no other indications of immigrant community theatre groups being active before 1930, despite obvious manifestations of active networks of such groups, culminating most prominently in the establishment of the Manitoba Drama League. The article thus silently erases any ethnic theatre groups active before the 1930s, ignoring theatre as an important factor in the staging of national and ethnic identity among diverse groups of immigrants in Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The narrative of multicultural theatre that the article produces certainly raises a series of questions. As evidence of theatre activities involving structures, networks, performance venues and so on clearly exists well before 1930, the periodization of the article, for example, gives room for criticism. If, as the article states, the first ethnic theatres were formed in the 1930s, what sort of structure does such formation refer to? What exactly characterized the theatre groups formed in the 1930s that leads the authors to state that these were the earliest ethnic theatres? Some indications of an answer are revealed in the continuing narrative of the article. It in fact leaves the 1930s behind fairly rapidly, quickly jumping to the wave of immigration following the Second World War, emphasizing the arrival of professional theatre artists to Canada, before taking another leap into the 1970s and 1980s and focusing on initiatives to professionalize and institutionalize multicultural theatre in the country. This issue reveals the problem of the way certain cultural preferences dominate how theatre history is narrated – in this case, in disregarding amateur theatre. Theatre historians have had the tendency to exclude amateur theatres from history, as Claire Cochrane, for example, has argued, due to their cultural and critical preferences that reject amateur theatre as not fulfilling traditional criteria of innovation or artistic quality (Cochrane 2003). In the context of national theatre histories, amateur theatre has thus been virtually excluded from the dominant narrative, unless it is perceived as the ‘roots’ of professional theatre. Such teleological approaches to theatre history tend to privilege the emergence of professional theatre as the peak of artistic quality, the establishment of theatre institutions such as national theatres or artistic innovation in experimental or avant-garde theatre. Amateur and community theatre that does not fit this teleological narrative hence tends to be marginalized or even erased. Such an emphasis is clear in the Canadian Encyclopedia article on multicultural theatre. Only when it enters the field of institutionalized professional (or semi-professional) theatre does it become worthy of attention. In the Canadian context, the privilege of professionalism is particularly related to the problematic status of amateur community theatre performed in other languages than English or French. Alan Filewood has pointed out that there is a certain divergence between the idea of ‘Canadian theatre’ and theatre in Canada, which reveals complex layers of erasure in Canadian theatre historiography. As Filewood argues, a ‘governing thesis’ of Canadian theatre historiography can be traced, ‘which developed to narrate the “emergence” of a professional theatre culture as a corollary of postcolonial Canadian nationhood. In this thesis, diasporic theatre has been perceived as an “ethnic” replication of the evolutionary teleology of Canadian

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theatre from community-based amateur “roots” to a professional theatre estate, in which “amateur” means “prenational”’ (Filewood 2004: 107–8). The label ‘ethnic’ here causes certain problems that tend to confine amateur theatre of immigrant communities to a rather restricted function of staging ethnic identity. Although this must certainly be said to be a central role of much community theatre, the label ‘ethnic’ is clearly problematic. The case of Icelandic-Canadian culture reveals, as probably is the case with most immigrant cultures, that it tends to stand in a paradoxical relationship to the question of ethnicity. In her research on Icelandic-Canadian literature, Daisy Neijmann has argued that much of twentiethcentury literature by Icelandic immigrant reveals a certain tension: a desire to be ‘Icelandic’ and to preserve a notion of Icelandic identity, but at the same time a strong resentment of being defined and looked at as the Other. Adding that the official Canadian policy of multiculturalism has in some sense strengthened the status quo of Anglo-Canadian dominance, Neijmann notes: ‘Once the label “ethnic” has been attached to a work of literature, it is no longer eligible for the label “Canadian”’ (Neijmann 1997: 382). The result is that the Icelandic-Canadian culture falls somewhere in between. It is not ‘national/Canadian’, but it doesn’t quite seem to qualify as ‘the exotic other’. In the case of Icelandic-Canadian theatre, it tends therefore not only to be erased on the grounds of being amateur, but also because it disappears into the cracks between the ‘nation’ and the ‘ethnic’. Narratives that prioritize the teleological progress of professional institutionalized theatre or some kind of national/ethnic divide can therefore only provide a highly restricted perspective on histories of amateur immigrant community theatre.

APPROACHING IMMIGRANT AMATEUR COMMUNITY THEATRE In order to examine the richness of immigrant amateur community theatre history, a different approach is clearly needed; one that looks beyond the confinements of nation-state borders, past the preferences of professionalism or artistic innovation, and that transcends the limitations of ‘ethnic’ labels. An investigation of a transnational history of immigrant community theatres, as in the example of the Icelandic-Canadian theatre, might thus profit from Marvin Carlson’s call for a paradigm shift, where he proposes replacing the dominant narrative model of teleological national theatre history with a more open-ended rhizomatic approach. The image of the rhizome, a notion Carlson adopts from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘allows for fluid multiple connections without privileging any controlling models of either representation or interpretation’ (Carlson 2013: 157). Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome replacing the tree – with its roots, trunk and branches as the more traditional metaphor of the organization of knowledge – is intriguing, allowing for a shift from a linear narrative to what Carlson describes as ‘an ever-shifting web of cultural interweaving’ (2013: 157). Indeed, Carlson notes that ‘theatre history has always been far more rhizomatic than theatre historians have admitted’ (2013: 157); this can be seen in the 1946 article on Icelandic-speaking theatre in Canada by Árni Sigurðsson, where the history

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of Icelandic-Canadian theatre resembles more of an intertwined network than a linear structure. Árni starts his report by mentioning the first theatre performances staged in Riverton in the region known as New Iceland along the west coast of Lake Winnipeg, after which he takes the narrative 13 km south to Hnausa before heading north again to the remote Hecla Island. He then heads back south to give an account of theatre in the rural municipality of Bifrost – through the communities of Geyser, Vidir, Framnes and Arborg – before ending his overview of the Lake Winnipeg region in Gimli, in the southern part of the New Iceland district. The next tour starts far west in Shoal Lake, close to the provincial borders to Saskatchewan, heading 300 km east to Lundar on the shores of Lake Manitoba, turning south to Morden near the US border, back north again to Argyle, before taking a 200 km westward route to Glenboro. The article then takes the reader to Saskatchewan on a linear route from east to west through the townships of Leslie, Elfros, Mozart, Wynyard and Kandahar, before crossing the border and following a less linear route through the communities of Gardar, Hallson, Svold, Akra, Pembina and Mountain scattered over the north-east corner of North Dakota (see the map in Figure 3.8.1.1). His overview ends in Winnipeg, which he claims to have been the centre of IcelandicCanadian theatre activities – a designation, however, that he uses for a couple of other locations as well.

FIGURE 3.8.1.1:  Map showing the distribution of Icelandic-speaking theatre in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota according to the information in Árni Sigurðsson’s article. The underlying map is in the public domain and overlay information added by the author.

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With centres shifting, participants constantly moving and venues being temporarily used for theatre performances, Árni’s account of Icelandic-Canadian theatre may therefore be depicted as a decentralized, ever-changing map. A linear narrative of its history, however, is more difficult to trace. Deleuze and Guattari, in fact, state that the rhizome differs from the tree in being ‘a map and not a tracing […] open and connectible in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’ (1988: 12). However, such a paradigm shift does not eliminate the tracing: ‘The important point is that the root-tree and the canal-rhizome are not two opposed models’, Deleuze and Guattari note, stating further that ‘there are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots’ (1988: 20). Rather than throwing away the possibility of structure, a rhizomatic approach focuses on the map and all the possibilities of connections and routes it fosters, opening up the potential for new structures instead of forcing a pregiven tracing onto a map that limits the possible narratives. Attempting to investigate the history of immigrant community theatre, such as the case of the Icelandic-Canadian theatre, within the paradigm of national theatre history may be seen as an attempt to adjust the open-ended changeable map towards a fixed pregiven tracing. Rather than looking at the map and the possibilities it provides in connecting any point to any other point, such a perspective can only provide a highly restricted narrative. It tends, for example, to prioritize elements that can be categorized as ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’; running the risk of tracing a historical narrative according to previously known patterns; privileging events where plays of ‘national’ importance are produced; structuring the history around performances dealing with questions of ‘ethnic’ identity and so on. Such prioritizing may be seen, for example, in Sveinn Einarsson’s appendix on Icelandic theatre in North America, which names over sixty Icelandic plays performed among Icelandic immigrants. In contrast, he only mentions ten translations from other languages into Icelandic, all of which are plays previously shown in Iceland (Einarsson 2016: 489–97). The reference to these plays is made in connection to the statement that the theatre activities of Icelandic Canadians were strongly influenced by what was happening in Iceland, thereby limiting the traffic on the route of influence to a one-way direction. Árni Sigurðsson’s article, however, which is one of Sveinn’s key sources, mentions a number of translated plays that seemingly were never performed in Iceland, in addition to the multiple original plays written by Icelandic Canadians that travelled freely between the points of the network of community theatres. An attempt to map the activities of immigrant theatre, such as the IcelandicCanadian community theatres during the period 1880–1950, thus calls for a resistance towards pregiven structures, teleological linear narratives and common working analytical tools such as the concepts of national/ethnic, however tempting these may be. A rhizomatic approach, perhaps in the direction of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, means that the researcher should be prepared to ‘cast off agency, structure, psyche, time, and space along with every other philosophical and anthropological category, no matter how deeply rooted in common sense they may appear to be’ (Latour 2007: 24–5). It involves moving excruciatingly slowly across the territory under investigation, looking for the tiniest traces left behind,

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resisting the temptation to focus primarily on what seems to be the centre. Browsing through the two Icelandic-speaking newspapers in Canada published between 1880 and 1950 (both based in Winnipeg), one might jump to the conclusion that Winnipeg was the clear epicentre of theatrical activities. There is, however, important evidence that gives a different picture, not only in the case of the Icelandic-Canadian theatre. Of the 122 member groups of the Manitoba Drama League in 1933, only 16 were located in Winnipeg. The variety of activities happening elsewhere show how important it is to look beyond the centralization indicated in published sources, instead examining the details of the routes, flows and points of intersection of the network.

NOTES 1. This essay marks the beginning of a three-year research project into the history of theatre of Icelandic immigrants in North America 1880–1950, funded by the Icelandic Research Fund. In its initial stages, the project also received support by the Non-Fiction Writers’ Fund and the Association of Non-Fiction and Educational Writers in Iceland. 2. In this essay, Icelandic names are partly adapted to fit common Western systems of family names. The Icelandic naming tradition does not use family names, but is instead based on a patronymic (occasionally matronymic) system: Icelandic last names consist of the first name of the father (occasionally the mother) with the suffix –son for males and –dóttir for females. Consequentially, references and bibliographies in Icelandic are organized by first names (last names for non-Icelandic names). The article therefore refers to Icelandic authors by first names, but to avoid confusion, the bibliography is organized by last names with occasional references carrying the initials of the first name to distinguish authors with the same last name. 3. The ten evaluation categories listed in the paper Lögberg were: (1) literary merit; (2) stage, setting, costumes and make-up; (3) memory; (4) diction, voice modulation; (5) deportment and gestures; (6) understanding of parts; (7) stability in character; (8) enunciation and emphasis; (9) coordination of playing; and (10) language of performance. The first prize was awarded to the Arborg group for their production of Tengdamamma (Mother-In-Law) by the Icelandic writer Kristín Sigfúsdóttir, a play originally performed at the author’s farm in Saurbær in the northern region of Eyjafjörður in 1923.

CHAPTER 3.8.2

Decolonizing Theatre History in the Arab World (The Case of the Maghreb) KHALID AMINE

INTRODUCTION Delinking Arab theatre historiography from Western ‘Telos or Vorhaben’ does not mean the recuperation of a pure and original performance tradition that pre-existed colonial encounters, past and present. Arabocentrism, Tamazighocentrism, Afrocentrism all inevitably lapse into inverted violence and dangerous quests for purity. Does the possibility even exist of returning to an ‘authentic’ state, since all locations are somehow contaminated and criss-crossed by various encounters past and present? The Maghreb is made up of many different cultural and historical influences and one cannot simply turn one’s back on any of them. Cultures absorb material vestiges, remnants, echoes, remains and tattoos of a silent history that is quite literally inaccessible until subjected to an archaeology of silence and a process of transcription or translation. The option of ‘double critique’, a model developed by the Moroccan sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi, helps us to re-evaluate that very landscape and highlight the multiple crossroads and palimpsests of interweaving and underlying acts of arche-writing. Our resiting of the intercultural theatre debate in the post-colony known today as the ‘Global South’ – which has been and continues to be the quintessential postcolonial space for created hybridities and cultural pluralism – raises the following questions: What is the task of Arabic performance research in an era of globalization? Is there still a global divide between affluent countries and ‘wretched ones’ as far as theatre practice is concerned? How far are our local histories affected/ inflicted by what Walter D. Mignolo calls ‘global designs’? The postcolonial turn in the Arab world and elsewhere requires an evaluation of all different ‘Occidents’ and ‘Orients’ that have produced most Arabs as postcolonial subjects. In this essay, my deployment of Khatibi’s double critique is an invitation to redeem postcolonial performance history from its interminable oppositional thinking ‘by shifting the postcolonial subject’s fixation on the Other/West to an inward interrogation of his political and ideological self-colonization and self-victimization’ (Hamil 2002:

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72–86). I argue that the two disparate paths chosen by people of the Maghreb as means to reconstruct a postcolonial society risk falling into essentializing creeds: in choosing to seek refuge in pastness, they turn their back on the Western influence that has become part of our heritage ever since the Greco-Roman presence in the Maghreb. Yet, in choosing to blindly appropriate Western models, they also fall into another kind of essentialism which sees European theatre traditions as a universal paradigm that should be disseminated all over the world even at the expense of other peoples’ performance cultures. This essay will focus on these lines of questioning, with a particular emphasis on Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Moroccan theatre, as an exemplary instance of Arab theatre, exists in a liminal space between East and West. It marks a fusion of Western theatrical traditions and the Arab-Tamazegh performance cultures. The hybrid nature of such a theatre form is evident in the way popular performance behaviour, rooted in performance spaces such as al-halqa (the circle), has been transposed from public squares and marketplaces such as Marrakech’s Jemaa-elfna into modern theatre buildings.1 Al-halqa – a traditional public gathering in the form of a circle around one person or more (hlayqi/hlayqia) in a public space – constitutes an environment that stands in stark contrast to the European proscenium tradition. Its audience is called upon ‘to drift’ spontaneously into an area surrounding the performance from all sides. The space required by the hlayqi (the maker of spectacle) is not specified, and neither is the timing of the performance. No fourth wall with hypnotic fields is erected between stage and auditorium. The entire marketplace and Medina Gates can be transformed into a stage; the entire circle may serve as a performance space, as open as its repertoire of narrative performances, acrobatic games, songs and dances. In retrieving this performance tradition, theatre in Morocco has become increasingly improvisational and selfreflexive, even as this retrieval is negotiated within the paradoxical parameters of appropriating and disappropriating the Western models of theatre-making that were introduced to the country at the turn of the twentieth century. The Europeanization of Morocco’s performance cultures happened as late as 1913, the year the ‘Teatro Cervantes’ (its architecture resembles nineteenth-century European neo-baroque theatres) was created in Tangier, followed by other new theatres in big metropolitan centres such as Casablanca, Rabat and Tetouan. By 1926, Moroccan amateur companies had started performing in Fes, Tetouan, Tangier and Casablanca. Famous Moroccan political figures of the independence movement not only encouraged this theatrical activity, but also utilized theatre’s intricate subversive potential as a means of empowering the majority of illiterate Moroccan subjects under the Franco-Hispanic colonial administrations. In 1950, the French colonial administration decided to check this progressive theatrical activity in Morocco. Professionals were called in from France to orient Moroccan theatre towards the direction designated for it by the colonial administration. Thus, André Voisin and Charles Nugue, assisted by Abdessamad Kenfaoui and Tahar Ouaziz, supervised theatrical workshops in the Mamora Center in Rabat. As a result of this theatrical training, the first professional Moroccan theatre company was created under the auspices of the Ministry of Youth and Sports, bringing together

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Tayeb Saddiki, Ahmed Tayeb Laalej, Fatima Regragi, Abdessamad Dinia, Driss Tadili, Mohamed Afifi and others. In short, the hybrid nature of Maghrebi theatre emerged as a result of cultural negotiations between Self and Other, East and West, tradition and modernity. It marked a postcolonial theatre located at a crossroads – a continuum of intersections, encounters and negotiations. The outcome is a complex palimpsest that highlights the importance of cultural exchange and hybridity rather than an essentialist quest for something pure and original. Still, the urge to rewrite our theatre history highlights not only the uncomfortable reality of previous dominant histories, but also the political connotations of coloniality.

CONTEXTUALIZING THE DEBATE Europe has ever been the silent referent in world theatre history. In response to rising demands for further democratizing theatre historiography as an academic discipline, new modes of writing theatre history from below have emerged, with an earnest desire for inclusion and revision. International theatre research has long studied the world before undergoing its revolution from inside. Should the world write back, or rather, perform back while striving for recognition? Did the intercultural debate of the 1980s and 1990s imply the possibility of a democratic interweaving across and within worldwide performance cultures? Still, the task of postcolonial scholarship is further complicated while revisiting the existing body of world theatre histories. Non-Western performance cultures are hardly visible in what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the ‘universal narrative of capital – History 1’ (2000: 254), typically edited out, and if ever mentioned as local histories it is often on the borderlines between absence and presence. The provincialization of Eurocentric theatre scholarship can only be achieved by recovering the irreducible plurality and age-old interweaving between European theatre with other histories and traditions. How to retrieve such repressed histories and articulate subaltern positions in their name without falling into the essentialist creed of ‘wild difference’, ‘deviant nationalism’ or worse, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, ‘the sin of sins, nostalgia’ (1992: 1), still constitutes one of the fundamental difficulties facing postcolonial historians and critics. Here, the Napoleonic military expedition to Egypt and Syria (1798–1801) constitutes a significant historical moment. It has ever since marked the beginning of a conflicting interplay between modernity and coloniality as its darker side.2 The ‘Molierization’ of Arab stages and the desire of the Arabs to appropriate Western models of theatre production came as an effect of this interplay. Napoleon’s introduction of theatre aimed to serve two main objectives: first, as a means of entertainment for the soldiers and second, as an agency aimed at changing people’s traditions and implementing the French civilizing mission (writing to his successor General Kléber in 1799, he noted the importance of theatre ‘as a means of beginning to change the customs of the country’ (Sadgrove 2007: 28)). These Napoleonic aspirations foreshadow Karl Marx’s thesis on British colonialism and its double mission in a supposedly backward India: ‘England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old

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Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia’ (1853). Khatibi provides an important critique of Marx’s terrifying statement: ‘the murder of the traditions of the other and the liquidation of its past are necessary so that the West, while seizing the world, can expand beyond its limits while remaining unchanged in the end. The East must be shaken up in order to come back to the West’ (1985: 12). Similarly, the introduction of European theatrical traditions in the Arab world was utilized as a means to bring the East back to the West. Thus, theatre in the Arab world was from the start ‘deterritorialized’, perhaps even trapped in an ambiguous compromise and confronted with the necessity to interpolate between different temporalities, conflicting epistemologies of performance cultures and discursive structures. Taking up the argument in Khatibi’s Double Critique (1990), I suggest here that the Arabs’ appropriation of Western models of theatre-making came as a consequence of their abrupt disavowal of native performance cultures along with their own cultural identity. The colonial enterprise has, indeed, brought about divided loyalties manifested in two mystifying discursive practices that look different but share the same essentialism as a major source of epistemic violence. The first stance sees Western theatre as a supreme model opposed to its local counterpart that is so often reduced into local performance traditions and pre-theatrical forms. In this context, the European theatrical traditions are considered unique models that should be imitated and reproduced; there is seemingly no other theatrical practice but the one that developed in ancient Greece and was reappropriated by many parts of Europe some twenty centuries later. However, Western theatrical models are more than dramatic/theatrical spaces: they are cultural and discursive ones as well, and are in fact multifold, heterogeneous, local and variable from one Western country to another, and most importantly, from one European theatrical age to another with all the ruptures and epistemic breaks between them. Borrowing these historiographical models without critiquing their claim of universality and exclusivist tropes thus amounts to a new kind of colonialism, led by what Lila AbuLughod calls ‘guides of modernity’: a concerned group of culture-industry professionals has constructed of […] women, youths, and rural people a subaltern object in need of enlightenment. Appropriating and inflecting western discourses on development they construct themselves as guides of modernity and assume the responsibility of producing […] the virtuous modern citizen. (1995: 191) Such a Europeanization of Arabic performance (Ta-awrub al-furja al-arabia) exemplifies the complicity of colonized subjects. Rustom Bharucha’s critique in Theatre and the World: Essays on Performance and Politics explains the dangers of such ‘exchange’: ‘Colonialism, one might say, does not operate through principles of “exchange”. Rather, it appropriates, decontextualizes, and represents the “other” culture, often with the complicity of its colonized subjects. It legitimates its authority only by asserting its cultural superiority’ (1992: 2). There is no exchange in the tradition of going West under colonial corporal conquest of alterity, for such exchange is, in fact, a one-way utterance that claims an inherent power.

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As to the second position, Western performance models as represented in the proscenium tradition are repudiated and replaced by a call for a return to the ‘indigenous’ performance traditions (another way of returning to pre-colonial Morocco). This tendency has led some to the worship of ancestors, and eventually to a useless quest for purity that can be called ‘Arabocentrism’. Such essentialist theoretical and theatrical enterprises rest upon a new myth of origin in the name of ‘authentic’ Arabic/Moroccan theatre (a tendency that is part of pan-Arabism in the realm of politics). However, these so-called ‘indigenous’ performing traditions are diasporic cultural constructs that constantly change and are transformed according to the inner dynamics of the fluid and yet adaptive folk traditions. In this context, Abdelkrim Berrchid argues: ‘It may be said that al-Ihtifalia (ceremonial theatre theory) is fundamentally a group in search of a theatre. However, the reality is different, for al-Ihtifalia is a people and a nation, a nation in quest of its culture, identity, and reality’ (Berrchid 1985: 15). With the advent of colonialism, the colonial machine eclipsed the differences between Self and Other and forced bipolar opposites such as colonizer/colonized, Western/Oriental, superior/inferior, civilized/primitive and theatre/pre-theatre. The European subject forcefully made his way to the Others’ space and eclipsed the latter’s voice. The Eurocentric exclusion, then, prevailed within the empire(s). The canonization of the Western dramatic and performance traditions was made possible in the colonies by relegating indigenous performance cultures to non-dramas, manifested forms of folklore and formulaic orality, or at best, as pre-theatrical phenomena. Thus, the fiction, invoked by the great narrative of Eurocentric historiography in order to assert itself as a founding presence, became reality through various strategies of containment, appropriation and dissemination. Such historiographic interventions, despite their positivistic claim of objectivity, were framed within what Mignolo calls ‘the colonial matrix of power’ (coloniality in short) (2009: 42).

ISLAM AND THEATRE Within the context of wider colonial power, the power of Western theatrical discourse in the Arab world has been reinforced by the repeated and inaccurate portrayal by hegemonic theatre historiography of the religion of Islam as a largely negative force against theatrical activity in the region of the Middle East and North Africa. Such misleading scholarship has been sustained by both Westerners and Arabs beginning with Jacob Landou (1958) and continuing through John Gassner and Edward Quinn (1969), Peter J. Chelkowsky (1979) and Mustapha M. Badawi (1988), among others. When Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre first appeared in 1968, it immediately established itself as the model for world theatre history, and, subsequently co-authored with Franklin Hildy, still retains its aura of authority in the field today. Islam, they claimed in the 2003 edition, was in large part responsible for the absence of theatre in Arabo-Islamic contexts: ‘[Islam] forbade artists to make images of living things because Allah was said to be the only creator of life […] the prohibition extended to the theatre, and consequently in those areas where Islam became dominant, advanced [i.e. European] theatrical

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forms were stifled’ (2003: 69). This stigmatizing generalization, though inaccurate, is still widely accepted. This view of the incompatibility of Islam with European concepts of theatre is by no means restricted to Western scholars; one may find many Arab writers on the theatre taking a similar position. The problem is often traced back to the Arabs’ first encounter with the Greek heritage through Syriac translations, which took place during the golden age of the Abbasids dynasty (the second century of Islam). Mohammed Al-khozai, for example, argues that by ‘this time Arabic poetry was maturing; and because of the new monotheistic faith it was unlikely that Arab scholars would turn to what they considered a pagan art form’ (1984: 4). At this time, Islam was still struggling to make space among other religions that preceded it. Moreover, Greek drama’s celebration of simulacra and conflict constituted a real danger to the newly established monotheistic Arabo-Islamic structure, as well as to the social and political orders. Mohammed Aziza concludes that ‘it was impossible for drama to originate in a traditional Arabo-Islamic environment’ (1987: 21-45-211). Many such antagonistic interventions are based on a flawed argument produced by some Muslim orthodox scholars, the so-called guardians of Islamic faith. Indeed, the Moroccan Ahmed Ben Saddik (1901–61) was the first to publish a whole book against theatre: Iqamatu Ad-Dalili ‘Alaa Hurmati At-Tamtili (Substantiating Evidence Against Acting) first published in Cairo in the 1940s, then edited and republished as At-Tankilu Awi Taqtilu liman Abaha Tamtil (Torturing or Killing Those Who Permitted Acting) in Beirut in 2002. Ben Saddik, who studied at Al-Qarawiyin and Al-Azhar, provided forty-eight facts against theatrical activity in the edited version, which is based on a manuscript dating back to the 1940s. Yet, these writings themselves reveal the existence of debate among Islamic scholars: in his third argument, Ben Saddik displays a strong animosity against other enlightened Fuqaha who encouraged theatre as a moral institution. Among these were Mustafa al-Maraghi (1885–1945), who was appointed rector of Al-Azhar University in 1928 and began a series of reforms, and the enlightened Cheikh Mustapha Abderrazaq (1885–1947), who led Al-Azhar between the years 1945 and 1947. Abderrazaq studied in Al-Azhar with the renowned Islamic modernist Mohammed Abdu (1849– 1905), and taught at the University of Lyon in France. Ben Saddik goes beyond the limits of scholarly debate to call these moderate Azhari leaders ‘the most ignorant people of their religion’ (41). Ironically, Ben Saddik’s many fatwàs were ineffective even inside their home city, Tangier, which was one of the theatre centres of North Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Often, the assertion has been made that Islam does not allow Taswir, the representation of either human or divine forms. In fact, no passage anywhere in the Qu’ran speaks negatively about theatrical or mimetic activity. Abdelkebir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi discuss this matter extensively in their 1976 book, The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy. The only authority for this injunction they can discover is an unverifiable hadith (a saying outside the Qur’an attributed to Mohammed) cited by Al-Bukhari which ‘expresses the prohibition on figurative art straightforwardly: “Those who make these pictures will be punished on the Day

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of Resurrection, and it will be said to them, make alive what you have created”’ (Al-Bukhari, Volume 7, Book 72, Number 835; emphasis mine). According to the fuqaha (Islamic religious scholars): This alleged prohibition was directed against the surviving forms of totemism which, anathematized by Islam, could conceivably reinfiltrate it in the guise of art. The principle of the hidden face of God could be breached by such an image. In one sense, theology was right to be watchful; it had to keep an eye on its irrepressible enemy – art. (Amine and Carlson 2012: 4) Yet, in opposition to the widespread view that Islam is opposed to representation, they remind us of an ancient Islamic tradition that the prophet Mohammed allowed one of his daughters to play with dolls. Aicha, the mother of the believers and daughter of Abou Bakr, was married to the prophet and taken to his house as a bride when she was six years of age, and her dolls were with her. ‘I used to play with the dolls in the presence of the Prophet, and my girlfriends also used to play with me’ (Sahih Bukhari, Book 78, Hadith 157). Moreover, there are numerous examples of drawings both of animals and humans, as well as of figurative sculpture, as, we are told, ‘the eight century Caliph al-Mansur had in his palace’ (Khatibi and Sijelmassi 1977: 192). Thus, Islam’s presumed opposition to totemism was by no means universal, nor should it be taken as implying a generally accepted condemnation of theatre. In fact, during the colonial period, as we have seen, the first flowering of modern Arabic drama, theatre with very close ties to Islamic history and the Islamic community, became in some parts of the Arab world a major weapon in the developing struggle against colonialism. However, it is clear that modern Arabic theatre has been informed by the previously mentioned Eurocentric claim to the birth and mastery of theatre practice. It has been ‘over determined from without’, in Frantz Fanon’s terms (Read 1996: 116), transfixed and emptied as well as exploded in the ‘fetishistic’ and stereotypical dialectics of the gaze of the Other. The rhetorical strategy of negation and reductive annihilation has so often been deployed by Western orientalists (French ethnographers in the case of the Maghreb) to designate the Arabs as a cultural Other whose presence is eclipsed and substituted by an overwhelming absence and emptiness so as to justify colonial corporal and discursive expansion. Thus, the West prevailed ‘within the West and outside; in [the] structures and in [the] minds’ (Fanon 1963: 193) of the colonized Arabs. In this context, the legacy of reification and auto-reductionism operated as a form of conceptual entail or constraint on the Arabs’ attempts to recover theatrical experience. These instances of reification that were brought about by the colonial encounter caused a rupture between the old tradition and the newly acquired one. The introduction of Western theatrical traditions in the Arab world took place precisely at this very moment of rupture. The first negotiations of Western dramas represent the phase of duplicating the Western model, though they can be considered double enunciations outspoken by the colonized in order to subvert the surveying model of the colonizing Other. The result is not a return to any illusive authentic state, but a creation of what Homi Bhabha calls ‘thirdness’ as both a ‘desovereignizing’

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and ‘aporitical’ space and an openness of ‘binarity’ (Bhabha 1994: 112). It is precisely this openness that makes critique an urgent call for transcending the polarities of East/West within a global environment. Thus, the Arab subject was invited to borrow Eurocentric theatre discourses and to blindly adopt Western theatre historiography via different Western colonial enterprises without realizing, at least in the earliest beginnings, the epistemic violence entrenched in the claim of universality, the subordination of the political in favour of the poetical and, most importantly, the deployment of Western theatre models as parts of the strategy of extending and disseminating influence into nonWestern territories. ‘The influence of the west’, as John Maier admits, ‘is a burden on all Arabic writers who opt to write in narrative forms invented by and for the west’ (1996: 178). Theatre practice, then, is among the Western artistic forms that have significantly influenced the Arab intellectual. The burden of such influence is felt through the Arab’s appropriation of the proscenium tradition that does not match their cultural structures. The act of borrowing has been justified by many Arab theatre practitioners, such as Mohammed Al-Khozai and Mohamed Aziza, as one of the different ‘facets of modernism’. However, such modernism did not develop as a dialectical relationship, or as a result of a conflicting internal economy/politics; it had been part of the Western desire to contain the Arab’s cultural otherness. It was transplanted in the Arab body from without. Of course, a local intelligentsia enhanced the incorporation of these models. Paul Bowles, a prominent American expatriate writer who lived in Morocco for more than fifty years, writes about the predicament of self-annihilation experienced by some Moroccan intellectuals in the ‘Foreword’ to a collection of essays entitled Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: ‘My own belief is that the people of the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the byproducts of our civilization as by the irrational longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners’ (1984: viii). Clearly, this statement by an American who strove to rid his gaze of the masks of difference and who chose to live in double exile reveals the violence of the letter as experienced by the natives.3 The colonial enterprise produced a native intelligentsia that spoke the same language as the colonizer. Western literary forms, among other things, were thus internalized by the educated elites who were already incorporated within the Western discourse as docile bodies ready to rehearse the colonial text. From 1847 until the mid-1960s, Arabic theatre could not escape the Western telos as manifested in the European apparatuses of playwriting and theatremaking.4 Dramatic texts ranged from translations and adaptations of Molière and Shakespeare, and embryonic forms of Arabization were attempted – mostly coming from other neighbouring Middle East Arab countries that were far ahead in assimilating Western theatre. Meanwhile, the Arabization of foreign texts (texts written, or rather rewritten, with recourse to an alien text) was a common practice. Thus, these were native appropriations of an alien medium though they strove to mirror an inner self, for in borrowing the Western model, the shape of immediate experience changes in the process. This period was characterized by

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native collaboration through various excesses of self-annihilation and the othering of the self. Consequently, the Western text became the model of all writing. Here, again, Western logocentrism found its way in structuring and refashioning dramatic writing in the Arab world.

THE POSTCOLONIAL TURN AND DOUBLE RESISTANCE With the postcolonial turn, new modes of writing theatre history from the margins have emerged with an earnest need for inclusion that is often coupled with a desire for subversion. We are constantly reminded of Frantz Fanon’s conclusion in The Wretched of the Earth, where he repudiated the degraded ‘European form’ and called for something different: Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe. […] For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (1963: 312–16) Fanon’s reliance on theoretical Marxism, however, soon undermined his oppositional thinking. Unlike Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty ends up proclaiming ‘an anti-colonial spirit of gratitude’: ‘provincializing Europe cannot ever be a project of shunning European thought. For at the end of European imperialism, European thought is a gift to us all. We can talk of provincializing it only in an anti-colonial spirit of gratitude’ (2000: 255). Such spirit attracts our attention to an ambiguous compromise that is complicit with the radical West in its critique of Eurocentric underpinnings of consumerist modernity, along with the coloniality of power as manifested in the hegemonic world theatre history. Obviously, ‘third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate’ (1992: 1–2). Meanwhile, Chakrabarty’s attempt to interrupt the totalizing thrust of ‘History 1’ was immediately caught in a double bind and was soon problematized by Rustom Bharucha in the margins of his seminal essay ‘Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare’. Chakrabarty’s ‘historicist debt to Europe had overpowered his critique of Eurocentricity, so much so that (in my reading, at least) Chakrabarty ends up “provincializing Bengal” rather than Europe’ (Bharucha 2004: 21). This is precisely where the Moroccan sociologist Khatibi’s concept of double critique is effective in problematizing the very notion of the binary opposition of West/East. Khatibi’s call is similar to Fanon’s but his strategy deconstructs rather than reverses the language of Manichaeism. His line of questioning disrupts all sorts of hierarchical definitions of Self and Other, East and West, as Mignolo notes, ‘since to be critical of both of Western and Islamic fundamentalism, implies to think from both traditions and, at the same time, from neither of them’ (2012: 67). By casting the West as the other, Fanon runs the risk of homogenizing the multifold West into one single entity; in contrast, Khatibi’s call for a pensée-autre

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(other thinking) seeks a third path towards decolonization, a double subversion that strives to elude ‘wild difference’: the fake separation which casts the Other into the absolute outside. Wild difference definitely leads to frenzied identities: cultural, historical, ethnic, racial, national. […] It has condemned the West and made it a captive of hostility. (Khatibi 1990: 30 (my own translation)) This pensée-autre is a way of rethinking difference and sameness without recourse to essentialist absolutes and ‘isms’; it is an ‘epistemic resistance’ of all closed systems. The ‘Other thinking’ requires a radical rupture to ‘escape its own theological and theocratic foundations which characterize the ideology of Islam and of all monotheism’ (Khatibi 1985: 14). Meanwhile, it claims to stand on a different ground than both the East and the West; ‘for we want to uproot Western knowledge from its central place within ourselves, to decenter ourselves with respect to this center, to this origin claimed by the West’ (13). The transgressive effects of such a critique as a subaltern form of deconstruction are already apparent in its transformation rather than passive borrowing from the radical West. ‘The Occident is part of me, a part that I can only deny insofar as I resist all the Occidents and all the Orients that oppress and disillusion me’ (Khatibi 1971: 106). It also calls for rethinking the Maghreb, the home country, and considering it for what it currently is: a container of multiple identities, a sedimental layering of cultures past and present, in permanent flux between moments of conviviality and tragic sublimity. The Maghreb has long been at the crossroads of civilizations, a point of intersection for various encounters, coveted by different powers, notably Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Spaniards, Portuguese, English, Arabs and Turks. Double critique is a decolonizing archaeology that leads to an examination of the binary concepts of East and West, Occident and Orient, and the philosophical, metaphysical and theological traditions propagated in each domain. This double-edged critique encompasses a deconstruction of critical discourses on performance that used to speak in the name of the Arab world but was informed by a deeply rooted Eurocentrism. In the meantime, the second critique is a reflection on the ‘politics of nostalgia’ and how the Arabs view their performance cultures. Double critique is an effect of a plural genealogy wherein one stages his/her confrontation of Self and Other, East and West. Meanwhile, the subaltern theatre scholar becomes the translator of a body of writings that was ‘formed elsewhere and whose archaeological questions, most of the time, he/she hardly doubts. Frightened by the intellectual production of the West and by a process of accelerated accumulation, the researcher is satisfied with constructing, in the shadow of the western episteme; a second knowledge that is residual and that satisfies no one’ (Khatibi 1985: 16). His/her task is made more difficult and risky. The provincialization of Eurocentric theatre scholarship can only be achieved by recovering the irreducible plurality and age-old interweaving between European theatre with other histories and traditions. Otherwise, the two disparate paths chosen by the people of the Maghreb as a means to reconstruct a postcolonial society risk relapsing into essentializing creeds. In choosing to seek refuge in the past, they turn their backs on the Western influence that has become

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part of their heritage ever since the Greco-Roman presence in Tamazgha and other parts of what is now the Arab world. This tendency has led some to worship ancestral ways of performing everyday life and, eventually, to a nostalgic quest for an elusive origin. The rebirth of theatrical pan-Arabism in the late 1960s exemplifies such a painful process of renewal. Arab nationalism, as has mostly been performed on Arab stages, seems to re-enact the same violence against its internal others, including native non-Arabs such as the Imazeghen people in North Africa (also known as Berbers). However, in choosing to blindly appropriate the Western path, they also revert to another kind of essentialism, which sees European theatre as a unique and homogeneous epitome that should be disseminated all over the world even at the expense of other peoples’ performative agencies.

NOTES 1. Jemaa-elfna is one of the famous sites of popular culture in Morocco. It is a huge open square in the city of Marrakech wherein storytelling and other performance behaviours rooted in Moroccan popular culture are practiced as licensed and free oral performances. In brief, the square marks a site of popular orality and ritualistic formulae as well as an archive of Moroccan performance cultures. The square is classified by UNESCO as a site of living intangible human heritage. 2. Walter D. Mignolo admits that ‘modernity is a European narrative that hides its darker side, “coloniality”. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity – there is no modernity without coloniality’ (2009: 39). 3. ‘Double exile’ here refers to the situation of estrangement related to Paul Bowles as an American writer who lived for about fifty years in Tangier, a voluntary exile which contributed a great deal to his ambiguous compromises. 4. Lenin El-Ramly describes the first Arabic reception of Western theatre: ‘Discussing the French Expedition to Egypt of which he was a witness, Egyptian Chronicler Abdel-Rahman al-Jabarti wrote that the French had constructed at al-Azbakiyya quarter special buildings where men and women would gather to engage in unrestricted entertainment and acts of licentiousness. It was theatre that he was describing. As we get to know later, Egyptian natives would go out of their way to steal a look at what took place inside’ (El-Ramly 2008).

CHAPTER 4

Changing Perspectives and Current Challenges: Introduction CLAIRE COCHRANE AND JO ROBINSON

The sixteen case study essays that make up the central section of this volume have been carefully selected to introduce our readers to a range of local knowledges from around the globe, while at the same time pointing – via their pairing into key themes and approaches – to the different ways in which the methods and methodologies discussed and explored in Chapter 2 can be productively mobilized and applied to histories of theatre and performance generated within very different specificities of culture, geography and historical time. In this section, we return more explicitly to questions of method and approach, and to the questions and potentials which our choices of method and methodology entail for theatre history and historiography. We begin with two essays that address and assess the current state of knowledge in two developing areas of theatre history research. Elisabeth Dutton’s ‘A Manifesto for Performance Research’ argues the case for research through performance, eloquently suggesting that performance research can help the theatre historian explore both the practices and – vitally – the effects of past performance, particularly from the early modern and medieval periods when performance, not reading, was the dominant model of theatre creation and reception. Conscious that it is impossible to replicate a past performance, Dutton argues for research performances – as all performances – as experimental collaborations based on the dynamics among actors, the emotions of audiences and the interactions of the senses. Jo Robinson, too, is concerned with the embodied, material, interactive and placed practice of theatre, in an essay that explores the potentials and limitations

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of digital historiographical methods that have come increasingly to the fore in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging the potential of big data and digital spatial histories to more fully capture the mobile and networked experiences of theatre practitioners, repertoire and audience that earlier essays by Coates, Wessely and Thorbergsson have described, Robinson also identifies the potential limitations of these models to overturn the structural imbalances of existing theatre history, noting the concerns of Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit that ‘data-driven methods will reinforce existing structures of power and aesthetic–political hierarchies’ (2016: 587). Robinson thus emphasizes the importance of finding ways to capture the local, lived experience of theatre production and reception within the new, potentially more democratic and dialogic digital landscapes of theatre. The third contribution in this section marks a move away from the individual essays that make up the bulk of this volume. As we hope those essays have made clear, the practice of theatre history and historiography is shaped for each of our contributors not only by shared understandings of historiographic principles but also by specific local contexts shaped by geographies, political and social contexts, cultural traditions of performance and economic conditions, at the level of the academy and the nation. The edited conversation captured here thus represents an attempt to bring together and debate with our contributors both those shared principles and the effects of local contexts and understandings. It represents one extended conversation; we offer it here as a model of dialogue, and an invitation to our readers to join in that discussion from their own local standpoints of culture and knowledge.

CHAPTER 4.1

A Manifesto for Performance Research ELISABETH DUTTON

THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE AND ACADEMIC RESEARCH In 2004, Marvin Carlson concluded the second edition of his wide-ranging critical introduction to ‘performance’ with an ‘apologia for theatre’ (2004b: 213–16). Having surveyed the dynamic expansion of the concept of performance into global cultural, social and technological discourses, and cited Jon McKenzie’s case (2001: 18) that ‘performance’ will be the dominant intellectual trope of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Carlson argued that we should not lose sight of theatrical performance, since it offers ‘a specific blending of occasion and reflexivity’. Theatre, Carlson writes, is1 a specific event with its liminoid nature foregrounded, almost invariably clearly separated from the rest of life, presented by performers and attended by audiences, both of whom regard the experience as made of material to be interpreted, to be reflected upon, to be engaged in – emotionally, mentally, and perhaps even physically. (2004b: 213) Activity akin to the process of scholarly research – observation, interpretation, reflection – is inherent in theatrical performance, whether or not it is given an academic label. This activity is carried out by both actors and audiences. In creating a production, the actors and production team may deploy experimental methods that are taken ‘not from the science laboratory’ but rather from long-established theatrical practice. In ‘the workshop, the staged reading, the rehearsal process, the design process’ experiments are conducted that contribute to a theatrical interpretation of a play that is ‘creative, practical, and critical’ (Carson and KarimCooper 2008: 7). But a performance is not simply an ‘output’, the publication of definitive research results. Rather it is an invitation to a further field of researchers – the audience members – to observe, interpret and reflect, and perhaps even affect the performance through their engagement. Furthermore, theatrical methods are closely allied to processes of teaching. The introduction to the RSC School Shakespeare edition of The Merchant of Venice (2018) explains that rehearsal

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rooms and classrooms should alike be ‘places of exploration and shared discovery’, where activities are conducted that ‘require close, critical reading’ and attention to language as well as ‘social and historical context’ in order to interpret what a play first meant and ‘means to us now’ (2018: 4–5). Academics, teachers and theatre practitioners are, in many ways, doing the same job.

EARLY ENGLISH THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE RESEARCH This essay will discuss examples drawn mostly from the history of English theatre. However, Carlson’s apologia, and my manifesto, are relevant to a broader tradition, in Europe and perhaps beyond. For several reasons, I will focus on ‘early’ theatre – by which I mean medieval and early modern theatre up to 1642, when the English playhouses were closed by a puritan parliament. First, because of its historical remoteness, the theatre of this period is often only accessible at any level because of research: by palaeographers who unearth its manuscripts; by philologists who gloss its archaisms; by historians who explain its contexts; by literary scholars who expound its allusions. The collective result of this research may be a scholarly edition that enables a reader to understand, in some detail, a text – and thus, arguably, to understand the work of the playwright, whose job extended as far as the production of the script. If the playwright is the object of enquiry, this may therefore seem a reasonable place to stop – the reader receiving the playwright’s words through the pages of a book – but few, if any, early playwrights envisaged this as the primary means by which their works would be received. The early-seventeenth-century English playwright John Marston, for example, declared that plays are ‘to be spoken, not read […] the life of these things consists in action’ (1964: preface) and was ‘afflicted’ by the idea that scenes should be ‘enforcively published to be read’ (1986: 95). Books do survive, medieval and early modern, that present plays to be privately read.2 But the same plays were probably also performed, whether before or after being copied or printed. Early playwrights most commonly wrote scripts for performance, and, as will be discussed further, sometimes drew attention to the circumstances of performances that they envisaged for their scripts. Performance research thus becomes an essential tool for those studying their work today. Secondly, study of the circumstances in which early drama was performed can enrich and nuance the definition of theatre as ‘liminoid’ and ‘clearly separated from the rest of life’, because early theatre was not exclusively contained in purpose-built theatre buildings. The apparent ‘neutral emptiness’ of the playhouse – then and now – facilitates the creation of other times and spaces within it. It is intentionally a ‘space’ rather than a ‘place’ (Hubbard, Kitchin and Valentine 2004: 4–5) and a play first performed in one playhouse is usually adaptable to performance in another.3 But, before playhouses were built, medieval theatre happened in spaces defined for other purposes – places of worship, feasting, study, commerce – and the interaction of performers’ staged, theatrical action with the other kinds of action that habitually occupied a particular place, could be vital to the effects of performance. Furthermore,

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in the early modern period, after the first commercial playhouses were built in the late sixteenth century, performances nonetheless continued to be staged in nonplayhouse locations. This is perhaps due partly to the significance these venues gave to plays presented in them; conversely, performances enriched the meaning of ‘the rest of life’ precisely by not being clearly separated from it. When Jesus’s crucifixion was enacted in the streets of medieval York, the faithful may have been moved to an affective realization of human suffering and divine immanence in their own time and place (Dutton 2010: 393). Thus, early theatre is often site-specific, and sometimes occasion-specific, too – although the occasion could be a repeated one, such as an annual religious festival – and modern performances can illuminate early plays by resituating them in time and place, thereby deepening understanding of their meaning, methods and artistry. This is a study of con-text that moves, importantly, beyond text. A small illustration: in 2013, I directed a Christmas production of the fifteenthcentury Chester Shepherds’ Play in the Grange Theatre, University of Lausanne; the stable was set up just outside the theatre, in a rugged stone structure that is actually a drinking fountain, and the audience followed the shepherds to this stable at the end of the play. Two years later, audience members told me that they still recall the Nativity every time they walk past that fountain on their way to class. Devotional mnemonics of this sort are a device by which the skilled medieval playmaker moved and taught an audience, bringing the performance to bear on everyday life. Thirdly, early theatre richly and often explicitly supports Carlson’s characterization of theatre as involving both performers and spectators in a kind of research through performance. A production is a collaborative effort of writers, producers, designers, manufacturers and performers; each performance is also, vitally, a collaboration between the production and acting team and an audience. Performance research must therefore consider the audience. The nature and degree of audience collaboration may vary, as may the extent to which audiences are aware of themselves as collaborators, but even where audience members are silent and invisible, in a darkened proscenium arch theatre, their presence, and their attention, affects the performance of the actors and the response of other audience members. In the early modern playhouse, when playing was open air and audience members were not hidden from the actors by darkness, the collaboration between actors and audiences was more explicit, and playwrights habitually scripted lines to acknowledge it: Shakespeare’s characters demand audience applause – an imitation of the Roman plaudite that was used to signal the end of a play in a theatre without a curtain (Meisel 2007: 10), but also draw attention to the audience’s acts of imagination, and occasionally tease them for their gullibility – as, for example, when Fabian, in Twelfth Night (c. 1601–2), comments: ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction!’ (3.4. 116). Early theatre before and beyond the playhouse gives audiences even more work to do: for example, in Henry Medwall’s late-fifteenth-century play Fulgens and Lucres, a feasting audience must be quiet and make room for the actors (193, 201); in Mankynde (c. 1464–71), vice figures teach the audience a scatalogical ‘Christmas song’, and collect money before they will permit the appearance of Tityvillus, a demon with a monstrously large head; Christ in the fifteenth-century York Crucifixion enjoins those watching

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in the street to see and feel fully his suffering on the cross.4 Mummings involved performers playing the audience with (loaded) dice (Twycross and Dutton 2014: 320). After-dinner performances in the dining halls of guilds, colleges and palaces made the dining audience part of the set or even of the action of the play (Dutton 2019). Audiences were written into the scripts of early plays, so we cannot ignore them – and for there to be an audience, there must be a performance.

WHAT PERFORMANCE RESEARCH CANNOT DO First, a few words acknowledging the limitations of performance research. It is impossible to replicate a past performance, and performance research, though it can explore possibilities, cannot tell us exactly how theatrical practices or devices were used in any production. A research performance might find a device or technique that works well but this does not imply that it is the only way things could have been done – ‘this works’ is not proof (though ‘this does not work’ might be). This is frustrating, but it is true of all theatre, since no one performance is identical to the next, even with the same cast and venue, and it is true of all disciplines that attempt to understand the past. It is also impossible to know entirely what an audience experiences. In contemporary performances, researchers can give out questionnaires or even monitor eye movement and neurological responses electronically, but the results will be partial and probably compromised by the audience members’ awareness that they are being ‘tested’ (Purcell 2013: 12–23). In the case of historical performances, tests are impossible, and it is rare to have even one eyewitness account. We cannot generalize audience responses from a sample: we are always working with a ‘best guess’.

WHAT PERFORMANCE RESEARCH CAN DO Performance research draws attention to practicalities, taking the script from the page and insisting that it be physically realized. In medieval schemes of knowledge, theatre is one of the artes mechanicae. Hugh of St Victor (Didascalion [c. 1130s] book 1, chapter 9; book 2, chapters 1 and 11) writes that there are three ‘works’, that of God, that of nature and that of the artificer who imitates nature – these last are human works. Human knowledge is divided into four branches – theoretical, practical, mechanical and logical – and of these, mechanical knowledge contains seven sciences: fabric-making, armaments, navigation, agriculture, hunting, medicine and theatrics (theatricam). These were the applied arts – making something work, as opposed to understanding theories of why it works. Human acts of creation operated within the scheme of the divine mind: God understands everything, but he also creates everything, including the laws of the universe that can then be used by humans when they build things, even if they do not entirely understand why gravity, for example, happens. The mechanical arts were learnt through hard work: observation and experiment. Frustratingly, Hugh of St Victor then discusses this in relation not to medieval theatre but to that of ancient Rome, and the best that he can say for ancient theatre

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is that, like athletics, it kept the actors physically fit and kept the audience out of the pubs. But Hugh of St Victor’s categorization of theatre illuminates the approach of medieval practitioners. The medieval playwright, like a movie scriptwriter, provides the words. In some types of performance, he might not even have provided the plot, since commissioned pieces were drafted by a deviser (or a committee of them) who produced a device of the action (Twycross and Dutton).5 Theatre happened when actors spoke the words and realized the action, and costumes, music and special effects such as fireworks added spectacle. One reason that medieval plays have often been neglected by scholars whose primary training is literary is that much medieval theatre cannot be appreciated at all unless it is performed. Performance research is essential to understand all theatre, but especially medieval theatre. Of course, research could simply describe the conditions of an earlier performance without having to recreate it – research into performance, rather than research through it. However, we stray far from the medieval understanding if we withdraw to the theatre of the mind, as later, Romantic poet-playwrights such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron sometimes sought to do. The English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy intended his play The Dynasts (1904–8) for ‘mental performance’, free from the limitations imposed by ‘the material possibilities of stagery’ (Meisel 2007: 13). But material possibilities are the very point of the mechanical arts, and performance requires that the modern researcher engages with them with the greatest commitment. It is one thing to say that God on a pageant wagon might have been lit by the sun: it is another thing entirely to create a wagon with materials suitable for the reflection of light, and to ensure that it will have an effect whatever the weather (Twycross 2018). The choices that a modern researcher will make in creating such a device may or may not be the same as those medieval practitioners made – usually it is impossible to know – but performance research can engage with material effects in the same way as did medieval practitioners, for the laws of the material world do not change. The aim of such research may be to learn about the production, rather than the effects, of a performance – an audience is not necessary in answering a question about the size of a pageant wagon that may fit in the streets of York, although audiences must be at least envisaged in order to research the sight lines on a wagon stage (McKinnell 2000). But performance research that focuses on material reconstruction may also have the potential to reconstruct aspects of an audience’s experience, and although we can never entirely characterize the experience of an audience today, let alone centuries ago, performance research may reveal human responses that modern audiences share with medieval ones. In the 2001–2 Yiimimangaliso – The Mysteries, directed by Mark Dornford-May, played at the Wilton Music Hall in London, the production translated the medieval Chester Mystery plays into the modern languages of South Africa. The critical and audience acclaim ensured its return, in 2008, to the West End. Its success was due in part to its simple and elemental material aesthetic – a wooden trellis to represent the ark, a white cloth to represent the table of the Last Supper, bundled blankets to represent the babies slaughtered by Herod’s soldiers. Dornford-May’s production did not seek to be reconstructionist, but its stagecraft demonstrated that even for audiences

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used to CGI it is possible to perform miraculous stories, and to portray the divine, compellingly with only low-tech devices that would have been available to medieval craftsmen. Audiences may delight in the ingenuity of a material device rather than in the illusion that hides its nature as a device – just as part of the appeal of stage puppets may lie in the skill and graceful movements of the puppeteer. Furthermore, as Lyndie Wright comments, ‘puppets are little thought-experiments, they demand the use of our empathy in order to function’ (Wright 2016) – audiences enjoy the sense of a shared project when they complement the skill of the actors with sympathetic acts of imagination. Although electrical lighting was used, the stage effects in Yiimimangaliso – The Mysteries were otherwise not dependent on modern technology. The flames from which Satan emerged and into which Herod descended were perhaps generated by a modern stage device, but for the audience, their power was that of fire as an element. Water was also used in the simple representation of the forty days of the flood by an ‘Angel’ with a watering can. These effects, and the delight audiences took in them, suggest atavistic pleasures that might be shared by medieval and modern audiences: we respond to those things that we can perceive with our senses, and the four elements are the purest of these – there is perhaps also here a resonant contrast between the simple, small-scale use of the element and the vastness of the thing it represents: water sprinkling from a watering can and the flood that destroyed the world. When the real elements are used on the stage, a literal, material reality connects the world of the play and the world of the audience. Performance research can teach us not only about the use of material devices but also about the effects created by certain practices of early theatre. It is well known that in early modern public performance, female characters were played by boys. Furthermore, many scripts were written for entire companies of boys, rather than adult males. Today, Edward’s Boys, a company based in King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon and directed by the deputy head, Perry Mills, are reanimating boys’ company scripts. Although Mills’ productions are far from reconstructionist in their design – they often use electric lighting and recorded music, and may translate early modern scripts to 1950s’ London or the punk era or the 1960s’ Summer of Love – Edward’s Boys’ productions offer researchers insight into an important practice of the early stage.6 The company functions, in important ways, similarly to early modern boys’ companies: actor training occurs alongside schoolroom teaching; rehearsal focuses on detailed study of the script; the boys often work with each other for a number of years and the younger boys are informally ‘apprenticed’ to the older. The Elizabethan grammar school followed the theories of Erasmus in emphasizing play – imaginative engagement with, and then representative performance of, the inner life of literary characters, and considerable space was given to the exploration of female characters (Rutter 2004). This may have helped Tudor schoolboys to understand the opposite sex, and appears to offer the same benefit to modern schoolboys (Mills and Mills 2015: 288–9). The ethopoeia through which ‘the schoolboy studies the grammar of emotion’ exhibits a potent learning effect of performance research in the classroom (Rutter 2007: 61). Furthermore, if there was a suspicion, among scholars, that

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Elizabethan boy actors performing salacious material were being exploited through what was required of them onstage (Orgel 1989: 7–29), Edward’s Boys give a very different picture: they perform highly sexualized narratives in drag with the same relish and aplomb with which they play sport, and with a knowing enjoyment of their power to parody the adult world of their audiences, who can only watch and laugh. The boys can also shock with their violence, for example when staging the murder of the child Julio in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (c. 1600): although the murderer, Antonio, is an adult, in Edward’s Boys’ 2011 production an older boy performed the killing of a younger boy, and while the diminutive size of the actor playing Julio certainly created much of the shock, the full horror lay in the audience’s awareness that the ‘murderer’, too, was only a boy. Adults are forced to confront the enormity of acts of violence when viewed through the eyes of child witnesses – even, or perhaps especially, if the children are not just audience but actors. Edward’s Boys play girls, but also old men, gods, murderers, allegorical personifications: performance and pretence – ‘playing’ – is the point (Mills and Mills 2015: 280–2) and it seems probable that the power and humour of boys’ company plays in performance stemmed, then as now, from the anarchic character of the boys themselves ‘showing through’. The boys highlight an important aspect of live theatre that the proscenium arch and the sophisticated effects of the modern stage sometimes obscure – that audiences may derive both meaning and enjoyment from awareness of the gap between real, live actors and the fictions they present. Performance research can illuminate the skill with which early modern writers created roles that exploited the potential of boy actors and audience responses to them.

CASE STUDY I offer here an example from my performance research that illustrates many of the points discussed: material reconstruction, site-specificity, the theatrical effects of boy actors, audience involvement and response. In 1583, William Gager’s Dido was staged in the great hall of Christ Church, Oxford, as the after-dinner entertainment for the visiting Polish ambassador. In September 2013, as part of the Early Drama at Oxford (EDOX) project, the play was restaged in the same venue, also as the accompaniment to a feast.7 We do not know how the original performance was staged within the space of the great hall. The EDOX production deployed the traditional hall arrangement of a high table for important guests, on a dais across the width of one end of the hall, and lower tables running down the hall’s length. Action was organized around these tables and Dido and Aeneas joined the guests at the high table for the banquet with which the Queen welcomes her Trojan guests. The play world and the real world of the audience were thus conflated: the audience became guests at Dido’s banquet. Although the 2013 production sought to ‘reconstruct’ these aspects of the 1583 production, it did not seek to reconstruct all the performance details from Raphael Holinshed’s eyewitness account: a goodlie sight of hunters with full crie of a kennell of hounds, Mercurie and Iris descending and ascending from and to an high place, the tempest wherein

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it hailed small confects, rained rosewater, and snew an artificiall kind of snow. (Elliott et al. 2004: 191) University drama played for official visits was once at the cutting edge of sixteenthcentury theatrical technology, partly because it could afford to be: it was funded by mandatory donations from university members, and did not have to be commercially viable like professional playhouse drama (Elliott et al. 2004: 603–4). But the conservation requirements of a historic venue today can make it difficult to introduce a pack of dogs or construct machinery for gods to ascend and descend: they may also inhibit pouring rosewater rain on the audience. The focus of our research was not the reconstruction of these staging effects, but rather the effect of an after-dinner entertainment bringing classical heroes into the audience’s time as well as space. We do not know how Dido was costumed, but we do know that medieval and early modern productions that presented stories from the past tended towards aesthetic ‘fusion’ in their designs. Early modern interest in the classical resulted in biblical figures dressed in classical style, and Thomas Peacham’s 1595 illustration of an early modern play, probably Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1588–93), shows a queen in a contemporary costume alongside a man in a toga, a black character in a Roman tunic and soldiers looking more like Swiss guards (whose costumes are traditionally said to have been designed by Michelangelo) (Dillon 2006: 55). With this in mind, the costuming of the 2013 Dido juxtaposed period and modern costume to create identifications in the audience’s eye. The deities Venus, Iris and Mercury wore flowing tunics of classical cut, but they were the only classical figures. Gager’s play draws explicit parallels between Dido, also known as ‘Elisa’, and Queen Elizabeth I (Dutton 2018): we therefore dressed Dido not as a classical queen but as Elizabeth I, immediately recognizable by her pale, jewelled dress and red hair (see Figure 4.1.1). The iconic sixteenth-century figure was at once alien to the audience’s world and at home in the sixteenth-century hall that she certainly visited. The foreigners who come to her palace, Aeneas and his fellow Trojans, were by contrast dressed in modern army fatigues and then modern evening dress like that of the audience: they were thus alien in time as well as space to Dido, but were identified with the audience, and their sense of wonder as they encountered Dido and her palace paralleled that of the audience. The entire production was a translation: Gager’s Latin was translated into English; Gager’s identification of Dido with Elizabeth was developed to translate Dido into Elizabeth; Aeneas was translated into a modern-day soldier; even the music, composed by Chris Williams, was a modern electronic meditation on Purcell’s 1680s’ operatic translation of the Virgilian source. But these acts of translation were all informed by research, since one must understand the source in order to render it anew, and they sought to allow the audience an experience that was actually closer to that of the 1583 audience in its simultaneous accessibility and exoticism. The 1583 audience would have been entirely conversant with Virgil’s Latin and would have had no trouble understanding Gager’s dramatic rendering of it; they would have readily grasped Gager’s identification of Dido with Elizabeth; the college members in the audience would have been primarily familiar with the hall as the place where

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FIGURE 4.1.1:  Rehearsal photo of William Gager’s 1583 play Dido, dir. Elisabeth Dutton (2013). Aeneas (Chris Williams) sleeps in the lap of Dido (Alex Mills) who is dressed as Elizabeth I to reflect the identification that Gager creates in his play between his queen and the tragic classical heroine. Image copyright: Elisabeth Dutton.

they ate their meals. The thrill for the 1583 audience may be imagined to have come from iconic figures whose histories they had studied – Dido and Aeneas – appearing among them in their contemporary setting. This was the thrill the 2013 production, by different design devices, sought to reproduce. These choices also facilitated research focus on the aspects of the production that were more literally reconstructed in the EDOX production, including the allmale cast. The play explores a passionate sexual relationship between Dido, in 2013 represented by Alex Mills, a man dressed as Elizabeth I, and Aeneas, represented by Chris Williams, a man dressed in a modern dinner suit. That the result was apparently unproblematic for the audience may have been due to the fact that the iconic Elizabeth I costume was so dominant that many of them did not even realize – at least until he spoke – that Alex was a man. But more importantly, Alex is not Dido, whether Dido is male or female, so the process of belief or suspension of disbelief required of the audience, whether modern or Tudor, is the same. This process, importantly, allows focus on deeper questions that the play reflexively raises about

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performance: does Gager stress the role of queen above that of woman? Or even the fallibility of the human being when trying to fill the role? Virgil shows Aeneas torn between the role Jupiter would give him – founder of Italy – and his human desires; Gager’s focus is on Dido: should she give way to emotion and private happiness or, like Elizabeth, sacrifice them to her greater role? The production also offered insight into the great hall as a material performance venue. During our first and only rehearsal in the venue, we discovered that the actors were inaudible in the huge empty space; however, when the hall was full of audience, there was no problem with audibility, even with the noise of cutlery and crockery that inevitably attends a feast. Christ Church Hall was built for optimum reverberation time: when the hall is empty, sound bounces confusingly off the walls and ceiling; when it is full of people, sound energy is absorbed by them. Live performance and an audience showed how the acoustics worked. A bigger problem was presented by light levels: there was no overhead light and the hall in the evening was quite dark, lit only by electric lamps on the tables – the effect was much as it would have been by candlelight in 1583 (see Figure 4.1.2). Dido’s pale jewelled dress glowed, picking her out among the dark suits of the men. When we cannot see clearly, we listen differently – we tend to respond by turning our heads to direct our attention to sounds, and thus there is a delay in hearing while we pick out the speaker on whom we should focus. Dido’s several long, stately speeches, that in rehearsal had seemed potentially dull, drew and

FIGURE 4.1.2:  Shipwrecked Aeneas (Chris Williams), in modern army fatigues, kneels to ask help of Dido (Alex Mills), while Cupid (Matthew Monaghan), disguised as Aeneas’s schoolboy son, weaves his magic. Still from the documentary film Performing Dido, dir. Maria Sachiko Cecire, about the EDOX production of William Gager’s Dido in the dining hall of Christ Church, Oxford, dir. Elisabeth Dutton (2013). The film is freely available at http:​//edo​x.org​.uk/p​rojec​ts/pe​rform​ing-d​ido/p​erfor​ming-​dido-​film/​. Image copyright: Elisabeth Dutton.

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held the attention of the slowed-down audience. Gager, it seems, knew how to write for his performance venue.

CONCLUSION Performances – both creating them and importantly watching them – are as valid a form of research as reading and writing; in fact, they are forms of reading and writing, and the forms most appropriate to a text written to be performed. But they will illuminate a play in unpredictable ways: it is not always possible to know what one will learn from performance research, because its focus must be, precisely, performance, and preparing a performance is a collaborative creative process of discovery, of serendipity and disappointment, the outcome of which is only gradually revealed. Research performances are perhaps, at best, examples of ‘bluesky thinking’, and they are experiments that require humanities scholars to engage with volatile elements that are far less fixed than the printed page – the dynamics among actors, the emotions of audiences, the interactions of the senses. Research performances must be affective as well as effective: a research-driven performance that does not creatively engage its audience fails, unless we think that the performers of the past also sought to bore their audiences – an unlikely hypothesis given the commercial imperatives of performance then as now. Early modern writers wrote consciously for performance, and in medieval schemes of knowledge theatre was a mechanical art: clearly, then, it is performance, not reading, that will enable us to appreciate early theatre.

NOTES 1. I thank Meg Twycross, Perry Mills, Olivia Robinson and Laurie Maguire for helpful discussion of the material explored in this essay, some of which was prepared with Meg Twycross for a joint presentation on Performance Research at the Early English Drama and Performance Network Graduate Seminar, University of Kent, Canterbury, in March 2016. 2. Ben Jonson prepared his work for print, and even Shakespeare may have paid some attention to this possibility (Erne 2003). Earlier plays, including Everyman, a latefifteenth-century morality play translated from Dutch, printed c. 1530, were printed with woodcuts that may have helped the reader to ‘imagine’ a performance, and the lengthy but impractical ‘stage directions’ that appear in some play manuscripts, such as that of the N Town Plays (a collection of late-fifteenth-century scriptural plays, though copied possibly as late as the reign of Mary I), may also have been intended to guide a reader creating a performance in their mind’s eye. 3. Hubbard and others trace the numerous definitions and redefinitions by which philosophers and human geographers have refined the distinction between place and space, but demonstrate the continuing importance of this distinction to the discourses of spatial theorists. 4. For editions of these plays, see Walker (2000).

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5. I use the male pronoun here as most identifiable playwrights are male; however, Hrotsvitha is one example of a female playwright, and it is likely that the scripts produced for convent performance were by medieval nuns – see www. medievalconventdrama.org. 6. On boy actors and education, see Preiss and Williams (2017). For photos and reviews of the company, see www.edwardsboys.org. 7. See www.edox.org.uk for discussion and performance footage.

CHAPTER 4.2

Digital Histories, Digital Landscapes: New Possibilities of Arranging the Record JO ROBINSON

In her 2016 essay, ‘Digital History and Performance’, Sarah Bey-Cheng notes that the challenge of digital technology in history ‘is to apply our critical faculties to digital resources, as we are used to do when dealing with “traditional” archival materials, [and to] be aware of the ways in which they differ and in which they affect historical analysis’. (2016: 515, citing Gerben Zaagsma 2013: 25) This essay focuses for the most part on my own use of digital technologies to explore the history of theatre and performance in the regional city of Nottingham, situated in the East Midlands of the UK. Through a critical interrogation of, and reflection on, the different stages of that activity, I aim to explore the new challenges, and new potentials, that the variety of methods grouped under this heading might offer to the theatre historian, and how they might affect historical analysis. Writing in the introduction to the 2016 Theatre Journal issue focused on ‘Theatre, the Digital and the Analysis and Documentation of Performance’, Joanne Tompkins notes that such projects ‘use digital technologies to produce something that was not possible or apparent before’ (2016: xi): what has the digital research uncovered and what things might still remain undiscovered? In particular, my discussion here focuses on what my title describes as the digital landscapes of theatre history, in order to explore the ways in which the new historiographies – new arrangements of the historical record – enabled by different kinds of digital technologies can both help and hinder us in our exploration and investigation of the placed-ness of performance, its geographies and its local and wider contexts and audiences. For as Heike Roms and Rebecca Edwards make clear, performance’s ‘embodied, material, interactive practice can only be realised if it is located somewhere’ (2011: 177); and, I would add, watched by someone.

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DIGITAL LANDSCAPES OF PERFORMANCE: MAPPING THE MOMENT It is now nearly fifteen years since I began my own digital mapping and database project ‘Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham, 1857–67’. This focused on the mid-nineteenth-century performance history of Nottingham, then still a town rather than the city it became in 1897 during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. In a 2004 article, ‘Mapping Performance Culture: Locating the Spectator in Theatre History’, I argued for the utility of an expanded idea of what Jacky Bratton calls ‘intertheatricality’ – ‘that mesh of connections between theatre texts and between texts and their creators and realizers that makes up the moving, multi-dimensional, cross-hatched background out of which individual performances, nights at the theatre, regularly crystallise’ – that could take into account not just the creation of theatre texts and performances but also the social, economic and cultural positioning of the spectator of performance (Robinson 2004; Bratton 2001: 15). My own questions about such intertheatricality – about complex and competing networks of both production and reception – were initially prompted by separate but related remarks in two articles in the Nottingham Journal of 27 September 1865. Concluding a review of a ‘Grand Concert at the Mechanics’ Hall’, the writer commented that ‘it is probable that the attendance would have been larger but for the recent opening of the new theatre’, while in the commentary on ‘New Theatre Royal, Parliament-Street’ situated just above on the same page, it was noted that ‘the attendance in the house last night was not so large as might reasonably have been expected, and probably is in some measure to be accounted for by the fact that a concert of a first-class character was taking place in the Mechanics’ Hall’. The experience of each event had – according to these reviewers – been impacted by the other: how could I develop a way of arranging and narrating the historical record of a performance culture that encompassed both these and other choices? In order to explore these questions, the ‘Mapping the Moment’ project – carried out in collaboration with colleagues from both theatre history and geography – turned to a combination of a database and map. In doing so, we hoped that a digital humanities approach, with its capacity to hold large amounts of data which – if properly tagged and linked – can demonstrate connections between individual data points, would offer a potential way of exploring the landscape of performance in mid-nineteenth-century Nottingham that individual histories of theatre venues, theatre managers or performers could not.1 Such ‘new empiricist’ methods, say Katharine Bode and Robert Dixon, can address ‘some of the larger questions about production, distribution and reception, institutions and subjectivities, and cultural systems, networks and fields’ (2009: 16). Bode and Dixon are here writing largely in the context of literary studies, but their emphasis on production and reception, institutions and cultural systems, suggests that the bringing together of databases and geospatial mapping is potentially a particularly productive approach for theatre history. The questions which the Mapping the Moment project addressed were thus questions both of theatre history – where were the sites of performance? What

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types of performance took place there (drama, pantomime, variety, lectures, readings, concerts, grand parades)? Who were the performers? Who watched these performances? – and also of spatial and social culture. How did the different performance venues relate to one another: their repertoire; their audiences; other places nearby (churches, markets, factories); and to the cultural identity and spatial landscape of the town itself? In seeking to answer such questions, the project defined performance very widely. The project database lists not just theatrical performances at established venues within the town, but also, where they were advertised to a potential audience via one of the two main newspapers published in Nottingham during our period – the Nottingham Journal and the Nottingham (later Nottingham and Midland Counties) Daily Express – or through other announcements, lectures, concerts, panoramas, penny readings, exhibitions and religious sermons. Where appropriate, images of advertisements, diary entries, playbills and newspaper reports were also made accessible via the database search, together with photographs of performance venues and other key sites in the town. What the database provided, then, was both a collection of facts – information about performances, ticket prices, venues, advertising, audience numbers and their reactions – and a pathway to access images from various archives that support and illustrate those facts for users of the project site. While, for obvious reasons, the level of information varies across the different events, this brief summary of the approach gives some sense of the scale of the quantity involved in the project’s data collection, albeit only over a relatively short period of eleven years and within the confined space of the town. However, as I hope I have made clear, the purpose of all that quantity was to achieve a particular kind of quality, and it was here that the map interface was central to our research aims. Debra Caplan points out that ‘as scholars of a collaborative art form, we are always dealing with relational data, for theatre artists almost never work in isolation’ (2016: 560): our expanded definition of intertheatricality sought to draw out relationships not just between performers but also between venues, repertoires, managers and potential audiences. For while each night of performance is unique, it also relies on reuse and recirculation of actors, sets, scripts, venues and – perhaps particularly within a provincial town like mid-nineteenth-century Nottingham – audiences, both in terms of numbers and in terms of the knowledges they brought with them and took away from any particular performance event. Thus, while any individual performance was captured in the database via a schema that recorded the production, performance, repertoire, location, venue, people and roles as well as ticket prices and types (see Figure 4.2.1), we sought to find a way to put those individual performances into dialogue with the mass of other events happening in the town – in the same week or month, or in the same venue at a different time.2 Based on a careful accumulation of material and information across the urban environment, what we sought to accomplish was a filling in – as far as possible – of the social and performance contexts in which nineteenth-century theatre performances took place and in which the town’s theatre audiences saw, heard and responded to those performances. Thus, our mode of presentation and visualization – a time-enabled map, which used an 1861 map of the town overlaid with a digital interface to show the

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FIGURE 4.2.1:  Database schema for Mapping the Moment.

individual performance events in relation not just to each other, geographically and temporally, but also to other key spatial and cultural elements within Nottingham’s landscape – aimed at enabling an understanding and awareness of those connections across both space and time (see Figure 4.2.2). In designing the site in this way, we sought to create a spatial history that in Richard White’s terms, writing a year after the Mapping the Moment project was launched, was a ‘means of doing research’,

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rather than just ‘producing illustrations or maps to communicate things that you have discovered by other means’: ‘it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past’ (White 2010, emphasis in original). Working with Doreen Massey’s notion of space as a ‘simultaneity of stories-sofar’ (2005: 130), our aim was to enable users – and ourselves as researchers – to access a multiplicity of stories that criss-crossed the town, just as audience members in 1860s Nottingham might have made choices between the Grand Concert at the Mechanics’ Hall, or the opening production of The School for Scandal at the town’s New Theatre Royal. Prompted by the connections that clustered on the map, our resulting research was able to utilize the revealed patterns to trace a variety of relationships between performance, place and audience: focusing, for example, on the different approaches to marketing the 1865 pantomime, including the provision of trains that regularly ran to different outlying villages to bring in new audiences during the long weeks of the pantomime season (Robinson 2010) or the parades and performance displays of the Robin Hood Rifles, the local volunteer militia, through the streets and in the parks of the town (Sutherland 2016).

FIGURE 4.2.2:  Screenshot: Mapping the Moment interface.

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POSSIBILITY SPACE AND DIGITAL PERFORMANCE PLACE It is important, however, to reflect both on what this data model and presentation interface did not or could not capture or represent, and on the ways in which our choice of the map as the presentation interface might affect the kinds of questions that could be asked of the data – ‘to apply our critical faculties to digital resources’, in Bay-Cheng’s terms. In thinking about what the map is doing in this way, I have found it useful to turn to writing on other kinds of digital interfaces between user and material content: in particular, the work of Ian Bogost on the persuasive power of video games. Bogost introduces the idea of procedurality, used to ‘craft representations through rules’ (2008: 122), and of the possibility space that those rules create and delimit that can be explored through play. ‘The rules do not merely create the experience of play – they also construct the meaning of the game’ (121): the structures imposed by games are not caused by the nature of programming per se but instead caused by conscious decisions taken to code certain possibilities in and out of the game space such that the game can give ‘representations of the ordinary world that might give players new perspectives on the world they inhabit’. (Robinson 2012: 506, citing Bogost 2008: 122) While our Mapping the Moment project had nowhere near the sophistication of the kinds of video games that Bogost is addressing here, the concepts of procedurality and possibility space can perhaps help to conceptualize the work that our map, as interface, was doing in terms of shaping a particular theoretical, qualitative approach to the mass of quantitative data on performance events which the Nottingham research project collected. Bogost explains that possibility space and procedurality come together in procedural rhetoric: ‘the practice of effective persuasion and expression using processes’ (2008: 125). The procedural rhetoric of the map, with its prompt to think about both spatial and temporal relationships and connections between different performance events, performance venues, performers and so on, sought to encourage the user to explore such connections. So what did this particular digital humanities approach code in or out of the Mapping the Moment possibility space – and what might we learn for future projects? The possibility space of big data projects of course depends on the data that is included in their design. Caplan notes that ‘big data can only show what is accounted for in the dataset, which is still curated by the scholar who chooses what to include and what to exclude’ (2016: 572); while Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit similarly argue that the ‘cleaner’ and bigger a dataset is, the more likely it is to favor practices and people that are already well-represented in the archives. One of the dangers is thus that data-driven methods will reinforce existing structures of power and aesthetico-political hierarchies. (2016: 587) In the context of much British theatre history, which as Claire Cochrane has pointed out elsewhere, is marked by an ‘unselfconscious provincialism’ ‘to skew the record

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towards the assumption that everything important in British theatre happened in London’ (Cochrane 2011: 3), the very fact that the Mapping the Moment project focused on a provincial town in the East Midlands worked against such a danger. Nottingham is not well represented in the national theatre history of the UK, and although its theatres hosted many actors and companies advertised as coming ‘out of London’, the stage performers most familiar to the town’s audiences have gone largely unremarked. In extending our collection of data beyond the town’s established theatre and concert halls, recording popular lectures, exhibitions, menageries and portable theatres at the town’s annual Goose Fair, our aim was to be as inclusive as possible, but of course the level of information available as to the performances at Bennett and Patch’s ‘unique Theatre in the Market-place’, or the concerts held in the Napoleon Inn public house on St Ann’s Well Road during Goose Fair week (‘Amusements’: 1865), was much less detailed than that about the opening night of the new theatre, where newspapers recorded lists of important audience members, and descriptions of every scene presented on the stage. Reviewing the Mapping the Moment project in 2011, other absences of the kinds of knowledge that our own particular data model offered were clear: the spatially-based interface necessarily privileges those categories of information and implied relationships which can be tied to location over those which cannot. The map can show where performance venues and religious venues are located in relation to one another, but it cannot show the complex range of attitudes towards theatre and performance held by members of both the established and dissenting congregations within the town. (Robinson et al. 2011: 121) Such information is hard to capture as points of data. Reflecting on Franco Moretti’s call to ‘distant reading’ (2000: 56) – a term that has been taken up by many digital humanities scholars aiming to ‘“zoom out” from the detail to reveal unexpected patterns that we do not see “up-close”’ (see, for example, Holledge et al. 2016: 8) – Alan Galey identifies that the ‘bracketing [off] of history and materiality is typical of computational approaches in the parts of the digital humanities associated with big data’ (2017: 244). More importantly, what goes missing in using a map as a means to interrogate the history of performance – an experience which depends on liveness, movement and gesture, on (in the mid-nineteenth century at least) the copresence of the performer and spectator and on a shared understanding of historical and social context – is precisely the lived experience of that performance, and of the places in which it is experienced. Stuart Dunn points out that ‘digitizing space most obviously means removing physicality from the digitization process: it is the representation of a concept, not an object’ (2017: 89). And what is true of space is even more true of performance: as Bollen notes, a data model in itself will never reveal what happens inside a performance. Only attending a performance and participating in its happening or gathering the evidence it leaves behind can deliver insights into that. (2016: 627) Thus, while the ‘Mapping the Moment’ project – and others operating on similar models of data collection and display such as the Australian AusStage database or the

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Global Ibsen project – provides theatre historians with access to a rich array of data, and the ability to explore key questions such as the transmission of repertoire and actor mobility, it is important to note what is not included in the possibility spaces of these digital landscapes. In a project which aimed towards historical enquiry about audiences and their choices, their access to performances and performance spaces – about the lived experience of performance culture in Nottingham in the mid-nineteenth century – the loss of that lived experience through the reduction to representation on the single visual plane of the map has to be acknowledged. Other digital theatre and performance history projects have tackled this absence through what Hugh Denard has called the digital ‘enactment’ of performance spaces (2004). Readers of this essay may wish to explore the digital environments of Theatron (http://www.theatron.org/), Ortelia (https://ortelia.com/research/) and Virtual Vaudeville (see https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=GuR​EpfP9​znQ),​ each of which offers its users the ability to digitally move through historical performance places, whether it be the Theatre of Dionysus, Athens (Theatron), the Rose Theatre of early modern London (Ortelia) or B. F. Keith’s Union Square Theatre, a typical Vaudeville house seating approximately 1,200 spectators, in the year 1895 (Virtual Vaudeville). This latter project explicitly aimed ‘to reproduce a feeling of “liveness” […]: the sensation of being surrounded by human activity onstage, in the audience and backstage, and the ability to choose where to look at any given time (onstage or off), and to move within the environment’ (Saltz 2001). Reflecting on the development of Theatron, Denard suggests that ‘the unfamiliarity of digital simulations as a form of historical documentation’ opens up the potential for a different historiography, challenging its users ‘to produce original, non-textually-delimited historical narratives’ (2004: unpaginated). But the makers of the more recent Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) system note a different problem in their discussion of their predecessors (Roberts-Smith et al. 2013). Comparing the use of their ‘stage view’ – a scaled, three-dimensional model of a performance environment, populated by abstract avatars that can be moved around in the space, and optionally annotated with text or images – to these other projects, all of which aim towards a mimetic reproduction of historical theatre spaces, the SET creators write that Theatron3 and Ortelia, even the planned interactive version of Virtual Vaudeville would function primarily in publication mode, as a means of disseminating historical research, rather than enabling it. Users of all three systems are positioned primarily as consumers, whether as visiting students, audience members, or readers, and not given the opportunity to become producers of theatre-historical research. Although each of these systems is a rich and valuable resource for students of theatre history, none attempts to fully represent, document, or enable its methodologies. Since their focus is on communicating rather than generating findings, these resources are theatre-historical rather than historiographical. (Roberts-Smith et al. 2013) In other words, for projects that aim towards digital reconstruction of performance place and spectatorship, the historical record has already been arranged within the

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research process – although the makers of Ortelia, in particular, would I think, argue that their virtual Rose or Boar’s Head theatre has enabled them to explore the practical realities of producing theatre within particular material constraints. However, the final experience of space for the viewer is largely a fixed one, in contrast to the varying journeys across space and time that the Mapping the Moment project sought to make available to its users. Reflecting on these different modalities in the final section of my essay, I thus return to Nottingham, and briefly consider two more recent approaches to generating new data for digital research: projects that aim both to expand what is accounted for in the data set, and the pool of researchers who contribute towards its development. In these ways, I suggest, a new wave of digital scholarship, with participation and engagement at its centre, might function to counter the concerns of Caplan, Bench and Elswit highlighted earlier, that ‘data-driven methods will reinforce existing structures of power and aesthetico-political hierarchies’ (Bench and Elswit 2016: 587) – and also to re-engage the lived experience of spectators within the creation of digital histories.

DEMOCRATIZING THE DIGITAL: CROWDSOURCING AND CITIZEN SCHOLARSHIP As this essay has highlighted, the possibility space of any such big data project – what research findings can be developed, explored and demonstrated within it – depends first and foremost on the data that is included. With this in mind, Bollen calls for increasing collaboration and convergence between projects to increase the data available to researchers, and the kinds of research stories that can be told, ‘from the local activities of an organization and its people to participation in a national network and cultural distribution on a global scale’ (2016: 630). In contrast, here I want to briefly consider new practices that support the generation of digital data, both in terms of increased volume and in terms of adding in a different kind of qualitative texture that perhaps allows fuller access to the complex range of attitudes towards theatre and performance, the absence of which from the Mapping the Moment database I previously noted. Researchers interested in the history of performance in Nottingham are currently benefiting from the activities being carried out through the British Library’s ‘In the Spotlight’ project. This project, led by Mia Ridge, digital curator for Western Heritage Collections, is harnessing the power of online volunteers via the library’s LibCrowds platform to mark out and transcribe key information such as dates, venues and performance titles from their significant collection of 234,000 playbills dating from the 1730s to the 1950s from theatres across the UK, a proportion of which have already been digitized but are not machine-readable (http​s://w​ww.li​bcrow​ds.co​m/ col​lecti​on/pl​aybil​ls). Among these playbills, which list entertainments at theatres, fairs, pleasure gardens and other such venues, are details of various venues and performances in Nottingham during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Given the discussion of power and provincialism

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in this essay thus far, it is notable that the project has chosen to initially prioritize transcription of data relating to regional theatres around the UK and Ireland. ‘In the Spotlight’ utilizes a ‘crowdsourcing’ approach, which Ridge has described elsewhere: Crowdsourcing projects often divide up large tasks (like digitizing an archive) into smaller, more manageable tasks (like transcribing a name, a line, or a page); this method has helped digitize numerous primary sources. In cultural heritage crowdsourcing, easy-to-complete ‘microtasks’, or ‘one-off tasks requiring minimal effort’ (McGonigal 2008) enable a broad base of potential participants who would find more complex or time-consuming tasks less satisfying. Tasks can be described as the ‘atoms’ of crowd-sourcing, and can be linked together to form larger actions that contribute to project goals. (2013: 437) Launched in November 2017, the site had registered over 120,000 contributions by October 2018; data generated by the project is available to researchers at https​://ww​w.lib​crowd​s.com​/coll​ectio​n/pla​ybill​s/dat​a under a CC0 licence, that is, with­out copyright. The project encourages volunteers to comment on interesting items and to ask questions about what they find; the project’s twitter feed then highlights these finds to other volunteers and supporters. Such an approach – with volunteers clearly kept engaged by the variety and interest of the typefaces and the extravagant descriptions of nineteenth-century shows – perhaps provides one way forward for enhancing the data set for digital humanities projects in theatre and performance; in addition to making the data generated by this project freely usable, the LibCrowds platform itself is open source and available for use by other projects. As Ridge’s commentary makes clear, crowdsourcing approaches follow in the footsteps of ‘citizen science’, a mode of engaging volunteers in research tasks that draws on the fact that, as Hasan Bakhshi, Philippe Schneider and Christopher Walker suggest, ‘scientific modes of knowledge creation, insofar as they rely on more stable and standardised languages, are easier to codify, transfer and build on’ (2008: 2). What will be generated through this volunteer activity is, initially at least, a data set of venues, performances, names and dates that can be utilized by other researchers, perhaps to build the kinds of data models discussed by Bollen, albeit subject to the proviso that the British Library’s collection of playbills, while extensive, is still far from complete in its coverage of UK theatre. In contrast, my own most recent digitally based project focusing on the history of theatre in Nottingham has also drawn on the goodwill and hard work of volunteers, but has taken a very different approach. ‘Our Theatre Royal Nottingham: Its Stories, Heritage and People’, funded by the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund, aims to explore the potential of working in collaboration with volunteers to co-research and co-curate a digital archive of the venue’s history since its opening in September 1865. In doing so, the project moves from citizen science towards what our project team are terming ‘citizen scholarship’ – our way of acknowledging that humanitiesoriented scholarship must take account of the fact that ‘pluralism and dissent is a vibrant and creative element in the arts and humanities, and is often concerned with the different ways of making fragmentary and ambiguous evidence comprehensible’

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(Bakshi, Schneider and Walker 2008: 15). Arts and humanities researchers adopt interpretive, contextual and analytical methods, acknowledging potentially differing understandings of historical evidence; tasks cannot be broken down into ‘one-off tasks requiring minimal effort’ (McGonigal 2008). In the brief description of this project that follows, I thus emphasize both the independence and the support that has been given to each of the nearly seventy volunteers who have joined the project, before exploring the new kinds of information that the project brings to the digital theatre history of Nottingham. As a time-limited project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund rather than an academic research council, it was always clear that we could not aim towards comprehensive coverage of every performance event across 150 years or more of the Theatre Royal’s history. Working with focus groups of theatregoers and Nottingham residents at the outset of our project, we thus identified four key themes: Building the Theatre, Theatre in Wartime, Pantomime and Onstage and Backstage. Our volunteers divided into groups to investigate these topics, to carry out oral history interviews and to work in the theatre itself to organize and catalogue the theatre’s physical archive, as well as to organize talks, exhibitions and events to publicize the progress of the research over the two years that the project is running. With an expanded sense of citizen research in mind, ‘Our Theatre Royal Nottingham’ provided training and opportunities to our volunteers. They have been supported to develop the skills – as oral historians, as researchers in the archive, as curators – required to instigate and investigate their own interests and projects within the project’s overarching themes, with results that have mobilized their own local knowledges and networks to uncover stories and documents outside as well as inside the official archives. Our volunteers have brought many interesting stories to light from those archives, but what has been particularly notable for me as an ‘academic’ researcher is their ability to access and work with informal local networks that reach far beyond the materials held in the formal archives and repositories. They have unearthed local enthusiasts and collectors of memorabilia happy to share their collections; realized that their neighbours and friends have been leading lights in the many amateur theatre and opera groups that use the theatre for annual performances; and tapped into social media networks to find, for example, many of the now grown-up women who in the past performed with groups from local dance schools in the pantomime chorus. Those stories enable a deeper engagement with the images available on the project site, captured under the heading ‘What’s the Story?’ that sits underneath each item. The independence that we have sought to enable and facilitate our volunteers is mirrored in the development of the digital interface, where visitors to the site are invited to make their own journey through the displayed items, rather than being guided to follow particular narrative arcs. As Figure 4.2.3 shows, the main archive page of the site simply presents images and their stories, inviting the user to click and explore. Links at the bottom of each item point to other relevant material where appropriate – a poster for the 2017 pantomime production of Beauty and the Beast links to the 1868 playbill that advertises the pantomime of the same name as well as to a clip of an oral history interview with the actor playing the pantomime

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FIGURE 4.2.3:  Screenshot: Archives page, ourtheatreroyal.org.

dame – but we hope that visitors will find their own paths through the site, perhaps summoning up the memories of their own interactions with the theatre and its history. ‘Our Theatre Royal Nottingham’ – which emphasizes in its very title the sense of shared ownership not only of the theatre but also of its history which the project has sought to enable – thus makes a move from the realm of big data or distant reading that underpinned the approach to the Mapping the Moment research towards the local story. In making that move, we are perhaps more able to capture the lived experience of working in or visiting the Theatre Royal. If performance is always ‘located somewhere’ (Roms and Edwards 2011: 177) and watched by someone, this project aims to bring back the experiences of place and spectator to digital theatre histories. Combining images, memories, anecdotes and evidence of the lived experience of working and spectating in the theatre, chosen, collected and curated by volunteers who themselves have been regular visitors to the venue, this very local project offers a different mode of engagement and a different digital landscape of theatre in Nottingham.

NOTTINGHAM THEATRE: A WARNING! On the opening of the Theatre Royal in 1865, several clergymen within the town wrote to the papers and published pamphlets protesting the new building in their midst, one of which was titled ‘Nottingham Theatre: A Warning!’ (Iliffe and Baguley 1972: 51). It therefore seems appropriate to adapt this admonishment in conclusion to this essay, in order to note the challenges of digital theatre research. Of the various

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projects discussed in this essay, three, including my own ‘Mapping the Moment’, no longer function as originally intended, as the digital architectures on which they were built have passed into obsolescence or have become too expensive to sustain. Digital technologies – indeed the very process of digitization – are certainly no panacea for preservation, and research councils understandably tend to focus on the preservation of digital data rather than digital interfaces. To embark on a digital humanities project is thus to face the challenge of sustainability: here, Bollen’s call towards convergence may represent a key step towards developing networks of support and institutional knowledge.

NOTES 1. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and undertaken at the University of Nottingham in collaboration with Dr Gary Priestnall from the School of Geography as co-investigator. Other members of the project team were Dr Lucie Sutherland (English), Dr Robin Burgess (Geography) and Dr Richard Tyler-Jones (Information Services), with support from Nottingham City Libraries and Museums and the Nottinghamshire County Archive. 2. Jonathan Bollen describes a convergence of different data models for theatre research around key elements: places, people, companies, performance and works (2016). For a detailed data entry model utilized by an ongoing project, see, for example, https​://ww​w.aus​stage​.edu.​au/pa​ges/l​earn/​about​/data​-mode​ls.ht​ml.

CHAPTER 4.3

Historians in Dialogue: A Roundtable Discussion As our Introduction makes clear, our ambition for this volume is to set up international conversations between scholars predicated on their understanding and experience of their ‘local’ landscape of theatre history. That conversation emerges through the pairing of essays from different geographies and temporalities, and in the web of connections that we have sought to highlight in the Introduction to this volume and elsewhere. However, mindful of the criticism that the individual case-study approach leaves those case studies isolated, we invited our collaborators to take part in a dialogue about approaches, methods and contexts with the aim of identifying and discussing key issues and modes of working. What follows is an edited version of a conversation between several of our contributors – Ruthie Abeliovich, David Coates, Milena Grass Kleiner, Hyunshik Ju, Rashna Darius Nicholson, Dorota Sosnowska and Magnus Thor Thorbergsson – that took place in Belgrade, in July 2018, at the meeting of the IFTR. We were joined for the discussion by Mark Dudgeon, publisher for theatre and Shakespeare studies at Bloomsbury. What are the models of ‘theatre’ that we are working with? Is what we think of as the object of theatre history becoming more expansive, and what is its relationship with performance studies? Are we looking at radically new material or just more material? Ruthie:  The answer to the question what is theatre – the categorization of theatre, of its limits, changes, basically, through the lenses of performance studies, through the lenses of sound studies and when objects transfigure from things to recordings – and I mean recordings in a noun kind of way and in a verb kind of way, as an action, that it can be recorded and replayed, and replayed, and replayed, and so the performance is an ongoing event, and no longer ephemera. The life and the afterlife of theatre is re-examined not through spectral modes of haunting but rather through the materiality of the theatre and the agentive nature of the artefact that remains. Dorota:  So I think it’s a very fascinating question, especially for those cultures or those histories that have this division of language. So we have this very problem let’s say in Polish that we don’t have a word performance so it functions in its original way – in its English way – but only to describe some phenomena in the arts. Then we have some Polish versions […] to describe some kind of perspective looking at

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culture – so these are performances of everyday life – and then we have theatre which is a very established and a little bit ‘anachronistic’ category. So our new artists don’t like to do theatre – they do performative works, they do work in progress, performance installations, something like that – sculpture even, or performative lectures. […] So I think that on the one hand these boundaries are crossed or blurred, but on the other hand, it seems very interesting to still track them, and to see how theatre, as a very specific and old – some people say even dead – medium, still interferes and brings with it categories and aesthetics and formats, some new possibilities […]. So while seeing it as a whole as a very big field for us, I see that very possibility of moving in that field, keeping those two categories in mind. Rashna:  I think it’s also a question of the opposite happening, where people who traditionally do theatre history self-reflexively move towards performance studies techniques of analysis, within their worlds, so it’s a mutual exchange I think. Milena:  In Chile […] we kept both, because some of the scholars felt more close to performance and some to theatre, and we wanted to recruit more people into the field of theatre studies, and because we do both practical and theory projects in postgrad. But I think that the main thing is that the discussion always goes to political references abroad – so when we are talking about performance studies we are talking about the United States, and Diana Taylor, basically, and when we are talking about theatre studies we are talking about [Hans-Thies] Lehmann and [Erica] Fischer-Lichte. So one has to have been in the discipline for a long time, to get further than that – just geopolitical separation – and to get into objects and methodologies. And I would say that, at the end in Chile, most of the people, most of the scholars, are working in both theatre and performance at the same time. Magnus:  In Icelandic we don’t have a word for performance. […] We have two words for theatre, and they both refer to playing, and one of them is the art of playing and the other is the playing house – basically the theatre building. But we don’t have a tradition of theatre history writing or of theatre studies. […] But in my work – I think I’m focusing on a very traditional concept of theatre, but I allow myself to draw in examples from other performances – be it social events or exhibitions or anything that can help basically – allowing myself to look at boundaries between theatre and performance as more fluid and plastic gives me the opportunity to basically create the field like I want. What material do we work with and how is it accessed? What and where are our archives? Ruthie  The digitization of archives has opened new avenues – mostly unexplored through theatre studies. Phenomena such as theatre sound that was previously inaccessible can now be examined. This puts a focus on the orality of theatre – language, accent, articulation, intonation – and in this sense, it is new material. […] So there’s something really interesting about the technologies I work with, because although the theatre recordings I work with were produced fifty, sixty, sometimes a hundred years ago; they are available to us as research materials only in the last

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decades or so due to digitization of archives. And also due to the internet and the opening of these archives. So if you search Google now for a historical play, some of the materials that will pop up are sound recordings, and then theatre sound, which was unavailable to us until now, suddenly comes back as material – I think in relation to the discussion we just had now, the question of where the theatrical event begins and when it ends becomes very crucial. We have the event, or the eventness, and we have the paratheatrical activities around it, and the theatre recordings are part of the paratheatrical activities around the actual performance – and the performance does not have to be the thing, but maybe its resonance – and its resonance can be through listening, and not always through seeing. If there is a performance – and some of the recordings I’ve worked with, that’s the case – if there’s a recording of a performance that was very successful, and ran for years and years and years, then when it’s played on the radio, when it’s sold as commercial recording, suddenly it becomes memorabilia, and people can listen to theatre and remember what they saw, so it relates to the celebrity they saw on stage. Rashna:  Again, one has to think about – I think, I feel that digitization is really a First World problem. I think about the archives in India – we haven’t even got to the phase of preserving yet – it’s just been dumped from one floor to another. It’s also a problem of wealth – of economic problems […]. Ruthie:  What was so interesting about – [what Dorota said earlier, and in her essay], is that you exposed the ideology of cataloguing and categorizing and of saving, and then the archive stops being just a place, but it becomes a place that is embedded with ideology and this ideology is also framed in a specific time, in a specific cultural context, in specific things that happen – so maybe that can take us back to the previous discussion about the difference between theatre and – it’s not just the difference between theatre and performance, the inside of the archive and the outside of the archive, but it’s also about the conditions of making and of saving it. Milena:  So in the case of Chile, there is no national archive of theatre; the biggest one is managed by P. Universidad Católica de Chile, and there are some minor finds in other smaller institutions. Due to restrictions in the access to the existing archives and to a contra-hegemonic move – there has been a strong movement from the companies to create their own digital archives that are self-administered. And I wonder whether those archives will be seen as such, even though they are more like repositories of the companies themselves – whose criteria for the selection of materials are not made known to the public and have not undergone a curatorial process as such. David:  Going back to digitization is one of the things that I was thinking about in relation to this question – and of the challenges it brings about actually as well in terms of new researchers that are coming into the field. They have this – I’m thinking of students in particular – they think that the best access to the archive and to the material is through digital means, searching online catalogues and whatever else, and aren’t aware of the more traditional means of accessing materials – so actually in some ways the archive is shrinking, because less is available digitally – so it’s harder to get hold of the material that in the first instance was already marginalized, the

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stuff that’s being digitized are the things that archivists feel are most important to be digitized, so it feels like the pool is shrinking again, but gradually with digitization perhaps that will improve? Rashna:  There are also systemic national problems within archives. A very obvious example – talking with my Palestinian hat on – is the absence of archives in certain places. All the Palestinian material is in the Israeli archives. So if you are a Palestinian theatre scholar, you don’t have access to your sources. The only people who have access to your sources are the foreigners who can go to the Israeli national library and sit down and look at these records – so politics also has a role to play in terms of the construction of the archive, and the kinds of access we have. Ruthie:  I think that archiving is a cultural tradition. In Israel it’s not easy either. It has profound ideological aspects that relate to the Holocaust and the recollecting of something that has been perished – but other than that, the impulse to collect, and the knowledge, also the tradition – compare the German tradition of archiving to an Indian one or to a Palestinian one – I think it exposes something that is really culturally rooted. Hyunshik: As Ruthie said, archives can generate identity formation – archival knowledge is not a fixed mode. Archives in other terms can be defined as results of performative processes but in Korea we have no – or very little – evidence or documents for Korean masked dance drama in the eighteenth century. Rashna:  I think there is also the impulse to collect, but there is also the impulse to discard. And I think the impulse to discard can be a very strong one. So I feel like – again, if I think about Parsi material, it’s in the Parsi libraries, it’s never in a national library, so you have these Parsi libraries that notoriously do not get much governmental assistance. And there are reasons for devaluing that material […]. Magnus:  I was on the board of the Icelandic Theatre Museum, which is basically a storage room – a rented storage space that is not accessible and it’s not – not digitized, it’s not even catalogued – basically, you can’t find anything there. But what I learned through my work there was that there’s a tendency at least in the Nordic countries to cut funding to specific theatre archives and to integrate them into larger national libraries or archives. And one of the fears that I’ve heard arising is that through this process we lose the people who have specific knowledge of theatrerelated material. At the theatre museum in Iceland, we realized that [we] can’t go on as we had done, we can’t just dump everything into a storage space and not do anything with it – so we have distributed the material to the National Museum, the National Library, to the archives that really know how to handle the material and how to preserve it. But then of course comes the [… question] who makes the selection, and on what ground – what is discarded and what is kept? Jo:  I’m going to go back to the First World problem. The second-order First World problem is that things that are digitized aren’t necessarily preserved in a sustainable fashion – so it kind of seems like a solution, but actually – someone’s just given me a recording of a production that I’ve written about and never seen, and I can’t find

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a device to play that recording on. […] There’s a danger that everything is copied or digitized and then it’s impossible to find or play in a few years’ time. Dorota:  Maybe, we can think about a situation of not recording, or not having actual documents in place – it’s a very, very interesting place to be in. So – and with this in mind, touring archives, and searching for some traces, some evidences, becomes something different from just thinking about the technique of saving, recording and having something, which is also coming very much from art – this willingness to have something, to have it on my own, at my home. […]The other thing is, looking from the other perspective, what is very interesting in thinking about evidences, documents, leftovers, archives, is that we as theatre historians are always put in this paradoxical situation of distrust. Defining our subject as ephemeral as we always do – even if we know those important theories stating that it’s not ephemeral, we always have this feeling of loss, so coming from this place we are always in a little bit of distrust towards our evidences, as they are – what copies, schedules, what is it really, how it works with the actual event. And this kind of tension is also something that I think it would be very worth thinking about and theorizing. In this volume, aware of our position as two UK-based scholars, we have tried to emphasize the importance of local contexts in understanding the theatre histories that our contributors explore. What does the local mean to you? Milena:  I have a problem with the very idea of local contexts. I think that ‘local’ is always in relationship to something else – so one thing is if you are writing for a foreigner, or for somebody else, what’s local and what’s unknown for that person in particular? That’s one thing. The other thing is that we tend to ‘naturalize’ what local is, so I would say that in Chile the idea that everybody knows what a specific play is or was in the past is not true. I’ve heard colleagues describing the ‘reality’ of Chilean theatre eighty years ago, but if you do your research, theatre was not like that. So local is not something that only deploys in space, but also in time – I think that we have to think of the local both in terms of space and time. So there might be things that you think as local because they are from the city where you live in, but because they are so far away in time they are still alien. So again, I think local has always to be thought in terms of ‘local in relation to what?’ – and – who’s the one you are talking with, or who’s the recipient of the information that you are giving or something you want to convey, and to which purposes? Rashna: I was just thinking through this and when you talk about defining the local in relation to what – the first thing I think of is the global, and what the global means, and what global theatre history means. What the problematics are of global theatre history but also in relation to that, what the problematics of writing local theatre history are […]. Milena:  Yes, but I think that what global means to you, what global means in Chile, it’s not the same. And if you go from – for instance, from the community of scholars in the main capital city in Chile, where most of the cultural and artistic life occurs, and you talk with scholars in the south, we will understand global in different ways.

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So that’s why I intentionally did not mention the global, or the national. I’ve been talking a lot [with Andres Kalawski, a colleague of mine] about the use UK citizens make of ‘Western’ as something self-evident, and we were wondering whether Chilean culture is Western culture, or not? Jo:  It seemed to us that there are some very specific conditions that pertain in – not necessarily a national local, but a really local local, in terms for example of Rashna just saying the Parsi archives are being neglected – because of a particular set of conditions that pertain in that local. And of course there are different sets of suspicions or anxieties everywhere. Ruthie:  It sounds from your definition that when you say global theatre histories then you are referring to a set of power relations […]. Magnus:  I think one of the problems is – even though we are saying ‘I’m doing global theatre history’ or ‘I’m doing transnational something […]’, you’re still entangled somehow in the local. I mean – me doing the history of Icelandic-Canadian theatre has a different meaning in an Icelandic context than it does in a Canadian one. Even though I say well I’m doing transnational history, yes, but I talk quite differently in Iceland than I would do in Canada. It’s a question – as Milena raised earlier – who’s the recipient? Who are we talking to? So, I think taking off from the local context doesn’t leave that behind, it just gets more entangled, more complex. Hyunshik:  As Milena said, local always can be defined as something related to what is called essential. So the most difficult thing of my essay is how can I relate the local to the universal scene – that means the tension between locality and universalism – but in the case of South Korea, the situation is very complicated, because we have a double universal horizon – that is, both Western culture and Japanese culture. So, as you know, Korea was under cultural domination of Japan […] in the twentieth century. And then in the 1950s we were under control of the US government, so we – as a result we had a – double universal horizon. So it’s a very complicated situation. David:  Yes – I’m processing all this as we go along, but it feels like a challenge of the local is about how others see and value it, and it feels like from academia, we have to always find the importance of it for academia. Ruthie:  Yes, that’s a very interesting question. And I think it also has to do with the difference between immigrants and minorities, in a way – I mean, looking inside a community, what’s going on, or looking at the trajectories that connect between worlds. So we use a lot – I mean, the term migration, or tracks, migrating tracks, but we don’t often look at what’s going on inside the community – the local. Dorota:  I would also see it in terms of methodology. I always treat my local context as kind of a virus that I can put into methodologies that have been worked out with different material or different cultural context but they are presented as universal, as something that fits – like, it’s universal theatre, universal performance – it’s just human nature. […] And I really like to ask those methodologies with my own context and with my own history and with everything that is – let’s say local in this sense –

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and to see how it will change, how it will collapse, how it will be: how it won’t fit anymore or how especially different binaries that are proposed will collapse. David:  I’m also thinking of micro and macro histories and the value that we place on those – and to me, it feels like the macro is valued more than the micro – whereas I personally would feel that both are needed – the micro is very, very important. Mark:  So going back to who it’s for – the micro – that narrative and analysis will be of great value to people from that region, but that won’t fund, or make that project viable [as a publication], unless there’s that macro – or wider – resonance to scholars who may not be concerned at all about the region – it’s about having those hooks, so it has resonance and relevance to them in research. And yes, as a publisher, I do think publishers have a role in shaping a narrative – but that’s inevitably affected by economics. There’s a danger then that certain histories and narratives are privileged because of where we [publishers] know titles will sell. What are the challenges of addressing/developing local knowledges in the context of a Western publishing market that is necessarily working in the medium of English? Hyunshik: One of the most difficult things for non-Western authors publishing their paper in the medium of English might naturally be the problems of translation. There are many Korean words that have no English words. For example, han, heung, musim employed in my essay here could not easily translate into sadness, joy, absentmindedness in English, despite similarities between them. I should minutely detail the meanings of Korean and English words and compare the two usage contexts. Thus, it reveals a constant, urgent problematizing of the complex relationship between local knowledge and universalism. When it comes to writing a research paper in English, I am always nervous about whether I have an ability to skilfully rove from the broad contextual universalism to the tiny local knowledge and vice versa, although local and universal knowledge are inextricably linked. In sum, with a greater level of accountability and conceptual elaboration, deftly traversing between two knowledges, calls for a more rigorous scholarship for nonEnglish native writers. Magnus:  This is a huge issue for everyone outside of the English-speaking world. I mean, academics in my country are being pressured to publish internationally – because that’s what strengthens the status of the university […]. But that also means that we have to – it’s the danger of – being too much on the surface and not being able to go in depth in our research – because you always have to explain basic situations before going into the real subject area. And then when publishing internationally you have the fear of being too local – that it doesn’t resonate with a broader audience. Dorota:  We have exactly the same problem especially that now there is new reform of the higher education system careers in Poland […]. For me it always was a very interesting thing – to publish in, to write in English, to think about issues I know very well, that are right under my skin, in another language, and try to see from another

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perspective, just by usage of different words. And what I came up with is that my texts in English are far more radical than in Polish [laughter] – that I state certain things just as I think them, because of the lack of the words’ meaning, without those different kinds of reasons why I say what I say. So this was always very interesting, this switch – that is possible to do using two languages, that you have this chance of switching and seeing your position from a different point of view. So when it’s possible, it’s a very fruitful thing for me. And the other thing is that I really like to quote in those English-language texts all the Polish words – I really like to interrupt the flow of text with some Polish, very strange names […]. Rashna: I think it’s important to acknowledge systemic differences. So I mean I understand challenges of trying to publish in English when it’s not your first language but then I think it’s also a sort of different problem when you’re coming from some tiny university from India, where you don’t necessarily have a colleague who you can ask to proofread your paper, or you definitely don’t have the resources to get your work proof-checked professionally, and I think it’s not just the English language as such, it’s also a larger problem of language, of academic language in general […] so there’s different types of jargon and these have certain values – and you may not have the ability to get that, to develop that jargon, if you don’t have the resources. How do we tell competing stories, histories of different cultures and heritages, within a single space? Rashna:  I must confess I don’t fully understand the idea of a single space. I feel that space is constructed, inflected with power, having destructive as well as creative effects, whose boundaries are constantly contested. […] How do we tell competing stories, histories of different cultures and heritages? The first thing that came to my mind when I read the question was self-reflexivity. The imperative of being finely attuned to the kinds of linguistic access that we have, the networks that we move through, the privileges that we enjoy. The next point – how do socioeconomic privileges impact access to universities, and analogously, to the ability to frame narratives about ourselves and about others – history writing, who writes history? How does the inability to work effectively in and through English determine our ability to write narratives about ourselves and about others? And lastly, how do the contours of our fields – theatre studies, cultural studies, performance studies, more specifically South Asian Studies, Arabic studies, South East Asian studies – value and unvalue particular competences, for example linguistic ones? Dorota:  I’m also thinking about notions of analogy – and – how much good it brings and how much bad things it brings in terms of historiographic thinking. There’s this book by Michael Rothberg [Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization] which is now very popular, at least in Poland because it was recently translated – it’s about the multidirectional memory, and it tries to establish a place from which – or a methodology – which will allow us to make space for different memories. So it doesn’t matter if it’s Holocaust memory, because this is

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of course his point of reference – or Black African Americans history – we can find a shared space where this multidirectional memory, cultural memory, will work. And as fantastic as this thought is, it’s also very problematic because there is a kind of antagonism between those histories in history itself and their fighting for a place to be visible and denounced – that’s also very important. Finding a shared space where they will become just you know – equal – is some kind of – Rashna: Utopianism. Dorota: – utopian, yes – false, also – standpoint. And I’m thinking about this – those different histories shouldn’t be said in terms of analogy – their different status is something that makes today as it is. […] This is something that troubles me, when we talk about differences – Ruthie:  You’re talking about ideas of symmetry? Symmetrical history? Dorota:  Yes – and that generally, that it can’t be compared. The notion of being ‘competitive’ to each other is also the history of those different histories, so this is what I find very important, because it creates the space for critical thinking. What are the areas where we think new work is being done/new directions undertaken? David:  For me, it’s the idea of engaging with new technologies. […] I think that a lot of the research that we’re doing could utilize these new tools and digital resources […] that are able to map these amazing networks of people – a kind of prosopography – so that it becomes a new sort of source that we can utilize and it shows different things, or is a useful way of presenting that material so that we don’t have to write it all down in text necessarily […] and it feels like for us as theatre historians, digital humanities aren’t around our table – or maybe not round the tables that I’ve sat at. Magnus:  I have a bit of a problem with the concept of ‘new’ directions. I think every new object of inquiry challenges you to somehow seek new directions, if not a new direction in itself […] in my case looking at immigrant theatre that doesn’t quite fit into narratives that I’m used to, forces me to look somewhere else to try to find other ways to frame knowledge and to think about my object of study. Milena:  I was thinking some minutes ago, about the idea that the past is behind and the future is in front of us, which is not what Mapuche people in Chile think – they believe that the future is behind and the past is in front of us – so, and we have also been talking about languages. So, one challenge for me, and it’s something that I really expect to see how it develops, is how much of the way in which we understand history is linked to language, to written structures, and in which way these new possibilities of digital media, make us look at the same objects or situations in a different way, because we are no longer following the structure in which the written language unfolds in English or Spanish. And that fascinates me – to what extent written language allows us to say some things and not others, or to think some events of the past in a specific way, and not in others – much more multilayered

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experiences. And I don’t know what comes first – the experience, or the way in which we have been telling things for a long time, and to what extent it is the characteristics or the features of language which has allowed us to see the past in a specific way and not from another perspectives. But that’s an open question. Dorota: I think it’s fascinating, really – because in terms of newness, I’m also catching myself on that – when something is established as new, but established already – I’m always looking for older categories to be opposed to that one. Rashna: We’ve been having lots of discussions about how to create these digital networks, so they’re not random, they’re very thought out: what are the categories that we want to look at, what are the questions that we’re asking – I mean these are very thought out questions, so in a way, even these digital tools are languages. And they’re not without some ideological baggage – there’s no getting away from some mediation, whether it’s through English or through a digital network or so on. Dorota: Just maybe to throw in an idea – recently we had a book published in Poland – Post-theatre – that is kind of a turn, of course – I really wanted to ask the author – how it’s possible, how can you imagine post-theatre, something that began so many centuries ago, how can it be now ‘post’? It’s impossible. So working with something that has this kind of story, that impacts so much in culture, at the very beginning of culture – I think it changes the notion of new very much. Especially to say that the truth, every kind of thinking about theatre is history – because of this very situation that just the moment you left the theatre the spectacle is history, so – we are always in this situation. And I totally agree with Magnus that new is not the solution for this field – it’s like digging things out, and finding something new in old: the search for something that you will see in a new way because of practice, because of the new circumstances, because of the new context – this, I think this is the mechanism. Jo:  Are there key terms that really matter to you, that you hear or that people don’t use because they don’t exist in different languages and would be useful if they did? To what extent is what we think of as shared understanding actually shared, or are we using the same word but not the same underlying concept? Dorota:  If we talk about a word ‘performance’, its lack in Polish is for me a very rich place of doubt – and I wouldn’t like to resolve it in any way. To find another word, or to establish a definition or something, because I think this is a very, very good place – again, something like a virus, going into language, into structures of thinking, and challenging you, posing those questions: What do you really mean? What kind of practice do you define with it? Is it universal? I think, this is something very, very interesting and very important in the field. I would feel very bad if we had a very specific definition of the practice I want to catch with this word. Does theatre history matter; what do we think that work is doing? Hyunshik: As theatre historians we should deal with the relationship between structure and agent – that is, I wonder how theatre practices can impact on the social

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situation, on the political situation, and then – how the social or political situation can impact on theatre-making practices – it’s a very dynamic process […]. Dorota:  I think that theatre history is important because it’s a history of bodies. That no other kind of history has such an access to living, acting, experiencing bodies – and it’s of course a great challenge, because this is a very specific material, especially in terms of history and loss – dead bodies. Rashna: I would reframe the question to whom does theatre matter? Because it doesn’t matter to everyone. It matters to all of us, but it may not matter to a lot of people – and so relatedly I’m questioning about how value is constructed. What gives something value and what doesn’t. I’m thinking about – at a very practical level – what gets the grants, what gets the money in the bag, and also thinking about publishing – and I’m also thinking about the theatre departments that are shutting down, and how value is determined at the administrative level in terms of theatre – how are the decisions being made about theatre being valuable to a student at the BA level or even in the high school classroom? Dorota:  In some strange way it still exists. It should die so many years ago, but it doesn’t – Ruthie:  It doesn’t matter? Dorota/Claire:  No, it doesn’t die – Claire:  They keep trying to kill it, but it doesn’t die. Ruthie:  You know, this kind of discourse is very difficult. […] So if you’re asking for whom does it matter I think it matters for persons in society. David: I think it’s important that we all define ourselves as theatre historians. I don’t define myself as a historian – you know, we specifically want to make clear that we are interested in theatre. So that says something. And what it made me think about is the hierarchies of history – we all know that theatre is marginalized in most histories, so from where I began as a theatre historian it was in the country house setting of Britain, where theatre was taking place but it was not there in any of the country houses that you go to, so I was uncovering a history that is there in the archives of these country houses but they’re choosing not to tell it. So I’m finding these amateur theatrical histories within this country house settings and I want to see the impact – I want to see it coming back through and saying actually no this is part of this same history that we all privilege. Magnus:  I think this question partly comes from a general – I wouldn’t say crisis, but within the humanities, trying to justify our existence […] I got into a debate with a local politician a few years ago, who said, well – we’re going through an economic crisis, so we need to cut down funding for a lot of things, and we can’t afford to have a national theatre, for example – and so, the importance of what I’m doing, I think, led me to say, to raise the question, well, why do we have a national theatre, where does it come from? What are the ideas behind it, why did we build it? Why did

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we build this big a house in a society that didn’t have enough people to sustain it? Interestingly, the man behind the idea of building the national theatre was the first Icelander to ever study economics, so he really thought this was very important. He said we need theatre because if we don’t have theatre we don’t have culture. So […] how it plays a role in producing images of identity, creating modern society, creating modern culture – saying well, this thing has played a role in history and it still does. Claire:  I think the thing is as Dorota said, it’s about the history of bodies. It’s not going away – it’s whether we are writing about it, or whatever the language we find, that we are collecting it, we are shaping it, we are finding it, we are trying to identify where it has happened, where it has been important – but where it is not remembered, so we remember what people have done in the past. Milena:  We have had this huge feminist movement this last two months in Chile – and it has been very interesting, how these students who are twenty years old know nothing about feminism from the 1960s and 1970s. So I thought when you raised your question that it’s not only theatre history which matters, it’s a problem with history for younger generations. Because one of the problems we faced these days when it comes to denunciation is a sort of time collapse where the whole problem of telling a story of something that happened became very important. So I think that talking about theatre history makes them relate the present to the past and, to their own lives, and to the public sphere. […] In relation to this collection, I’ve always had the feeling that you were not just compiling different texts, but really giving us a space to speak the English we could, and that you were both very respectful of that – and in a sense, the fact that we gathered today, is not just something that will make the book better, but it’s an experience that we will share in our local contexts when we come back and in a way it features the way in which we will be working there. So it’s a practice that allows things in academia to be different – so I think that’s the very subtle way of understanding that we are there. […] I’m stuck in theatre – but since we are working with younger people, it has a lot to do with real life, and not something just very abstract, and for me that’s the challenge – how to think on what we do in terms of research, and how the same questions that we were asking today – about languages, about hegemony – about the relationships that through theatre history we can produce, and the knowledge we can share, is something that we will pass to somebody else in another context, so that makes lots of sense to me.

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The annotated texts selected by our contributors, and mainly grouped geo-culturally, point readers towards further work that will help develop research in relation to the overarching topics of theatre history and historiography covered in the case-study essays.

THEATRE HISTORIOGRAPHY Our introduction provides a comprehensive and critical overview of the development of the discipline of theatre historiography, and we point the reader towards that introduction as a starting point. Bank, R. K. and M. Kobialka, eds (2015), Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. A collection of eleven radically ambitious essays with international, especially European, perspectives, which are organized within the themes of time, space and matter. The essays address how theatre/performance historians analyse the historiographical methodologies that have been used to write about theatrical and performance histories, and how they resituate theorizations of the archive, of periodization, and of the past within theatre/ performance research. Bial, H. and S. Magelssen, eds (2010), Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Drawing together approaches from theatre history and performance studies, this accessible volume offers a series of short essays intended to address what each author sees as the ‘critical’ issues facing them as theatre historians. Bratton, J. (2003), New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. An important book on a methodological level: By taking seriously the historical actors (both in the sense as theatre practitioners and as acteurs) and their experiences, practices and interpretations, Bratton opens up new ways to interpret theatre history, thus helping us to understand the meaning of theatre for historical societies. Canning, C. M. and T. Postlewait, eds (2010), Representing the Past Essays in Performance Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book builds on the ground breaking 1989 Interpreting the Theatrical Past (see entry on the book), significantly advancing current historiographic preoccupations in a series of essays by distinguished theatre historians, including three essays which focus on African,

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Indian and Chinese theatre, thematically organized into five sections: archive, time, space, identity and narrative. Cochrane, C. and J. Robinson (2016), Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. This volume firmly establishes ethics on the theatre-historiographical agenda. The introduction sets out the theatre historian’s often tense dual duties to the ethics of truth and ethics of care, and these tensions are carefully worked out through a series of casestudy essays. Davis, T. C. (2000), The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis’s seminal work views British theatre history from a previously unvisited standpoint. It has enabled a subsequent generation of scholars to consider the economics of theatre in their work. More generally, our contributors note that Davis’s work across the discipline combines close examination of historical source material with the willingness to let the insights of the analysis of this material inform new views on the research subject at hand. Fischer-Lichte, E. (1997), The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective, Iowa: University of Iowa Press. This collection of essays provides a wide-ranging introduction to intercultural theatre and performance and to the work in history and historiography that helps us to explore and theorize this activity. Kershaw, B. and H. Nicholson, eds (2011), Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Two chapters ‘Researching Theatre History and Historiography’ and ‘The Imperative of the Archive: Creative Archive Research’ intertwine historiographically nuanced discussion of methodologies with concise case-study examples drawn from mainly British theatre history. McGillivray, G., ed. (2011), Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia: Hidden Archives of Performance, New York: Peter Lang. This edited collection considers the archiving and analysis of the traces of theatre and performance, with a particular focus on histories and voices that have been ‘hidden’. Postlewait, T. and B. A McConachie, eds (1989), Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Although this collection of essays was published thirty years ago, it remains a core text for scholars wishing to ground their research and writing in the principles of theatre historiography. Postlewait, T. (2009), The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Postlewait’s book is an indispensable introduction to theatre historiography and provides a thorough introduction to and examination of historiographic methods such as

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periodization, narrative construction and the use of evidence in theatre history. It draws on an interdisciplinary array of scholarship to explicate critical issues that apply to the study of theatre from a historical perspective, with case studies largely reflecting British theatre history. Schoch, R. (2016), Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660-1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is a boldly polemical study which aims to challenge traditionally accepted historiographic assumptions about the foundational documentary sources of British theatre dating from the Restoration period until the emergence of the formally recognised discipline of theatre history at the beginning of the twentieth century. Wiles, D. and C. Dymkowski, eds (2012), The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. As a Cambridge Companion this volume is accessible in approach. International foci include European theatre histories, Egyptian performance culture and traditional Japanese Noh; chapters on the ‘how’ of doing theatre history research include visual records, the role of archives and museums, re-enactment and the role of the internet.

GENERAL INTERNATIONAL HISTORIES Charle, C. (2012), Theaterhauptstädte. Die Entstehung der Spektakelgesellschaft in Paris, Berlin, London und Wien [Theater Capitals. The Emergence of the Society of Spectacle in Paris, Berlin, London and Vienna], Berlin: Avinus. Although Charle deals only with the large metropolises, his findings are relevant for the study of theatre culture in the respective areas. Based on the statistical evaluation of countless sociological and theatrical data, this work provides facts and numbers in a field of study where those are often hard to come by. Cruciani, F. and N. Savarese (1991), Guide bibliografiche. Teatro [Bibliographic Guides: Theatre], Milan: Garzanti. This bibliographical guide (Cruciani [3–248] on ‘European Heritage Theatre’, Savarese [251–315] on ‘Asian and Oriental Theatres’) is also a crypto-history of the theatre. As a tool it gives researchers initial information and enables them to undertake more challenging courses of study and research. Cruciani, F. (1992), Lo spazio del teatro [The Space of the Theatre], Rome-Bari: Laterza. The space of the theatre is contextualized in the various historical epochs and nations, both as a form that eventually crystallizes in the playhouse of the theatrical institutions, and as a dynamic and generative element of the theatre. The book ranges from ancient Greek and Roman theatres, to contemporary theatre, from Western to Eastern civilizations, from theatrical architectures to the spaces of the relationship, outside the playhouses.

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Davis, T. C. and C. Balme, eds (2017), A Cultural History of Theatre, 6 vols, London: Bloomsbury. In six volumes ranging from antiquity to the modern age, Davis’s and Balme’s editors and contributors offer a comprehensive survey of theatre in history, interrogated via common themes: institutional frameworks, social functions, sexuality and gender, environment, circulation, interpretations, communities of production, repertoire and genres, technologies of performance and knowledge transmission. Enciclopedia dello spettacolo [Encyclopedia of the Performing Arts] (1965), Rome: Le Maschere. Starting from 1954, in nine volumes published annually until 1965, this encyclopedia constitutes the first, sole and original attempt at the European level to define a catalogue of the state of knowledge in the field of theatre, music, cinema and dance. Fischer-Lichte, E., T. Jost and S. I. Jain, eds (2014), The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism, London & New York: Routledge. This collection draws together internationally focused case studies to explore the politics and consequences of globalization. Kennedy, D. ed. (2003), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Vol 1, A-L; Vol 2, M-Z, Oxford: Oxford University Press. These are two monumental volumes with 4,300 main entries authored by 320 contributors which offer a globally expansive overview of international theatre and performance histories, practices, practitioners and theorists. McConachie, B., T. Nellhaus, C. F. Sorgenfrei and T. Underiner (2016), Theatre Histories: An Introduction, 3rd edn, London: Routledge. First published in 2006, and now in a substantially revised third edition, this volume is determinedly global in its scope. It provides substantial information about non-Western, non-verbal, non-canonical performance cultures, and weaves in methodological and theoretical guidelines and perspectives.

MOROCCAN AND WIDER ARABIC THEATRE Amine, K. and M. Carlson (2012), The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performing Traditions of the Maghreb, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. This book adopts a chronological approach to the theatre cultures of the Maghreb, surveying the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial periods. There are chapters on Islam and coloniality, developing national traditions from 1970–1990 and subsequent developments up until 2010. Carlson, Marvin and Safi Mahfouz, trans. and eds (2013), Theatre From Medieval Cairo: The Ibn Daniyal Trilogy, New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications. The book contains the first translation of the only three surviving plays from the medieval Arabic theatre: the farces The Shadow Spirit, The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger

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and The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One who Inspires Passion, created by Ibn Daniyal in thirteenth-century Cairo. Fertat, Omar (2018), Le théâtre marocain à l’épreuve du texte étranger, Bordeaux: Presse universitaires de Bordeaux. The book addresses the development of theatre in Morocco from 1956 till now. Massaia, Ahmed (2013), Répertoire du théâtre marocain, Rabat: les Éditions du ministère de la Culture. Massaia’s huge work is seminal in studying the development of Moroccan theatre companies from 1956 to 2000.

ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE Kurahashi, Y. (1999), Asian American Culture on Stage: The History of the East West Players, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. Kurahashi’s book is the only comprehensive study of the early decades of the East West Players, the first Asian American theatre company founded in 1965 in Los Angeles. Lee, E (2006), A History of Asian American Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Esther Lee’s book surveys the history of Asian American theatre from the 1960s to the early years of the twenty-first century. Based on over seventy-five interviews, the book traces the history of major Asian American theatre artists and theatre companies. Lee, J. (1997), Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Josephine Lee’s first book provides an in-depth literary analysis of Asian American plays. It examines a variety of topics including racial stereotypes, audience reception, dramatic realism and history plays. Metzger, S. (2014), Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race, Bloomington: Indiana University. Metzger’s book interrogates how aesthetics and politics intersect in performance with case studies of clothing, fashion, hair, accessories and habits as signifiers of Chineseness. Moon, K. (2005), Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Moon’s book examines Chinese and Chinese American music in American popular culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on musicians who appeared in popular venues such as world fairs and early vaudeville. Shimakawa, K. (2002), National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shimakawa applies the theory of abjection to explore the relationship between ‘Asian Americanness’ and ‘Americanness’ through theatre, drama, and performance. She

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examines the emergence of Asian American theatre in how it represented Asian Americans and addressed issues of exclusion and displacement.

THEATRE IN CHILE AND WIDER LATIN AMERICA Cánepa Guzmán, M. (1974), Historia del teatro chileno [History of Chilean Theatre], Santiago: Editorial Universidad Técnica del Estado. Mario Canepa Guzmán’s book gives an account of Chilean theatre from indigenous performances to the professional work produced in the 1950s, mainly in the capital city. The account is chronologically organized and presents the milestones and authors that have become canonical. Illustrated with photographs. Hurtado, M. de la L. (1997), Teatro chileno y modernidad: Identidad y crisis social [Chilean Theatre and Modernity: Identity and Social Crisis], California, Ed. Gestos; Santiago: Ediciones Apuntes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Hurtado analyses the development of Chilean theatre from the sixteenth century to 1970 in the context of the various modernity projects locally put in place. This approach traces the way in which theatre depends on local subsequent sociopolitical, economical and cultural crisis. Hurtado’s work has been widely read within the country and abroad, becoming a key reference for any scholar interested in Chilean theatre that is rarely critically approached. Muguercia, M. (2010), Teatro latinoamericano del siglo XX. Primera modernidad (1900–1950) [Latin American Theatre of the Twentieth Century. First Modernity (1900–1950)], Santiago, RIL Editores; and (2015), Teatro latinoamericano del siglo XX (1950–2000), Modernidad consolidada, años de revolución y fin de siglo [Latin American Theatre of the Twentieth Century (1950–2000): Consolidated Modernity, Years of Revolution and the End of the Century], Santiago, RIL Editores. These two books aim to cover the history of Latin American theatre in the twentieth century. In the first volume, Muguercia – a Cuban author settled in Chile – studies various regional theatrical practices (opera, zarzuelas and sainetes, independent theatre, professional University theatre) at the crossroads between the modernity a Europeoriented ruling class seeks and a ‘peripherical modernity’ which expresses the ethnic, cultural and social diversity of the continent. The second volume focuses on three key moments, including a final third stage where theatre develops postmodern and deconstructive strategies, and performance unfolds. Pereira Salas, E. (1970), Historia del Teatro en Chile: desde sus orígenes hasta la muerte de Juan Casacuberta, 1849 [History of the Theatre in Chile: From Its Origins to the Death of Juan Casacuberta, 1849], Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. This volume is part of a major project: Eugenio Pereira Salas (1904–1979) was attempting a comprehensive history of Chilean art and culture. Thus, it is part of a trilogy, along with one book devoted to music and another to beaux arts. Covering indigenous performative practices to mid-nineteenth century professional theatre, the historical narrative is built following the development of European theatre.

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Piña, J. A. (2009), Historia del teatro en Chile 1890-1940, Santiago, RIL Editores, and (2014), Historia del teatro en Chile, 1941-1990, Santiago, Taurus Editora. These carefully researched histories provide a unique account of the complete theatre field in relation to the broad cultural context and political development in Chile. Piña includes descriptions and analysis of productions, acting training and profession, companies, circulation, reception and media, drawing on primary sources, documents and interviews. Rojo, G. (1985), Muerte y resurrección del teatro chileno 1973-1983 [Death and Resurrection of the Chilean Theatre, 1973–1983], Madrid: Ediciones Michay. Rojo’s book collects together a series of essays, written during his exile in the 1980s, which analyse the development of Chilean theatre from the creation of the professional university theatres in the 1940s to its dismantlement in the aftermath of the 1973 coup, and its subsequent rebirth. Villegas, J. (2005), Historia multicultural del teatro y las teatralidades en América Latina [Multicultural History of Theatre and Theatricalities in Latin America]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna. Villegas’ historical account highlights the most relevant discourses and practices in the field of theatre and theatricality in Latin America, going from Amerindian performances to contexts of production embedded in postmodernity and globalization. The author proposes a distinctive analytical frame which highlights the relations between culture and power, questioning the current canon, and the idea of cultural diversity in the region.

CHINESE THEATRE Aoki, M. ([1930] 2010), Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi [A History of Early Modern Chinese Drama], trans., rev. and enl. by G. Wang; rev. by Y. Cai, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. A pioneering general historical survey of the development of theatre in China from the Song (960–1279) to the late-Qing dynasty (1644–1911) with focus on later periods. This book was written under the influence of Wang Guowei as a continuation of Wang’s History of Song and Yuan Drama. Che, W. (2005), Zhongguo shenmiao juchang shi [Architectural History of Chinese Temple Theatre], Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe. A book-length study of the architecture of Chinese temple theatre by one of the pioneering researchers of Chinese temple theatre and Chinese theatrical relics. Dolby, W. (1976), A History of Chinese Drama, London: Paul Elek. This is the first and by far the most comprehensive history of Chinese drama in a Western language. Following the chronological division of China’s history into dynasties, this book traces the history of Chinese drama from its early origins in the forms of religious ritual and court jestings through imperial ages up to the time of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s. One of the most noteworthy of the numerous prominent features of the book

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is its ten-page description of Chinese stages and stage performance in Qing (1644–1911) China based on Western missionary and Chinese literati anecdotal accounts. Idema, W. L. and S. H. West (1982), Chinese Theater 1100-1450: A Source Book, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. This is an invaluable source to students of Chinese theatre. This volume provides annotated translations of topically and chronologically arranged texts from a variety of primary sources, ranging from literati jottings to essays and treaties to literary works such as poems, plays and vernacular novels that illustrate the distinctive features and development of Chinese theatre with focus on Song-Yuan Nanxi (southern drama) and Yuan Zaju – the two earliest mature forms of classical Chinese drama. Liao, B. and Y. Liu (2013), Zhongguo xiqu fazhan shi [History of the Development of Chinese Traditional Drama and Theatre]. 4 vols, Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe. This monumental work is more than 1.4 million Chinese characters, and has been the most detailed and comprehensive research on Chinese theatre history and represents the highest academic achievements made by contemporary Chinese scholars in this regard. The book distinguishes itself from other major studies in Chinese theatre history by providing a great deal of archaeological evidence illustrated with full-colour photographs. Mackerras, C. (1990), Chinese Drama: A Historical Survey, Beijing: New World Press. This is a very informative and inspiring historical survey of Chinese drama from its beginnings during the Song dynasty (960–1279) until 1988. The book is divided into two parts. Part One deals with ‘Tradition and the Old Society’ up till 1949 when communists came to power, Part Two with ‘the New China’, covering a time span of forty years from 1949 to 1988. This work is unique in that it devotes one whole chapter to ‘The Dramas of China's Minority Nationalities’, pays close attention to regional theatre and organizes its materials mainly by theatrical form rather than by dynastic sequence. Wang, G. ([1915] 2010), Song Yuan xiqu shi [History of Song and Yuan Drama], Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Completed in 1912–13 and first published in 1915 under the title of Song Yuan xiqu kao (Evidential Study of Song and Yuan Drama), this was the first modern study of classical Chinese drama, and the conceptual framework established in the work has since served as a foundation upon which most, if not all, later studies of Chinese theatre have been based. Yu, W. and R. Sun, eds (2006–2009), Lidai quhua huibian: Xinbian Zhongguo gudian xiqu lunzhu jicheng [Collection of Remarks on Theatre and Performance of Successive Dynasties: A Newly Edited Anthology of Scholarly Writings on Traditional Chinese Drama and Theatre], 15 vols, Hefei: Huangshan shushe. Built on the ten-volume Zhongguo gudian xiju lunzhu jicheng (Collection of Works on Traditional Chinese Drama and Theatre) published in 1959, this multivolume work has a length of more than seven million Chinese characters, boasting the most comprehensive collection ever compiled of writings on Chinese theatre and performance from the seventh century to the early twentieth century.

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THEATRE OF THE GERMAN-SPEAKING WORLD Martersteig, M. (1904), Das deutsche Theater im 19. Jahrhundert [The German Theatre in the Nineteenth Century], Leipzig: Breitkopf. This is still the most extensive overview on the topic, though of course it includes all the biases of its time. The book therefore has to be regarded as a historical source and not taken at face value as regards its interpretations of history. Marx, P. W. (2007), ‘Zur Proliferation des bürgerlichen Theaters im 19. Jahrhundert’ [On the Proliferation of Bourgeois Theatre in the Nineteenth Century], in Friedemann Kreuder et al. (eds), Theaterhistoriographie. Kontinuitäten und Brüche in Diskurs und Praxis [Theatre Historiography. Continuities and Breaks in Discourse and Practice], 133–49, Tübingen: Francke. This makes a strong case for a new view of the history of theatre in the nineteenth century that frees itself from either nostalgia for the ‘good old times’ or the denunciations of the historical avant-garde. Matzke, A. (2012), Arbeit am Theater. Eine Diskursgeschichte der Probe [Work on Stage: A Discursive History of Rehearsal], Bielefeld: transcript. This is a book that actually takes a look at the working conditions under which theatre productions came to life, albeit with a gap in the study between the early and the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, it analyses the way rehearsals were seen and described by theatre practitioners themselves.

ICELANDIC THEATRE HISTORY With a few exceptions of occasional journal articles, research on Icelandic theatre history only started to emerge in the 1990s, particularly with the publication of Sveinn Einarsson’s books on Icelandic theatre: Sveinn Einarsson (1991), Íslensk leiklist I: Ræturnar, Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs; (1996), Íslensk leiklist II: Listin, Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag; (2016), Íslensk leiklist III: 1920–1960. Reykjavik: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag. The first volume covers the period from the first settlements in the ninth and tenth centuries to the founding of the Reykjavik Theatre Company in 1897; the second volume focuses on the years 1897–1920; and the third volume from 1920–1960. These volumes provide a valuable account of theatre in Iceland and, as the first and only comprehensive overview of Icelandic theatre history, they form a central point of departure for future research. Three doctoral dissertations have been completed on Icelandic theatre history: Jón Viðar Jónsson (1996), Geniet och vägvisaren: Om den isländska skådespelerskan Stefanía Guðmundsdóttir (1876-1926) och författaren och regissören Einar H. Kvaran (1859-1938), PhD thesis, Stockholm: Teatervetenskapliga institutionen.

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Sveinn Einarsson (2007), A People’s Theatre Comes of Age: A Study of the Icelandic Theatre 1860-1920, Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press. Magnús Þór Þorbergsson (2017), A Stage for the Nation: Nation, Class, Identity and the Shaping of a Theatrical Field in Iceland 1850-1930, PhD thesis, Reykjavik: Hugvísindasvið Háskóla Íslands. Jón Viðar Jónsson’s thesis provides a somewhat general overview of the operations of the Reykjavik Theatre Company, focusing particularly on its leading actress, Stefanía Guðmundsdóttir. Sveinn Einarsson gives an account of theatre activities in Iceland 1860–1920 with particularly valuable information on theatre performances in the countryside. Magnus Thor Thorbergsson looks at theatre in Reykjavik from 1850 to 1930 with particular interest in the role of theatre in developing national identity and class formation in the period. Þórunn E. Valdimarsdóttir and Eggert Þór Bernharðsson (1997), Leikfélag Reykjavíkur: Aldarsaga, Reykjavík: Leikfélag Reykjavíkur/Mál og menning. Published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Reykjavik Theatre Company, in 1997, this book provides an important comprehensive overview of the company’s history but is greatly marked by the project’s narrow timeframe and lack of critical engagement with sources such as autobiographies, memoirs and reviews. Still, as the only full history of the company, it cannot be overlooked by students and researchers of Icelandic theatre.

INDIAN THEATRE Dharwadker, A., ed. (2019), A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory 1850 to the Present, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. This recent publication contains translations of significant texts pertaining to theatre theory in India. Gupt, S., with K. Hansen, ed. and trans. (2005), The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development, Calcutta and New Delhi: Seagull Books. This publication has been seminal in drawing scholarly attention to the colonial South Asian theatre. Jones, Sir W., trans. (1790), Kālidāsa’s Sacontalá or The Fatal Ring, London: Edwards, and Wilson, H. H. (1827), Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, Calcutta: V. Holcroft. These volumes shaped the course of scholarship on South Asian theatre in the nineteenth century Lal, A., ed. (2009), Theatre of India: A Concise Companion, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. This wide-ranging overview of Indian theatre was published as a concise and updated version of The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (2004). There are two parts: Part I consists of long overviews of Indian theatres by language, with Part II surveying specific

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forms, genres and traditions. One third of the essays focus on urban theatre with the rest concentrating on rural theatre. Freshly commissioned essays, reflecting new research interests, include discussion of women’s theatre. Mehta, K. (1960), English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and in the Nineteenth Century, PhD thesis, University of Bombay. This unpublished thesis is a significant but relatively unknown work on colonial drama in Bombay. Yajnik, R. (1934), The Indian Theatre: Its Origins and Its Later Developments under European Influence, London: George Allen and Unwin. Written during the nationalist period, this book sets the stage for postcolonial theatre histories on Western India.

ISRAELI THEATRE HISTORY Abramson, G. (1998), Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abramson provides a social history of post-state Israeli drama (from the mid-twentieth century), considering the drama and performance as political ‘documents’. Ben-Zvi, L., ed. (1996), Theater in Israel, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thirty-nine contributions introduce, map and analyze the historical, ideological and performative components of Israeli theatre. Kohansky, M. (1969), The Hebrew Theatre: Its First Fifty Years, Jerusalem: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Press. This is one of the first, and therefore foundational, scholarly historical studies of the Hebrew theatre. Yaari, N. (2018), Between Jerusalem and Athens: Israeli Theater and the Classic Tradition, New York: Oxford University Press. A comprehensive historical study of classical Greek drama in Israeli theatre. The book explores both dramatic and aesthetic issues, offering an in-depth analysis of a wide range of translations and adaptations of Greek drama on the Israeli stage.

ITALIAN THEATRE HISTORY Apollonio, M. (1938–1950), Storia del teatro italiano [History of Italian Theatre], Firenze: Sansoni, 4 vols (new edition with integration, ed. by F. Fiaschini, Milano: Rizzoli, 2003, 2 vols.) Apollonio’s primary contribution to the foundation of the discipline of history of the theatre in the Italian Academy is well represented in this work which considers the study of the theatre as the supreme case of the study of the ‘chorality’. This is not a literary

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point of view, but focuses on the actors’ culture and the dialogue between individual creativity and collectivity. D’Ancona, A. (1891), Origini del teatro italiano [Origins of the Italian Theatre], 2 vols, Florence: Loescher. This is a work still unsurpassed for the exceptional richness of the documentary records – its evolutionary account of theatre development is overshadowed by the versatility of the material itself and the opening of perspectives it offers. Falletti, C. (1999), Il teatro in Italia. Cinquecento e Seicento [Italian Theatre: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries], Rome: Edizioni Studium. The investigation of theatrical forms that spans two centuries shows the transformation taking place and the emergence of two unique Italian professional theatres (the Opera theatre and the Commedia dell’arte) and their dramaturgies. Farrell, J. and P. Puppa, eds (2006), A History of Italian Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Published in English, this is one of the few opportunities for international readers to approach the overall history of Italian theatre. However, the book takes a literary approach, shown by an index which privileges authors’ names and a list of contributors coming in great majority from a literary or linguistic, not historical or theatrical, background. Schino, M. (1995, 2nd edn 2002), Profilo del teatro italiano. Dal XV al XX secolo [Profile of the Italian Theater: From XVth to XXth Century], Roma: Carocci. Schino’s book is a really synthetic profile, but it is clear, well-planned and convincing in its approach to the different components of theatre with a multiplicity of points of view that privilege facts and documents over aesthetic judgements. Taviani, F. (1969), La Commedia dell’Arte e la Società Barocca: La Fascinazione del Teatro [Commedia dell’Arte and Baroque Society: The Theatre Fascination], Rome: Bulzoni [‘Theatre Library’ Series 4];. Marotti, F. (1991), La Commedia dell’Arte e la Società Barocca: La Professione del Teatro [Commedia dell’Arte and Baroque Society: The Theatre Professionals], Rome: Bulzoni [‘Theatre Library’ Series 60] These are two big volumes on the birth of professional theatre in Italy. Taviani examines the phenomenon historically and socially from the point of view of the moralistic bourgeoisie and the Church in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Marotti focuses on the point of view of the actors, and the story is accompanied by rich documentation of their techniques, scenic structures, specific language, and a selection of the actors’ writings in defence of their own dignity and good reputation. Tinterri, A., ed. (1990), Il teatro italiano dal Naturalismo a Pirandello [Italian Theatre from Naturalism to Pirandello], Bologna: il Mulino. Tinterri introduces a book on the Italian theatre in the fifty years ranging from the late nineteenth century to the Fascist era, and offers cross-readings of that historical period through divergent points of view on authors, actors, critics and direction.

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KOREAN THEATRE HISTORY Kim, J.-C. ([1933] 2003), Hangugyeongeuksa [History of Korean Theatre], Seoul: Dongmunseon. The first book ever written in Korea on the history of Korean theatre. The author Kim Jae-Chul was the first to attempt to establish the concept of modern theatre with the aim of expanding the coverage of the discipline. Kim, U.-D. (1994), Talchumui mihak [Aesthetics of Korean Masked Dance Drama], Seoul: Hyeonamsa. The author Kim Uk-dong offers alternative readings of Korean masked dance drama from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The book places the interpretations of the dramas within postmodern critical theory. Lee, D.-H. (1997), Hangukgamyeongeukseon [A Collection of Korean Masked Dance Drama], Seoul: Gyomoon Publisher. The author Lee Du-hyun is the most well-known scholar of Korean theatre after Korea’s liberation in 1945 from Japanese colonialism. His book is based on anthropological and forkloristic perspectives on the dramas.

THEATRE IN NIGERIA AND WIDER AFRICA Adeniyi, T. (1997), Theatre on Wheels: The Yoruba Travelling Theatre of Nigeria Its Origin, Organisation and Structure, Canada: IMPACT Communications. This book gives a background of Yoruba, traces the development of theatre in Yoruba from ritual performances, the Christian Church, and the school end of year entertainment. The major focus of the book however, is on the actor-managers and the theatre companies such as Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, Duro Ladipo, and Oyin Adejobi. Banham, M., ed. (2004), A History of Theatre in Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This collection of essays by eighteen scholars of African theatre offers a broad history of African performance traditions covering the entire continent. Introduced by a discussion of ‘Concepts of history and theatre in Africa’ by Kole Omotoso, chapters are divided under the headings of North Africa, Francophone Africa south of the Sahara, Anglophone West Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, South Africa, Theatre in Portuguese African countries, Mauritius and Réunion. The final essay by Osita Okagbue is on ‘Surviving the crossing: theatre in the African Diaspora’. Barber, K. (2000), The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. This book documents the theatre of Oyin Adejobi including its formation and management, content, form and technique, as well as the biography of the artist himself, and some reviews of some of his productions. It is a very rich source material on the travelling theatre in general, and Oyin Adejobi’s theatre in particular.

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Clark, E. (1980), Hubert Ogunde: The Making of Nigerian Theatre, London: Oxford University Press. In this first major publication on the Yoruba popular travelling theatre of Nigeria, Clark documents the theatre work of the pioneer of that theatre form, Hubert Ogunde, from its amateur beginning in 1944 to 1977. This historical survey of Ogunde theatre covers the biography, content and form of his theatre, his travels as well as his political troubles. Jeyifo, B. (1984), The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria, Lagos: Nigeria Magazine Publication. This is a general critical reading of the Yoruba popular travelling theatre of Nigeria, including its emergence and development; the companies and their dramas; the scope of their travels; as well as their social and political impact. Interviews with three actor-managers – Kola Ogunmola, Funmilayo Ranco, and Isola Ogunsola – are also included at the appendix. Okagbue, O. (2007), African Theatre and Performances, Abingdon: Routledge. Based on field work in Nigeria, Senegal and Mali, this book looks at four specific performance forms and questions the tendency to employ Western frames of reference to explore African theatre. Chapters look at masquerade theatre in Eastern Nigeria, Hausa ritual theatre, musical and oral traditions of the Mandinka of Senegal and the comedy and satire of the Bamana in Mali. Raji-Oyelade, R. et al. (2008), Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, 2nd edn, Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. This book, with great number of pictures (covering almost half of the book), is the only major work on one of the greatest names in the Yoruba popular travelling theatre – Duro Ladipo. It is co-authored with Duro Ladipo’s widow and the pillar of his theatre company, Abiodun Duro Ladipo and contains very valuable primary data.

POLISH THEATRE Fik, M. (1981), Trzydzieści pięć sezonów : teatry dramatyczne w Polsce w latach 1944-1979 [Thirty-Five Seasons (1944–1979)], Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Filmowe i Artystyczne. Marta Fik was one of the most eminent theatre scholars of the twentieth century in Poland. ‘Thirty five seasons (1944–1979)’ is a most important chronicle of theatre life in Poland after the Second World War. It is divided into chapters that present particular artists, institutions and repertoires and offer unique insights into this historical period. Kolankiewicz, L. (1999), Dziady: teatr Święta Zmarłych, Gdańsk : Słowo/ Obraz/ Terytoria. In a turning point for Polish theatre research, Kolankiewicz introduced the anthropology of culture as a methodology that allows us to grasp the experience of theatre. He used the most important Polish theatre text – Dziady by Adam Mickiewicz – as a model of Polish culture. For the first time theatre was understood as coming from ritual, from archaic celebration not the high culture of ancient Greeks, and thus as a vehicle of society, of

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community. In terms of historiography this book changed the model of research as it introduced the search for the experience of audience and artists as an important part of investigation. Niziołek, G. (2013), Polski teatr Zagłady [The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust], Warszawa: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Published in English by Bloomsbury in 2019, Niziolek’s methodology is rooted in psychoanalysis, affect and trauma theories. The book asks how is it possible that in postSecond World War Polish theatre there are no images or subject of the extermination of Jews. Niziolek builds the category of bystander – someone that is neither a victim, nor a perpetrator, but also not a witness: someone who just sees something but does nothing about it. A series of case studies shows how in the best-known theatre spectacles from the period the subject of extermination was indeed present but not seen by their audiences. Raszewski, Z. (1977) Krótka historia teatru polskiego [Short History of Polish Theatre], Warszawa: Państ. Instytut Wydawniczy. Written in the 1970s this is still one of the most important histories of Polish theatre. While it does not include significant female artists, class issues or any of the critical theories that allow us to see history in a new light, the book offers a basic periodization from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century and remains a reference point for new generations of researchers. Sajewska, D. (2016), Nekroperformans: kulturowa rekonstrukcja teatru wielkiej wojny [Necroperformance: Cultural Reconstruction of the Great War Theatre], Warszawa: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego. This book, due to be published in English, offers new theoretical categories. Necroperformance is a performance of remains, bones, past bodies and present leftovers which determines some deep cultural structures. Working on repressed historical material from the First World War and inscribed with images from the Second World War, Sajewska shows how the Great War lives in contemporary theatre and arts as a leftover and remains pulsating under official narrations about nationhood. This book, rooted in the theories of Rebecca Schneider, Diana Taylor and Samuel Weber interacts with their thinking, while simultaneously introducing new ways of writing theatre history.

AMATEUR THEATRE Nicholson, H., N. Holdsworth and J. Milling (2018), The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre, London: Palgrave Macmillan. This is the first major study of amateur theatre, using archival and ethnographic research to trace the importance of amateur theatre to the cultural and social life of communities. While the focus is primarily on the UK, general commentary also includes examples of international activity.

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Hawley, J. and M. Isbell, eds (2011), ‘Amateur Theatre in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 38 (2). This special issue was the first significant scholarly publication to draw attention to the history of amateur theatre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries since Sybil Rosenfeld’s Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700–1820 (1978). Although the essays cover amateur theatre in a range of non-theatre spaces besides private houses – including universities and ships – they do not consider amateur theatre in more everyday settings, such as community halls, schoolrooms and working men’s clubs. Elliot, W. G., ed. (1898), Amateur Clubs and Actors, London: E. Arnold. This forgotten volume is unique in providing an overview of elite amateur theatrical activity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its chapters are written by wellknown amateur theatrical enthusiasts of the period and cover activity at the universities, at school, in the military and at country houses.

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ARCHIVES AND COLLECTIONS The majority of the resources listed have been supplied by our contributors and relate directly to the research outlined in essays. A few major national collections, most notably for Russian and French theatre, have been added to widen international coverage appropriately in line with references in the Methods and Methodologies chapter. However, there has been no attempt to provide a comprehensive survey to encompass the richness and variety of world theatre, which would be far beyond the compass of this volume. A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow, Russia This State Central Theatre Museum holds thousands of designs, as well as manuscripts, playbills and posters, film, audio collections and physical objects. The museum’s online collection hosts an ever-growing database of scene and costume designs. http:​//col​lecti​on.gc​tm.ru​:9000​/?gro​up-by​=rub_​iss Biblioteca Museo Teatrale S.I.A.E., Rome, Italy The Library and Museum of the SIAE (Italian society of authors and publishers) are two collections dedicated to the history of theatre and performance that opened in 1932 in Rome. They hold 50,000 books from the sixteenth century to today; journals from the eighteenth century; an archive of librettos; 57,000 press clippings on Italian productions; 25,000 photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present; sketches of scenes and costumes; collection of engravings and prints; and collections of costumes and accessories for the scene, puppets, paintings and sculptures. http://www.burcardo.org/index.asp Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Spain Founded in 1712, this is Spain’s most important state library, holding manuscripts, personal archives, incunabulum and ancient and modern printed books, which include sixteenthcentury and seventeenth-century printed books, chronicling key events and individuals in the conquest of New Spain. There is an excellent searchable website of major holdings. http://www.bne.es/es/Inicio/index.html Biblioteca Nacional de México, UAAM, Mexico City, Mexico The National Library of Mexico holds more than 1,250,000 documents and printed books including the first book to be printed in Mexico, and some 95,000 books printed in Europe between 1501 and 1821. http://bnm.unam.mx/

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Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française, Paris, France The Library Museum is the department dedicated to the history of the Comédie-Française over the last three centuries and is responsible for the archival and museum heritage of the theatre. Its main task is the preservation, enrichment, provision and promotion of the collections in its care. It maintains close links with researchers, academics and theatre historians more generally. Its team also participates in the daily life of the theatre by providing the actors, staff and guest artists with the documentation they need to prepare productions. The library caters for a specialized public of researchers, theatre professionals and students. Iconographers, journalists and theatre specialists are accepted subject to justifying that their research warrants the use of the library’s collections. Consultation is on site only and by prior appointment. The consultation of certain collections requires the prior approval of the curator-archivist. https​://ww​w.com​edie-​franc​aise.​fr/fr​/bibl​iothe​que-e​t-doc​ument​ation​ Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France The Département des Arts du Spectacle (The Performing Arts Department) of the French National Library holds items relating to all forms of performing arts: theatre, circus, dance, puppetry, mime, cabaret, music and street theatre, as well as cinema, television and radio. One of its missions is to preserve all types of documents created before, during and after a show: manuscripts, letters, models, items of scenery, costumes, objects, photographs, audiovisual documents, posters, drawings and prints, programmes and press cuttings, as well as books and magazines. The department also holds archives and collections relating to individuals or institutions. The reading room is open to users of the main library: academics, researchers, students, performing arts professionals and librarians. http:​//www​.bnf.​fr/fr​/coll​ectio​ns_et​_serv​ices/​spect​/s.th​eatre​.html​ British Library, London, UK Besides holding collections of prominent actors, playwrights, directors and theatre companies, the British Library is home to the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, which contains a manuscript copy of all new plays, adaptations and translations submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for licensing between 1824 and 1968. The British Library’s extensive Playbills Collection is also noteworthy. In 2017 the British Library launched their In the Spotlight project, which uses crowdsourcing to help make their collection of playbills more accessible. https://www.bl.uk/ Canterbury Old Stagers Collection, Canterbury Cathedral Archives, UK Founded in 1842, the Canterbury Old Stagers are believed to be the oldest surviving amateur theatrical society in Britain. Their collection consists of a number of acting books compiled by former members, as well as a series of scrapbooks documenting the society’s activities from its founding through to today. The collection offers a unique insight into 175 years of amateur theatrical activity in Britain. Le Centre national du costume de scène et de la scénographie, Moulins, France The National Centre of Stage Costume is the first institution, in France or abroad, to be entirely devoted to the material heritage of theatres. Its mission is the preservation, study

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and valorization of a heritage collection of 10,000 theatre, opera and ballet costumes, in addition to painted stage sets, provided by the three founding institutions of the centre: the National Library of France, the Comédie-Française and the National Opera of Paris. The centre has also received numerous donations from artists and theatres. The CNCS is devoted to the preservation, growth, study and valorization of its collections. It is open to theatre professionals and researchers as well as to the general public. http://www.cncs.fr/ Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich, Germany Collection of items on both Munich theatre history and German theatre history more widely, dating back to the Renaissance period. The museum holds the world’s largest collection of theatrical photographs. http://www.deutschestheatermuseum.de/ Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, USA This institution houses the largest collection of printed books and manuscripts relating to Shakespeare in the world. Its collection is an important resource for theatre historians working on periods from the mid-fifteenth century through until today. https://www.folger.edu/ Garrick Club, London, UK Since 1831 the Garrick Club has operated as a private club for men with literary and theatrical interests. The club has a significant collection of manuscript materials as well as an important collection of theatrical paintings and drawings. https​://ww​w.gar​rickc​lub.c​o.uk/​colle​ction​s/ Harry Ransom Center, Austin, USA The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has holdings on a large array of British and North American theatre and popular entertainments. It has a strength in areas such as magic, minstrelsy, puppetry, circus and pantomime. http:​//www​.hrc.​utexa​s.edu​/coll​ectio​ns/pe​rform​ingar​ts/ Harvard Theatre Collection, Cambridge, MA, USA Founded in 1901, the Harvard Theatre Collection is the oldest and largest collection of its kind in the world. It has a strength in collecting material from a wide variety of entertainment forms, including theatre, circus, ballet, pantomime and opera. https​://li​brary​.harv​ard.e​du/co​llect​ions/​harva​rd-th​eatre​-coll​ectio​n Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv, Israel Located at Tel Aviv University, the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts contains a large collection of materials covering Israeli and Jewish theatre, opera, dance and pantomime. The collection – mostly material in Hebrew – includes personal collections of prominent actors, directors and theatre companies. The centre maintains a continuous relationship with all active Israeli theatres and receives from them material which reflects their artistic and administrative activity.

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The J. N. Petit Library, Mumbai, India The library was founded in 1856 by about a dozen students of the Elphinstone College living in the Fort Area in Bombay (now Mumbai) and was named the ‘Fort Improvement Library’. About 1895 Bai Dinbai Nesserwanjee Petit donated a sum of about Rupees 250,000 for a building to be erected in memory of her son late Mr. Jamsetjee Nesserwanjee Petit. The new building, in the present location, consisting of two storeys and one mezzanine floors, was inaugurated on 1 May 1898. The main book collection of the library, which numbers just over 100,000, covers popular materials in all subjects and reflects the members’ reading interests. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of history – Indian and international – and Zoroastrianism. While the majority of the books are in English, there are significant numbers of items in Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and some special materials in Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian. http://www.jnpetitinstitute.org K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai, India The K.R. Cama Oriental Institute was established in 1916 through funds collected from the citizens of Bombay to perpetuate the memory of Mr. Kharshedji Rustomji Cama, the renowned Oriental scholar, linguist, social reformer and educationist who passed away in 1909. The institute aims at promoting study and research on the religions, history and culture of the East. The institute annually publishes a journal, which is widely distributed to universities and scholars all over the world. They also publish books and reprint rare books. http://krcama.org/ Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA The scope of the theatre collections includes books, periodicals, playbills, manuscripts, letters, promptbooks, production photographs and scenic design. Its published and unpublished stage scripts give the library the largest collection of American drama in the world, including the collection of unpublished dramas deposited for copyright since 1870. https​://ww​w.loc​.gov/​rr/pe​rform​/guid​e/the​ater.​html Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT) archive, Moscow, Russia This collection was originally situated in the Moscow Art Theatre Building, founded by the theatrical historical documents fund and bringing together the personal archives of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko as well as other important theatre artists associated with the theatre. Now situated separately from the Theatre, it holds historical documents, works of set design and memorial items related to the history and the present MXAT and its leaders. The archives can be difficult to access unless you have a personal connection with one of the MXAT officials. Museo Biblioteca dell’Attore, Genoa, Italy This library specializes in drama and cinema. It holds more than 42,000 books; 1,000 (Italian and foreign) journals; an archive of 72,000 autographs; 69,000 photographs; 1,300 scripts; 4,000 pieces including scale models; sketches; original drawings; posters; 62,000 press clippings; and 1,000 theatre programmes. It also holds a collection of theatrical costumes, some of which were owned by Adelaide Ristori, Ermete Zacconi, Sergio Tofano and Lilla Brignone. http://www.museoattore.it/

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Museo de América, Madrid, Spain Large collection of some 25,000 artefacts covering 12,000 years of indigenous history across the Americas. This includes the pre-Columbian era, as well as the colonial period and material associated with the viceroyality of New Spain. http:​//www​.cult​urayd​eport​e.gob​.es/m​useod​eamer​ica/e​l-mus​eo.ht​ml Museo Nacional del Teatro, Almagro, Castile-La Mancha, Spain The only museum dedicated exclusively to the history of theatre in Spain. Collections cover the history of performance in Spain from Greco-Roman theatre to the present day and including medieval theatre and the theatre of the Spanish Golden Age. There are over 8,000 works on paper including stage and costume design. Other holdings include paintings, sculptures, costumes and photographs. http://museoteatro.mcu.es Museo teatrale alla Scala (and Biblioteca Livia Simoni), Milan, Italy Many Italian theatres have a museum, among which one of the biggest and most interesting is that of La Scala, which in addition to its many books, holds a substantial material archive of sketches, figurines, posters, autograph letters, photographs and engravings as well as original manuscripts of operas and opera librettos. http://www.museoscala.org/ National Archives of Nigeria Following the creation of the Nigerian Records Office in 1954, the Nigerian government in 1957 authorized the establishment of three National Archives in Ibadan, Enugu and Kaduna, based on the then regional grouping in Nigeria. Today the National Archives of Nigeria has established ten additional branches with headquarters in Lagos. The National Archives Kaduna houses the oldest records, dating back to the twelfth century AD – many of these records, which deal with the activities of Muslim traders, Muslim missionaries and adventurers, have been preserved through a collaborative project with the UK British Library (https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP535). The holdings of the National Archives in the three major repositories in Ibadan, Enugu and Kaduna include consular despatches, records of the protectorate administrations, records of the civil secretary offices, provincial and district offices records, records of local government and native administration, records of judiciary and ecclesiastical records. There are also civil war collections comprising printed matter, tapes and discs and records of various ministries. http://www.nigerianarchives.gov.ng/ National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria Established in 1979 by the Federal Government of Nigeria as a replacement for the Federal Antiquities Department to manage the collection, documentation, conservation and presentation of the national cultural properties to the public for the purposes of education, enlightenment and entertainment. In an attempt to encourage cultural understanding and peace across all the different Nigerian nationalities following the impact of the Civil War, there is an ongoing operation to establish a wide network of Museums of National Unity. The Museums of National Unity in Ibadan and Enugu were completed, commissioned and

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opened to the public in 2002 and 2006. Fifty outlets across the country are managed from the NCMM headquarters in Abuja. http://ncmm.gov.ng/about-us/ National Library of Australia, Australia Archival holdings of diaries, journals and books are held in the National Library and State libraries across the country. https://www.nla.gov.au/ National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel Materials held include playbills, photographs, personal diaries, manuscripts, theatre sketches and photographs. In addition, the library is also the house of the Israeli National Sound Archive that includes audio materials from theatre performances, radio drama, theatre songs and music. The National Library is currently in the midst of a large-scale project of digitizing various performing arts collections related to Israeli and Jewish theatre and dance. http://web.nli.org.il/sites/nlis/en National Theater of Korea Archive, Seoul, South Korea The Museum of Performing Arts of the National Theater of Korea, based in South Korea holds about 220,000 items. Anyone can easily and conveniently access and use a variety of resources in the performing arts genre, including performance materials of National Theater’s resident companies specializing in dramas, dance, music, Changgeuk (a traditional Korean opera), Pansori (traditional art form of musical storytelling) and plays. As well as a physical archive there is a large online archive, where you can access films of performances and other online resources. https://ntok.go.kr/kr/Museum/Guide/ArchiveGuide Natya Shodh Sansthan, Kolkata, India Natya Shodh Sansthan, located in Kolkata, is Indian’s largest repository of archival material and documentation covering the entire history of Indian theatre in all its different languages, with special emphasis on folk and traditional forms and post-independence Indian theatre, in the form of original manuscripts, books, periodicals, newspaper clippings, reviews, audio recordings on gramophone discs and photographs, slides and audio cassettes, video recordings, films, stage models, production scripts, masks, costumes, stage ornaments, publicity material – for example, folders, posters and handbills and exclusive recorded interviews with theatre personalities. http://natyashodh.org/profile.htm New York Public Library, New York, USA The Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library houses one of the largest theatre collections in the United States. Besides holding materials on theatre in North America, there is also a substantial amount of material relating to British theatre history. https​://ww​w.nyp​l.org​/loca​tions​/divi​sions​/bill​y-ros​e-the​atre-​divis​ion

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Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), Moscow, Russia The Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, which describes itself as the ‘Archive of Muses’, represents the largest archive holding in Russia covering literature, music, theatre, cinema, fine arts and architecture. It holds vast, easily accessible collections of works on paper with meticulously organized finding aids which are searchable online. http://rgali.ru/ Saint Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music, Saint Petersburg, Russia Smaller than the A.A. Bakhrushin collection but with a similar remit, the Saint Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music holds materials relating to all aspects of Russian theatre from its foundation till present days. Its holdings and collections, divided into separate branches (the N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov Museum, the F.I. Chaliapin Museum, the Samoilov Family Museum, the Museum of Music in the Sheremetev Palace), include theatre designs, posters, manuscripts, theatre props and set models. http://theatremuseum.ru/ Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India The Sangeet Natak Akademi – India’s national academy for music, dance and drama – is the first national academy of the arts set up by the Republic of India. It was created by a resolution of the (then) Ministry of Education, Government of India, dated 31 May 1952, notified in the Gazette of India of June 1952. The library of Sangeet Natak Akademi is a multilingual reference library extensively used by the students, researchers, scholars and artists in the field of performing arts. http://sangeetnatak.gov.in/sna/ Shanxi Normal University Museum of Theatrical Relics, China Covering an exhibition area of 1,200 square metres, this is the first and foremost museum of Xiqu (traditional Chinese drama and theatre) relics. Divided into five exhibition rooms devoted respectively to Xiqu stages, Xiqu carvings and paintings, Xiqu stelae, regional forms of Xiqu and ritual Xiqu performances, the museum houses more than 100 brick and stone carvings dating from the Song (960–1279), Jin (1115–1234) and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties, approximately 3,000 rubbings of Xiqu stelae, more than 50,000 photos of theatre relics, 600 hours of Xiqu video, and more than 300 handcopied scripts of regional, folk and ritual drama from premodern China, in addition to a sizeable collection of Xiqu costumes, headdresses, properties, musical instruments, puppets and shadows, among others. http:​//ysx​y.sxn​u.edu​.cn/i​nfo/1​003/1​063.h​tm Theatermuseum, Vienna, Austria The essential starting point for any research on theatre history in the area of the former Habsburg monarchy. The library has a large collection of theatre yearbooks, almanacs, programmes and prompt books, and the different collections hold materials from posters and photographs to sketches and autographs. https://www.theatermuseum.at/

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Union of Theatre Practitioners State Central Theatre Library (STD), Moscow, Russia The STD library is one of Russia’s most authoritative repositories of literature and archives relating to writings on the theatre arts. Its stock of books and magazines in more than thirty languages alone amount to 450,000 pieces, including full runs of theatre periodicals brought to you in batches with no wait times. It has a very comprehensive card file of periodical articles. The main union’s web site is www.stdrf.ru University of Bristol Theatre Collections, Bristol, UK. The University of Bristol was the first British University to open a Drama Department in 1947, with the theatre collection being founded shortly after in 1951. Since then, it has grown to become the second largest collection of its kind in Britain. As well as holding the collections of writers, designers, directors, actors, academics, collectors, theatre companies and theatrical organizations, it is home to the Live Art Archive. http:​//www​.bris​tol.a​c.uk/​theat​re-co​llect​ion/ V&A Theatre and Performance Archives, London, UK The V&A’s Theatre & Performance Archives are the national collection of performing arts documenting current practice and the history of all areas of performing arts in the UK. Particular strengths are the archives of key theatres, theatre and dance companies, twentieth-century stage designers, actors and directors, photographers and government bodies such as the Arts Council. Typically, the archives contain a wide range of materials such as diaries, correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, business papers, and designs. https​://ww​w.vam​.ac.u​k/inf​o/the​atre-​perfo​rmanc​e-arc​hives​

DIGITAL RESOURCES The list of digital theatre resources at https​://ww​w.sta​gesto​ries.​org/r​esour​ces/d​igita​ l-col​lecti​ons-i​n-per​formi​ng-ar​ts/ curated by Eric Colleary, Cline Curator of Theatre & Performing Arts at the Harry Ransom Center, is an excellent starting point, providing a comprehensive breakdown of resources into digital hubs (allowing you to search digital collections from multiple institutions through a single search engine); digital collections at archives, museums, libraries and other organizations; digital collections of individual performance companies; performing arts digital humanities projects; crowdsourcing projects, and archiving organizations and resources for the performing arts. Some of these resources are highlighted in more detail in the paragraphs that follow by our contributors; other resources fall outside Colleary’s current listing. African Journals OnLine (AJOL) AJOL is the world’s largest online library of peer-reviewed, African-published scholarly journals. As the site’s mission statement puts it: ‘Historically, scholarly information has flowed from North to South and from West to East. It has also been difficult for African researchers to access the work of other African academics. In partnership with hundreds of journals from all over the continent, AJOL works to change this, so that African-origin research output is

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available to Africans and to the rest of the world.’ The search facility on the site provides access to a number of journals focused on theatre and performance in different regions of the African continent. https://www.ajol.info/index.php AMAtI Archivio Multimediale degli Attori Italiani (Multimedia Archive of Italian Actors – AMAtI) is a digital archive available on the web which collects data and information on Italian actors who have practiced their profession in theatre, opera, dance, cinema, radio and television from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. For each actor, AMAtI offers updated biographical-artistic entries, a list of sources (handwritten, bibliographic, iconographic) and a detailed selection of career data and individual interpretations, enriched by documents, images and multimedia material (video and audio). http://amati.fupress.net/Main.uri The Arab Theatre Institute in Sharjah: This site contains many digitized performances, e-books, and other documents related to Arab theatre. https://atitheatre.ae/ Archivi teatrali in rete Theatre archive on the web is a network of archives that aims to promote theatrical art and its culture by making available the vast audiovisual documentary heritage in their possession. The institutions involved are Teatro Scuola Paolo Grassi, Milan; Riccione Teatro (with the archive of ‘Premio Riccione per il teatro’, Riccione TT video collection); Laboratorio multimediale ‘G. Quazza’, Faculty of Education, Università degli Studi di Torino; Department of History of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, Università degli studi di Milano; Museo Biblioteca dell’Attore, Genova; AMAtI http:​//arc​hivin​rete.​media​libra​ry.it​/home​/home​.aspx​ Arde Arde is a digital repository where Chilean theatre artists and companies can archive and share documents resulting from their own creative processes. http://proyectoarde.org/ AusStage The Australian live performance database. The project established a national online database of theatre research, bringing together many existing resources from within the participating universities and other theatre research organizations. Over the last five years Casey has been entering Aboriginal initiated corroboree performances from 1800–1950. Only performances that can be located on specific dates in identified locations are being entered and where possible the names of the Aboriginal participants or at least the names by which they were known to the settler colonist who documented the event or the advertisement in newspapers for the event. https​://ww​w.aus​stage​.edu.​au/pa​ges/b​rowse​/

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British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800–1900 This resource enables researchers to access a wide variety of regional and national nineteenth-century British newspapers. It includes access to The Era, which was the main theatrical trade paper before the founding of The Stage in 1880. https​://ww​w.gal​e.com​/uk/c​/brit​ish-l​ibrar​y-new​spape​rs-pa​rt-i Chileescena Digital archive on Chilean theatre created by the Programa de Investigación y Archivos de la Escena Teatral of the Theatre School at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, which holds the most comprehensive collection of photographs, drawings and videos on local theatre. http:​//www​.chil​eesce​na.cl​/inde​x.php​?secc​ion=q​uiene​s-som​os Chinese Storytelling Designed and developed by Vibeke Børdahl and Jens-Christian Sørensen, Chinese Storytelling is a research tool for the investigation of Chinese oral performing arts (quyi) as represented by Chinese storytelling. The database includes several collections of oral and written documentation, as well as photos and pictorial art with relevance to storytelling. The materials are available as audio- and video-recordings, scanned versions of original texts, rewritten versions with computer characters and translations into English. http://www.shuoshu.org/default.htm Digital Library of Chinese Theatre Based at the University of Leeds, the Digital Library of Chinese Theatre is designed to provide a central hub for Chinese theatre resources that can be used for teaching and research or simply as a way of accessing theatre that would otherwise remain unknown. The pilot site contains over thirty pieces of theatrical work (some are full plays and some are short clips accompanied by long or short notes). Chinese theatre has far more genres than any of the Western theatre forms and thus, each ‘play’ can be presented by a large variety of different genres creating different interpretations. https://chinesetheatre.leeds.ac.uk/ Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture The Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture covers eight subjects, including seasonal customs, folk literature, folk arts and folk society. Enter ‘mask’ into the keyword search to access resources on mask dance drama. http://folkency.nfm.go.kr/en/main Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT) An open access, internet-based interactive resource for theatre and performance researchers interested in the evolution, history and forms of drama, theatre and performance in South Africa. http:​//esa​t.sun​.ac.z​a/ind​ex.ph​p?tit​le=Ma​in_Pa​ge

348SELECTED RESOURCES

Global Shakespeare Project Since 1992, The MIT Global Shakespeare Project has been constructing electronic environments and building tools for teaching and research based on digital copies of primary documents in all media, including texts, high resolution page images of early editions, digital collections of art, illustration and stage photographs, and film and performance videos, and holds substantial material relating to Arab Shakespeare plays. https​://gl​obals​hakes​peare​s.mit​.edu/​arab-​world​/ Herla Project – Fodazione Mantova capitale europea dello Spettacolo The Herla project aims to collect and inventory the documentary material related to the spectacular activity sponsored by the lords of Mantua, the Gonzagas, in the period of their maximum splendour (from 1480 to 1630). This material, currently spread in archives throughout Europe (Paris, London, Madrid, Vienna, Munich, Innsbruck, Lyon, Lisbon, etc., in addition to the Italian cities that at the time were in relation with the Court of Mantua), constitutes a substantial part of the entire worldwide documentation on Renaissance and Baroque theatre. http:​//www​.capi​tales​petta​colo.​it/it​a/arc​hivio​.asp Korean Digital Archives for the Arts This digital archive gives access to footage of various theatre performances as well as posters, photos and other resources. This archive is also an actual physical archive. http:​//www​.daar​ts.or​.kr/h​andle​/1108​0/908​27 Memoria Chilena Offers documents and original content on key issues for Chilean cultural identity that are physically held in the archives of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (Chilean National Library) and other departments of the National Service of Cultural Heritage. http:​//www​.memo​riach​ilena​.gob.​cl/60​2/w3-​chann​el.ht​ml On the Road Again: Tracking Itinerant Performance Through Time Emerging from the REED project (see below), this digital theatre history hub focuses on itinerant performers – who have much in common across centuries and countries, using a map and database type approach to connect primary sources such as original documents, images and newspaper clippings, for the study and understanding of touring entertainment from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. https://otra.library.utoronto.ca/ Records of Early English Drama Online This international scholarly project aims to establish the context from which the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries grew. REED has for the last thirty-five years worked to locate, transcribe and edit historical documents containing evidence of drama, secular music and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres. Along with twenty-seven collections of records in print, REED has now developed a collection of freely available digital resources for research and education. https://ereed.library.utoronto.ca/

SELECTED RESOURCES

349

Theatrescapes research tool Being developed by the Academy of Digital Humanities in Theatre Research within the Centre for Global Theatre Histories, Munich, this project is still under construction, but includes databases and mapping tools for theatres and people within the framework of Global Theatre Histories. https​://ww​w.the​atres​capes​.gwi.​uni-m​uench​en.de​/#hom​e Trove Trove is the National Library of Australia’s portal for all of the library’s online discovery services, including the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts, Picture Australia, Libraries Australia, Music Australia, Australia Dancing, PANDORA web archive, ARROW Discovery Service and the Australian Newspapers Beta service. The latter includes digital reproductions of publicly available newspapers. The digitization process is ongoing and currently includes 220,763,809 works from the first newspapers published in the colony to 1950. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ 17th and 18th Century Burney Newspapers Collection In partnership with the British Library, Gale have digitized the vast collection of British newspapers and pamphlets compiled by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757–1817). https​://ww​w.gal​e.com​/uk/c​/17th​-and-​18th-​centu​ry-bu​rney-​newsp​apers​-coll​ectio​n 19th Century Acts! Created by a team at the University of Michigan, 19th Century Acts! provides a suite of tools designed to illuminate aspects of nineteenth-century performance, organized around people, context, reconstructions and mapping – the latter showing nineteenth-century performance venues in the United States and Europe through the careers of four artists: Ira Aldridge, Jacob Adler, Jenny Lind and Edwin Booth. The site also links to resources used in the project. http://19thcenturyacts.com/

INDEX

Abdu, Mohammed  241 Abeliovich, Ruthie  18, 49, 50, 173, 185–96, 274–85 Aboriginal Australians ethnographic analysis  69 language groupings  69 performance practices  68–76 (see also corroboree) relationality of land and peoples  72–3, 75–6 settler accounts of Aboriginal performance  68–70, 72–6 Aboriginal communities Dharuk  69 Goenpul  72 Ngugi  72 Noongar  68 Nununkul  72 Quandamooka  72, 73, 75 Turrubul  75 Yanyuwa  73, 76 n.1 Accademia dei Filodrammatici, see Teatro Patriottico Acosta, José de  62, 63, 65, 66 n.4 actors  42, 50, 60, 69, 85, 86, 102–3, 115, 159, 170–1, 173, 175 autobiographies of  33, 41, 124–5, 139–40 (see also autobiography) empowerment through alternative theatre movement  29 mobility as constituent part of actors’ careers  10, 33, 40, 124–5, 141–6, 148 professional development of  18, 113, and teleological idea of coherent career path  140, 148 training of  89 n.3, 98 n.2, 102, 142–3 voices of  187 (see also voice/s)

African theatre and performance Nigeria  17, 39, 99, 112–23 North Africa  222, 240, 241, 246 no specific word for theatre and drama  16 Southern Africa land mass  15 West Africa  16, 42–3, 44 Ajayi, Gboyega  118 Alarinjo theatre (Yoruba)  113 Al-Azhar University, Cairo  241 Alfieri, Vittorio  90, 91, 97 Brutus the First  97 Brutus the Second  97 Virginia  90, 97 Alfred Nāṭak Maṇḍalī  206–7 al-halqa performance space  44, 237 al-Ihtifalia (ceremonial theatre)  240 Al-Khozai, Mohammed  241, 243 Al-Maraghi, Mustafa  241 amateur theatre  18, 28, 42, 126–38, 224–35 Adunni Oluwole and  114, 119 amateur turn  126, 128 archive collection practices  127–8, 133, 134, 138 n.1 Charles Dickens’ involvement with  129–30, 133 Chile, in  86, 87 early experience of Victorian professional actors  133 Icelandic-Canadian activity  224–35 Jewish immigrant amateur actors  187, 193 Morocco, in  237 Nigerian amateur performers  114 Nottingham Theatre Royal and  284 participation in festival performances in China  166 private theatres in London  129–33, 136

INDEX

symbiosis with professional theatre  131, 134 Victorian London’s West End, in  129–34 Wales, in  45 workers’ theatre in Polish factories  109 American Society for Theatre Research  29 American Theatre Archive Project  29 Amerindian peoples and cultures  17, 58, 59, 60–1, 63, 65 definitions of  17, 27, 57, 59, 61–2 relationship to American identity formation  17, 57, 65 Amine, Khalid  11–12, 19, 27, 44, 51–2, 222–3, 236–46 ancestral shrines  161, 162, 163–4, 167, 168, 172 n.3 definition of  163–4 typical structure of  168 ancestral shrine stages, see temple theatre Andrade, Mariana Hausdorf  17, 28, 36, 77–8, 79–89 anecdote  34–5, 143, 176, 272, see also autobiography; biography Arab  6, 19, 193, 194, 195, 196, 221, 222, 223, 236–46 Arab opposition to Jewish diaspora settlement in Palestine  193, 195–6 Arab-Tamazegh performance cultures  237 Arab theatre  239, 241, 242, adoption of European proscenium tradition  243 contrast with and repudiation of European proscenium tradition  237, 240 Greek dramatic heritage  241 Molièrization of  238 historiography of  236, 240 Arab world, European influence and appropriation  236, 239, 240, 243–4, 245 archaeo-historicism  2–3, 27 archetype  38, 178 definition  178

351

architecture and performance within non-theatre spaces  122, 136, 237, 250–1, 255–6 as shaping performance practice  36–7, 44, 50, 149–50, 151–60, 168–71, 237, 250–1, 258–9 archives  6, 30, 35–6, 201, 275–8, see also Derrida, ‘Archive Fever’; digitization absence of archives  27 allure of  30–1, 189, 191 colonial appropriation of  28–9 critique of fixed nature of  48–9, 104–5 (see also Diana Taylor) empty archives  30 limitations of collecting and cataloguing  28, 127–8, 138 n.1, 177, 191 materiality and vulnerability  20, 29 models of working with  107–8 narratives external to  271 new archives, creation of  28, 29 physical encounters with  31–2, 191 political access and implications  20, 29, 30 recordings of performance within  49–50, 102, 104, 108, 173–4, 185–6, 187, 189, 190–2, 195, 196, 274, 275–6 technological innovation and  185 Ari Jónsson, Sigríður Eyjafjarðarsól (Sigrid, Sun of Eyjafjörður)  225, 227 Ariosto, Ludovico  152, 154 Arishekola, Ayox (Ayox Arishekola Theatre)  116 Aristotle  23, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65–6, 211 Árni Sigurðsson  226, 227, 229 mapping of Icelandic-speaking theatre in Canada  232–3 assemblages  41, 45 asymmetric ignorance  1, 11–12, 137 audience research  44–8 greater understanding of heterogeneity  45 into historical audiences  46–7, 262–5, 268 more systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis  46–7

352INDEX

audiences  32, 33, 44–8, 50, 71, 72, 73, 74, 102, 109, 113, 117, 123 n.7, 127, 130, 143, 168–9, 177, 204–5, 212, 219, 223, 247, 249, 251, 253, 261, 263, 265, 267, 268 as collaborators with performance in early English theatre  251–2 and cultural specificity of effect  220, 221 expectations and knowledge of provincial audiences  141–2, 263, 267, 268 little analysis in Chilean theatre  86, 89 n.4 multiple contingencies of response  45, 72 Austro-Hungarian monarchy  18, 141, 143–4, 147 authenticity/inauthenticity  71, 102–3, 105, 106, 111 n.5, 188–9, 193, 194, 195, 196, 223, 236, 240, 242; see also socialist realism performative impression of the real  154–5, 158, 159, 184, 254, 255–7 Walter Benjamin on  191 autobiography  34–5, 139–41 as performative act  141 autos sacramentales  42, 60, 61, 66 Awe, Bolanle, Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective  113, 114 Aziza, Mohammed  241 Aztec empire  58, 63, 65, 66 cultural traditions  42, 58, 60 Balme, Christopher  11, 13, 33, 38, see also Davis and Balme Bank, Rosemarie K.  7, 13, 16–17, 22–3, 27, 42, 54–5, 56–66 Bank, Rosemarie K. and Kobialka, Michal Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter  4, 5, 7, 12–13 Benjamin, Walter  23–4, 57, 191 Bennett, Susan  25–6, 44 Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception  44, 47

Berlin, Germany  2, 10, 125, 140, 141, 144 Bernardoni Giuseppe  95–6 Bernstein, Robin  49, 104, 220 Berrchid, Abdelkrim  240 Bhabha, Homi  242–3 Bharucha, Rustom  10–11, 13, 16, 239, 244 Bial, Henry and Scott Magelssen, Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions  6 Bible  115, 188–9, 192 biography  34–5 ethical dimensions of  35 Bleiker, Roland  25, 51 Bloch, Marc  91 bodies as evidence  48–51, see also performance research aurality studies  186–7 body to body transmission of history  48–9, 104 kinaesthetic imagination  50 Bollen, Jonathan  40, 267, 269, 270, 273, 273 n.2 Bogost, Ian  266 Bombay, India  32, 44, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204, 207, 208 Bonaparte, Josephine  90, 94 Bonaparte, Napoleon  90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97 ideological utilisation of theatre  91, 97 Italian campaign  90 Battle of Lodi  90 Festival of the Foundation of the French Republic (1st Vendémiaire)  90 French entrance into Milan  90, 94, 96 suppression of counter-insurgency  96–7 military expeditions in Egypt and Syria  238 borders conceptual  23, 40, 51, 56, 57 geopolitical  20, 23, 58, 125, 146–7, 223, 224, 225, 228, 232, 233 Bowles, Paul  243, 246 n.3 boy actors  254–5, 260 n.6 Braidotti, Rosi  14

INDEX

Brandson, Lee  225, 226 Bratton, Jacky  2–3, 7, 33, 35, 50, 127, 140, 143, 262 Braudel, Fernand  14 Brennan, Timothy  6, 7 Bridie, James, The Letter-Box Rattles  224 Brockett, Oscar and Franklin Hildy  121, 240–1 Burgtheater, Vienna  140, 141, 143, 144, 145 Bush-Bailey, Gilli  50 Canada  10, 19, 40, 224–35 canonization of dramatic literature  2, 3, 26, 28, 46, 77, 79–89, 240, see also erasure and exclusion, through canonization process creating a canon of British and American women playwrights  26 lack of canon of Icelandic-Canadian theatre  225 ‘recanonization’ loop in Chilean context  86 Caplan, Debra  39, 40, 263, 266, 269 Carlson, Marvin  2, 5, 7–8, 9, 13, 40, 46, 127, 149, 224, 232, 242, 249, 250, 251 Casas, Bartolomé de las  61, 62–3, 65 Casey, Maryrose  16–17, 27–8, 29, 42, 54–5, 67–76 Castiglione, Baldassar  153, 154–5 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  1, 11, 12, 238, 244 Chile  28, 38, 77–8, 79–89, 275, 276, 278–9, 283, 285 Chile, social and political context 1973 coup and ‘Dictatorship’  84–5, 86 centenary and bicentenary of independence from Spanish crown  77, 80–1 feminist uprising  89, 285 Santiago, developments and dominance  80, 86 universities key agents in artistic production  89 n.3 Chilean National History Project  79 Chilean theatre history  79–89 diversity of disciplinary approaches  85–6

353

lack of published play texts affecting  83–4 linear logic of  87 monological accounts  86 Chinese imperial dynasties Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BCE)  162, 172 n.2 Han Dynasy (206 BCE–220 CE)  162 Tang Dynasty (618–907)  163, 164 Song Dynasty (960–1279)  162, 163 Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368)  162 Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)  161, 162, 163, 165, 168, 170, 172 n.3 Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)  161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170 Chinese literati anecdotal accounts  161, 163, 166–7 citizen scholarship  270–1 citizen science  270 Clark, Ebun  113, 115, 116, 117 Clarke, Jan  36, 38, 39 Coates, David  18, 28, 29, 40, 124, 126–38, 223, 248, 274–85 Cochrane, Claire  43, 45, 79, 88, 126–7, 129, 133, 229, 231, 266–7, 274–85 Cochrane, Claire, and Jo Robinson, Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth  3, 24, 38 cognitive neuroscience  18, 37, 51, 146, 149, 151, 157–8, 160, see also McConachie; Rizzolatti brain imaging techniques  158 Collegio dei Nobili, see Collegio Longoni Collegio Longoni  95, 96 colonial cross-cultural context  67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74 colonialism  67, 203, 238, 239, 240, 242 colonial rule, commentary on  7, 15, 16, 17, 19, 27, 28, 29, 42, 56, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 80, 112, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123 nn.5, 7, 175, 199, 201, 205, 209 nn.1, 2, 223, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244 concert parties, West African  44, 118, 120 Confucianism Chinese lineage culture  163

354INDEX

influence on state ideology in Korea  218, 220–1 Corriere milanese  94, 98 n.5 corroboree  68–76 definition of  69 Cortés, Hernãn  58–9, 61, 63–4, 65 costume  256, 257–8 Croker, Thomas Francis Dillon  134–7 acting book  135–6 cross-dressing  254–5, 257–8 Cruciani, Fabrizio  152, 156, 160, see also epiphyte theatre ‘the invention of theatre’  152 cultural pluralism and syncreticism  16, 55, 65, 236, see also mimetic reproduction practices useless quest for purity  240 cultural syncretism  11, 16, 55, 65 cultural tourism and performance commodification  70–1 Czanerle, Maria  102, 103, 111 data big  40–1, 262–3 models of  267, 270, 273 n.2 potentials and limitations of big  248, 266–8 visualization of  18, 39–41, 124, 129, 131–3, 135–7, 233–5, 263–5 databases  29, 40, 262–5, 269 limitations of  39, 177, 266–8, 269 potential of converging  269, 273 potential of interaction with geospatial mapping  129, 262 Davis, Jim  37, 38, 50, 127 Davis, Jim and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience  46, 47 Davis, Ronald, Guy  112, 116, 121 Davis, Tracy C.  5, 43, 127 Davis, Tracy C. and Christopher Balme, A Cultural History of Theatre  12 Dejmek, Kazimierz  102, 103, 111 DeLanda, Manuel  14–15, 20, 41, 45 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari  9, 14, 40, 41, 232, 234, see also rhizomatic approaches Derrida, Jacques  30–1, 35 ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’  30–1

Despinoy, Hyacinthe François Joseph  95–6 Deutsches Theater, Berlin  141 de Witt, Johannes, sketch of Swan Theatre  37, 153 digital humanities  248, 262, 266–7, 270, 273, 282 limitations of  267 digitization  39, 128, 267, 273, 275–8 documentary sources close reading  31–3 primary sources for ‘history-as-record’  161, 171, 198 reading against the grain  28, 33, 130 scarcity of in Nigeria  17, 25 dominant narratives  24, 25, 47, 54, 56, 77–8, 127, 138, 225, 231–2, 238 Dornford-May, Mark  253–4 double critique  236, 239, 244, 245, see also Khatibi, Abdelkebir Dovizi, Bernardo, Calandria  152, 154, 159 Duro Ladipo, Abiodun  115 Dutton, Elisabeth  41–2, 50, 247, 249–60 Early Drama at Oxford (EDOX)  255–9, 260 n.7 early modern playhouse  250–1 early theatre  250–2, 254, 259 characteristics of  250–2 definition of, as including medieval and early modern theatre in England  250 East Midlands, region of England  261, 267 East West Players  176 Edward’s Boys  254–5 Elizabeth I  256, 257 embodiment  1, 18, 48–51, 69, 100, 109, 110, 156–8, 159, 184, 191–2, 247, 261, see also Gallese; Mallgrave emotions affect studies and affective turn  27, 50–1, 220 and cognitive neuroscience  51, 151, 157

INDEX

contrasting treatment of shame in Western and premodern Korean drama  220–1 historicity of  19, 48, 51, 197, 210–2, 220–1 within Korean masked dance drama (see han; heung; musim) as liminal phenomena  212 social constructivist approach  51 encomienda system/encomenderos  59, 62, 65, 66 n.3 Enders, Jody  31–2 English language, see also language colonial pre-eminence and dominance  201, 203, 229 international academic dominance of  5, 229, 281 professional and intellectual advantages of  274, 280–1, 282 refusal of  15 (see also Ngugi wa Thiong’o) Enlightenment, the  23, 24, 27, 56, 57, 60, 65, 66 n.3, 80, 91 non-Enlightenment historiographies  63 post-Enlightenment  26, 54 pre-Enlightenment  27, 54, 57 theatre as instrument for disseminating civic virtues  80, 92 epiphyte theatre  152 episteme  23, 26, 245 epistemology/ies  21–2, 23, 24, 38, 41, 43, 51, see also new materialism epistemic relativism  51 epistemic violence  239, 243 epistemological foundation  173, 176–7, 184 relationship to methodology and method  21–2, 51–2, 80, 88, 178, 184 relationship to ontology  21–2, 51, 67 Erasmus (Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus)  254 erasure and exclusion  17, 18, 25, 27, 28, 39, 99–100, 104, 116, 130, 208, 222, 225, 231, 240 through canonization process  32, 86 essentialism  51, 237, 238, 240, 245, 246

355

ethics  4, 7, 12, 13, 14, 19, 24, 26, 28, 35, 38, 51, 98 witnessing as ethical act  107 ethopoeia  254 Eurocentric cultural dominance  7, 9, 67, 238, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245 evidence architecture as  161–2, 163, 168–71 eyewitness  25, 36, 39, 42, 46, 118–19, 150, 165, 252, 255 Eyjafjörður, region of Iceland  226, 227, 235 n.3 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi  57 Falletti, Clelia  18, 37, 51, 149, 151–60 Fanon, Frantz  242, 244 feminist ethics  26 feminist theory  26, 34 second-wave feminism  25 Ferrara, palace of  153–4 dimensions  153 festa  149, 152, 153, 156, 158–9, 160 ‘festa of the court’ container  152, 153 Fik, Marta  103 First Actress Party  17, 99, 115, 117–20 Fischer-Lichte, Erika  5, 7, 10–11, 16, 139, 141, 229, 275 forensic aesthetics  107 Foster, Susan  50 Foucault, Michel  22–3, 57, 59 Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation  29–30 French Revolution  92, 97 Freshwater, Helen  31, 44–5 Gager, William, Dido  255–9 Dido, character in  255–9 Gale, Maggie B. and Ann Featherstone  28 Gallese, Vittorio, and embodied simulation  157, 159 Gammerl, Benno  212 Gardner, Viv  46, 140 gazetteers, local in China  163, 164–5 Huizhou Prefecture Gazetteer  165 Records of Shexian County  165 Shexian County Gazetteer  165

356INDEX

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)  30 General Labor Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine  187, 196 n.2 German cultural sphere  18, 125, 146–8 German empire  141, 144 Ginzberg, Carlo  173 Giornale degli amici della libertà e dell’uguaglianza (Journal of friends of freedom and equality)  90–1 Giusti, Innocenzo Domenico  95–6 global, the  7–14, 19–20, 38, 41, 49, 224, 243, 278–9, see also the local global designs  236 globalization  7–8, 11, 19, 85, 236 Godos, Farfán de los  58, 64 The Arrival of the Franciscan Apostles  58, 64–5, 66 Gras, Henk and Harry van Vliet  47 and Philip Hans Franses  47 Grasso, Nicola, Eutichia  18, 149, 152, 155, 158–9, 160 character of Gastrinio  149, 152, 155, 158–9 greasepaint  173, 178–9 colour number system  179–80, 182–3 racially classified guidelines for  179–83 Guðrún Indriðadóttir  227 Guerrilla Theatre  17, 99, 112, 114, 115 contested origins  116, 121–2 definition of  121 Gujarati  19, 32, 198, 199–9 historiographic problems raised by  200, 207–9 impact of Indian nationalism  205–6, 207–8 number of Gujarati periodicals in Bombay  201 (see also Rāst Goftār) Parsi Gujarati linguistic death of  200 pure and impure  32, 201, 202–4, 206, 207 Sanskritization of  202, 204–5 standardization and reform  19, 202–3

Gujarati Vernacular Society  202, 203, 206, 208 Gutiérrez, Ramón  64–5 Guttormur Guttormsson  229 Halevy, Moshe  185, 187, 193–4, 195 han  214, 216–17, 218, 219, 220, 221, 280 Hansen, Kathryn  208 Hardy, Thomas  253 Hay, Colin  22, 23, 25 Hebrew language  186–7, 189–90, 192–4 as central component in Jewish national self-identification  192 migratory origins exposed by pronunciation in Yaakov and Rachel  193–4 hegemonic intercultural theatre (HIT)  11 Heimskringla  228 Herrmann, Max  2 heung  214–16, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 280 Hinch, Thomas and Richard Butler  71 historiography, definition of  4 history-as-event  161, 171 history-as-record  161, 171, 198 Holland, Peter  49, 187 Honam Study Centre at Chonnam National University, South Korea  211, 220 Hugh of St Victor, medieval classification of knowledge  252–3 Hui Opera (Huixi)  162, 165, 166 as regional rural form  162, 165 Huizhou, prefecture in China  163–8, see also temple theatre; Yuqing Tang high population-to-ancestral shrine ratio  164 Jixi, county, destruction of temples in  167 Qimen, county, isolation and preservation of temple theatres in  167–8 Hume, Robert, D.  2–3 Hurley, Erin  51, 211 Hurtado, María de la Luz  82, 85, 86, 88

INDEX

Hurtado, María de la Luz and Mauricio Barria, Antología Bicentenario (Bicentennial Anthology)  79, 80–2, 82–4, 88 n.2 hybridity  71, 212, 222, 237, 238 Ibadan, Nigeria  114, 118 Icelandic-Canadian theatre  224–35 amateur dramatic organisations and festivals  228–9 circulation of plays and manuscripts in  227 inter-settlement touring  227–8 lack of research on  229–32 origins of  226–7 Icelandic emigration, causes and history of  225–6 Ijele masquerade (Igbo)  42 Indian National Congress  205–6 Indigenous peoples  27, 58, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 75, 83, 196, 199 Indigenous performance practices  42, 54–5, 56, 58, 63, 68–70, 71, 72–3, 74–6, 194, 240 constant renewal  42 erased or overridden  17, 27, 28, 69 framed as ritual  69 inadequacy of term  15 intercultural concept of  10–11 debate over  10–11, 236, 238 effect of pressure  60 intermezzo, importance and spectacularity of  154 International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR)  4–5 International Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts (iNARPA)  45 International Women’s Year (1975)  113 internet, impact of  3, 39, 275–6 interweaving  10, 21, 229, 232, 236, 238, 245 as concept  10, 21, as method  10, 13–14, 15, 25 In the Spotlight  269–70 Islamic opposition to theatre, assumptions and debates  240–2

357

Israel  49, 174, 186, 190, 192, 194, 196, 196 n.2, 277 Italian Renaissance  18, 37, 149, 151–3, 160 Jacobin theatre  91, 98 n.1 Jacobin Triennium (North Italy)  77, 92, 94 Jacques-Dalcroze, Émile, School of Eurhythmics at Hellerau  157 Jemaa-elfna site in Marrakech  237, 246 n.1 Jenkins, Keith, Rethinking History  98 Jenkins, Keith, and Alan Munslow, The Nature of History Reader  23 Jóhannes P. Pálsson, The Parrot  228 Jóhann Sigurjónsson, FjallaEyvindur (Eyvindur of the Mountains)  227 Ju, Hyunshik  19, 48, 51, 197, 210–21, 274–85 Kābrājī, Kekhuśro Navrojjī  204–5 Kalawski, Andrés  88, 279 Káňia, Vaško, Brygada szlifierza Karhana (Karhan Grinder’s Brigade)  102–3, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110–11, 111 n.4 Kant, Immanuel  57 Kean, Edmund  34, 133 Kemble, Fanny  34 Kerr, David, and Stephen Chifunyise  15 Khatibi, Abdelkebir  51, 236, 239, 241, 242, 245 and pensée-autre  244–5 Kleiner, Milena Grass  17, 28, 36, 38, 77–8, 79–89, 274–85 Korean dynasties Goryeo dynasty (918–1392)  213, 218, 221 n.2 Joseon dynasty (1392–1911)  213, 214, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 221 n.3 Japanese invasion during  218, 219 Manchu invasion during  218, 219

358INDEX

political and social change in late period of  218–19 Korean masked dance drama  210–21, see also Yangju Byeolsandaenori origins and development of  212–13 sandae  213 SandaeDogam  213 SandaeNarye  213 sandaenori/sandaegeuk  213 Korsberg, Hanna  30 Krasheninnikov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, Yaakov and Rachel  185, 187–8, 192 Avraham Shlonsky, Hebrew translation  187, 192–3 production by Ohel Theatre (1928)  185–6 sound recording (1952) analysis of  189–90 sound recording, conservation and quality of  187, 190–1 Kristín Sigfúsdóttir, Tengdamamma (Mother-In-Law)  235 n.3

local, the  7–9, 13–14, 15, 16, 19, 28, 41, 45, 46, 52, 54, 198–9, 222–3, 247–8, 278–81, see also examples of local knowledge in essays; global, the theatre history inflected by knowledge of  12, 13, 18–19, 20 Łódź, Poland  102, 105, 108, 109 Poznański Factory, strike in  108–9 Teatr Nowy (New Theatre)  102, 103, 108, 110, 111, 111 n.3 Lögberg  228, 235 Lombardy  90, 92, 95 London  18, 28, 40, 46, 124, 126–38, 153, 187, 253, 254, 267, 268, see also West End dominance of British theatre history  129, 266–7 regions of  127, 136–7 looking, ways of  29, 36–41, see also Falletti; perspective as point of view Lorimer, Hayden  14

Lagos, Nigeria  113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120 language homogenisation of  32 ‘performance’ as a concept in different languages  16, 73, 274–5  problems with translation of terms across  19, 73, 221 n.1, 274–5, 280–1, 283 as shaping of cultural sphere  147 Latour, Bruno, and actor-network theory  234 Lee, Esther Kim  27, 38, 173, 175–84 Lee, Josephine  177–8 Leikfélag Reykjavikur (Reykjavik Theatre Company)  227 Le Mierre, Antoin Marin, Guglielmo Tell  95 Leon, Mechele  24 Levinas, Emmanuel  35 listening as an analytical historical method  191–2, 196 lived experience  13–14, 16, 20, 51, 197, 248, 267–8, 269, 272

McConachie, Bruce  5, 8, 51, see also Postlewait and McConachie Mackay, Ellen  2 Maghreb, the  19, 52, 222, 223, 236–46 Maier, John  243 make-up books  178, 184 James Young, Making Up  182–3, 184 Maurice Hageman, Hageman’s Make-up Book  179–80, 182–3 Mallgrave, Harry Francis  151, 156–8, 160 The Architect’s Brain  156 Architecture and Embodiment  151, 156 multisensory and multimodal experience  158 Mander, Raymond and Joe Mitchenson  133, 138 n.3 Manitoba  224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 233 Mankynde  251 Manning, Erin  31 Mao Zedong, Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)  167, 168

INDEX

destruction of ancient theatres  167, 168 ‘The Four Olds’  172 n.5 map deep, definition and discussion of  137–8 mental  141, 142, 145, 146–8 time-enabled  263–5 mapping as historiographic method  18, 19, 40–1, 124–5, 126–38, 225, 232–5 limitations of  41 ‘Mapping the Moment’  262–5, 266, 267–8, 269, 272, 273 Marston, John  250, 255 Martinazzi, Giovanni  94–5 Marx, Karl  238–9 Marxist thought  21–2, 244 Massai, Sonia  13 Massena, Andrea  94, 96 Massey, Doreen  265 materiality  1, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 31, 41, 42, 48, 49, 57, 87, 104, 127, 133, 136, 163, 173–4, 175–96, 236, 239, 247, 253, 254, 255, 258, 261, 267, 269, 274, 279, see also new materialism and ‘stuff ’  14, 18, 21, 24, 33, 41 Matthews, Brander  2 mechanical arts  252, 253, 259 medieval theatre  8, 250, 252 deviser producing device of action for  253 as mechanical art  252–3, 259 Medwall, Henry, Fulgens and Lucres  251 memory and forgetting  3, 25, 29, 48–9, 83, 87, 99, 107, 111 n.1, 140, 209, 211, 281–2, 285 mentalities  13–14, 32, 44, 81, 147, 160 impact of perspective vision  18, 37, 160 methodology  2, 6, 7, 12, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 39, 41, 50, 51, 52, 85, 138, 173, 177, 184, 212, 247, 268, 275, 279, 281 definition  21–2

359

relationship to ontology  21–2, 25, 27, 38–9, 41 Mexico (New Spain)  56–66 microhistory  77 Mignolo, Walter D.  236, 240, 244, 246 n.2 Milan  90–7 mimetic reproduction practices  42, 60, 69–70, 254, 268, see also cultural pluralism and syncreticism debate within Islam  241 modernism  45, 139, 243 Morocco  237, 240, 243, 246, see also Jemaa-elfna development of professional theatre  237 Europeanisation of performance culture  237 Franco-Hispanic colonial rule  237 moros y christianos  42, 60–2, 63, 65, 66 The Conquest of Jerusalem  61 The Conquest of Rhodes  61 Motolinia, Toribio de Benavente  60–1, 63 mummings  252 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio  92 musim  214, 217–18, 219, 220, 221, 280 Nagler, A.M.  2 Napoleon, see Bonaparte national organisation of theatre history, challenges to  224–5, 234 in accounts of Icelandic-Canadian theatre  230 nature’s slave/nature’s child/nature’s man  61–3, 65, 66 n.3 Nellhaus, Tobin  9 Newey, Katherine  26 new materialism  12, 14–15, 27, 41 Nguyulnguyul, definition and thicker description  73 Nicholls, Nancy  17, 28, 36, 77–8, 79–89 Nicholson, Rashna Darius  15, 19, 27, 29, 32, 44, 197–8, 199–209, 274–85

360INDEX

Nigeria  17, 25, 39, 42, 44, 99, 112–23 campaign for independence  116–17, 118, 123 n.1 current political situation  116, 120, General Strike 1945  116–17, 123 n.5 Nigerian Commoners Liberal Party  118–19 Normington, Katie  42, 50 Nottingham, England  40, 129, 261–73 Nuwhju (Billy Cassim), Quandamooka performer  74–6 performance of the wreck of the Sovereign  75–6 the ‘Soldier’  74–5 ‘The South Passage Corroboree’  74–5 Ogunde, Hubert  112–13, 115, 116, 117, 122 African Music Research Party  117 Bread and Bullet  117 Strike and Hunger  117 Tiger’s Empire  117 Ohel Theatre  185, 187–9, 190 Okagbue, Osita  16, 42 Olusanya, G. O.  114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 123 n.6 Oluwole, Adunni  112–23 appearance  19, 118 childhood  114 church and religious affiliation  114–15 death  117 performance style  118, 119, 120 politics  116–17, 118–9 Omotoso, Kole, Just Before Dawn  119 Oñate, Juan de  64–5 ontology, questions of  21–2, 23, 27 related to epistemology  21–2, 51, 67, 223 relationship to method and methodologies  21–2, 25, 27, 38–9, 41 oral history  17, 25, 69, 70, 75, 76, 113, 271 Orientalism  11, 52, 175, 176, 177–8, 188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 195, 240, 242 as exhibited in Japonism  182–3 politically influenced anti-Chinese bias  182–3

Ortelia  268–9 orthography  27, 32, 198, 199–202, 203–4, 208, 209, see also Gujarati; language Other, the  7, 11, 35, 54, 59, 70, 98, 189, 193, 197, 232, 236, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244–5 ‘Our Theatre Royal Nottingham’  270–2 Palestine  18, 49, 173, 174, 186, 187, 189, 193, 194, 195, 277 palimpsest  27, 36–7, 150, 171, 222, 236, 238, see also Yuqing Tang ancestral shrine stage, as evidential palimpsest definition of  222 Parsi, the  199–209, see also Gujarati; language as compradors under British rule  199, 201, 209 n.1 influence on education, local government and press  203 Parsi Gujarati  200, 201–3, 204 political disempowerment  206 reversal in fortunes  203 Parsi drama  200, 202, 204, 207 cultural identity and delegitimization  204, 206–7 linguistically driven changes in repertoire  204, 206–7 variety of language  199 Parsi theatre  199–209 actors and difficulties with language  204 (see also actors) Alfred Nāṭak Maṇḍalī theatre  206–7 excluded from Indian theatre histories  208–9 origins, national and international influence of  199 privileging of Hindu patrons  205 as sites of identity performance  202, 204 Pascoe, Judith  49, 187 Peacham, Thomas  256 Peja, Laura  17, 23, 32–3, 77, 90–8 performance, technologies changing with time  41–2, 49, 173, 175, 178–9, 183–4, 253–4, 256, 258

INDEX

performance as collaborative art form  40, 41, 50, 247, 251, 259, 263 performance ephemerality  21, 48–9, 104, 106, 185–6, 278 performance research  50, 247, 249–60 limitations of  252 as research through performance  247 perspective as point of view  3, 6, 7, 15, 27, 29, 38, 45, 46, 48, 54, 63, 70, 75, 85, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 110, 127, 139, 156, 157, 158, 173, 177, 196, 210, 212, 232, 234, 247–8, 266, 274–85, see also global, the; local, the perspective scenery and setting  18, 37, 149, 152, 153–6, 159–60 perspective vision  37, 149, 152 mathematical laws and pervasiveness  151–2, 158, 160 as mental and cultural construct  151, 160 perception of the world and of ourselves  37, 152 Phelan, Peggy  21, 48, 104, 185, 240 Pilarski, Józef  100, 102, 109–10 Piña, Juan Andrés, Historia del Teatro Chileno 1941–1990  85, 87 Poland  17, 101–11, 280, 281, 283 establishment of Polish People’s Republic in 1949  101, 108 Polish Film Chronicle  102 Pope Julius II (Giuliana della Rovere), annexation policies  152 positivism  2, 27, 35, 79, 89 n.1 possibility space  266, 268 postcolonial thinking and impact  6, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 24, 27, 29, 199, 222, 231, 236, 237, 238, 244, 245 Postlewait, Thomas  7, 9, 34–5, 46, 87, 99, 140, 161, 171, 176, 177, 198, see also epistemology/ies, epistemological foundation; history as event; history as record The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography  5–6

361

Postlewait, Thomas and Bruce McConachie, Interpreting the Theatrical Past  5 Postlewait, Thomas and Charlotte Canning, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography  5–6 postmodernism  2, 6, 23, 42 poststructuralism  12, 22–3, 30, 48, 51 practice as research, see performance research Prechtler, Heinrich  143–5, 147 procedurality  266 procedural rhetoric  268 proscenium arch theatre  251, 255 provincial  7, 13, 83, 86, 88, 89 n.2, 140, 141–2, 143, 228, 233, 263, 267 provincializing  19, 238, 244, 245 unselfconscious provincialism  266 puppets  254 Qur’an, the  115, 241–2 Rabasa, José  57, 65 race/racial  6, 24, 27, 54, 57, 74, 175, 177, 178, 184, 206, 245 classification and hierarchies of  27, 54, 57 (see also Enlightenment, the) Rancière, Jacques, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’  45 Rāst Goftār  201–4 requerimiento  58, 65 reviewers and critics, role of  46, 47, 94, 102–3, 141, 142, 177, 192, 253 Reykjavik, Iceland  226, 229 rhizomatic approaches to theatre history  9–10, 13, 15, 19, 21, 40, 222, 232, 234 Ricoeur, Paul  1, 3 Ridge, Mia  269, 270 Rizzolatti, Giacomo, work on mirror neurons  157 Roach, Joseph  5, 48, 50 Roberts, David  35 Roberts, Les  138

362INDEX

Robinson, Jo  3, 7–8, 9, 13, 39, 40, 46–7, 79, 88, 129, 229, 247–8, 261–73, 274–85, see also Cochrane and Robinson Rüsen, Jörn  4, 12, 38, 99 Saddik, Ahmed Ben  241 St George’s Hall, Langham Place, London  134, 136 Salazar, Gabriel and Julio Pinto  86 Salfi, Francesco Saverio  93 Salvador, Carlo  93 San Francisco Mime Troupe  112, 116, 121 Scala Theatre, Milan (Teatro alla Scala)  94 Schneider, Rebecca  104, 185 Schoch, Richard, Writing the History of the British Stage 1660–1900  3, 34 Schweighofer, Felix  143–5, 147 scientific method  2, 27, 51 falsifiability imperative  51 script  250, 252, 254 as written for performance in early English theatre  250, 253 Sedgman, Kirsty  45 Senelick, Laurence and Sergei Ostrovsky  30 Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)  268 site-specific  251, 255 socialist realism  17, 99, 101, 102, 103, 106–7, 110 introduced in Poland in 1949  101–2 Società degli amici della libertà e dell’uguaglianza (Society of friends of liberty and equity)  94 Société d’Histoire du Théâtre  4 Society for Theatre Research  4 Sokorski, Włodzimierz  101–2 Sosnowska, Dorota  17, 46, 48, 49, 99, 101, 111, 274–85 Soviet Union  30 Soyinka, Wole  112, 121–2 spatial history  18, 23, 125, 264 stage Chinaman  173, 180–1 Charles Parsloe  176, 180–1 James T. Powers in San Toy  181

States, Bert O.  178 Steedman, Carolyn  128, 191 Stefanía Guðmundsdóttir  227–8 structures of feeling  21–2, 50, 212 subaltern  11, 77, 80, 238, 239, 245 Sveinn Einarsson  225, 229–30, 234 Tangier, Morocco  237, 241, 246 n.3 Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire  48–9, 104, 275 Teatro Canobiana  90 Teatro Dramático Nacional  79, 80–1, 82, 88 Teatro Patriottico, later Accademia dei Filodrammatici  32–3, 91, 92, 94, 95–6 temple theatre, China  161–72, see also Xiqu performance; Yuqing Tang definition of  162 development of in Huizhou  163–8 documentary evidence for (see gazetteers) importance of  171–2 literarati anecdotal accounts  161, 163, 165–7 origins of  162 punishment opera (faxi)  165, 166 Termometro politico della Lombardia (Political thermometer of Lombardy)  92–3 theatre as political instrument  17, 77–8, 91–2, 101–2, 116–23 Theatre Histories: An Introduction  8–9 theatre history as dynamic process  12–13, 21, 24 genealogy of the discipline  2–7 teleological narratives of  231 Theatre Royal, Nottingham  262, 265, 270–2 theatre studies, institutional origins of  2 Theatron  268 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa  15 Thorbergsson, Magnus Thor  10, 19, 40–1, 222–3, 224–35, 248, 274–85 Tillis, Steve  16 Tlaxcaltecans  58, 60–1, 64, 65

INDEX

Tompkins, Joanne  36, 261, see also Ortelia translation, see language, problems with translation Trivedi, Poonam  7, 28 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph  78 truth relationship between history and truth  21 as responsibility of historian  4, 23–4, 51, 198 truth claims and ideology  51 Udayrām, Raṇchoḍbhāi  204–5 Udengwu, Ngozi  17, 25, 30, 39, 44, 99, 112–23 Unfinished Histories project  29 university drama  255–6 Urbani, Urbano  153, 155, 159 Urbino  18, 149, 153, 155, 156, 159 descriptions of scene for festa of 1513  153–6 dimensions of throne hall in duke’s palace  154 Duke of  153, 155 duke’s palace  152 Verri, Pietro  93, 96–7 Storia dell’invasione de’ francesi repubblicani nel milanese nel 1796 (History of the invasion of the French Republicans in Milan in 1796)  93 Vienna, Austro-Hungarian empire  2, 125, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145 Vince, R.W.  5 Virtual Vaudeville  268 vision, as multimodal process  157 Vitoria, Francisco de  61–2, 63, 65, 66 n.2 De indis  61–2 voice/s  1, 3, 12, 18, 49, 50, 86, 88, 173, 174, 196 voice scholarship  186–7 Wessely, Katharina  10, 18, 33, 34, 40, 41, 124–5, 139–48, 223, 248

363

West End (London)  40, 124, 127, 128 embeddedness of amateur theatre within  124, 125–34 White, Richard  40, 126, 264–5 Wiles, David  37, 39 Wiles, David and Christine Dymkowski, The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History  6–7 Williams, Raymond  21–2, 23, see also structures of feeling Winnipeg  224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 233, 235 Wohlmuth, Alois  143–5 women’s history  17, 25–6, 29, 39, 113, 123, 142 Woods, Leigh  34 Woroszylski, Wiktor  103 Xiqu performance  162, 163 evidence for  170 four performing skills  170–1 four role types  166, 172 n.4 ‘one table and two chairs’  170 theatre as theatre  170 Yangju, region of pre-modern Korea  213 Yangju Byeolsandaenori  197, 210–21 divided into episodes called madangs  214 emotions within (see han; heung; musim) incorporation of farcical scenes  215–16 influence of social turmoil on  218–29 structure and stock characters  213–14 Ybarra, Patricia  58, 60, 64 yellowface as archetype  38, 178 Asian American actors challenge to  175–6 changing with technology  175, 184–5 in comparison with blackface  175, 176, 180, 181 convention of  175

364INDEX

limited research on  176–8 persistence of  178 Yiimimangaliso – The Mysteries  253–4 York Cycle  251–2, 253 Yoruba Travelling Theatre  112, 113 Yuqing Tang ancestral shrine stage  36–7, 149–50, 161–2, 168–71, see also Xiqu performance audiences in  168–9

as evidential palimpsest  36–7, 150, 171 structural features  168–71 zaojing  171 Zahry-Levo, Yael  46 Zhao, Xiaohuan  18, 36–7, 39, 43, 149–50, 161–72 Zhao Jinde  168 Zionist enterprise  187, 188, 196