“But you got to have friends…”: A Bette Midler playlist

Bette Midler began her recording career back when Richard Nixon (“Tricky Dick,” as she liked to call him) was still President, and her range and versatility were obvious from the very beginning. Since she first entered a recording studio, she’s tackled just about every genre of music. This tour through her recorded output reveals not just the familiar best-selling hits but five decades of deep cuts and delightful discoveries. Take a listen for yourself:

1. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (1972)

Midler’s affinity for 1940s music resulted in her first top ten hit: a period-perfect recasting of this Andrews Sisters’ World War II boogie woogie smash. Multi-track layering gave us Midler as Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne, all in perfect harmony.

If you like that, try this: “It’s the Girl” (2014): Decades on, Midler’s harmony chops were undiminished as she revisited this swinging 1930s hit by the Boswell Sisters, one of her childhood favorites.

2. “Do You Want to Dance?” (1972)

This sultry, slowed-down version of the Bobby Freeman hit opened Midler’s debut album, The Divine Miss M—no album ever got off to a better start. Midler has never sounded more sensuous as she pleads for one more dance in an arrangement that remained a staple of her live concerts into the twenty-first century.

If you like that, try this: “Under the Boardwalk” (1988): Midler brought a similar sexy vibe to this remake of the 1960s Drifters’ hit for the soundtrack of Beaches.

3. “Friends” (1972)

This jaunty sing-along ode to the importance of friendship became Midler’s unofficial theme song when she worked at the Continental Baths in the early 1970s and it’s been part of her act ever since. Its lyric, “I had some friends but they’re gone/Something came and took them away,” has meant different things at different stages of her career. In the 1970s it was a promise of solidarity with the gay men who made up her first audiences. During the AIDS epidemic, it acknowledged the unfathomable losses of the gay community. In later years, it marked the passage of time and the inevitable loss of aging friends.

If you like that, try this: “Samedi et Vendredi” (1976): Midler wrote lyrics to many of the songs she’s recorded over the years, and this captivating burst of witty wordplay and infectious rhythms is one of her best. Singing all the voices––and doing it entirely in French––Midler sounds like she’s gathered all her friends into one room and let them run wild.

4. “Hello in There” (1977)

Midler the actress made a meal out of John Prine’s poignant ballad about an old couple facing the end of an uneventful life. On her 1977 Live at Last album, she prefaced the song with an outlandish monologue about a giant, bald-headed woman on the streets of New York wearing a fried egg on her head, turning the fried egg into a metaphor for the existential anxieties of our era. After that introduction, “Hello in There” was more heart-wrenching than ever.

If you like that, try this: “Waterfalls” (2014): Midler turned TLC’s rambling scenario about mothers’ inability to keep their sons safe from the horrors of street crime and AIDS into a stripped down, mournful ballad.

5. “I Shall Be Released” (1973)

Midler claimed ownership of every song she ever sang. In the case of Bob Dylan’s classic lament for an incarcerated man, she turned it into a furious feminist cry. Barry Manilow’s piano arrangement slowly builds in intensity as it takes Midler from quiet resignation to righteous anger.

If you like that, try this: “Beast of Burden” (1983): Midler did a similar renovation of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s teasing riff aimed at a reluctant lover, redefining it as a woman’s demand for respect.

6. “Cradle Days” (1979)

Possibly the greatest vocal Midler ever laid down. In this slow-burning soul shouter, she’s a modern-day Medea pleading with a departing husband to restore both their relationship and their shared children. Her singing is equal parts untamed and tightly disciplined, all of it cushioned in creamy backing vocals led by Luther Vandross. Sublime.

If you like that, try this: “Birds” (1977): Midler’s take on Neil Young’s gentle breakup song gives it a driving R&B edge and features fierce vocal back-up from the Harlettes.

7. “Stay With Me” (1979)

Midler’s film debut as a tortured Janis Joplin-like star in The Rose gave her plenty of opportunities to rock. But her best moments demonstrated her (and Joplin’s) feel for combining rock and soul, as in this staggering plea to a lover as he heads out the door.

If you like that, try this: “When a Man Loves a Woman” (1979): The other great performance number from The Rose. Midler sings the old Percy Sledge ballad as a recognition of the difficulty a woman rock star can have finding love. For maximum impact, watch the performance clips of “Stay With Me” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” rather than only listening to the audio.

8. “Wind Beneath My Wings” (1988)

Midler’s first and (so far) only #1 hit demonstrates her skill at stirring in a bit of vinegar to cut the sticky sweetness. She rides the song’s anthem-like waves, but never falls off into bathos. Even if you’re immune to its message, it’s hard not to be moved by Midler’s sincerity.

If you like that, try this: “Laughing Matters” (1998): This rueful call to keep a sense of humor in a world gone increasingly mad gets a ravishing orchestral backing for one of Midler’s most reassuring vocals.

9. “The Rose” (1979)

Just about perfect. The hushed power of Midler’s voice captures the “endless aching need” so vividly evoked in Amanda McBroom’s evergreen hymn—a classic pairing of singer and song.

If you like that, try this: “Lullaby in Blue” (1998): Midler holds back on the emotion and her restraint makes this tender remembrance of a teenage pregnancy deeply affecting.

10. “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” (1973)

Another great Barry Manilow arrangement, this one starts soft but gathers force as Midler and a stentorian choir take it to church. Just when you think she can’t go any higher––or wilder––she reaches even more frenzied heights.

If you like that, try this: “Bang, You’re Dead.” (1977): Midler was known to dabble in disco, and this propulsive Ashford and Simpson production is one of her best in that genre. It’s impossible to stand still when Midler’s scorching vocal rides that four-on-the-floor beat.

11. “Mele Kalikimaka” (2006)

Midler frequently evoked her background growing up on the island of Hawaii, and this holiday song, based on the Hawaiian derivation of the phrase, “Merry Christmas,” is an affectionate tribute to her home state.

If you like that, try this: “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (2003): Midler at her good-humored best, swinging lightly through Johnny Mercer’s dense, savory lyrics.

_{Featured image by Rob Bogaerts / Anefo. via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.}

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Election plays and the culture of elections and electioneering in the days of Dunny-on-the-Wold

England’s pre-Reform elections are memorably satirized in the historical sitcom, Blackadder the Third. Also glancing at late 1980s politics, the series begins with the rigged by-election for a fictional rotten borough—Dunny-on-the-Wold—taking centre stage. The first episode of the TV series based on the Horrible Histories books by Terry Deary contributes to the same satirical and comedic tradition: the sketch ‘How to Vote in a Georgian Election’ mocks the corrupt aspects, inequalities, and elite control of pre-democratic politics, for example, by stressing the importance of voting for the lord of the manor’s son: ‘You have to, there are no other candidates’.

In fact, these satirical takes on the long eighteenth century on the small screen have much in common with the drama of the period itself—as well as with related forms, such as Hogarth’s famous series of paintings, and associated prints, on the ‘humours’ of an election. Across the eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries, and across the country, a rich and varied genre of election plays—that is, plays about contemporary elections and electioneering—presented society with images of itself, displaying key aspects of the political process, corrupt practices, abuses endemic to the electoral system, and acts of principled resistance, through the entertaining lens of particular dramatic performances and conventions.

Although potentially subject to forms of censorship, these daringly topical plays nevertheless circulated in print and manuscript, and were staged, in different parts of the country, before and after the Licensing Act of 1737 (which stipulated that new plays, and new material added to old plays, should be submitted for official examination in advance of performance). Election plays were also adapted—for instance, as printed plates for a toy theatre—and disseminated as extracts: for example, ballads featured in these plays circulated separately and in song books. The genre includes the work of canonical authors such as Shakespeare, as well as lesser-known playwrights and anonymous and now lost pieces.

One example is Henry Fielding’s self-consciously ‘libellous’, commercially canny ‘rehearsal play’, Pasquin, A Dramatick Satire on the Times (1736). The play presents an eighteenth-century precursor to the metatheatrical The Play That Goes Wrong plays of today, a kind of Election Play That Goes Wrong. Set in the theatre itself, it features the rehearsal of a ludicrously bad comedy about an election, with commentary provided by the playwright, Trapwit, and rival dramatist, Fustian, as well as the critic Sneer-well and other stage personnel.

Through the farcical dramatization of electoral bribery in Trapwit’s ‘senseless’ comedy—at one point, Trapwit directs the actors playing the voters to ‘range your selves in a Line’, and those playing the candidates to ‘come to one End, and Bribe away with Right and Left’—Fielding satirically suggests the similarities, as well as differences, between this parodic, exaggerated representation and real life. Fustian asks, ‘Is this Wit, Mr. Trapwit?’, to which Trapwit responds: ‘Yes, Sir, it is Wit; and such Wit as will run all over the Kingdom’. The play was a hit at the Haymarket in the spring of 1736, due, in no small part, to the appeal of its electoral comedy.

Fielding’s play also circulated widely in print. In 1737, there appeared what claimed to be a tenth edition, printed by Edmund Cook. The edition had a smaller, more portable duodecimo format than previous Pasquin editions. It also attracted purchasers by prefacing Fielding’s play-text with a frontispiece portraying a scene from the rehearsal of Trapwit’s election comedy, further underscoring the popularity of this part of the play.

Although it is not a straightforwardly accurate representation, the frontispiece brings into focus some of the ways that election plays afforded voters and non-voters opportunities for political engagement and expression, at a time when the ability to vote was restricted. For example, as the copy in the Senate House Library Malcolm Morley Collection shows, the illustration highlights the presence of unenfranchised women in Fielding’s theatre audiences (members of whom have a prominent place on the left-hand side of the frontispiece); women could also read, hear readings from, and view the frontispiece to, the printed edition itself. (In writing his election plays Pasquin and Don Quixote in England (1734), Fielding was, moreover, following the example of Susanna Centlivre, whose influential works include the seminal election farce, The Gotham Election (1715).)

Again, the frontispiece comments on the role of actresses as active agents in shaping Fielding’s electoral comedy; the illustration represents the satirical onstage encounter between Miss Mayoress, a government supporter, and Miss Stitch, a supporter of the opposition, who, in Trapwit’s comedy, is susceptible to the bribe of a hand fan. In addition, the frontispiece points to the dynamic interplay between literary and visual satire key to the era’s electoral culture, apparent in the fruitful exchanges between numerous writers and artists, including Fielding, Hogarth, and Frederick Pilon. 

Election plays like Pasquin had both immediate and wider, long-lasting implications for literature and political culture. Such plays reveal important interconnections between commercial theatre, the market for entertaining print, and the expansion of an audience for representations of contemporary political life in the long eighteenth century. This is also suggested by the way that other forms of electoral culture tapped into the popularity and appeal of dramatic forms (including election plays). These forms include partisan electioneering materials, such as mock playbills attacking particular candidates, which could also be sold as part of printed election miscellanies—collections of texts generated by particular contests—further highlighting connections between the commercialization of literature and politics.

At the same time as election plays energized contemporary drama, they also had an impact on political life. In a period when many seats were not contested (that is, the candidate(s) for a particular constituency faced no formal opposition) and many could not vote, election plays fuelled political engagement and the formation of opinion about elections across the social spectrum and across the country in terms of their diverse authors, audiences, and performers. These plays had the potential to popularize ‘libellous’ views, promote electoral partisanship, and encourage calls for reform. Interacting and overlapping with other forms—including ballads, prints, and novels—election plays helped to create an active culture of elections and electioneering in the age of ‘Dunny-on-the-Wold’ itself.

Today, political culture continues to draw upon and rework well-known cultural forms, including entertaining dramatic forms, at a time when many people also engage with elections and electioneering without voting, for example, by sharing parodic online memes. Campaigning for the UK general election held in December 2019 saw the Labour and Conservative parties circulate adaptations of the well-known seasonal romcom Love Actually (2003) on social media, reimagining the romantic declaration made by Andrew Lincoln’s character Mark to Keira Knightley’s Juliet via cue cards as an act of doorstep canvassing.

As forms of political communication continue to draw upon dramatic culture, elections remain occasions for satirical and comedic creativity. During campaigning for the 2015 general election, the comedy series Ballot Monkeys reworked the classic satirical theme of ‘canvassing for votes’ by focusing on rival party ‘battle’ buses. The election play itself remains alive, and ready for reinvention. December 2019 also saw the topical updating of James Graham’s election play, The Vote, previously staged and televised on election night in 2015. The next UK general election, currently expected to take place in 2024, may well see Graham’s play revived and adapted to the times once again, as earlier election plays were revived, adapted, and repurposed to suit different political and cultural occasions. If a variety of dramatic forms still feature in today’s political and cultural landscape, election plays of the long eighteenth century offer us a window onto the drama and political life of the past, and the vital exchanges between them.  

_{Featured image credit: Frontispiece to Henry Fielding, Pasquin. A Dramatick Satire on the Times, ‘Tenth Edition’ (London, 1737) © University of London, Senate House Library, Malcolm Morley Collection, M.M.C. 2841}

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On specters and spectacle: tales of two Eurovisions, Liverpool-Ukraine 2023

Phantoms from the past, ghosts of the present, specters of the future, all gathered on 13 May to haunt the Eurovision Song Contest, cohosted in 2023 by the United Kingdom in Liverpool and by Ukraine in the spectral spaces of a Europe divided by war, but singing in concert under the banner, “United by Music.” Two Europes and two Eurovisions were on full display, each summoning its many specters in the chorus of the nation at its most spectacular: three minutes of song, dance, and theater in the most widely-viewed annual cultural event in the world.

One Eurovision was the temporary safe space of competition among a community of nations. The annual run-up to Eurovision Week in Liverpool unfolded according to well-worn tradition, the internet flooded with videos from national song contests and their winning entries, the full range of genres from intimate love songs to no-holds-barred extravagance. Fans would gather in Liverpool in the thousands (estimates claimed ca. 100,000, a figure significant only because of its symbolic excess).

The other Eurovision was Ukraine, the nation as a whole rather than a host city, a place of precarity, whose life as a European nation was under siege. The annual run-up to Eurovision Week in Ukraine was one of war and suffering, of pride in the long history of Ukrainian sovereignty to which song and music had borne witness, chronicled by the Ukrainian entries in the Eurovision over the past two decades, three first-place finishes among them, most recently the 2022 winner, Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania.”

The tale of two Eurovisions in 2023 is the story of a Europe riven by the conflict between East and West, unsettled by migration and unabated refugee crisis, and staggered by the threats of rising fascism, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ politics. Europe has been here before, and far too often. So, too, had the Eurovision Song Contest, first established in 1956 at the height of the Cold War, and on the eve of the Soviet military intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the establishment of the European Commission, the precursor of the European Union. The phantoms of the past are all-too-familiar, the specters of the future once-again-threatening. 

This year’s competition witnessed a substantial retreat in the number of nations competing, only 37 after a decade and a half when the numbers hovered between 42 and 43. Recently competing nations choosing not to enter this year came entirely from Eastern Europe: Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Russia, and Slovakia. There are many explanations for the retreat of Eastern European nations—Russia was banned from entering—but the most common one claimed that costs for smaller nations were prohibitive. The investment in sending a national team to the Grand Prix are not insignificant, but smaller nations in Western Europe routinely manage them, among them San Marino (population 33,745) and Luxembourg when it re-enters the Eurovision next year.

There is much about the two Eurovisions in Ukraine and Liverpool in 2023 that seems hard to reconcile. Though I have written about the Eurovision Song Contest since the 1980s, from the multiple perspectives of ethnographic fieldwork, close analysis of the songs themselves, and active integration of Eurovision courses into university curricula in the United States and Germany, I am unable, in 2023, to write about the two Eurovisions as one big party, conjoined by kitsch and camp. The phantoms and the ghosts are too haunting. Public celebration takes on more spectral meaning in the Ukrainian Eurovision when public curfew sends viewers to their homes and shelters after 8:00 pm.

At the Liverpool Eurovision the desire to celebrate by no means disappeared. It was the spirit of celebration that lifted the Swedish popstar Loreen to first place after she garnered the largest number of votes from the professional juries in each competing nation for her song, “Tattoo.” As she had in 2012, when she won the Eurovision in Baku, Azerbaijan with “Euphoria,” Loreen brilliantly captured the magic of the Eurovision stage with a Eurosong par excellence. When I wrote about her in my 2012 blogpost, I claimed that, as a child of Moroccan immigrants in Stockholm, Loreen (Lorine Zineb Nora Talhaoui) “represents the New Europe, with a multiculturalism and religious diversity that undoes the nationalism of the Old Europe.” In the 11 years since her first Eurovision—much rejoiced as the first woman to do so, and on the fiftieth anniversary of Sweden’s greatest Eurovision victory, ABBA’s “Waterloo”—Loreen’s performance relies on an earlier history, comfortably situated in the Liverpool Eurovision.

The favorite of the public voting was, however, not Sweden’s Loreen, but Finland’s Käärija, whose “Cha Cha Cha” successfully cobbled together the Eurosong’s tried-and-true formulae of over-the-top spectacle, with a refrain of countless iterations of “cha cha cha,” to which ecstatically entertained fans in the Liverpool arena and on the internet could sing along. Käärli’s public could not, in the final moment, outweigh Loreen’s media professionals.

The spectacle of the Liverpool Eurovision was plentiful, and yet the specters of the Ukrainian Eurovision were present, and painfully so. These were the specters that drew me to the other Eurovision, the one haunted by the phantoms tearing apart Europe along its very borders. These were the ghosts of misogyny and physical violence. The Czech entry—and my overall favorite—Vesna singing “My Sister’s Crown,” placed tenth in the Grand Finale, singing proudly of the resistive power of sisterhood, every verse framed by the couplet, “My sister won’t stand in the corner / Nor will she listen to you.”

It was the call to listen that most powerfully opened the spaces of the Eurovision that took place in Ukraine on 13 May 2023. We were reminded that song and sound draw us to places we cannot be, spectacle transformed to oracle, amplified by the beauty and horror of the sirens, past and present. If we watched one Eurovision on the stage in Liverpool, the sounds of the other Eurovision in Ukraine refused to be silent. I had the good fortune to watch the Grand Finale with my friend, colleague, and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Olha Kolomyyets, who holds a professorship in ethnomusicology at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. Even as the spectacle in Liverpool was broadcast, the air raid sirens in Ukraine were sounding through Olha’s cellphone, fully in disharmony with a contest professing “Unity in Music.” The ensuing Russian missile attacks, not least among them a strike on the home city of Tvorchi, the two singers of the Ukrainian entry, Ternopyl, immediately prior to their performance. It is to Tvorchi, then, whose song, “Heart of Steel,” placed sixth in Liverpool, that I give the final words for the Eurovision in Ukraine:

Don’t be scared to say just what you think,

‘Cause no matter how bad, someone’s listening.

_{Featured image: Tvorchi performing the song “Heart of Steel” on stage by Michael Doherty via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)}

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“Through Gilded Trellises”: a reflection on one hundred years of <em>Façade</em>

The making of Façade

“Poetry is more like a crystal globe, with Truth imprisoned in it, like a fly in amber. The poet is the magician who fashions the crystal globe. But the reader is the magician who can find in these scintillating flaws, or translucent depths, some new undiscovered land.” 

Osbert Sitwell, writing in 1921 (in his book of “remarks on poetry,” Who Killed Cock Robin?), accurately perceived the secret of the verses that his sister, Edith, was writing at that very time, and which, as they were produced, were being to set music by the Sitwell family’s young protégé, William Walton. By 1922 there were enough verses for Edith to publish in a small collection called Façade, and sufficient with music for an apparently unsuccessful private performance in the bitterly cold drawing room of the Sitwells’ London house. Walton conducted a small instrumental ensemble, Edith Sitwell declaimed through a special megaphone (a “Sengerphone”, its use suggested by the third Sitwell sibling, Sacheverell), and Osbert presided as master-of-ceremonies. The following year, with even more poems now set to music, the first public performance was given, on 12 June 1923, at London’s Aeolian Hall.

That public premiere became something of a succès de scandale, with the hostile press criticisms (“naggingly memorable,” conceded the Daily Express) simply encouraging Sitwell and Walton to further endeavours in verse and music. Walton refined the music and instrumentation, and various new numbers were admitted, discarded, and altered, but by the early 1940s the collection had settled: a “Fanfare,” followed by twenty-one verses “spoken” over a musical accompaniment for flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, cello, and percussion. 

Walton’s publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), had controlled the musical settings since 1926, but only published a score in 1951, almost thirty years after those contentious early performances—the score had a decorative front panel reproducing the back-curtain designed in 1942 by John Piper for performances of the work. That publication established Façade: An Entertainment as the definitive title for the collaborative work. 

The composer and conductor Constant Lambert (who, after its premiere, had rapidly become a polished “narrator” of Façade), was very soon praising the “concentrated brevity” of the various numbers. Lambert labelled these as “satiric genre pieces, over in a flash, but unerringly pinning down some aspect of popular music, whether foxtrot, tango or tarantella.” Osbert Sitwell stated that his sister’s poems were experiments in sound, using words as musical rhythms to evoke the very dances named by Lambert. Some say that the “Entertainment” was simply making a jibe at the “modern music” of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire of 1912 (also 21 verses set for “a speaking singer” and ensemble), others that it was merely playful whimsy on the part of the Sitwells and Walton. 

Façade was chosen in 1978 as one of OUP’s own special quincentenary publications. A deluxe edition of the score in a slipcase was issued that year, showing the John Piper curtain design in full colour as a frontispiece, and featuring essays by Edith Sitwell and Frederick Ashton—once enfant terrible, Façade had become a favoured child. 

Now, the centenary in 2023 of Façade’s first public performance allows us to move away from issues of genesis and growing pains, and instead provides a moment to reflect on Façade’s hugely important achievement, and its legacy in terms of the way its music became used and has become loved.

Music and verse

Sitwell’s language is rich in alliteration, assonance, and imagery: “Melons dark as caves have for their fountain waves / Thickest gold honey” in “Tarantella”; in “Valse”, Daisy and Lily are “lazy and silly”—they “Walk by shore of the wan grassy sea”; and “spangles / Pelt down through the tangles / Of bell-flowers” in “Through Gilded Trellises”. There are dark, disembodied, and surreal moments too: Queen Victoria sits “shocked upon the rocking horse” in “Hornpipe”, while Sir Beelzebub, in his verse, calls for syllabub “in the hotel in Hell”. Rhythm and effect provide the façade behind which meaning and syntax sit. Walton, in his music, responds directly and deftly to Sitwell in kind: musical allusion and reference (and, in one case, direct quotation), fragmentary and fleeting melody, and quicksilver changes of mood—for these poems, it was William Walton, rather than any reader, who held the key to their translucent depths and undiscovered lands.

Music and verse, in Façade, work perfectly together, but at the same time do so in two curiously detached layers. Edith Sitwell’s words were not set by Walton in the conventional sense that they became songs; rather they were designed to be recited, or spoken, above the instrumental music, in rhythmic patterns determined by the composer. This immediately provided liberation for both the music and words, resulting in quite separate existences for each alongside their continued symbiosis as the “Entertainment.” 

Sitwell had, as we have seen, published the then-small number of Façade items as poetry as early as 1922, with a complete edition following in 1950, and would often include selections in her celebrated poetry readings. The music (as both Walton and OUP quickly realized) was not, with a few exceptions, entirely dependent on Sitwell’s words for its effect, and mostly worked perfectly well without them—eventually resulting in a vast array of arrangements, adaptations, and new versions (all without words). Walton did, though, eventually set several of the Façade poems as songs: the now-lost Bucolic Comedies (voice and six instruments, 1923-4), and Three Songs (1931-2) for voice and piano (dedicated to Walton’s OUP publisher Hubert Foss and his wife Dora, who together recorded them for Decca in 1942). Of these three songs, the setting of “Daphne” is completely unrelated to its (eventually rejected) “Entertainment” version, while “Through Gilded Trellises” and “Old Sir Faulk” are broadly based on the originals.

Other composers, beyond Walton, have made musical settings of various Façade poems, but what was perhaps the ultimate tribute used neither Sitwell’s words nor Walton’s music at all. Noel Coward, who had walked out of the 1923 performance and afterwards perhaps read that early press review headlined “The Drivel They Paid to Hear,” included as a sketch in his first big revue, London Calling (1923), a merciless send-up of Edith Sitwell (now “Hernia” of the Swiss Family Whittlebot, the actress wearing clumps of fruit as earrings), her Whittlebot brothers, the poems, and Walton’s music. Even the venue of Façade’s first public performance was mocked: “the A-E-I-O-Ulian Hall,” Coward called it. Coward and the Sitwell family remained enemies for years as a result, especially after Coward, like Edith, had published his own skittish poems separately, under the title Chelsea Buns. But, as with all parodies, there was surely an element of respect on Coward’s part, and happily Noel and the Sitwells were eventually reconciled, in 1957, on the eve of Edith’s seventieth birthday.

Façade lives on…

It was Walton who, in 1926, decided to transcribe five dance-based numbers from the “Entertainment” for medium orchestra (no speaker). These items were first performed at London’s Lyceum Theatre on 3 December 1926, conducted by the composer, in an interlude as part of that theatre’s season of Russian Ballet. This group of pieces rapidly became immensely popular under the banner “Façade Suite for Orchestra”, showing that the music was already moving far from its original foundation in amiable, if esoteric, entertainment. The suite was renamed “No.1” when Suite No. 2 (with the majority of items orchestrated by Constant Lambert) appeared in 1936. It is through these two orchestral suites, rather than via the “Entertainment”, that Walton’s music rapidly became firmly embedded in concert programmes and record catalogues, and therefore in the mind of the public. In 1991, for a Walton recording project with Chandos Records, Christopher Palmer created a third suite, comprising six numbers (including “Daphne” in the version from Three Songs). And four popular numbers found yet another incarnation in a version for salon orchestra made by Walter Goehr, published in 1939.

The market for domestic piano music (solo and duet) was still healthy at the time of Façade’s inception: arrangement of the catchiest numbers for this medium was an obvious step for OUP, especially having seen the popularity of the two orchestral suites. Broadcast music in Britain (from what was then the British Broadcasting Company) was “born” in the same year as Façade’s own first appearance, and mechanically reproduced music (the gramophone) was developing rapidly, but neither mode of music consumption in the home was yet ubiquitous—the pianoforte (just) remained the domestic music provider par excellence through to the Second World War. Walton himself produced the first Façade piano solo arrangement (“Valse”) in 1926—this was designated “Concert Arrangement,” was championed by Artur Rubinstein, and was in the end too difficult and showy for the domestic market. 

It was Roy Douglas’s later and simpler solo piano arrangements of the five top numbers from the two orchestral suites (including “Scotch Rhapsody” and “Popular Song”) that became the sure-fire sellers. Piano duet arrangements by Constant Lambert of the two suites were published in 1927 and 1938 respectively (more-or-less coinciding with the launch of their orchestral counterparts). Ethel Bartlett and Rae Roberts commissioned two-piano versions of “Swiss Jodelling Song” (Herbert Murrill) and “Popular Song” (Mátyás Seiber) for their extensive “Oxford Music for Two Piano Series”—a note by Bartlett and Roberts in Seiber’s 1939 “Popular Song” arrangement made it clear that “it is rather the cheerful atmosphere of the old-fashioned Music-hall which is called for than the moaning of present-day crooners.” All of these arrangements were based on the “Suites” rather than “Entertainment” iterations of Walton’s music. 

A frightening interview with the “immensely tall” Edith Sitwell was, for the choreographer Frederick Ashton, the immediate result of the most colourful and what has become the best known of all the Façade incarnations: his eponymous ballet. That meeting with Edith “was just like going before the headmistress,” recalled Ashton. “Why wasn’t I given a credit for Façade?” she demanded, having noticed that her name had not appeared on the programme of the ballet’s first performance (which had been given, on 26 April 1931, by the Carmargo Society in London). Being based on the orchestral versions (numbers from the first suite, plus various newly orchestrated items, themselves eventually to find a place in the second suite), the words were not recited and therefore had not been credited. But Ashton immediately caved in, conceding to Edith that an acknowledgement to her would “add great lustre to the whole thing.” Thus, the ballet is now designated as “freely adapted to music originally written as a setting to poems by Edith Sitwell.”

It was, though, Walton’s music (much of it based on the popular dance forms of the day, and “sounding like” ballet in orchestral form) rather than Sitwell’s words that had intrigued Ashton all along. “I wanted to do it and I did do it,” he said. Ashton’s choreography, notes his biographer Julie Kavanagh, was “a perfect match for the mood, wit and rhythms of the poetry and music, preserving a Sitwellian sense of fantasy and fun, while, at the same time, adding a personal, totally new dimension.” The dancers, in “Swiss Jodelling Song,” configure to provide a fantastical human cow, complete with udders and tail, and a dropped skirt revealing a pair of enormous bloomers still shocks in “Polka.” “I’m very fond of Façade,” said Ashton, “because I think it seems to me to be a complete entity in itself.” Matters turned full circle in 1972 when, in an evening of music at Aldeburgh in honour of Walton’s seventieth birthday, adaptations of Ashton’s choreography were given to the music of the relevant numbers in the original “Entertainment” scoring, with Peter Pears reciting Sitwell’s verses. In truth, it was indeed both William Walton and Edith Sitwell who sat behind and were the true progenitors of the by-then huge array of works, both literary and musical, known familiarly and collectively as Façade. One hundred years on, the fly no longer sits in amber.

_{Featured image: A sketch from the OUP Archive of John Spicer’s curtain design for the first public performance of Façade.} 

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Macbeth, King James, and biting the hand that feeds you?

Possibly the most dangerous play William Shakespeare wrote was The Tragedie of Macbeth.  The drama is packed with illegality: assassination of kings; prophecies about kings; supernatural women; and necromancy. To add to the danger, Shakespeare’s employer, King James, was a prickly patron of the performing arts and notorious for his sensitivity to slights, real and perceived.

Patrons of the theatre can have a confrontational attitude to the world of the stage and one such patron was King James VI of Scotland and I of England. James enjoyed plays and, prior to his elevation to the English throne, he kept abreast of English works as well as those in Scotland. Foreign observers considered the theatre to provide a valuable insight into the thoughts of King James, so much so that George Nicolson, the English agent at the Scottish court, gave his employer, the Secretary of State Robert Cecil, a list of plays. James was aware of the political implications of plays and also was sensitive to what he considered abuse or insults. A message from Nicolson to Robert Cecil’s father William, Lord Burghley on 15 April 1598 pleaded with his lordship: 

It is regretted that the comedians of London should scorn [King James] and the people of [Scotland] in their play; and it is wished that the matter be speedily amended lest the King and the country be stirred to anger.

James also used the theatre in his contest for power with the church and the towns. The next year Nicolson wrote on 12 November 1599 to Robert Cecil that the ministers of the churches were forbidding their parishioners to attend theatrical performances. Furthermore, the bellows-blowers were claiming that two English actors named Fletcher and Martin were English agents who had been sent to sow discord between the king and the Church. King James responded by directly ordering the Edinburgh city council and the churches to reverse their bans and allow people to attend performances. 

When King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England on 24 March 1603, he extended his patronage to the English theatre. In a royal patent of 19 May 1603 the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s men became the King’s Men. The first name on the patent for the actors was Lawrence Fletcher (died 1608), apparently the same Fletcher who is mentioned in George Nicolson’s letter of November 1599. The very next name is William Shakespeare. 

The King’s Men discovered that plays referring to Scottish events did not always meet with their royal master’s approval. There was, for example, the Tragedie of Gowry that the company performed twice in August 1604. This was otherwise known as the “Gowrie Conspiracy,” which was a supposed attempt on the king’s life in August 1600. When hunting near Falkirk, the king was approached by Alexander of Ruthven, the brother of the Earl of Gowrie, who said that a man with a pot of gold coins was at his residence called Gowrie House. James rode to the house and came to a room in a turret where there was an armed man. The king dashed to a window where he shouted “Treason” and his entourage broke into the house. Neither the assassin nor the man with the pot of gold coins was found and that led many people to question the king’s account. A generous interpretation is that there was an attempted assassination by Alexander Ruthven who wanted revenge for the execution of his father ordered by James’ regency council. The controversy might explain the cold reception the King’s Men received. A letter of 18 December from John Chamberlaine to his friend Sir Ralph Winwood noted: 

The Tragedy of Gowry, with all the Action and Actors hath been twice represented by the King’s Players, with exceeding Concourse of all sorts of People. But whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that Princes should be played on the Stage in their Life-time, I hear that some great Councellors (sic) are much displeased with it, and so ‘tis thought shall be forbidden.

Therefore, it is somewhat surprising that the Tragedie of Macbeth was performed so soon afterwards. Many critics believe that the play was written during the winter of 1606 and performed for the first time in the summer when James entertained his brother-in-law King Christian of Denmark. The play had many topics of possible offense to King James; so why did Shakespeare write Macbeth?

One possible answer is that the Tragedie of Macbeth told history the way that King James wanted it to be told. The drama was based on the historical record. All the main characters and the progression of events—murder of Duncan, flight of Malcolm Canmore, and his eventual triumphant return—are historically attested, with one exception: Banquo. The murder of Duncan by Macbeth could have been seen by James as parallel with the murder of his father Henry Darnley, while the victory of Malcolm was similar to his triumph over the Scots and English nobility. James’ fear of witches can be judged by his Demonology of 1599, where he sees them as enemies of humanity. Even prophecy was dubious and, since the fifteenth century, any prophecy that juxtaposed royalty with chronology was illegal. In the play, however, all these unsavoury elements are destroyed. The prophecies are shown to be deceitful and the witches deliberately mislead Macbeth. Finally, the world is put right when Malcolm avenges his father.  

Like Robert Cecil, William Shakespeare understood how the theatre offered an insight into the mind of a prince. The Tragedie of Macbeth was drama of the sort that King James wanted and for which he paid.

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“A tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide”: Shakespeare under attack

Around three years into his career as a dramatist, Shakespeare’s blank verse—his unrhymed iambic pentameter—came under attack:

there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. O! that I might entreat you rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses and let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.

This passage from Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592) is the first recorded response to Shakespeare’s writing and the first reference to Shakespeare in print. It was written by some combination of Henry Chettle and Robert Greene (although most scholars now think Chettle was the principal author, it was designed and marketed as Greene’s). The passage can be characterised by “lasts” as well as by “firsts.” It appears on the last pages of the Groatsworth, in a letter addressed “To those gentlemen his quondam acquaintance that spend their wits in making plays.” And it emerged from the last days of Greene’s life. He was dying. If we believe his adversary Gabriel Harvey, Greene had succumbed to “a surfeit of pickled herring and Rhenish wine” after a lifetime of boozing (even his occasional ally Thomas Nashe would admit, and then assert, that Greene’s “only care was to have a spell in his purse to conjure up a good cup of wine with at all times”). By the end of 1592, Greene was dead. The Groatsworth was published posthumously by Chettle.

In the letter’s catalogue of abuses, Greene attacks Christopher Marlowe for his atheism, Thomas Nashe (or perhaps Thomas Lodge) for his wit, and George Peele for being neither Marlowe nor Nashe. Greene allows a little admiration for these three “gentlemen” (his “sweet boy” Nashe, and “the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing inferior”)—sufficiently so for Thomas Dekker to later stage Greene, Marlowe, Nashe, Peele, and Chettle engaged in nothing worse than good-humoured spat. It is only Shakespeare who emerges without anything like the “Million of Repentance” advertised by the Groatsworth’s subtitle.

The Groatsworth’s salvo at an “upstart crow” has long been interpreted as an accusation of plagiarism (the “Shake-scene” Shakespeare beautifying his plays with others’ feathers) and/or as a belittling remark about Shakespeare having been a mere actor (an “ape” for others’ inventions). Yet scholars have not paid proper attention to the Groatsworth’s remarks about Shakespeare’s blank verse: that he “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of” the best playwrights. To “bombast” is to “stuff” or “swell.” According to Greene, Shakespeare’s blank verse is both too little and too much; he pads out its essential emptiness (its blankness, even) with portentous rhetoric and vacuous sound. In thinking about Shakespeare’s alleged “bombast,” we might consider whether he spoke others’ blank verse with a bellow (if he is one of the actorly “puppets […] that speak from our mouths”), and whether his own blank verse was especially or exclusively bombastic, or whether the Groatsworth was condemning the blank verse of the period as typically and vexatiously loud and then condemning Shakespeare for being unable, or all too able, to reach that miserable standard. In other words, we might wonder whether the Groatsworth was right rather than treating it “as something to attack, or a document from which Shakespeare needs defence or exoneration” (as Andy Kesson has put it). 

The Groatsworth twists a line from 3 Henry 6: “his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide” alludes to “O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!” (1.4.138). As it appears in 3 Henry 6 the line is part of York’s long polemic against Queen Margaret. Having treated him to a mock-crucifixion and wiped his face with his son’s blood, Margaret urges York to “Stamp, rave, and fret” (92). York obliges. He calls her “an Amazonian trull” (115), “vizard-like” (117), “as opposite to every good / As the Antipodes are unto us, / Or as the south to the Septentrion” (136-8), “stern, indurate, flinty, rough, remorseless” (143), “ruthless” (157) and “abominable” (134), “more inhuman, more inexorable – / O, ten times more – than tigers of Hyrcania” (155-6). Could this be the “bombast” which Greene hears in Shakespeare?

At the start of my new book Shakespeare’s Blank Verse: An Alternative History, I listen to the rhythms of this early Shakespearean blank verse and establish what about it makes the verse sound so bombastic—and then how Shakespeare wriggled loose of such bombast over the course of his career, and finally returned to Robert Greene’s criticism by versifying his prose romance Pandosto (1588) into the supple, non- or un-bombastic blank verse of The Winter’s Tale (c.1611). Can we even think of Shakespeare as taking his revenge upon Greene, in a play much concerned with questions of retribution and restitution, by finally returning Greene’s epistolary assault to its sender?

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America’s first feminist ballet: Ruth Page and <em>American Pattern</em>

In 1977, reflecting on a six-decade career, Ruth Page (1899–1991) made an off-the-cuff remark to a newspaper reporter: “I was always making up dances. I knew right away that was the world for me. I never could endure a humdrum life.” 

In her more than nine decades of life, Page created a large oeuvre of choreographies, served as the artistic director of several dance companies, staged her ballets on numerous others, completed 13 extensive national tours at the helm of the Chicago Opera Ballet, and collaborated with countless international and Chicago-based artists in dance and the related arts. As that rare creature—an American woman who, defining herself as a choreographer and ballet director, amassed a degree of power and prestige and exerted aesthetic prerogatives—her life and work offer refreshing paradigms for the twenty-first century, at a time when women still encounter a “satin ceiling” in the ballet world. 

Page’s career stands as an exemplar of how a wider spectrum of choreographic voices could serve the diversity of ballet and, consequently, its popular appeal and ability to flourish today. 

Always a creative boundary-crosser—whether of genre, gender, race, or sexuality—Page generated movement through her own embodied practice, using kinesthetic methods that stood at the cutting edge of modernism. Neoclassicism struck her as a banal throwback. So far from seeking purity of the medium, she relished what one might call the anti-ballet, or what was not ballet in the space of ballet; an experimentalist, she tested the limits.  

Page’s ballet An American Pattern—originally titled An American Woman—presented an explicit statement of a female subject position. Premiering on 18 December 1937, it was probably, to boot, the first feminist ballet created in the United States. Not that its feminist message was unequivocal and resolute, because, for one thing, it emerged as a highly collaborative project, with Nicolas Remisoff co-authoring the scenario, Jerome Moross composing the music score, and Bentley Stone co-creating the choreography. Nevertheless, American Pattern embodied some of the dilemmas, conflicts, and compromises in Page’s own life, and these fueled its woman-centered subjectivity and implicitly feminist critique of women’s lack of meaningful options in society. 

Early drafts of program notes hint at some of the ballet’s ambivalent messages. One seems to question the whole institution of marriage from a middle-class woman’s perspective: “Her husband, being himself satisfied with the limitations of American business success, has little meaning for her as a woman, so that in the end they are strangers. There seems to be nothing ahead for her except dull routine, to which she succumbs.” Was Page bucking “the problem that [had] no name” 26 years before Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique touched off a second wave of feminism? The scenario certainly seems to challenge ideas that a woman’s whole being should revolve around husband and home, with housework representing the pinnacle of achievement. Admittedly, the jabs at American capitalism and unthinking automatism give it a quasi-radical, interwar-era slant; nevertheless, its focus on a woman’s alienation and failure to discover meaningful existence, hemmed in as she was by convention, anticipates feminist arguments articulated decades later. 

In the ballet’s plot, the young woman turns from one false icon or empty ecstasy to another: sex, money, mysticism, and mob—each represented by a male power figure. Neither acquiescing to nor flouting conventional, decorous existence offers a solution. Does the tragedy proceed from a flaw in the development of a self or society’s lack of meaningful options? Or are these two failings intimately related? “Her life is tragic because she has failed to find herself—her soul.” The woman finds neither worthwhile purpose nor meaningful relationships; it is truly an existential crisis without the prospect of educational or professional growth, self-development, or transformation. 

Such a predicament did not exactly reflect Page’s life. She had found meaningful—very meaningful—work: dance. She had built gratifying relationships with her husband and chief advocate, Thomas Hart Fisher; with coworkers in the arts; and with friends in Chicago, New York, and Europe. She had found her soul in creating through dance. Moreover, she knew how to educate herself through mentors and collaborators, literary and cultural pursuits, touring and travel, and new ballet projects. However, there was one overarching conflict or compromise in her life that could at times be felt as bad faith: settling for Chicago when she wanted New York. Her marriage to Fisher had made that compromise necessary. Nevertheless (or perhaps because of this), her husband supported her career ambitions magnificently, serving as her agent and attorney and, as a fellow arts lover and cultural patron, sharing her fascinations and commitments. But the kernel of truth in American Pattern—beyond its choreographic study of a social malady larger than herself—was that conventional, respectable, patterned existence filled her with dread. The life of a housewife, dilettante, or nondancer (non-doer of any sort) was anathema and oppression to her. 

Flagrant, outlandish, off-kilter, and weird, yes; “humdrum,” no—not a word one would ever use to ponder the life and work of Ruth Page. 

_{Featured image: “Scene of ‘class struggle’ from Ruth Page and Bentley Stone’s 1937 ballet An American Pattern.“}

_{Images used with permission from the Ruth Page Collection at the New York Public Library}

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Six books from 2022 to add to your 2023 reading list

With the new year unfolding before us and resolutions for the days ahead being made, it’s a good time to reflect on the pivotal moments and people that captured the attention of many in the last year. 

Here are six books from 2022 that reviewers and critics loved that you should add to your 2023 reading list:

1. Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea by Katie Stallard

Dancing on Bones is a deeply researched examination with first-hand reporting on the ground in North Korea, Russia, and China of how the leaders of these three countries manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule. Stallard argues that if we want to understand where these three nuclear powers are heading, we must understand the stories they are telling their citizens about the past. 

Dancing on Bones was included in the New Statesman list of Best Books of 2022, in the Financial Times Best Politics Books 2022, and The Sunday Times 15 Best Books on Political and Current Affairs 2022. 

Order your copy of Dancing on Bones →

2. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order is a sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left. Gerstle argues that the condemnations neoliberalism has thus far received fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why this worldview had such a persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades. 

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order was shortlisted for the Financial Times as Best Business Books of the Year, and was included in the Financial Times Best Books of 2022, Prospect magazine’s books of the year, and in Le Grand Continent 15 Books to Read in April 2022. It also received coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, the New Statesman, Oprah Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, Daily Kos, and The Nation.

Order your copy of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberalism Order →

3. La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern by Lynn Garafola

This is the first biography of twentieth-century ballet’s premier female choreographer, Bronislava Nijinska. Nijinska experienced the transformative power of the Russian Revolution and created her greatest work—Les Noces—under the influence of its avant-garde. Nijinska’s career sheds new light on the modern history of ballet and of modernism and reveals the sexism pervasive in the upper echelons of the early- and mid-twentieth-century ballet world—barriers that women choreographers still confront. La Nijinska was included in the New Yorker Best Books of 2022 So Far, in The Times 7 Best Film and Theatre Books 2022, and received coverage in The Telegraph, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Spectator. 

Order your copy of La Nijinska →

4. Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator by Paul Corner

Corner looks at the brutal reality of the Italian dictator’s fascist regime and confronts the nostalgia for dictatorial rule evident today in many European countries. By linking past history and present memory, Corner’s analysis constructs a picture of the realities of the Italian regime and examines the more general problem of why people look for strong leadership and take refuge in the memory of past dictatorships. 

The Economist declared “seldom is the publication of a book more topical,” and The Financial Times observed the book is “timely, balanced, succinctly argued and thoroughly convincing.” Mussolini in Myth and Memory was also included in Financial Times Best History Books 2022 and in History Today Best Books of the Year 2022. 

Order your copy of Mussolini in Myth and Memory → 

5. Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson

Thompson explains the historical origins of the political shocks of the past decade, and why we live in the political times we do in Disorder. This book recounts three histories—one about geopolitics, one about the world economy and one about western democracies—and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic the disruption in each became one big story.

Disorder was shortlisted for Financial Times Best Business Books of the Year award, selected as one of the New Statesman Best Books of 2022, the Financial Times Best Summer Book in Economics, and Five Books Best Business Books of 2022, along with coverage in The New York Times, New Yorker, The Spectator, The Times, Literary Review, and Prospect. 

Order your copy of Disorder → 

6. The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II by Mark Eden Horowitz

This epistolary book is a collection of letters from and to American musical theater’s greatest innovator, Oscar Hammerstein II. It provides an entertaining look behind the scenes of Broadway. Hammerstein II basically invented the modern American musical, first with Show Boat, and then in his celebrated collaborations with composer Richard Rodgers on Broadway classics like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The King and I that continue to captivate audiences today.

The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II was included in NPR Best Books 2022 and was recommended by Lin Manuel Miranda.

Order your copy of The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II →

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Funny how it ain’t so funny: casting, <em>Funny Girl</em>, and Broadway’s body issues

Sometimes the meeting of an actor and a role produces a rare kind of alchemy that forever bonds the two… and sometimes the opposite happens. The former occurred when twenty-one-year-old Barbra Streisand was cast as famed comedienne Fanny Brice in the 1964 musical Funny Girl. The latter happened when Beanie Feldstein was cast as Brice in the 2022 Broadway revival of Funny Girl, which rather auspiciously opened on Streisand’s 80^th birthday. Critics in 1964—and in 2022—hailed Streisand as Brice; her performance was the stuff of legend in a way that few match. The headline of the Los Angeles Times review announced, “‘Funny Girl’ still belongs to Barbra Streisand.” These kinds of reviews that openly compare the original star to the star of a revival are their own sub-genre of theatrical criticism and typically occur when, like Streisand-as-Brice, the performer and role are indelibly associated like Jennifer Holliday as Effie White in Dreamgirls (1981) or Ethel Merman in Gypsy (1959). Feldstein was inevitably and unfavorably compared to the legend, which was both impossible to live up to and to avoid. 

Initially, Feldstein’s casting was hailed by advocates and the media as a win for authentic, inclusive, and body-positive casting—she is Jewish and is fuller-figured than most women cast as romantic leads on Broadway—upon its announcement in August 2021. But from the start the press around Feldstein’s casting also raised the specter of another actor long rumored to covet the role: Lea Michele. The New York Times reported that Michele herself tweeted congratulation to Feldstein, writing “YOU are the greatest star!!” The same article contained a history of the troubled road traveled to revive Funny Girl on Broadway at all given the show’s structural problems and the long shadow of Streisand.

Feldstein’s reception in the role was ultimately mixed. It’s almost never a good sign when reviews of a revival open with paragraphs about the original star, or, as Adrian Horton’s review in The Guardian does, opens with this humdinger: “It must be difficult to cast Funny Girl.” Most critics found Feldstein’s acting winning and her singing wanting. What was a notable shift in criticism, given her historic casting and the pervasiveness of body shaming in the industry, was that critics faulted the size of her voice and not the size of her body in regards to her shortcomings in the role. Funny Girl is itself open about the appearance-based discrimination that runs rampant in entertainment, which remains as true of Brice’s time as it was in the 1960s when Streisand became a star as it is in 2022. One of the show’s first songs is titled “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty,” and it lists a litany of reasons a girl whose looks aren’t considered up to snuff should “forget the stage and try another route.” 

Critics overall received the revival as a let-down and it only scored one all-important Tony Award nomination despite brisk box office business. Feldstein announced that she would be departing the production earlier than expected and that’s where the offstage drama reached a fever pitch as rumors about who would replace her became fodder for internet gossip. This was nothing new for Funny Girl, though. 

And here’s where Broadway’s history repeats itself—with an ironic twist. Actor-singer Lainie Kazan made waves as understudy to Streisand in the original Broadway run of Funny Girl when she played a two-show day due to Streisand’s absence. The Times reported that “after her day in the spotlight . . . Ms. Kazan quit the show. Such was the publicity attending the musical that newspaper articles appeared when Ms. Streisand was thought to be ill and Ms. Kazan did not go on.” Kazan’s career seemed to be gaining momentum when she was cast in the Broadway-bound musical Seesaw in 1972. 

As I detail in Chapter 3 of Broadway Bodies, Kazan was fired from the show before it came to New York because “the consensus of opinion was that she didn’t look like a dancer or move like a dancer. She was also some 40 pounds overweight.” Kazan, a big, brassy belter, was replaced by her friend, the thinner, somewhat smaller-voice Michele Lee. This offstage conflict foreshadowed the onstage conflict of a later size-inclusive musical, Dreamgirls (1981), which shared a director in Michael Bennett.

Feldstein’s casting as a plus-sized romantic interest in a musical comedy was so rare that there are very few antecedents: Jennifer Holliday in Dreamgirls, Marissa Jaret Winokur in Hairspray (2002), and Bonnie Milligan in Head Over Heels (2018). The odd and certainly coincidental irony that Feldstein was replaced by Lea Michele while Kazan was booted for Michele Lee shows how body shaming has and hasn’t changed in the intervening five decades. Michele and Lee both won raves, while Kazan and Feldstein started over. To add insult to injury, Michele—and not Feldstein—even got to record the revival’s cast album, cementing her place in the show’s history.   

The history of appearance-based disqualification is not just history: it is ongoing. While it was a different and exciting choice for producers to cast Feldstein, casting Michele was a sharp correction to what Broadway musicals position as the norm: small body, big voice. 

_{Featured image: Barbra Streisand in her Oscar-winning role in “Funny Girl” (1968), via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)}

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Why we all need more Lesbian Dance Theory

Last month a Member of Congress joined Fox News to claim President Joe Biden is “robbing hard working Americans to pay for Karen’s daughter’s degree in lesbian dance theory” in response to the announcement that the President was providing $20,000 in debt relief for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for many other borrowers. A few days later the same Member of Congress shared her belief that “Joe Biden now wants to pay for Lesbian Dance Art degrees” at a campaign event. As far as I know such degrees are not in the official academic catalog of any accredited American institute of higher learning, but I may be wrong. Perhaps new programs in Lesbian Dance Art and/or Theory are emerging as you read this right now? The Congresswoman’s use of the “lesbian dance” as a stand-in for a useless degree and as a cover to lambast academic and artistic freedom and the humanities by and large is not new (Ben Shapiro has been using it to troll and mock since at least 2015), nor a uniquely Republican tendency in American politics.     

While “Lesbian Dance Theory/Art” may not be a real undergraduate degree, theorizing about lesbian dance and art is real, and it is certainly not useless, frivolous, or wasteful. Creating art and thinking about art are inherently valuable exercises: they improve our lives and broaden our understanding of ourselves and our world. For those of us lucky enough to practice, study, and teach in the arts, we see this every day. And while the Congresswoman’s remarks were most likely meant to denigrate and belittle (trafficking in homophobic and anti-intellectual tropes), Lesbian Dance Theory/Art offers us unique insight into the past and new paths into our future.

Over a century ago in a Parisian suburb, a young American woman and her friends dared to imagine a Lesbian Dance Art, a uniquely queer choreography of their loves, relationships, fantasies of queer pasts, and dreams for a queer future. This woman, Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) used her verve, artistic sensibilities, connections, and inherited wealth to host private spaces for lesbian women to come together, discuss art and life, and perform poetry, music, and dance. They did this at a time when public discussion of what it meant for women to love women outside of narratives of psychological pathology was relatively new, nebulous. Beginning around 1900, Barney and her dancing friends (including at various points, Mata Hari, Liane de Pougy, Isadora Duncan, Eva Palmer-Sikelianos, Penelope Duncan, and Marie Rambert) used dance to perform in the present an imagined ancient past where women were free to love women. As I discussed in my book, Performing Antiquity, they would dress in ancient Greek costumes, plucked reproductions of Sappho’s lyre, sang invented ancient Greek hymns, and danced invented ancient Greek dances as they sought to define a lesbian future where you didn’t need a man to lead. The reliance on millennia-old models (the Archaic Greek lyrics of Sappho of Lesbos, for whom lesbianism is named) was the only model Barney and her peers knew that allowed them to reimagine dance for lesbians. But they used this past to imagine a future.

As Natalie Barney’s reimagination of ancient lesbian dance art illustrates, while lesbians have been dancing for millennia, lesbian dancers and lesbian dance has historically received little theorizing or documentation. Barney had no models of lesbian dance to look to, no one to teach her the steps. This erasure of lesbian dance persists. Peter Stoneley’s 2007 book, A Queer History of the Ballet all but ignores queer women altogether focusing almost exclusively on queer male identification in ballet. More recently, Clare Croft’s 2017 edited collection, Queer Dance: Meanings & Makings takes important steps to theorize queer dance. “No single entity marks something as queer dance,” Croft asserts, “but rather it is how these textures press on the world and against one another that opens the possibility for a dance to be queer.” Lesbian dance, as part of the project of queer dance challenges and disrupts, disorients and reorients audiences, and that is perhaps its greatest power and threat. As Croft writes, “Queer performance can thwart an audience’s assumptions about bodies, desire and sex… In this way, queer performance becomes a kind of pedagogy, teaching someone what it might look like or feel like to refuse norms, particularly those related to gender and sexuality.”

Take Adriana Pierce’s choreography for Daphne Willis’s pop ballad, “I Am Enough” featuring New York City Ballet’s Georgia Pazcoguin and Broadway dancer Skye Mattox. Pierce places the dancers on either side of a suspended tangle of leather ropes and straps that serves as both a permeable barrier and visual bars separating the two women. Pazcoguin watches as Mattox arabesques. They dance for each other until Mattox reaches out her hand through the tangle of ropes to make contact with Pazcoguin. They are kept apart until the second verse of the song. In the second verse of the song the dancers perform a series of turns, spinning away from the tangle of ropes and straps and into each other’s arms. They partner, following the curve of the other woman’s twisting torso with their arms, embracing, and then joining together in synchronized arabesques and pirouettes, but the classical ballet vocabulary breaks down after the song’s bridge for the final chorus as Mattox presses Pazcoguin’s hands to her heart before Pazcougin goes in for a real and passionate kiss. After all the balletic performing of passion and intimacy, the gestures of love forbidden/blocked, the metaphoric spinning out and away from the tangled ropes, the two women do something rarely done in ballet. They stop doing ballet and kiss: necks craning, backs arching, shoulders rising, hands grasping faces. In that moment this piece of Lesbian Dance Art embraces and blasts open the conventions of ballet.

While Lesbian Dance Theory might not be a real major, the work of making sense of uniquely queer ways of moving, and knowing, and claiming space, provide creative spaces to reimagine our connections to each other through movement. The very vilification of Lesbian Dance Art and Theory is a testament to its important function in upsetting norms and creating spaces for bodies to create new meanings.

_{Featured image: A gathering of women including Eva Palmer, Natalie Barney, and Liane de Pougy in Barney’s garden in Neuilly, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain}

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Dance “crazes” and plagues: a precedented phenomenon

Lockdown raves, dodging people in the street, no more hugs, then hugs, then no more hugs, then hugs; confinement within the home worthy of house arrest—and the language of self-isolation, shelter, safety… all the makings of a sci-fi horror film depicting the world at an end. Or a history book, which is what this pandemic has felt like to me at times, having spent well over a decade thinking about historical epidemiology, specifically in relation to ideas about dance.

What came in the nineteenth century to be known as the “Black Death,” or bubonic plague, decimated somewhere between a third and half of the population of most towns and villages, cities and countrysides in the middle decades of the fourteenth century. It returned in bouts for centuries afterwards. At the same time, people, it seemed, were dancing; this gaiety in turn drew the attention of moralists who thought no one should be doing anything of the sort. Sometimes, these dancing people were travelling pilgrims, as I realised, digging through the archives of this medieval lore. Sometimes, they were hippie-like characters who wore wreaths in their hair and hung out in makeshift campsites outside town. By the time these stories came through to nineteenth-century colonial eyes, this started to look like what was being observed of rebellions—often dancing, sometimes no—all over the colonial world. In Madagascar, people were “possessed” by the dead queen, Ranavalona I, who was being called upon to help depose her puppet son; this too was described in medical literature as a dancing “plague” or epidemic. And yet as I realised, looking into this further, this actually constituted a perfectly legitimated form of governmental riposte. And the examples proliferate.

What today’s choreographies of gathering and distanciation show is that far from being “unprecedented,” today’s times, as it were, have a long history of precedent in ways of moving and ways moving bodies have been imagined or understood. Disorderly bodies—those that appear not to adhere to rules of good conduct—tend to be likened to the diseased, the contagious; tend to be seen as “contagious” themselves. At the same time, as we know well now after two years of pandemic life, quarantine has long been a proven measure of bringing infections down. During times of severe contagion that risk compromising the most vulnerable people’s health and lives, and in effect make everyone far more vulnerable than would be the case in more “normal” times, we shift our choreographies, shift our ways of understanding what is a convivial way of moving or what is right; shift also ways we see the present moment.

What I like to think of as the feeling of historicity describes this feeling of finding something uncanny, or comfortable, in the sense that the experiences of the present will be gotten through… that something not unlike this has been lived through before. Or, and these are not mutually exclusive, that something might radically change—a hope many have nurtured, especially in the early days of the current pandemic, in thinking that perhaps relationships to work, to family, or to climate, will finally transform. The feeling of historicity—perhaps the converse to the sense of these times being “unprecedented”—allows for a measure of proximity to other people, places, and times. “Crisis” becomes relativized.

Of course, the crisis is also very real, and felt presently, no matter how “precedented” it may be in some ways. A lot of what takes place is release from pent-up tension and strain: dance “crazes” sweeping TikTok or Instagram play—unwittingly, perhaps—on a very old trope, the expression of convivial energetic release and even “madness” of a sort, that comes with being cooped up for too long. In a great “case” of so-called “dance madness” or epidemic contagion I read about in the eighteenth-century Shetland Islands, some people were more or less climbing the walls with “cabin fever”; other “cases” in the Middle Ages involve girls and boys bored in church being told to go outside and dance forever, to their deaths. Many stories came of this sort of lore: familiar today includes Hans Christian Andersen’s moralizing version in his story of the “red shoes”—too much fixation on worldly things will drive one mad. The Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell film remake of The Red Shoes in 1948 featured a young woman (Vicky Page, played by Moira Shearer) who was so obsessed with dancing she eventually drove herself to insanity and ultimately death. Many different moralizing perspectives can be drawn from this, including, as I see it, a relationship to over-commitment or overzealousness with work, to institutional pressure (her dancing master is a slave-driver of a sort, and she is driven by her own passion, but also spurred on by this culture of “better, more” to the point that it harms).

With crowd gatherings mimicking madness, or with the many remakes of “mad” dance scenes filmed at home or in studios during lockdown, the desire for embodying “madness” seems never to have been so strong. What these moments teach us, and what I was able to explore in my book well before the current pandemic hit, was how the figure of dancing epidemics, or contagious dance, or dance madness are nothing if not enduring, and often accompany xenophobic or sexist prejudice associated with bodies apparently in disarray. Just as true is the fact that “madness” as such is at best a very volatile affair, often composed of a highly serious wish to let loose and “go a bit crazy,” together with a sense one has genuinely a bit of a screw loose. To dance quite literally allows for stomping out some of the tension, laughing, bonding with those around one, and opening up the chest or neck, among other basic physical or physiological things. Nothing is very “mad” about that, though to talk of this as madness or as a craze translates depreciatively in hindsight—only if we take this dancing too literally as an expression of entire populations or groups being “sick.” On the contrary, it is wellness they’re seeking and expressing, and this wellness is of course, when the world has gone a bit bonkers—when it has become unrecognisable, one has lost one’s coordinates, one is confused and unmoored—comprised of a solid portion of humour, joy, and sheer reprieve.

This does not for a moment downplay the seriousness of actually contagious illness; doctors dancing for their patients in covid wards, in videos that have themselves gone viral, know this well. The two go hand in hand: when tensions rise, so does the need to assuage them. The challenge today is to do this nevertheless safely—to legalise gatherings so safety measures can be put into place, for example, as municipal authorities did in Strasbourg in the early 16^th century, in an “episode” of dancing that has been grossly sensationalized, rather than to drive gatherings far underground. Across from my flat in London, enormous crowds gathered while clubs were closed. This was outdoors, in park space. Not an ideal measure given spread takes place even in open air; but the energy gathered kept some people going for a while. As I discovered writing my book, there is, as I’ve also noted here, nothing “manic” or “contagious” about this; but there is a long history of judgment, demonization in some cases, and medicalization from the sidelines—the sense that these young people should shut up and keep still (that their dancing itself was a plague). These are survival mechanisms of a sort, on a global level as well as on a local one. Survival comes in many forms, most of them, in the case of pandemic conditions, involving distance and masking, sanitation and further precautions; at the same time, if what we’re looking at is the history of underground culture and of rebellion, it is important, I think, to realise is that the need to dance, or the feeling of needing to join together with others in a release of energy which produces more energy in turn, has come at times with criminalization. For Native American Ghost Dancers in the 1890s, dancing in the face of genocidal conditions brought a sense of gathering and so collective force, even though crops and land were decimated through governmental treaty abuse. The dancing becomes a cipher for other tensions and culture wars, for other forces of judgment about who is allowed to move, why, when, and where.

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Three times systemic racism hindered Buck and Bubbles’s show business career

Since George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, social justice advocates have targeted systemic racism in housing, education, and law enforcement. Less attention has been paid to entertainment. As the recent controversy over racial bias in the Academy Awards suggests, however, this problem has always existed in show business. The career of legendary vaudeville team Buck and Bubbles shows how it worked.

Buck and Bubbles (aka tap dancer John Bubbles and pianist Buck Washington) were Black contemporaries of such well-known white duos as Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. Buck and Bubbles might have become well-known, too, if nameless forces hadn’t blocked their progress at pivotal moments in their career. Here are three examples:

RKO Vaudeville

In September 1928, Buck and Bubbles had reason to hope for an upsurge in their professional standing. For eight years they had been denied headliner status despite consistently (according to the critics) outpacing their white competitors. Now, they had just dominated a high-profile gig at the New York Palace, upstaging the headliners and securing a rare and much-coveted second-week booking (the first time such an honor had been given a Black act, according to the Pittsburgh Courier). Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) immediately offered them a contract at $750 a week the first year, $850 the second, and $900 the third. The clear expectation was that RKO would send them out as headliners themselves.

But this did not happen. Instead RKO booked Buck and Bubbles for a California tour headed by comedienne Frances White. What followed was an all-too-familiar pattern as Buck and Bubbles again overshadowed the headliner, making themselves “the hit of the bill” and “[casting] a spell over the audience that some critics have called ‘hypnotic.’” When White left the show after a few months, RKO replaced her with another white headliner, bandleader Gus Arnheim. Again, Buck and Bubbles stole the show, becoming the only act to be held over for a second week at the Los Angeles Orpheum. RKO’s shabby treatment of them continued for another year and a half, until outside circumstances intervened to dissolve their contract.

The Ziegfeld Follies

In early 1931, one of their childhood dreams came true when Buck and Bubbles were invited to join the celebrated Ziegfeld Follies. They were only the second Black act to do so, after Bert Williams. In a huge company of over a hundred people, Buck and Bubbles were part of a large cast supporting the four headliners. On opening night of the tryout in Pittsburgh, Buck and Bubbles received an ovation that lasted a full five minutes. And when the company opened in New York, Buck and Bubbles were spotted “next-to-closing,” the penultimate spot on a program normally reserved for the most important act on the bill. Why? According to Bubbles, it was because after two weeks in Pittsburgh none of the other acts wanted to follow them. In this bright spotlight they again thrived, “[hitting] that opening house like a ton of granite.”

Yet for unknown but almost certainly racially-motivated reasons, the white entertainment papers of New York concealed this triumph. In Pittsburgh Variety barely mentioned the team, and when the show opened in Manhattan the critic merely expressed annoyance that Buck and Bubbles had been spotted next-to-closing. We only know of the duo’s audience popularity from reports in Black newspapers and the Pittsburgh press. The Follies of 1931 appeared in New York for five months. The experience should have given Buck and Bubbles a substantial career boost, but the unconscionable silence of white New York critics killed their momentum.

Varsity Show

In 1937, Buck and Bubbles got their first chance to appear in a white feature film. Cast as janitors in Varsity Show, a college musical, they were given a bit more than three minutes of camera time to perform two set pieces. Their presence was so slight that Variety didn’t even mention them in its review of the film. By contrast, the Ritz Brothers, white competitors of Buck and Bubbles in vaudeville who made their feature film debut the previous year, were given five times as much camera time plus a written plug from the studio at the end of the movie. The Ritz Brothers went on to make fourteen more features in the next seven years; Buck and Bubbles’ contract, meanwhile, was not renewed.

Among other reasons for this failure, the studio was undoubtedly alarmed by Bubbles’s potent sexuality. Reports of his work in vaudeville and on Broadway (especially in Porgy and Bess) attested to his masculine allure. These rumors were confirmed on the set of Varsity Show, where, according to the Chicago Tribune, the young women of the cast flocked around Buck and Bubbles during breaks. The director took note. For the team’s first set piece Bubbles was asked to perform his dance feature down in the boiler room of a frat house, where only a few male students sat watching. For the second set piece, Buck and Bubbles performed on a fantasy set with no spectators at all. It was crucial to seal them off from the student body, to never present Bubbles alongside admiring white coeds. Apparently, despite his talent—and because of his race—he was too radioactive for a prominent role in Hollywood.

What’s the lesson of these examples? It’s not that the entertainment world didn’t value Buck and Bubbles. On the contrary, gatekeepers very much saw the team as a golden goose. Threading a devilish needle, they wanted to showcase Buck and Bubbles but not too much, lest they overshadow their white competitors. So, they gave them big contracts but withheld headliner status. Or they recruited them for the Ziegfeld Follies but refused to report their success. One critic voiced the patronizing attitude of the white establishment: “The colored young fellows are great entertainers in their own little way, and theirs is an act that is a decided asset to the big time.” In other words, they had a role to play, but only if they did not forget their subordinate place. No single showbiz chieftan can be blamed for hindering their careers. Buck and Bubbles fell victim to a racist system in which the need to subjugate them for their skin color was taken for granted by people across the industry.

_{Featured image: Domino Johnson (John W. Bubbles) in MGM’s Cabin in the Sky, 1943. Used with permission.}

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Why “the all-male stage” wasn’t

Why is “the all-male stage” inadequate as shorthand for the early modern stage? For one thing, it enforces a gender binary that has little to do with the subjects, desires, audiences, and practices of the time. Gender was elusive, plural, and performative, especially on the stage, where attractive androgynous boys played women, or switched back and forth between genders. The importance of female spectators, artisans, and backers gives the lie to total exclusion, and so does mounting evidence that women played in many spheres adjacent to the professional stage. Queens and aristocrats acted and danced in court masques, girls took roles in shows at great houses; mountebanks, tumblers, and rope walkers drew crowds on city streets; and women played in parish drama and danced in morrises. Similar performances by women show up on the professional stage, albeit in parts played by boys.

Not all this female talent came from England. Some came from abroad, especially Italy. In the mid-1570s versatile Italian troupes, some with star actresses, visited England and played for Elizabeth and for popular audiences. Their impact was immediate: writers began to turn out plays starring bold, exotic, and charismatic women. Each is a variant on the innamorata accesa (woman inflamed with passion), the trademark of the foreign diva. Suddenly boys were playing enticingly hot-blooded and Italianate heroines: the love-struck, cross-dressed virgins in Lyly’s Gallathea, the desperate Queen Dido in Marlowe’s The Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the strong-willed avenger, Bel-Imperia in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. From the start of his career, Shakespeare featured vividly theatrical Italian women, including Julia of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing, Portia of The Merchant of Venice, and Juliet of Romeo and Juliet. 

All bear a distinct resemblance to the prodigious innamorata shaped by divas such as Isabella Andreini, Vittoria Piissimi, Angelica Martinelli, and Diana Ponti. Like Shakespeare’s boy player, they were highly skilled professionals who began performing very young. All were trained in music and memorization, and some grew famous for singing. Both actresses and boys offered androgynous appeal and protean volatility, especially useful in comedies of cross-dressing. Both women and boys inspired writers to exploit their crowd-pleasing talent, training, and beauty, leading to more plays centered on women’s choices and desires. But there the resemblance ends.  

As full company members, actresses had far more autonomy than boy apprentices. They also took far greater risks, traveling constantly in often hostile territories far from home, and some became leaders of their troupes. Successful actresses enjoyed social as well as geographic mobility. Most came from the courtesan class, where they gained their educations; but in the theater, they played refined young women. Unlike boys, some became international stars, with kings and queens as protectors and patrons. A few were literary prodigies, such as Isabella Andreini, who wrote and published poetry and a pastoral, and was admitted to an all-male academy. Whether playing the innamorata in comic, pastoral, or tragic modes, the diva always spoke in literary Tuscan, spinning out witticisms, conceits, or poetic laments. She gained this facility through constant study and memorization of choice passages from romances, novelle, and poetry. 

To the English the diva was a glamorous prodigy, a novelty with tremendous stage appeal. Emulating the innamorata she created, they invented a “boy diva” capable of bravura displays—sung laments, swordfights, clever cross-dressing, riveting suicides—in plays of all kinds. To stress her alienness, the English stepped up the type’s metatheatricality. She stands out by alluding often to acting and theater, and leaps at the chance to perform. The audience is rarely far from her mind, and she connects to them by speaking in asides and soliloquys. She milks her big scenes by drawing out suspense, like Portia before the court in The Merchant of Venice, and delights in her own witty acting, like Rosalind in As You Like It. Proud of her greatness she seeks glory and fame, like Cleopatra. One of the most difficult star turns is the full-tilt mad scene, a specialty of Isabella Andreini, whose celebrity inspired Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton and others to include madwomen in their plays. All such roles relied on sprezzatura and improvisatory ability, qualities that were not easily imitated. By loading a boy’s role with alien literariness and emotional volatility, and cuing him artfully, playwrights created the illusion of Italianate improvisatory genius.

Because she is foreign, passionate, and theatrical, the diva-type is also scandalous and strange. English stage characterizations range in tone from fascinated ambivalence to savage caricature and bewhoring. Despite this animus, boys won applause and admiration as they portrayed Juliet, Desdemona, Vittoria Corombona, and other stellar roles, showing the power of the diva type in performance. Given the fervent attacks on theater and on actresses in particular, it’s remarkable that two vulnerable groups—women players and boy actors—did so much to increase the complexity and importance of female roles in this period. To return to my title, this phenomenon shows why “the all-male stage” is such a misnomer. Many of the best female parts written for boys, from Viola to the Duchess of Malfi, are marked indelibly by the creative labors of women.  

_{Feature image: Calcografia in Iconografia italiana degli uomini e delle donne celebri: dall’epoca del risorgimento delle scienze e delle arti fino ai nostri giorni, Milano, Antonio Locatelli, 1837. Available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication} 

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Digital dance cultures: from online obscurity to mainstream recognition

I didn’t enter the world of digital dance cultures as a scholar. When I was introduced to TikTok and Dubsmash in October 2018 by my high school students, I first engaged with the platforms as a dancer. Despite having no formal training in dance and believing that any opportunity for me to become a dancer had passed me by, I was suddenly dancing alongside my students on a number of digital platforms that facilitated a growing screendance community. These platforms—namely TikTok, Dubsmash, and Triller—became part of my every day vernacular as the Gen Z dance moves that fill those spaces such as the Woah, the Mop, and the Wave became my choreography. Suddenly, I was a dancer. 

In just over three years since TikTok’s entry into the United States and Dubsmash’s re-launch as a dance challenge app, so much has changed. When I joined these apps, posting videos dancing alongside my students, I was one of few adults among millions of teenagers. In fact, even today, Dubsmash is still an almost exclusively Gen Z space. TikTok, bolstered by the pandemic, has become a home for social media users of all ages even if young people continue to dictate the app’s dominant culture. TikTok and Dubsmash’s emergence as critical spaces for digital dance fall into a lineage of screendance platforms that have proliferated since the dawn of the internet. Although screendance has been steadily gaining popularity, the pandemic accelerated this trend.

As with most things during the pandemic, the digital dance world saw a dramatic shift that both changed the culture and solidified many of the trends that had been shifting on the sidelines well before March 2020. Seeing this, dance scholars Harmony Bench and Alexandra Harlig guest-edited a special issue of The Journal of Screendance that responded to the nuanced ways that the pandemic has shifted the ways we engage with dance on digital media. Bench and Harlig note, “Activities once on the sidelines of the dance field are the new normal: teaching technique on Zoom, holding online dance film festivals, DJing house parties on Instagram, streaming archival performance documentation, making TikToks.” Indeed, screens are where we dance now.

As digital dance cultures became more normalized, scholars and the general public began to take notice. This was no more apparent than on 12 March 2021 during the This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen Symposium, produced by Harmony Bench and Alexandra Harlig to coincided with the special journal issue. The online symposium began with a keynote roundtable featuring dance and digital media scholars Crystal Abidin, Kelly Bowker, Colette Eloi, Pamela Krayenbuhl, Chuyun Oh, and myself. Each scholar presented new research about how platforms such as Dubsmash and TikTok have exploded during the pandemic, making what was once something largely associated with teenagers in the US to something more universal. Now, dancing on TikTok, Triller, Dubsmash, and the like is not just an activity filling the hallways of high schools across the US. Rather, digital dance platforms have become an integral part of the mainstream.

As TikTok and Dubsmash have solidified themselves in mainstream US culture, so too have many of the conversations I engage with. Discussions about artist credit, monetization, choreography, activism, and community-building on social media apps, for example, are commonplace now. Casual onlookers now see these apps as serious spaces for artistic production which is the antithesis to how adults diminished young people’s content in the early days of these apps. 

Take for instance the story of the Renegade Dance Challenge set to K-Camp’s song “Lottery.” The Renegade Dance entered the mainstream in Fall 2019 after Charli D’Amelio, TikTok’s most-followed creator, posted a video of her performing the dance. The dance took off, becoming what is arguably the most famous dance in TikTok’s short history. But TikTok isn’t where I first encountered Renegade and Charli D’Amelio wasn’t who I associated the dance with. I first learned about the dance from my high school students who had seen it on Dubsmash. The dance wasn’t created by D’Amelio, but was created by Jalaiah Harmon, a Black teen who wasn’t credited for her choreography and was seemingly left behind. After a media firestorm in January and February 2020, Harmon was rightfully credited as the mastermind behind the Renegade Challenge. Her popularity and career both took off, demonstrating the monetization that corresponds with social media virality.

The case of the Renegade signalled a shift in TikTok culture. Soon after, TikTok’s major talents such as D’Amelio and Addison Rae Easterling began giving dance credits in their videos, which modelled a culture of crediting artists. Their followers soon began giving credit, as well. By the time Keara Wilson choreographed one of 2020’s biggest dances, the Savage Challenge set to Megan Thee Stallion’s song of the same name, the entire landscape had changed. Wilson immediately was given credit, received the blue checks on Instagram and TikTok, had articles written about her, and even had the stamp of approval from Megan Thee Stallion. As TikTok grew in import throughout 2020, this became common practice, demonstrating how digital dance spaces became more recognized and respected by mainstream US culture as well as the media who had frequently disregarded TikTok and Dubsmash as silly spaces for teenagers. 

Indeed, now looking forward into what the future might hold for screendance, we can see that the pandemic has ushered in many changes that were likely inevitable. Social media dance spaces have been normalized. 

_{Feature image by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash.}

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The VSI podcast season three: ageing, Pakistan, slang, psychopathy, and more

The Very Short Introductions Podcast offers a concise and original introduction to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves. From ageing to modern drama, Pakistan to creativity, listen to season three of the podcast and see where your curiosity takes you!

Ageing

In this episode, Nancy A. Pachana introduces ageing, an activity with which we are familiar from childhood, and the lifelong dynamic changes in biological, psychological, and social functioning associated with it.

Listen to “Ageing” (episode 43) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Pakistan

In this episode, Pippa Virdee introduces Pakistan, one of the two nation-states of the Indian sub-continent that emerged in 1947 but has a deep past covering 4,000 years.

Listen to “Pakistan” (episode 42) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Henry James

In this episode, Susan Mizruchi introduces American author Henry James, who created a unique body of fiction that includes Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Turn of the Screw.

Listen to “Henry James” (episode 41) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Secularism

In this episode, Andrew Copson introduces secularism, an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe that is more complex than simply “state versus religion.”

Listen to “Secularism” (episode 40) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Demography

In this episode, Sarah Harper introduces demography, the study of people, which addresses the size, distribution, composition, and density of populations, and considers the impact certain factors will have on both individual lives and the changing structure of human populations.

Listen to “Demography” (episode 39) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Psychopathy

In this episode, Essi Viding introduces psychopathy, a personality disorder that has long captured the public imagination. Despite the public fascination with psychopathy, there is often a very limited understanding of the condition, and several myths about psychopathy abound.

Listen to “Psychopathy” (episode 38) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Modern drama

In this episode, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr introduce modern drama, the tale of which is a story of extremes, testing both audiences and actors to their limits through hostility and contrarianism.

Listen to “Modern drama” (episode 37) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Slang

In this episode, Jonathon Green introduces slang. Slang has been recorded since at least 1500 AD, and today’s vocabulary, taken from every major English-speaking country, runs to over 125,000 slang words and phrases.

Listen to “Slang” (episode 36) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Creativity

In this episode, Vlad Glăveanu introduces creativity, a term that emerged in the 19th century but only became popular around the mid-20th century despite creative expression existing for thousands of years.

Listen to “Creativity” (episode 35) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

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Staging philosophy: the relationship between philosophy and drama

Where does philosophy belong? In lecture halls, libraries, and campus offices? In town squares? In public life? One answer to this question, exceedingly popular from the Enlightenment onward, has been that philosophy belongs on stage—not in the sense that this is the only place we should find it, but that the relationship between philosophy and drama is particularly productive and promising. 

Diderot, Voltaire, and Lessing refused to draw an absolute distinction between philosophy and drama—and excelled in both. Drama featured centrally in the works of nineteenth-century luminaries such as Hegel and Nietzsche. It should not surprise that modern dramaturges and directors drew on philosophy to formulate their views about the arts of drama and theater. It was in this intellectual climate that the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen positioned himself in the 1850s and 1860s.

In Copenhagen, where Ibsen spent time during his apprentice years, the theater was dominated by the powerful Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Heiberg was a student of Hegel and the author of a number of Hegelian writings. Hegelianism prospered among the Scandinavian expats in Italy, where Ibsen spent a formative period. Hermann Hettner’s Hegelian treatise is described by Ibsen as “a manifesto and program for reform in the modern theater.” Later on, Nietzsche’s reflection on tragedy, history, and morality gained traction. We see Ibsen’s mentor Georg Brandes transition from a romantic to a Hegelian and, finally, a Nietzschean position. Lou Salomé, the author of the path-breaking Eroticism as well as an early monograph on Nietzsche, wrote an early study of Ibsen’s heroines. 

When trying out ideas for a commission for the University of Oslo, the painter Edvard Munch sketched Ibsen with Nietzsche and Socrates. In Ibsen’s work, we encounter Sophists and Platonists. In Peer Gynt, the eccentric protagonist encounters a Hegelian director of a madhouse. Peer himself grandly converses about world history and logic. Works such as Hedda Gabler and An Enemy of the People put into play distinctively Nietzschean characters and address topics such as the relationship between life and learning, and the need for critical and existential approaches to history. The point is not that Ibsen, as a dramatist, passively drew on philosophical ideas, but that he allowed his characters to live out a set of worldviews, to test, as it were, their viability in the laboratory of individualized life. Ibsen actively transforms and challenges the philosophy of the nineteenth century. His drama does not make use of philosophy. It is philosophical. It is as such that it caught the attention of Freud, Adorno, Cavell, and others. 

Ibsen wrote in a period when philosophy was in the process of becoming increasingly academic. Philosophy understood itself as scientific and, as such, sought to guard its boundaries towards the arts. This, however, did not prevent philosophers from thinking about drama: its status as an artform, its cultural function, the relationship between drama as written and as performed in the theater. 

For Lessing and Herder, drama was the artform through which a historical culture would articulate itself. A dramaturg at the prestigious Hamburg theater, built to celebrate the city’s independence from the Danes, Lessing set the agenda for modern dramatic arts. Gone were the ideals of classicism. Modern drama cannot imitate the great tragedies and comedies of the ancients, but must put on stage the conflicts, contradictions, and experiences of modern life. With Herder, Shakespeare’s drama, featuring people of all classes, dialects, and worldviews, is put forth as a new paradigm. Here drama is freed from the distinction between high and low. It is, Herder argues, an art of the people. August Wilhelm Schlegel further developed this kind of thought. His lectures on drama launched a frontal attack on the formalist view of the purity of art and the autonomy of aesthetic judging. Following this lead, Hegel argued that drama explores the nature of human action—both in its ancient and in its modern forms. It is, at the end of the day, the highest stage of art. And even though Nietzsche was critical of Hegelian idealism, he continues its fascination with tragedy. For Nietzsche tragedy originally gave rise to the most profound metaphysical experience. 

Nineteenth-century philosophy of drama is no doubt fascinating. It should not surprise that playwrights such as Ibsen found such discussions fertile ground for dramatic content and reflections on the nature and politics of drama. 

Yet, at some point, the budding dramatist would have been disappointed. For Hegel philosophical thinking was ultimately assigned priority over artistic form. While historically important, art represented an incomplete stage in spirit’s cultural-educational development. Nietzsche, on his side, prioritized the mythological, rhythmic, and musical dimension of tragedy over characters and actors. 

For modern dramatists, by contrast, no such limitations apply. Instead, it is philosophy, with its abstractions and theorizing, that falls short. As such, it is fitting that Ibsen would present the (Hegelian) philosopher as the director of a madhouse or the (Nietzschean) philosopher-historian as being drawn to the lethal mix of alcohol, unhappy love, and loaded pistols (Hedda Gabler). 

Ibsen is not committed to a particular position or point of view. He hones in on the existential dimensions and consequences of positions and worldviews that would otherwise remain theoretical and academic. He engages philosophical ideas from the point of view of lived life. He takes these ideas as far as life can hold them and then puts them into focus as they burst and fall apart. 

Academic philosophy is sometimes hostile towards the idea that philosophy can take artistic or non-academic forms. But to the extent that philosophy is committed to the examined life, we will, as philosophers, be poorer if we leave out the quests for truth and understanding that drama, in Ibsen’s vein, embodies.

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Afong Moy on the 21st century stage

“I wish I could have!” As an historian, I have often wished I could slip into the person I was researching and rewrite their story, especially one whose record is obscure and whose fate is unknown. It would have satisfied my sense of justice to put a fulfilling end to a challenging life rather than to record all the complicated details of their difficulties through the pursuit of pesky and elusive facts.

The story of Afong Moy, the first known Chinese woman on American soil, and the first Chinese person to come face to face with American audiences across the country, was such a case. Coming to America in 1834, her trials were unending as an unwilling sojourner traversing the country with bound feet. As I labored for years to pursue the historical details of her life, friends and colleagues tried to persuade me to fictionalize her story. They said it would have been so much easier to create a persona rather than track down all the interminable elements of her life deeply hidden in libraries and archives. 

But I could not. 

I could not abandon the complexity of the research on this person for whom I cared so much. My trade as a historian bound me to the facts and it was the only way I could tell Afong Moy’s story. And I could not deviate, because I lacked the skills of a playwright or novelist who could conceive and present her life in ways meaningful to such an audience. 

Yet some years ago acclaimed playwright Lloyd Suh found Afong Moy’s story compelling and creatively presented her life in a way I could not. Unaware of my research, he wrote a script based on what he knew of her life. Only as my book, The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, came into print in 2019 did we realize that our work intersected. 

The play, The Chinese Lady, had already debuted in New York City in the fall of 2018, directed by Ralph Peña. Peña knew of the upcoming book and introduced me to Suh. After reading his script, I suggested some factual changes which he might include in later productions of the play, but I applauded the inventive agency he provided Afong Moy. 

What is less evident in the play, but emphasized in the book, is Afong Moy’s role in advertising the wares of American merchants, who traded in Chinese goods for the American market—her sole reason for coming to this country. For the first time, the burgeoning middle class was able to afford the vast array of consumer goods—floor and window coverings, comestibles, and toys— available from China. These products, as well as American and European objects, copied and reproduced in China at a lower cost, presaged today’s flood of “Made in China” at Walmart and other retail establishments across the land.

Many in the theatre’s audience might reflect upon their “coming to America” experience in the play. Since it is called The Chinese Lady without Afong Moy in the title, this could be the story of anyone who feels alienated and misunderstood in a new land. Based on reviews, this is how some people in the house do respond to the play. In contrast, the book with its subtitle indicates that it is solely focused on the experience of Afong Moy in early America. 

Suh provides his character of Afong Moy with a sense of intentionality. Though she has had no part in establishing herself in America, Suh grants her the role of pseudo missionary once she arrives. On stage, her duty to the audience is to promote understanding between peoples of difference. Historically, Afong Moy does present her differentness on stage—her bound feet, her clothing, and the chop sticks she employs—but the reality is that there is no indication that she considered her mission a promotion of audience understanding or appreciation of difference. 

In the historical record, Afong Moy was discarded by the merchants who brought her and eventually abandoned to play P. T. Barnum’s exotic on the same stage as the renowned Tom Thumb. Intriguing newspaper and diary accounts of the time record her reaction to these roles, and to her mistreatment, but sadly, her own voice is mostly silent. 

What was not silent in the historical record was how Americans responded to her and what that said about early nineteenth century racist attitudes toward China. News accounts, personal letters, and diaries commenting on Afong Moy document American’s first reflections on meeting a Chinese person. Afong Moy was the first Chinese to meet a United States President, Andrew Jackson. His appeal to her to return to China and rid the country of female foot binding is no less culturally tone-deaf than the expectations of today’s politicians that China might only thrive by following a Western model of political and economic development.

The play revolves around only two characters. Suh develops the second persona of Atung, Afong Moy’s on-stage Chinese translator, who in fact did serve in this capacity at the behest of Moy’s minders. We know little of Atung’s background, though in the book I speculate on the possible intriguing circumstances that brought him to the United States. The newspapers of the time effuse about the courtesies of “that very interesting and polished youth A’tung, whose handsome face, graceful manners, and Chinese dress, and well-spoken English, are of themselves a principal attraction.…A’tung moves about…. with all the grace of a gentleman and is at the same time an excellent cicerone to explain the different curiosities.” Although their relationship in the looplay is conflicted, surely his presence provided Afong Moy with some solace, and his departure after a year must have been wrenching. Unfortunately, neither recorded an account of their relationship. 

I was not able to establish her death date in the book, but Suh brilliantly projects Afong Moy forward in time, beyond her reasonable death. In this way she can address all the challenging moments of oppression experienced by Asians in America from the brutalities during the western Gold Rush to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Bringing her into the more immediate past allows the audience to confront current immigration issues and to grasp the historical comparatives. 

Hopefully, the book sets that stage.

_{Featured image by Gwen King on Unsplash} 

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The musical genius of Tommy Tune: “old plus old equals new”

From the beginning, Tommy Tune was pulled as if by centrifugal force toward dance and the Broadway musical. He was taking dancing lessons by the age of five, but his early ambition to be a ballet dancer was abandoned when he shot up in height during his teenage years. He later joked about his extreme height, saying, “Sometimes, instead of thinking of myself as six-foot-six, I tell myself I’m only five-foot-eighteen.” 

Nevertheless, he made a smooth transition from staging backyard musicals in his native Texas to standing tall (literally) in Broadway chorus lines. His friend and early mentor, Michael Bennett, provided Tune with both his first opportunity to choreograph on Broadway and his breakthrough as a performer. When Bennett took over the direction of the struggling musical Seesaw, he recruited Tune to join the show’s choreographic team and promoted him to the role of a gay choreographer. Refreshingly, the character was not sad and lonely, nor a focus for easy laughs. It was one of musical theater’s first attempts to portray gays as more than stereotypes. 

Tune’s showstopping number, “It’s Not Where You Start,” which he choreographed, served as a template for much of his later work. Throughout his career, he brought the Broadway musical forward by looking backward, drawing on well-worn show business performing styles and tropes and infusing them with contemporary energy and attitude. Here, in both his staging and performance, Tune blended the old and the new into something fresh and original. 

Tune won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Seesaw, but his towering height made it difficult to translate this success into a sustained performing career on Broadway and he soon distinguished himself as an exciting new choreographer and director. The hits started adding up: The Club and Cloud 9 off-Broadway won him Obie Awards, A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine and Nine brought him Tonys. In between, he gave Irish step dancing an athletic and homoerotic energy in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Despite his success as a director-choreographer, Tommy Tune still thought of himself as a performer first. For My One and Only, a reworking of the 1927 Gershwin musical Funny Face, he was happy to star with his friend Twiggy and co-choreograph with his frequent collaborator Thommie Walsh. But when the director was fired, Tune and Walsh were pressed into service as co-directors, meaning that Tune now wore three hats: as director, choreographer, and star actor. Tune turned My One and Only into a fleet, fast-moving entertainment built around a parade of prime Gershwin songs––an early example of the jukebox musical. Its bold staging used movement and lighting to drive the story forward against a series of bright geometric drops and flats that evoked the 1920s with stylish minimalism. 

Tune took styles and motifs of the past and remade them as fresh, exciting new performances. In the show’s penultimate number, Tune evoked first generation film musicals with their frenetic dance ensembles and screwball performers, as in this number from 1929’s Show of Shows. Tune joyously updated this style of dance for “Kickin’ the Clouds Away.”

In an evening full of stellar dances, perhaps the high point was a second act duet between Tune and Charles “Honi” Coles. Coles, who turned 72 just before My One and Only opened, was known for his legendary partnership with Cholly Atkins in the 1940s and 50s. Theirs was a “class act,” in which they appeared in elegant attire, performing a relaxed, graceful tap style that incorporated glides and turns, all danced in mirror-like precision. Their most famous number was a slow, deliberate tap routine to “Taking a Chance on Love.”

When Tune and Coles dance to the show’s title song, it is a number steeped in the earlier Coles and Atkins style, exhibiting an extraordinary economy of movement and sound. Tune later reflected on Coles’s influence on his own dancing, saying, “Honi was always saying, ‘More nonchalant, Tommy, more nonchalant. Besides the sounds that you’re making, it’s the spaces that count.’ It’s the way great painters leave things out,” Tune noted. 

After the long-running Grand Hotel, which won him more Tonys, Tune reconfirmed his status as the last of the superstar director-choreographers with his next musical, The Will Rogers Follies, the story of the beloved star of radio, vaudeville, and films, and one of the most popular headliners of the Ziegfeld Follies. For this look back at a bygone theatrical era, Tune’s staging drew upon a trove of forgotten show business antecedents, revisiting the showgirl lineups and dramatic tableaux of the Ziegfeld Follies with both authenticity and ironic detachment. 

Busby Berkeley’s cowgirl chorus, with its “hat-ography,” in the 1930 film, Whoopee, was an inspiration for Tune. Tune took Berkeley’s idea and streamlined and refined it for The Will Rogers Follies’ opening number.

The showstopping “Favorite Son” celebrated Rogers’s bipartisan appeal and offered up his formula for a fresh approach to politics. It was a dazzling expansion of a precision number performed by the Russell Markert Dancers in the 1930 film, King of Jazz. 

In Tune’s reincarnation, the pace is quickened to capture the rhythm of the lyrics. The routine, flawlessly performed, creates a delicious blur of whizzing colors and crisscrossing limbs. Without ever rising to its feet, “Favorite Son” became the dazzling dance highlight of The Will Rogers Follies. 

In the 1980s, Tune created a concert act for himself, harvesting American songbook standards for a song and dance presentation that he sometimes referred to as “contemporary nostalgia.” “Old plus old equals new,” Tune said. But there was nothing gauzy or dated about the performance. Tune performed the material with fresh exuberance and delight, as if it had just been created. 

The act proved remarkably flexible and durable, playing nightclubs and concert halls across the country and the world for more than thirty years. Tune’s enthusiasm for touring brought him a unique kind of celebrity. For many, he became the quintessential “Broadway Baby,” a man who summoned the spirit and continuity of the theater, even for those with little knowledge of the art form. Long after his contemporaries had stopped dancing, Tune continued to perform with precision and panache, as in this clip from the New York City Center Encores! 2015 production of Lady Be Good.

By the time Tune received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2015––his tenth, altogether––he had inspired a new generation of director-choreographers like Susan Stroman, Jerry Mitchell, and Casey Nicholaw. In musicals like The Producers, Kinky Boots, and The Book of Mormon, they absorbed Tune’s creative use of show business motifs and his ability to move forward by drawing on the past—“old plus old equals new”—and successfully adapted them to a new, faster-paced era. 

_{Feature image: Tommy Tune directing “Cloud 9” in 1982. Photo by Bernard Gotfryd, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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From La Source to Cold War cultural diplomacy, seven books on ballet [reading list]

From its origins in the Renaissance, ballet has evolved in various distinct ways, with different schools around the globe incorporating their own cultures. As a widespread and highly technical form of dance, ballet has been influential globally and forms the foundations of many other dance genres.

Explore some of our recent titles that look at the history (and future) of ballet, consider some of its influential figures, and the role it played in Cold War cultural diplomacy.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet edited by Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel and Jill Nunes Jensen

Compared to existing histories of ballet, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet prioritizes connections between ballet communities as it interweaves chapters by scholars, critics, choreographers, and working professional dancers. The book looks at the many ways ballet functions as a global practice in the 21st century, providing new perspectives on ballet’s past, present, and future.

Read The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet

Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work by Joellen A. Meglin

In Ruth Page, the Chicago ballerina emerges as a highly original choreographer who, in her art, sought the iconoclastic as she transgressed boundaries of genre, gender, race, class, and sexuality. Author Joellen A. Meglin shows how Page’s works were often controversial and sometimes censored even as she succeeded in roles usually reserved for men in the ballet world: choreographer, artistic director, and impresario.

Read Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work

One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet: La Source 1866-2014 by Felicia McCarren

One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet takes readers to four historic performances, over 150 years, showing how—through the sacrifice of a feminized Nature—the ballet La Source represented the biopolitics of sex and race, and the cosmopolitics of human and natural resources. This recent addition to the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series includes new archival research from the Paris Opera Ballet and offers perspectives from cultural history, biopolitics and gender performativity, as well as cosmopolitical eco-criticism.

Read One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet: La Source 1866-2014

Ballet Class: An American History by Melissa R. Klapper

Surveying the state of American ballet in a 1913 issue of McClure’s Magazine, author Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. One hundred years later, ballet is everywhere. Ballet Class explores the growth of ballet from an ancillary part of 19^th century musical theatre, opera, and vaudeville to the quintessential extracurricular activity it is today, pursued by countless children and an integral part of 20^th century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality.

Read Ballet Class: An American History

Catherine Littlefield: A Life in Dance by Sharon Skeel

While she is best remembered today as founder of the Philadelphia Ballet and the director and driving force behind the famous Littlefield School of Ballet, from which Balanchine drew the nucleus for his School of American Ballet, Catherine Littlefield (1905-51) and her oeuvre were in many ways emblematic of the full representation of dance throughout entertainments of the first half of the 20th century. From her early work as a teenager dancing for Florenz Ziegfeld to her later work in choreographing extravagant ice-skating shows, Littlefield was amongst the first choreographers to bring concert dance to broader venues, and her legacy lives on today in her enduring influence on generations of American ballet dancers.

Read Catherine Littlefield: A Life in Dance

Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange by Anne Searcy

In 1959, the Bolshoi Ballet arrived in New York for its first ever performances in the United States. The tour was part of the Soviet-American cultural exchange, arranged by the governments of the US and USSR as part of their Cold War strategies. The tours created space for genuine appreciation of foreign ballet but also led to a series of deep misunderstandings. Drawing on both Russian- and English-language archival sources, Ballet in the Cold War demonstrates that the separation between Soviet and American ballet lies less in how the ballets look and sound, and more in the ways that Soviet and American viewers were trained to see and hear. It suggests new ways to understand both Cold War cultural diplomacy and 20^th century ballet.

Read Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange

The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar: Interwar French Ballet and the German Occupation by Mark Franko

Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar (1905-86) is recognized both as the modernizer of French ballet in the twentieth century and as the keeper of the flame of the classical tradition upon which the glory of French ballet was founded. The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar is the first book not only to discuss the resistance to Lifar in the French press at the start of his much-mythologized career, but also the first to present substantial evidence of Lifar’s collaborationism and relate it to his artistic profile during the preceding decade.

Read The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar: Interwar French Ballet and the German Occupation

Feature image: Swan Lake Japanese Ballet Dancer by Gang Hao. Public domain via Unsplash.

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SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

In recognition of the essential role these disciplines play for societal recovery, we have curated a hub of SHAPE research which looks back on how we have rebuilt from social crises in the past, how societies process living through extraordinary times, and considers the next steps societies can take on the road to recovery.

Lessons from the past

Throughout history, individuals and societies have encountered periods of crisis caused by factors including war, natural disasters, and health pandemics. Responses to these crises can provide a vital insight into how we respond to future global threats.

In a review of how societies respond to peril, Robert Wuthnow suggests that, “nothing, it appears, evokes discussion of moral responsibility quite as clearly as the prospect of impending doom.” Wuthnow examines how societies have responded to four major threats: nuclear holocaust, weapons of mass destruction, concern about a global pandemic, and the threat of global climate change, and finds that, “the picture of humanity that emerges in this literature is one of can-do problem solvers. Doing something, almost anything, affirms our humanity.”

Looking further back, the US Civil War also had a profound impact on many people and touched women’s lives in contradictory ways. Hannah Rosen’s chapter “Women, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” examines the wartime and postwar experiences primarily of black and white but also Native American women and provides insights into how we can reconstruct a fairer society following conflicts. Meanwhile, in Total War: An Emotional History, Claire Langhamer examines the role emotions played in the immediate aftermath of WWII, approaching our relationship to feeling through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history.

How we choose to commemorate the past is also a key question, explored by Joshua Gamson in an article published in Social Problems about the US National AIDS Memorial Grove.

Looking back on the economic implications of social crises, Mark Bailey discusses how the plague acted as a catalyst for the vast transformation of trading routes in North Sea economies. This economic shift has been reflected in the COVID-19 pandemic and, in response, authors from the Journal of Consumer Research have created a conceptual framework for understanding how consumers and markets have collectively responded over the short term and long term to threats that disrupt our routines, lives, and even the fabric of society.

Literature, classics, and the arts also provide an avenue to explore the effects of social crises. Laura E. Tanner’s blog post explores the works of author Marilynne Robinson. According to Tanner, these works provide us with tools for coping during lockdown by exploring the familiar, whilst her characters also navigate the threat of mortality and how trauma disrupts the comforts of the everyday.

In her chapter “Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland”, Isabelle Torrance traces the evocation of Antigone in the context of the Northern Irish conflict. In this way, literature provides a mirror to explore and process contemporary social crises.

Music history also provides a window into past responses to social traumas. In her chapter “Embodying Sonic Resonance as/after Trauma – Vibration, Music, and Medicine”, Jillian C. Rogers shows that interwar French musicians understood music making as a therapeutic, vibrational, bodily practice which offered antidotes to the unpredictable and harmful vibrations of warfare.

Living through extraordinary times

As the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects have spread across the globe, nations and individuals have adapted rapidly to dramatic shifts in how we experience the world.

Recent history can provide a fascinating insight into how communities have lived through extraordinary times in the past. In Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative, the authors explore how the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic by examining the stories of individuals, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, historians have considered how we will write the histories of 2020. In “Documenting COVID-19”, Kathleen Franz and Catherine Gudis explore people’s keen awareness of the “historic” moment in which we are living, and the questions it poses for historians: how do we ethically document our current social, public health, and economic crises, and in doing so help to dismantle structural inequalities?

In her article “Slow History”, published in The American Historical Review, Mary Lindemann asks whether the pandemic provides an opportunity to evaluate the “doing” of history and to isolate what really matters in research, writing, and instruction. Arguing that we should learn to value a slow, painstaking approach to our work, Lindemann argues that “historians are, after all, long-distance runners not sprinters.”

Among the many frontline workers enduring the COVID-19 pandemic are social workers, who continued to support people through a period of unprecedented change. A 2020 article from Social Work—“Voices from the Frontlines: Social Workers Confront the COVID-19 Pandemic”—explores how these key workers operated in the US, how they were coping with their own risks, and how social work as a profession anticipated the needs of vulnerable communities during the early stages of the US health crises. The pandemic has also presented specific challenges for social workers interacting with children; a paper from Children & Schools delves into nine ethical concerns facing school social workers when they must rely on electronic communication platforms.

A philosophical approach allows us to explore human emotions and ethics during major world threats. In their chapter on “Emotional resilience”, Ann Cooper Albright explores resilience in the face of threats—from natural disasters to school bullies—finding that emotional resilience provides the opportunity for lasting transformation: “often in returning and remembering, we find that we no longer want what we had before.“

The road to recovery

Living through these extraordinary times, the COVID-19 pandemic poses some important questions for the future. How do we rebuild from the economic, social, and emotional traumas of the past?

Charlotte Lyn Bright’s Social Work Research article considers the vital role social workers play in supporting society and individuals by looking at the unique skills they employ in their work during difficult times. Meanwhile, in her paper on “Community development in higher education”, Lesley Wood explores how academics can ensure their community-based research makes a difference by discussing the socio-structural inequalities that influence community participation.

In piece for the OUPblog, Nicole Hassoun calls for universal, legally enforced human rights access to essential medicines and healthcare, arguing that, “protecting human rights can help us increase our Global Health Impact.”

The study of the past provides a vital tool to help societies rebuild in the future. In “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America”, Kevin Rozario examines the role of disaster writings and “narrative imagination” in helping Americans to conceive of disasters as instruments of progress, arguing that this perspective has contributed greatly to the nation’s resilience in the face of natural disasters.

In this blog piece “Listen now before we choose to forget”, oral historian Mark Cave describes how memory is pliable; our recollections are continually reshaped by our own changing experiences and the influence of collective interpretations. In 2020, Cave writes, the Black Lives Matter protests, divisive partisan politics, and anger over extended lockdowns were all influencing our memories of the pandemic. Cave further explores an oral history project conducted among New Orleans residents following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which “filled a deep need within our community to reflect and make sense of the experience of the storm and its aftermath.” Cave’s research will be vital for future historians considering how to study and understand the COVID-19 pandemic “at a time when history is clearly ‘in the making’.”

Literature continues to provide our society with a tool to understand and process trauma. In her blog post “Why literature must be part of the language of recovery from crisis”, Carmen Bugan explores trauma and social recovery in poetry, and its pertinence during the COVID-19 crises.

Pandemic life has underscored how digital technology can foster intimate connections. Research from Nathan Rambukkana discusses how this influx of digital connection has fostered a mode of interaction know as “distant sociality,” and asks whether this is here to stay following life under lockdown.

Looking much further to the future, Pasi Heikkurinen discusses the end of the human-dominated geological epoch and the potential technological advances needed to make a non-human dominated planet sustainable. Heikkurinen’s chapter provides sustainability scholars and policymakers with an opportunity “to deliberate not only on the proper kind of technology or the amount of technology needed, but also to consider technology as a way to relate to the world, others, and oneself.”

The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy is profound, and yet economists must grapple with how this impact will shape the future. In their chapter “The Interactional Foundations of Economic Forecasting”, Werner Reichmann explores how economic forecasters produce legitimate and credible predictions of the economic future, despite most of the economy being transmutable and indeterminate. Meanwhile, in “Why we can be cautiously optimistic for the future of the retail industry”, Alan Treadgold explores the new retail landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there is unprecedented uncertainty for retail outlets, Treadgold argues “there are substantial opportunities for reinvention also.”

Music also has the power to enact social healing and transformation following crises. In their chapter “Unchained Melody: The Rise of Orality and Therapeutic Singing”, June Boyce-Tillman explores therapeutic approaches to singing, finding that “singing has the ability to strengthen people physically and emotionally,” which brings “individuals and communities together in order to provide healing at the deepest level.”

SHAPE research

SHAPE research is an essential component of all societies and will be critical for rebuilding from the global COVID-19 crisis. In “Humanities of transformation: From crisis and critique towards the emerging integrative humanities”, Sverker Sörlin evaluates the efforts to enhance and incentivize the humanities in the among Nordic countries in the last quarter century, finding a far richer and more complex image of quality in the humanities following structural education reform in 1990.

Meanwhile, Jack Spaapen and Gunnar Sivertsen assess the societal impact of SHAPE subjects, arguing that the social sciences and humanities have an obligation to assist the main challenges faced by people and governments.

As governments, universities, and research institutions consider where and how they focus their efforts as the world tentatively begins to explore the idea of recovery, the range of research that we’ve gathered here demonstrates that, while science and technology must play a crucial role, a recovery without SHAPE will be no recovery at all.

Featured image by Ryoji Iwata via Unsplash

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Adapting Shakespeare: shattering stereotypes of Asian women onstage and onscreen

In 1930, English novelist Evelyn Waugh entertained the prospect of Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong playing Ophelia, Hamlet’s love interest: “I should like to see Miss Wong playing Shakespeare. Why not a Chinese Ophelia? It seems to me that Miss Wong has exactly those attributes which one most requires of Shakespearean heroines.” Waugh went on to say that “I cannot see her as Lady Macbeth, but she seems to me perfectly suited for the role of Juliet or to any of the heroines of the comedies” (The Daily Mail 24 May 1930).

There has always been some perceived affinity between the submissive Ophelia and East Asian women. Ophelia is a paradox in world literature. Even when she appears to depend on others for her thoughts like her Western counterpart, the Ophelias in Asian adaptations adopt some rhetorical strategies to make themselves heard, balancing between eloquence and silence, shattering the stereotypes about docile Asian women.

Gender roles in Shakespeare’s plays take on new meanings when they are embodied by Asian actors. For instance, inspired by feminist voices, several South Korean adaptations of Hamlet recast Ophelia as a shaman who serves as a medium to console the dead and guide the living. Because female shamans exist outside the Confucian social structure, they have greater agency. In some instances, a shamanistic Ophelia figure frames the entire play.

In some productions, Ophelia appears as a ghost. Jo Kwang-hwa’s play, Ophelia: Sister, Come to My Bed (1995), opens with Ophelia’s funeral. Ophelia is caught between the incestuous love of Laertes and the romantic love of Hamlet. Eventually, she is abandoned by both men: Laertes has no future with her, and Hamlet must carry out his revenge mission. Possessed by the dead king’s spirit, Ophelia conveys the story of his murder and urges Hamlet to avenge his death. When the ghost of Old Hamlet appears in the form of a large puppet operated by three monks, Ophelia moves in unison with the ghost and changes her voice to that of an old man. The effect is unsettling.

In other instances, Ophelia has more moral agency. In Feng Xiaogang’s martial arts film The Banquet (2006) Qing Nü, unlike Shakespeare’s Ophelia, is able to express her thoughts without going mad or resorting to singing as her only form of communication. Qing Nü is not drowned in the end, although she is still associated closely with water. Her songs allude to rivers and boating, and her intimate scenes with Hamlet often involve rain. An example of the water symbolism is a scene in a rainy courtyard where Qing Nü washes the prince’s hair as the prince looks up at the falling rain drops. As a symbol of innocence in a court of violence and intrigue, Qing Nü occupies the moral high ground. Significantly for a martial arts film, Qing Nü is the only character who is not versed in swordsmanship. Qing Nü publicly expresses her love for the prince. Her passions are uncensored and her reason is simple: she wants to accompany the prince so he will not be lonely. Unlike Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Qing Nü does not have to go mad or speak allusively to express herself.

Not all performances of Ophelia involve female empowerment. Some productions use her fate to highlight a history of oppression. Ophelia gives away some dolls in the Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa’s Hamlet (Barbican, London, May 2015). The production featured a gigantic, tiered hina-dolls display. Actors became human-sized dolls in the play-within-a-play scene. The set is inspired by the Japanese Girls’ Day or Dolls’ Day, a festival celebrating girls’ development and well wishes for their future. Since the dolls represent hope, Ophelia’s giving away dolls rather than flowers in her mad scene carried with it a grave tone, playing as a disruption to established rituals. Dolls adrift was a metaphor for Ophelia’s drowning and evoked the eleventh-century Genji-Monogatari. The floating-doll ritual is still performed by Kamigamo and Shimogamo Shrines in Kyoto. In some instances, the previous year’s dolls are brought to the shrines to be burned. Ophelia’s life-sized dolls drew attention to the artificiality of rituals and the performance.

Reflecting the idea that strength and empowerment can take many forms, these performances counter the racialized myths about Asian women that have led to the fetishization of Asian women as subservient and dainty objects. The fetish makes Asian women interchangeable. East Asian women are seen as erotic because they are perceived to be exotic in physique and manners. While her songs still occupy the center of attention, Ophelia does not tend to stand in for lost girlhood or female madness in East Asia. The strands of girl power and fragile girlhood coexist as Asian Ophelias lay claim to their moral agency by thinking and acting on their own behalf.

Feature image by Flybynight from Pixabay

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Listening as a way to manage stage fright

It is as important for music teachers to listen to what music students and performers say as to the music they play. The incident I am about to describe further opened my eyes and ears.

I always was interested in how to get help for my performance anxiety which, unfortunately, was not available when I was a music student at Juilliard. No one talked about it. It was too shameful to admit you were nervous, and typical advice was to practice more, believe in yourself, and/or don’t worry.

I taught piano for many years and performed professionally after my Juilliard graduation. I also struggled with stage fright since my first memory slip occurred at six years old. I loved performing but the emotional cost was steep. After a cancelled two piano performance with my husband due to a historic blizzard in Northern Michigan, and while sitting around reading magazines to pass time as roads were cleared, I found an article about a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who was conducting research in test anxiety. Upon returning home, I called him and asked if we could discuss musicians and stage fright. I assumed there were similarities and treatments for stage fright and test taking.

He was happy to meet with me and invited me to help in his lab that was conducting an experiment on test anxiety. After some training, I was assigned an anxious Subject who agreed to participate in the data collection. The protocol consisted of using progressive relaxation, cognitive copying (i.e., relabeling negative statements into positive self-talk), and biofeedback.

After linking biofeedback sensors to my Subject’s finger tips (warmer fingers would indicate lower anxiety), we began the full protocol. Her level of anxiety did not become lower over time although she agreeably complied with my instructions. When we reached the part where I had been instructed to use an image of relaxing on a beach, wind gently blowing, waves lapping, sun warmly shining to help her relax, I noted that the biofeedback indicator was rising rapidly. She was becoming increasingly anxious. This was neither the hypothesis predicted, nor did it feel comfortable for me to watch her anxiety climb toward a panic level. While knowing that altering the protocol would interfere with data collection, I made the decision to pause and talk with her. I did not follow instructions! Commenting on her high level of anxiety, I inquired about what was going on in her mind. She looked at me and forcefully told me, “I HATE beaches.”

If there was a defining moment that contributed to my return to a graduate program to broaden my interest in stage fright and to gain a psychological and psychoanalytic perspective, it was this one. More importantly, I realized vividly that I could not assume what a person needed or advise them what to think or what to do. It was more important to find out what the other person thought, to inquire, to ask questions, to hear what they liked and did not like, and to understand better their account of what in their past created anxiety that may be manifest in performance fears. In short, to LISTEN and to let the other person—or patient, student, test taker, doctor, executive, musician—talk. My professional role was to help that person feel understood and to use “theory” to address them as it applied to their experience of anxiety rather than a predetermined script. 

I present various styles and theories of psychological management for anxiety and do not take a stance on which one is right for each person. There is no “one size fits all”—there is no “beach.” Rather, I try to inform performers and their teachers (when I have the opportunity) about options with pros and cons evenly presented and discussed. I found for myself, after gaining experience, that my own personal and evolving clinical orientation felt more comfortable working in a style that promotes self-exploration, self-discovery, and increases self-esteem. I ask questions, inquire about details, invite clarifications, and gradually my patients and I create a new way of thinking about old debilitating problems. I am also aware that patients perform in treatment as outside it to try to be agreeable, as did my Subject, or to look smart, or not to reveal their perceived flaws. We examine this performance before our eyes and ears when together in session. It really helps!

I also ask myself questions about what is resonating in my mind with the awareness I do not want to suggest that what is “right” for me is “right” for another person. This listening “technique” helps me become a better and more empathetic helper. While realizing that teaching music is inherently more didactic than therapy, I maintain that listening to more than the music is an important tool for a teacher’s and performer’s mental toolbox. It is a skill that can be used appropriately in the teaching studio and taken on stage internally by performers.

Some of my performance anxious patients know of my musical background (everyone reads the web now). Some do not or avoid letting themselves know about me (which is something we talk about either way). I have had some people tell me that they want me to tell them what to do because I know what it is like to be anxious and perform. Others are afraid I will tell them what to do and not help them to figure out what is bothering them.

Music teachers teach a whole person who brings a lifetime of experiences and feelings—a unique life history—to lessons. Of course, music teachers give specific didactic instructions and should not try to be therapists. They, too, bring their personal histories to their studios, of which they also need to be aware. Sensitivity to what the students say and how the teacher responds influences both the relationship and the way this instruction is perceived, internalized by the student, and carried onto the stage. Music teachers (all teachers) can join their students in co-creating the best possible environment psychologically and pedagogically for learning and enhancing self-confidence. It is these attributes that can provide internal confidence that helps individuals better manage stage fright.

Feature image by Oscar Keys via Unsplash

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The mermaid in the fishbowl: the rise of optical illusions and magical effects

The nineteenth century saw the publication of several books explaining how magical effects and spectral appearances could be performed using the science of optics. It started in 1831, when Sir David Brewster (famed for his discovery of Brewster polarization and inventing the kaleidoscope) published Letters on Natural Magic. In this book, Brewster showed how to produce images of ghosts using partially silvered mirrors and by using a magic lantern to project images onto screens or onto clouds of vapor.

Brewster’s work inspired generations of stage magicians including Henry Dircks and John Henry Pepper, who eventually patented what came to be called the “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion. Pepper’s Ghost, impressive as it was, barely scratched the surface of what was possible using optical engineering. It’s a little surprising that more sophisticated optical tricks did not appear until the twentieth century, considering that the rules of imaging had been derived well over two hundred years earlier. But in 1909 something new and impressive burst forth in its fully formed glory. Antoine Francois Sallé, an engineer living in Paris, was granted a United States patent on a “Means for Producing Theatrical Effects” (US 922,722).

Sallé’s holographic invention

Sallé’s invention used the Newtonian rules of imaging, which hold both for lenses and for curved mirrors. Under the correct circumstances, one can create a “real” image (through which light rays pass, as opposed to a “virtual” image, which light rays do not pass through; if you place a screen where a real image is located, it will show up on the screen—a virtual image will not) that is the same size as the object, or magnified, or reduced, depending upon the relative positions of the lens or mirror, the object, and the focal length of the optic. The image will, however, be upside-down, but this can be corrected with an image inverter.

Using mirrors has advantages over using lenses to work this trick. There is no separation of colors as with a simple lens. In addition, a curved mirror can be used to cover a larger angular region, letting the image be viewed farther off-axis than can be seen with a lens, unless a very large and expensive lens is used. The result is that an image produced using a curved mirror can look much more convincingly real, and over a larger range of angles, than an image produced by a lens. With a subject that is brightly illuminated, the result was that a viewer on the other side of the apparatus saw a perfect reduced image of the subject. If the subject was a person, it could walk around and interact with things. Moreover, the image appeared to be three-dimensional, since each eye of the observer saw the image from a slightly different angle that provided a stereoscopic effect. The word wasn’t yet being used in this context, but a later generation would describe such images as holographic—perfect miniature 3D images of a moving person.

Sallé licensed his invention throughout Europe, and it was displayed in a number of places, including the Crystal Palace in London, the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne, Germany, and the 1914 Jubilee Exposition in Norway. It was also exhibited in a limited way in the United States at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City and at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, but the image’s bigger splash in the United States was yet to come.

Tanagra Theater reaches the United States

In 1922, the German Edward B. Schreyer bought the North American rights to Sallé’s patent, moved to the United States, and set up the Tanagra Theater Company at 229 West 42^nd Street, in the heart of New York’s Theater District.

Schreyer arranged for a Miniature Fashion Show at the 71^st regiment Armory, featuring miniaturized models wearing the latest clothes from the Bijou Dress company of Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile, the illusion was also on display at Coney Island, New York. A behind-the-scenes description (which wasn’t quite accurate) of how it worked was published in Huge Gernsbach’s popular technology magazine Science and Invention.

At about the same time, a production of Karel Čapek’s science fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was staged in Berlin and Vienna with sets designed by Frederick Keisler, who had seen the effect at the Werkbund Exhibition eight years earlier and incorporated it into the design for the show. Sallé’s effect, now called Tanagra Theater (because the miniature images resembled the tiny figurines that had been unearthed in Tanagra in Greece), had finally made the big time.

The wide use of the Tanagra Theater illusion for advertising and for displays in front of small groups of people is due to the technical limitations of the illusion. Although it provides a perfect miniature illusion, this can only be viewed over a small range of angles, which are limited by the size of the mirror. If you can’t see the mirror, then you can’t see the image.

Tanagra Theater is inherently made for small, close-packed audiences. You can have a situation where you limit the viewing time of your audience and keep moving them through so that everyone gets a view, paying for a necessarily time-limited seat. Or you can use it for advertising, luring viewers in with the promise of seeing something interesting, but which repeats the same things after a short period so that you get high turnover. Tanagra Theater was limited to short ads or to peep show experiences. Kiesler’s use of it in a stage show has to be seen as a stunt, since most of the audience would have been unable to see the miniature image at all.

Peep shows and nude exhibitions

Patents at the time only had a twenty-year lifespan. By 1928, Sallé’s original patent had expired and anyone was free to use the invention without having to pay royalties. Not surprisingly, the field opened up, with many people exploiting the liberated technology. Anthony “Tony” Sarg was already famous as a puppeteer, children’s book artist, and producer of unusual artworks. He is credited with reviving interest in puppets and marionettes. His huge inflatable sculptures were a hit at his Cape Cod studio, and he eventually filled them with helium, effectively creating the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Possibly because of his love of puppetry, he experimented with the Tanagra Theater. He installed a Tanagra Theater in the display window at Filene’s Department store in downtown Boston. Like Schreyer’s Tanagra Theater, it was used for miniature fashion shows.

Later he created The Car in the Clouds, an advertisement for the Ford Motor company that featured a miniature woman in a miniature latest-model Ford car that appeared to be flying over a landscape. There was a microphone hidden in the steering wheel that connected to speakers outside, so the woman could hear questions from viewers and reply. The Car in the Clouds showed up at the Ford pavilion at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, the 1937 Great Lakes Expo in Cleveland, and at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City (where there was a long-running automobile display).

Others discovered the extremely powerful draw of sex and started exhibiting miniature nude women using the Tanagra apparatus. In 1931, the 365 Club in San Francisco (later Bimbo’s 365 Club) began showing Dolphina, the mermaid at their bar. Dolphina didn’t have a fish tail, but she was naked. Being reduced to fantasy size and clearly untouchable probably helped keep the show from being shut down, but this was the golden age of burlesque and the Depression, and public mores had loosened somewhat—Sally Rand’s Bubble Dance and Fan Dance were the hit of the 1933 Exposition. Dolphina still appears at Bimbo’s today.

Naturally, there were imitators. Billy Rose’s Casino de Paree in New York featured its own nude mermaid. When that nightclub shut down after a very short life, other nightclubs in New York started featuring them. There appears to have been a Fishbowl Mermaid at the 1933 Exposition, as well. The 1937 Great Lakes Exposition featured a “Little French Nudist Colony” that lived up to its name, literally.

A traveling show called the “French Follies” or the “Parisian Spices” toured the United States. As an enticement, they featured a Mermaid in a Bowl in the theater lobby. This might not always have been a nude mermaid, but the one displayed in Washington, D.C. in 1935 apparently was. The Daughters of the American Revolution took offence and protested to the theater owners. They responded by putting a “strawberry colored” bathing suit on the mermaid.

The Fishbowl Mermaid

A Miniature Mermaid display, compact and transportable enough to be displayed in a theater lobby, sounds like something that wouldn’t work with the full Tanagra Theater. It might work with Bostock’s negative lens, but it’s likely that it was around this time a third major method of producing the illusion debuted. This is likely the same one that later ended up being used by traveling carnivals. It’s very simple and uses very inexpensive and easy-to-obtain components, rather than expensive and hard-to-fabricate curved mirrors or large lenses.

The fishbowl in which the mermaid appears is also the optical element responsible for the illusion (see diagram below). The bowl is filled with water. Better still, it is filled with clear mineral oil, which won’t let algae grow in it and won’t evaporate. This fluid-filled spherical bowl acts like a lens. It’s not a perfect lens, because it doesn’t have constant power across its face and has lots of chromatic aberration. But that’s okay, because it does make the mermaid appear to be truly underwater. The bowl sits atop a large rectangular box. There’s a large mirror behind the bowl, angled downward at 45 degrees, directing up light rays from inside the box.

Inside the box is a woman dressed as a mermaid, and maybe some undersea props. Her image is upside-down, but that’s not a big deal—she’s lying down and can lie with her feet in either direction, but appears to be upright. Her image is actually projected forward beyond the fishbowl, but most customers won’t notice—her image is a line with the fishbowl, so she appears to be in it. If you want to make the illusion perfect, put a second fishbowl in front of the first one, into which her image is projected (amazingly, this innovation isn’t documented until it showed up in a 1978 patent).

The proliferation of nude illusions bothered one entrepreneur who had worked at Billy Rose’ nightclub and had seen the nudes in 1933. Mike Todd felt that this use limited the potential audience. Children were the ideal targets for this technology, and he proposed using Santa Claus as the miniaturized subject (wasn’t he, according to Clement Clark Moore, “a right tiny old elf” with “eight tiny reindeer”? How else could he slip down chimneys?). This individual re-invented Bostock’s device, using war-surplus lenses bought for pennies on the dollar. Like the woman in The Car in the Clouds advert, he could speak to the audience using a telephone on a stand at his side. It was granted a patent and licensed to major department stores at Christmas in the big cities and made a small fortune for its creator. He was later to become a film producer and the driving force behind the Todd-AO widescreen process.

Interest in the illusion fell off after the second World War. The novelty was gone. The Girl in the Fishbowl still showed up at Bimbo’s and a few other nightclubs as an eccentricity. The Fishbowl Mermaid became a fixture of traveling carnivals and freak shows. Carnival operators could learn how to build one from the plans in “Brill’s Bible”, the mail-order guide for carnies.

Ultimately, the Tanagra Theater illusion suffered from its inability to play to a large enough audience to justify its expense. In many ways, Tanagra Theater resembles a much later optical effect—3D holographic movies. Such movies exist and are restricted to small sizes (being limited by the size of the holographic film) and small audience size, and limited range. Holographic movies, like Tanagra Theater, produce amazing 3D images, but they are expensive to make, have limited interest, and can only play to a small “house”. Both technologies, unable to pay their own way, have been reduced to the status of curiosities.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons

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Seven new books on musical theater: from Hamilton to Oklahoma! [reading list]

The musical is perhaps one of the easiest forms of theater to introduce new audiences to, and with theaters around the world anticipating opening their doors again in the coming weeks and months, the joy of the curtain lifting in a real-life setting can be shared once again.

Whether you’re new to the stage or eagerly counting down the days, explore some of our recent titles looking behind the scenes of musical theater.

1. Dueling Grounds: Revolution and Revelation in the Musical Hamilton edited by Mary Jo Lodge and Paul R. Laird

Hamilton opened on Broadway in 2015 and quickly became one of the hottest tickets the industry has ever seen. Dueling Grounds combines the work of theater scholars and practitioners, musicologists, and scholars in such fields as ethnomusicology, history, gender studies, and economics in a multi-faceted approach to the show’s varied uses of liminality, looking at its creation, casting philosophy, dance and movement, costuming, staging, direction, lyrics, music, marketing, and how aspects of race, gender, and class fit into the show and its production.

2. The Big Parade: Meredith Willson’s Musicals from The Music Man to 1491 by Dominic McHugh

In the 1950s, Meredith Willson’s The Music Man became the third longest running musical after My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music: a considerable achievement in a decade that saw the premieres of other popular works by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, not to mention Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls and Bernstein and Sondheim’s West Side Story. The Music Man remains a popular choice for productions, with a new revival starring Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman sure to be one of the highlights once Broadway reopens.

3. From Camelot to Spamalot: Musical Retellings of Arthurian Legend on Stage and Screen by Megan Woller

For centuries, Arthurian legend has captured imaginations throughout Europe and the Americas with its tales of Camelot, romance, and chivalry. The ever-shifting, age-old tale of King Arthur and his world is one which depends on retellings for its endurance in the cultural imagination. Using adaptation theory as a framework, From Camelot to Spamalot foregrounds the role of music in selected Arthurian adaptations, examining six stage and film musicals.

4. Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical by Tim Carter

First published in 2007, Oklahoma! tells the full story of the beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. In this revised and expanded second edition, Tim Carter draws further on recently released sources, including the Rouben Mamoulian Papers at the Library of Congress, with additional correspondence, contracts, and even new versions of the working script used—and annotated—throughout the show’s rehearsal process. Carter also focuses on the key players and concepts behind the musical, including the original play on which it was based (Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs) and the Theatre Guild’s Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner, who fatefully brought Rodgers and Hammerstein together for their first collaboration.

5. Sweet Mystery: The Musical Works of Rida Johnson Young by Ellen M. Peck

Rida Johnson Young (ca. 1869-1926) was one of the most prolific female playwrights of her time, as well as a lyricist and librettist in the musical theater. She wrote more than thirty full-length plays, operettas, and musical comedies, 500 songs, and four novels, including Naughty Marietta, Lady Luxury, The Red Petticoat, and When Love is Young. Sweet Mystery looks at her musical theater works with in-depth analyses of her librettos and lyrics, as well as her working relationships with other writers, performers, and producers, particularly Lee and J. J. Shubert.

6. A Wonderful Guy: Conversations with the Great Men of Musical Theater edited by Eddie Shapiro

In A Wonderful Guy, theatre journalist Eddie Shapiro sits down for intimate, career-encompassing conversations with 19 of Broadway’s most prolific and fascinating leading men. Full of detailed stories and reflections, his conversations with such luminaries as Joel Grey, Ben Vereen, Norm Lewis, Gavin Creel, Cheyenne Jackson, Jonathan Groff, and a host of others dig deep into each actor’s career.

7. Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater edited by Eddie Shapiro

The counterpart to A Wonderful Guy, Alan Cumming described Nothing Like a Dame, as “an encyclopedia of modern musical theatre via a series of tender meetings between a diehard fan and his idols.” Eddie Shapiro opens a jewellery box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway, including Elaine Stritch, Kristin Chenoweth, Patti LuPone, and Audra McDonald.

Feature image: Times Square, New York City by Florian Wehde. Public domain via Unsplash.

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On SHAPE: a Q&A with Lucy Noakes, Eyal Poleg, Laura Wright & Mary Kelly

OUP have recently announced our support for the newly created SHAPE initiative—Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy. To further understand the crucial role these subjects play in our everyday lives, we have put three questions to four British Academy SHAPE authors and editors—social and cultural historian Lucy Noakes, historian of objects and faith Eyal Poleg, historical sociolinguist Laura Wright, and Lecturer in Contemporary Art History Mary Kelly—on what SHAPE means to them, and to their research.

SHAPE subjects are well-named—they help us shape the world we live in and the future we’re building. What distinctive potential and skills do you think Arts and Humanities and Social Science disciplines bring to the lives of those learning them, as well as to society?

Lucy Noakes: I think that these disciplines, though they vary widely in approaches and methods used, all have one essential element in common: they help our students to learn how to be effective, engaged, and critical citizens. For example, the pernicious nature of “fake news” today, from the wilder extremes of QANON fantasists to the advice circulating on social media suggesting that people can protect themselves from COVID-19 by inhaling steam or drinking hot water with lemon juice, can be harmful to both individuals and to wider societies. SHAPE students learn to be active and participatory readers and listeners. A student researching an essay topic will ask: who is arguing this? Why? What is their evidence? Where was it published? They also learn how to develop arguments based on evidence, not opinion—crucial skills in today’s world.

Eyal Poleg: Critical thinking and the ability to reflect on events, past and present, are vital for our existence as a dynamic and pluralistic society. Our students learn how to analyse sources, be they written accounts, artwork, mundane objects, or buildings. These skills are invaluable in becoming active and engaged citizens within modern society, especially in the face of empty rhetoric and fake news. Their ability to clearly communicate complex ideas is likewise instrumental in shaping the world we live in. History does not simply repeat itself, but, by learning about past societies, we gain a better understanding of the nature of our own, and of possible future directions.

Laura Wright: I’m a word-historian so I’ll give a specific answer with regard to my discipline: looking at how people used language in the past holds a mirror up to who we are now. For example, names Alice, Emma, Joan, John, Katherine, Margery, Peter, Richard, Robert, Thomas, William entered English via the Anglo-Norman language and knocked out the Old English namestock of Beowulf, Cyneheard, Ealdraed, Frithuswith, Ohthere. So, if you are called Alice or John you signal to the world at large that your parents were members of the Anglo-Norman family. But they might not have known it or thought of it that way: Alice or John might have just sounded suitable for a baby—traditional, not too outlandish. Society and its traditions shape us and the choices we make and studying SHAPE subjects causes us to question those assumptions—and in the case of historians, track them back to their source.

Mary Kelly: Students and scholars of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences open important questions about, for example, human difference and why people maintain certain belief systems over others. Students are encouraged to analyse, to be critical, to be diplomatic, to challenge when required, and to think creatively when locating solutions. The Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences exist in the service of human development, always enhancing our quality of life.

For example, in 2016, University College Cork became the first Irish-based university to formally integrate modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa into its History of Art curricula. The teaching philosophy, which underpins the building of my courses, is to create an awareness among students about the current decentred world as well as our responsibility to equip students (potential future leaders) with robust cross-cultural competencies through innovative practices in teaching and learning. Our students are gaining valuable skills and insights which will galvanise them to engage with challenging conversations relating to human difference. Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences disciplines are actively enhancing human diplomacy.

As a SHAPE researcher, how are your concerns and needs different from your colleagues in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)?

Lucy Noakes: There is perhaps more in common between STEM and SHAPE subjects than we might first think. The key, and most important, similarity would be that we all work with evidence; it is just as important that a historian build their analysis based on the evidence available as an engineer or a biochemist, even though the outcomes might be very different. I would also argue that the overwhelming majority of academic research, across all subjects, is shaped by the historical context, concerns, needs, and values of the time and place in which we work. But perhaps the biggest difference is that in SHAPE we have more space for the development of arguments and perspectives—while 2 + 2 will always equal 4 in mathematics, historians’ analyses of a subject like the Second World War are endlessly varied and ever-changing. For me, this is a huge part of SHAPE’s appeal.

Eyal Poleg: STEM colleagues often pursue innovation, looking for ever more advance technologies, for ways of improving our quality of life and of understanding the natural world. SHAPE disciplines, on the other hand, tend to be more reflective, taking into account past accomplishments, and thinking more clearly about why and how should progress be made. This being said, I do not think of our work in opposition. Much of my recent research has been in collaboration with scientists, employing cutting-edge technologies in the analysis of historical objects. The two perspectives complement one another, with SHAPE defining the historical questions and STEM providing new means of answering them. At best, such collaboration contributes to both disciplines, unearthing hitherto unknown information about historical objects and learning about the past, on the one hand, while finding new uses for innovative technologies, on the other.

Laura Wright: What I need is historical text, and I suppose STEM researchers don’t—but in terms of research questions, we’re probably not very different. As a historical linguist I study creative literary texts as well as other kinds, but so do clinicians and scientists concerned with the brain, because people spend a lot of time talking about imaginary states—what might happen, what could happen, as well as what does happen. Whatever humans do ends up expressed in language, one way or another, and much of my source material consists of historic STEM text—people inventing things, in particular.  For example, the term pickled salmon was correlated with the London poor in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries as it was what they ate, sold from street barrows. Then the tin can was invented in 1813, pickled salmon was replaced, and the poor turned to tins, with the term tinned salmon having connotations of “working-class” for a century or so.

Mary Kelly: SHAPE and STEM address major societal challenges, however in very different ways. In addition, SHAPE researchers’ empirical and analytical needs, as well as divergent and convergent thinking processes, differ greatly to those applied in STEM.

In order for us to truly maximise the impact of STEM ideas and technologies, public and private sectors must engage with the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in order to understand how human groups and individuals are formed and how they behave, produce, evolve, and co-exist.

Right now, however, the most urgent need for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is the need for fair and adequate financial resources for SHAPE research and development. SHAPE research is undervalued by many in the public and private sectors: this is clearly evident from the limited funding and support which the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences receive from numerous funding bodies and in the education system.

SHAPE subjects are hugely diverse, but they do share a focus on understanding more about people and societies, and what it is to be human. How does your research go about investigating these concepts? How do you see your work contributing to and informing these broader discussions?

Lucy Noakes: My most recent work has been on death and grief in Second World War Britain, and on the insights that approaches to the past that are attuned to the emotional lives of those we study can bring to our understanding of what it might be like to live through and navigate crises and changes that feel out of our control. I have been struck again and again this year by how much our experiences of fear, loss, and changes to our day to day lives have shaped my students and my own understandings of the lives of those who experienced total war. I also have a new awareness of the changes that the crisis of war helped to bring about in Britain, particularly the creation of the Welfare State at the war’s end. If only we listen, history has a lot to teach us about not only how societies manage crises, but about how we can use these moments of rupture to rethink our priorities, and how we want to live.

Find out more about Lucy’s recently published title, Total War, edited alongside Claire Langhamer and Claudia Siebrecht.

Eyal Poleg: My earlier work has explored how people engaged with the Bible in the Middle Ages, demonstrating a reliance on mediated access, surprisingly similar to knowledge of people and events of the Bible among secular societies nowadays. More recently I have studied hundreds of manuscripts and early printed Bibles to trace continuity and change across three and a half centuries, reevaluating the impact of print and Reformation on English religion. This perspective enabled me to unearth the long and complex process of innovation and change. Some features familiar to us, such as chapter division, took centuries to implement, very gradually moving from the nascent universities, through nunneries and chapels, to be embraced by lay women and men. The parish Bible, an early modern innovation, was first met with confusion and uncertainty. Understanding the limits of innovation, and putting things we take for granted in new perspective, helps us better understand our own society, past, present and future.

Find out more about Eyal’s recently published title, A Material History of the Bible, England 1200-1553.

Laura Wright: Well I research things we tend to take for granted, and one of these is house-names.  Humans need shelter. Humans give things names. Numbering houses is modern—18th century—but house-names are old. The ubiquitous house-name “Sunnyside” started as a medieval Scottish legal term in dividing up farm land, and then became an 18th-century English house-name particularly used by Quakers—ceasing to be a legal term and becoming a cultural marker, insider-code for “a Quaker lives here.” Certain Quakers and Nonconformists became extremely rich and their Sunnysides were mansions, and American author Washington Irving, visiting Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford in the Borders borrowed the name of a nearby farm called Sunnyside and named his highly-influential New York mansion Sunnyside too. There’s more to the story, but who influences who linguistically shows how culture spreads, and all humans are shaped by their culture. It’s good to be aware of one’s prejudices.

Find out more about Laura’s recently published title, Sunnyside.

Mary Kelly: My current research project looks beyond the purely European canon of historical Orientalist art objects to explore contemporary artistic responses from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I argue that this approach will further contextualise art objects as being an important part of an ongoing, reciprocal socio-cultural dialogue between the global north and south. Specifically, I work in the space between 19th- and 20th-century European Orientalism and 21st-century responses to Orientalism from women artists located in various Middle Eastern and North African countries. Many historical and contemporary women artists from across the globe address the conflicting experiences of female identities and—through their art—they are “speaking back” to local, national and international marginalising views which present stereotypical ideas of oppressed or powerless women. I engage with Transnational Feminism in my work because it is rooted in the local and translocal experiences of women—after which women’s narratives cross “borders” in order to create meaningful conversations and collaborations internationally. My work evokes themes such as Orientalism, gender, female agency, female oppression, religion, heritage, diaspora, and difference all for the purpose of:

1. bringing art made by women to the fore.
2. the decolonisation of the History of Art.
3. using art to galvanise meaningful cross-cultural and transnational discourse about women in various societies.

Art builds progressive and positive bridges between different people.

Find out more about Mary’s recently published title, Under the Skin, edited alongside Ceren Özpınar.

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