This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries.
Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries – autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our ‘performance’ as participants in the public realm.
Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect.
Author(s): Maggie B. Gale
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 256
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
1. Performance cultures and the expansion, operation and circulation of the performance industries
Art or entertainment/art versus commerce: extant and new
performance histories
Organize the theatre! The ownership of ‘good taste’ and noncompliant
audiences
Entrepreneurial impresarios: Revue and Variety – new forms
shaping the performance industries
Theatre versus cinema: the new culture of moving pictures
The other ‘texts’ of performance as modes of circulation
and consumption
Notes
2. Legislating citizenship: regulating publics, regulating performance
Regulating and legislating performance: censorship and the ‘sketch
question’
Regulating the performance industries: State interventions
Self-regulation and professionalization: belonging, giving and
educating
Theatres and their publics: charitable activity for the profession
Education and citizenship: professionalizing performance and training
Self-help education and ‘how-to act’: professionalizing the amateur
Locating citizenship: London as a dramatic place of citizenship
Notes
3. Strangers and cultural transgressors on stage and screen: representing the outsider, the foreigner and the poor
Somewhere ‘over there’ on home stages: strangers in our midst
Making the stranger familiar: from The Children of the Ghetto to
Chaplin’s The Immigrant
The poor as the strangers living amongst us: performances of
poverty
The transgressive other and Sinophobia: The Yellow Peril and Mr Wu
Notes
4. Performing espionage: surveillance, the uncanny and theatrical spies
Surveillance, secrets and the uncanny: Simmel, Jentsch and Freud
Surveillance legislation, the performative and how to spy
Performance professionals as spies
The performance of espionage: masculinity and the spy play
Not quite Mata Hari: femininity and spy plays
The enemy within: women performing the spy to catch a spy
Class and the villainess
Notes
5. Performing conflict: beyond the First World War
The home disrupted: invasion, war and domestic life
Performance industries shaped by the First World War
Celebrity reminiscences of war
Philanthropic investments: women’s wartime charity labour
Conflict and the psychology of ‘home’
Confict, capitalism, class and labour
Notes
6. Corporeality and the body in performance: agency and degeneration
Photography and the changing cultural status of the performing female body
What a woman might do with her body: ‘natural’ dance
Agency and performing the suffrage body
‘Marriage as a trade’: who owns women’s bodies
Degenerative bodies
Locations for the degenerate body: clubland
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
