In the shadow of Carmen: Otero, Guerrero, Tortajada, and pantomime on the cosmopolitan stage

Purpose: The main objectives of the study were to analyse the predominant motor imagery modality used by professional Spanish dancers and to compare Spanish dancers’ ability to perform mental motor imagery with that of non-dancers, and to analyse differences between male and female dancers. As a secondary aim, to compare the motor imagery ability between two styles of Spanish dance: classical Spanish dancers and Flamenco dancers.Methods: A total of 74 participants were classified into two groups: professional Spanish dancers (n = 37) and sedentary participants (n = 37). The professional Spanish dancer group was composed of two dance disciplines: flamenco dancers (n = 17), and classical dancers (n = 20).Results: Professional Spanish dancers used predominantly visual imagery modalities over kinesthetics to generate motor imagery, with a moderate effect size (p < .01, d = 0.68). Regarding the ability to generate motor imagery, significant intergroup differences between professional Spanish dancers and sedentary participants were observed in all variables, with a large effect size (p < .05, d > 0.80). Differences were obtained between men and women among non-dancers group (t = −3.34; p = .03; d = 0.5). No differences between Flamenco and classical dancers were observed.Conclusion: Visual motor imagery modality was easier than the kinaesthetic modality in the generation of motor imagery for professional Spanish dancers regardless of the dance style. Spanish dancers had a greater ability to perform motor imagery compared with non-dancer individuals, needing less time to perform these mental tasks. Men non-dancers had a greater ability to generate motor imagery than women. Reinforcing the training of kinaesthetic motor imagery might be useful for professional Spanish dancers.

Although nowadays barely remembered, the dancer and singer Consuelo Tamayo Hernández, “la Tortajada” (1867–1957), once was a Spanish performer of considerable talent. She was a diva skilled at self-fashioning who knew how to exploit her public image both on and off stage. Born in Santa Fe (Granada, Spain), Tortajada hardly ever performed in her country of birth. But although her presence on the Spanish stage was merely marginal, as a “Spanish dancer” she achieved celebrity status in the music halls of Europe and the United States. Tortajada perfectly exemplifies the mobility and cultural transfer that took place between the cosmopolitan stages at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. This article explores how Tortajada obtained international fame and success, not so much because of the authenticity of her performances—which were often contaminated by the music halls where she performed—but because of her ability to export a certain idea of Spanish “otherness” and “marginality” by staging a series of traditional movements and dances. It is by skillfully embodying a stereotype construction of “Spanishness” (elapsing it into an Oriental fantasy) and a certain type of femininity that the artist achieved international celebrity.

Zapateado is a repetitive percussive footwork in dance. This percussive movement, and the differences in technique, may be risk factors for injury. A survey on zapateado dance students found a rate of 1.5 injuries/1,000 exposures. Knee injuries are more frequent than in Spanish dancers than folkloric dancers. The aim of this research was to study the relationship between technique and ground reaction force between zapateado on Spanish and Mexican folkloric dancers. Ten female dance students (age 22.4 ± 4 yrs), six Spanish dancers and four Mexican folkloric dancers, were considered. Each student performed zapateado with a flat foot, wearing high-heeled shoes during 5 seconds on a force platform. Videotapes were taken on a lateral plane, and knee and hip angles in each movement phase were measured with Dartfish software. Additionally, knee and ankle flexor and extensor strength was measured with a dynamometer. Ground reaction forces were lower for Spanish dancers than Mexican folkloric dancers. Spanish dancers had less knee flexion when the foot contacted to the ground than did Mexican folkloric dancers. On Spanish dancers, the working leg had more motion in relation to hip and knee angles than was seen in folkloric dancers. The ankle extensors were stronger on folkloric dancers, and there were no differences for the other muscle groups. Knee flexion at foot contact and muscle strength imbalance could be risk factors for injuries. It is suggested that the technique in Spanish dance in Mexico be reviewed, although more studies are required to define more risk factors.

Marine flatworms (polyclads) employ a wide variety of body kinematics for swimming. In the current study, we employ computational fluid dynamics to study the hydrodynamics and swimming performance of a large variety of swimmers inspired directly from flatworms as well as two other marine invertebrates: Aplysia and Spanish dancers. The free-swimming performance is evaluated via two metrics: Froude efficiency and terminal swimming speed. The study examines the effect of the flapping of the lateral margins of the body as well as body undulation, which are used in various combinations by these animals to achieve swimming. The simulations suggest that a spanwise compact wake with distinct vortex ring structures is well correlated with a high swimming performance. We find that the addition of even a small magnitude of body undulation to lateral flapping results in significant changes in the wake patterns and noticeable improvements in the swimming performance compared to swimmers that employ only lateral flapping. Periodic body-bending synchronized with lateral flapping, as employed by the Spanish dancer, is found to be a very effective swimming gait. Some gaits that employ body undulations but no lateral flapping are found to generate high swimming speeds but with limited swimming efficiencies. Taken together, this study provides insights that could inform the design of swimming robots.

Reviewed by: Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment by Lee Jackson Peter Bailey (bio) Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, by Lee Jackson; pp. xii + 304. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019, $30.00. In this congenially informative study, Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, Lee Jackson tours the major sites, promoters, performers, and publics involved in the dramatic growth of Victorian entertainments. The music hall is the lynchpin account occupying the first third of the book; further chapters cover the commercialized dance scene, the pleasure garden, and the exhibition ground; concluding excursions to the seaside and football ground move beyond the book's main focus on London. The gin palace, a novel enhancement of the pub, foreshadows the music hall in the opulence of its amenities amid the cramped and dismal conditions of city life in the 1840s. Jackson captures the alluring ambience of its "gaslight and gilding," its efficient service and logistics likened by contemporaries to the new retail stores of the day (6). The same sources labeled gin palace proprietors as capitalists, a term and phenomenon Jackson seems to resist. Pubs were also the site of the traditional "free-and-easy," or local amateur entertainments that expanded into singing saloons to accommodate surging demand from the growing working-class population (33). Crucial for business were annual licenses for music and dancing and the sale of alcohol. These were contested by temperance and moral reform lobbies, who charged the halls with drunkenness and prostitution encouraged by licentious songs and performances. Jackson pays new attention to the magistracy in the ongoing struggle. The music hall, Jackson emphasizes, was "the century's greatest entertainment innovation" (33), and he re-examines the mythical figure of Charles Morton of the Canterbury Hall in suburban Lambeth as "Father of the Halls" (61). Morton's "ostentatious respectability" is credited with countering the music hall's dubious public image as the haunt of prostitutes and drunks, attracting working-class families, middle-class visitors and respectable females with more refined professional entertainment (58). Performers in a professionalizing work force played several halls across town a night in the "turns system," and the first national stars emerged (61). Competition from the new halls provoked fights over artistic trespass with the legitimate theater, as well as continuing charges of obscenity and a government enquiry in 1866. Jackson demonstrates how the halls' signature comic song exploited its sexualized double entendre to the delight of the crowd and exasperation of reformers. He also revisits notorious clashes between managements and [End Page 126] reformers, including the controversy over prostitution at the Empire in Leicester Square in 1894, which the young libertine Winston Churchill riotously joined. By then music halls were the prime site of a mass entertainment industry: they were purpose-built variety theaters, corporately financed and managed, truly palatial in size and appointments, and they attracted audiences in the thousands. Jackson stops short of any comparatively sustained study of the very institutions that contemporaries and historians branded as such whose "invention" is foregrounded in the book title. Jackson breaks new ground in examining the commercial dance scene, from genteel provincial assembly rooms to London's louche casinos and the notorious Argyll Rooms, to Blackpool's grand ballrooms for the working classes at the end of the century, though a mass dancing public was not realized until after the First World War. Pleasure gardens and their dancing platforms are followed by accounts of exhibition grounds of varying success that added entertainment to the more high-minded formula of London's Great Exhibition. Among the showmen entrepreneurs awarded heroic stature by Jackson, Imre Kiralfy is singled out for his White City, a vast exhibition site in 1890s suburban London, pronounced "the zenith, the ultimate in mass entertainment … amusement on an industrial scale, using industrial methods—from the tollgate to the mechanized rides" (247). Seaside towns became popular holiday sites as cheap and rapid transport by steamship and railway drew a new working-class public that was eager...

The Dada movement, which both anticipated and prepared the way for surrealism by a few years, saw the light of day in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland on February 2, 1916.1 The first program began, not surprisingly, with the Frenchman Alfred Jarry's irreverent, mocking farce Ubu Roi, a burlesque of Shakespeare's Macbeth written in the late 1880s as a puppet show, first staged in Paris in 1896, where it was the sensation of the season, and conceived very much to borrow the title of one of Mayakovsky's famous works as A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. The birth of Dada at the Voltaire in 1916 marked a summing up of the creative tendencies of the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century European cabaret and, at the same time, an end of the cabaret as a locus of artistic innovation. The great political, economic, and social changes which engulfed Europe from 1918 to the outbreak of World War II also had a profound effect on art and that includes the cabaret as well. To be sure, the cabaret did not disappear from the landscape of European entertainment far from it but after World War I it lost most of its earlier elitist character. It became predominantly commercial and, no longer an expression of the dynamism of the artistic community, it assumed the aspect of a combination music hall and intimate nightclub.2 Because of the conditions prevailing in Weimar Germany, the cabaret like other forms of art and entertainment and, in some ways, more so often functioned as a vehicle for trenchant-social and political satire. It is this image of the earlier twentieth-century European cabaret that enjoys the widest dissemination, an image enhanced greatly by the immensely popular film Cabaret.

July 1914:An Interview with Sean McMeekin Donald A. Yerxa As we noted in our April 2013 issue, with the approaching centenary of the outbreak of World War I we can anticipate an avalanche of books dealing with the conflict. In these pages we intend to put a spotlight on some of the best of these, such as Sean McMeekin's July 1914: Countdown to War (Basic Books, 2013). McMeekin teaches modern history at Koç University in Istanbul. He is the author of several books, including The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), winner of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Barbara Jelavich Prize and The Russian Origins of the First World War (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), winner of the World War One Historical Association's Tomlinson Prize. In July 1914 McMeekin examines the five pivotal weeks following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and concludes that the outbreak of war "was no accident of fate." Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed McMeekin in May 2013. Donald A. Yerxa: Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of what you are doing in July 1914? Sean McMeekin: On one level, what I am doing is very simple: I inform readers of what happened in 1914, day by day and even minute by minute, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28 to Britain's ultimatum to Germany on August 4, which turned a European conflict into a world war. Telling the story in this way also allows me to frame an argument about the outbreak of the First World War, which blends contingency and accident together with evidence of plotting by various statesmen. Above all, I aim to show that the war was not some kind of inevitable event, predetermined by structural factors such as the European alliance system, the arms race, or a deliberate plan cooked up in Berlin. The war did not have to happen. Yerxa: How would you situate your book historiographically? McMeekin: Since Fritz Fischer published his famous exposé of Germany's Aims in the First World War (Griff nach der Weltmacht) in 1961, the field has been dominated by discussion of Germany's role. While few historians still subscribe to the more extreme Fischerite thesis that the war was a premeditated "German bid for world power," the general consensus is still German-centric, with a kind of modified version, exemplified by Holger Herwig and David Fromkin, claiming that Germany willed a "preventive war" (Präventivkrieg) in 1914 not so much out of greed as out of her fear of the growth of Russian power, in a kind of panicky "leap into the dark." My last book, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) was in part a critique of the modified Fischer thesis, based on my interpretation of Russia's own war aims in 1914. And yet I never really meant for it to be a definitive "origins" book—in Russian Origins the July crisis merits only one chapter out of nine. (My original title for the book was "Russia's Aims in the First World War," an allusion to Fischer, whose book is not really about the war's outbreak as everyone seems to think it, but rather German aims in the conflict. Harvard University Press, reasoning that few readers today know who Fischer was, wanted a more "dynamic" title: hence Russian Origins.) Click for larger view View full resolution Winston Churchill with Kaiser Wilhelm, 1909. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-75524]. July 1914, unlike Russian Origins, is clearly intended as a full-on interpretation of the outbreak of the war. In the sense that I do not subscribe to the German "preventive war" thesis, some scholars may describe my book as revisionist. I think these labels are unhelpful. I do not exonerate German statesmen of their responsibility for the outbreak of the war, and certainly not for the violation of neutral Belgium in August 1914, which I judge severely. I do, however, emphasize...

BackgroundHamstrings have been analyzed extensively due to their tendency to shorten and their effect in the lumbo-pelvic dynamics and the sagittal position of the spine in trunk flexion with extended knees positions. It has been demonstrated that practicing a certain sport results in long-term changes in hamstring extensibility. Despite this, adequate extensibility of the hamstring musculature is essential for the dancer’s performance. Several studies have found differences in the extensibility of the hamstrings depending on the dance style, but none have compared ballet, Spanish dance and modern dance. The purpose of the present research was to analyze the differences in hamstring extensibility among professional dance students based on dance style practiced and non-dancers.MethodsThe sample was comprised of 210 students from the Professional Dance Conservatory (70 for ballet, 70 for Spanish dance and 70 for modern dance) and 70 non-dancers. For the assessment of hamstring extensibility, the angle in the passive and active straight leg raise (PSLR and ASLR, respectively) test, and the scores of the pelvic tilt in sit-and-reach (SR) test and the toe-touch (TT) test were randomly conducted.ResultsThe results showed significant differences for all the tests according to group (p < 0.001). In the PSLR and ASLR test, for both legs, and in the pelvic tilt in the SR test, the ballet dancers showed greater ranges of hamstring extensibility than the modern dancers and Spanish dancers (p ≤ 0.001). In the distance in the SR test and in the pelvic tilt in the TT test, the ballet dancers obtained higher values than the Spanish dancers (p = 0.004 and p = 0.003, respectively). The modern dancers showed higher ranges of hip flexion than the Spanish dancers in the ASLR test for both legs and in the pelvic tilt in the SR test (p from 0.007 to <0.001). Dancers showed significantly higher hamstring extensibility than non-dancers in all the tests (p < 0.001).ConclusionsThe systematic practice of dance, regardless of the style, seems to lead to high ranges of hamstring extensibility. Ballet dancers have the greatest hamstring extensibility.

If I utter the sentence: Hitler caused the outbreak of the second world war, some interested logician may translate my sentence into the words: Hitler necessitated the outbreak of the second world war, If that translation be made I do not accept it, unless the dragoman makes it clear to me that by the word “necessitate” he means nothing more than I mean by the word “cause.” In which case I can dispense with his services. But if he is embodying in his translation the thought that the outbreak of war followed from the existence of Hitler at a given moment of time, as the equality of the angles in a triangle follows from the equality of the sides (I assume that that follows), then I repudiate his translation, because I do not agree that a statement or proposition such as event x caused event y is a hypothetical proposition of the type if x then y. A fortiori it cannot be regarded by me as a reciprocal hypothetical proposition: if x then y if y then x; nor, to complete the possibilities, can I infer what I call the cause from the effect.

Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the American Midwest

"Eine Schreckliche Zeit ist eingebrochen"

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

Reviewed by: Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacles in the Belle Époque by Lela F. Kerley Sharon L. Fairchild Kerley, Lela F. Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacles in the Belle Époque. Louisiana State UP, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8071-6633-8. Pp. 278. This work demonstrates how a variety of conditions in French society between 1880 and the beginning of World War I allowed the phenomenon of female public nudity to emerge on the entertainment stages of Paris. While acknowledging prior scholarly research in politics, history, and social change, Kerley's premise is that the normalization of female nudity in public came out of the world of art as seen in artists' balls, eventually becoming prevalent in music halls. During the Belle Époque, a bohemian subculture of artists, journalists, and young progressives rejected the hypocrisy and materialism of bourgeois society and found itself in conflict with the state and civilian moral leagues. These leaders interpreted nude performances as morally degenerate and a threat to society, while those who embraced modernism and the liberal reforms of the Third Republic felt that such performances were a sign of social progress. Kerley's work reveals how the normalization of nude exposition emerged in Parisian bals publics, especially the artists' balls, the most famous being the Bal des Quatz'Arts of February 1893, staged by art students from the École des Beaux Arts. This scandalous event, during which several nude artists' models paraded along with the costumed students during the festivities, was an affront because of its bold display of nude women. The event resulted in a sensational trial and riots in the streets. According to Kerley, despite the trial and conviction of the ball's organizers and models, the event was a first indicator of a change in mores. The larger part of this study deals with the relatively new phenomenon of music halls and their use of nude spectacles. Although such acts existed previously in various settings such as in café concerts, tableaux vivants, and poses plastiques, Kerley's analysis shows how the music halls experimented with female performances and appealed to a broad spectrum of society, bringing together various types of entertainment such as music, cabaret, or circus acts. Kerley discusses the transformation of the nude artistic model, traditionally held to be a representation of eternal classic beauty, to a commercialized sexualized character of the music halls. In addition, new technologies of photography and printing contributed to the popularization of visual representations of the nude performer. The use of lighting and props made performances more sexually charged, while at the same time allowing music hall directors to claim that their shows were artistic creations. Despite the actions of moral leagues and legal challenges, by 1914, exposing nude or semi-nude female performers was commonplace in Parisian venues of entertainment. This text is enriched by passages that cover a broad spectrum of issues, such as personal [End Page 277] accounts of famous female performers, descriptions of various types of theaters and practices of performance, costumes, female sexuality and self-expression. The author has conducted extensive archival research, quoting transcripts of trials, police reports, magazine articles, and newspapers, as well as other scholarly studies. This book is illustrated throughout, with beautiful reproductions of photos of performers, posters, and other media. Sharon L. Fairchild Texas Christian University (TX) Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebis