Entertainment Scene Research Articles

Cabaret and decency: how contemporary definitions of cabaret are shaped by censorship

The abundant ‘cabaret’ events that populate London’s contemporary entertainment scene strategically adopt specific structures and aesthetics. Common points of reference include the Weimar Republic, Berlin clubs of the 1920’s, ‘salacious’ female nudity, ‘outrageous’ camp reveals and inevitable references to Bob Fosse’s ‘Cabaret’. The events often promise to provide a ‘high quality’ drinking and dining experience. In this way ‘nostalgia’ can be turned into financial success. This formulaic approach defines the contemporary understanding of cabaret, omitting vital aspects of the genre while turning it into a purely commercial commodity. My artistic practice as research interrogates the experimental nature of the cabaret of late nineteenth century Paris within a contemporary British context. Setting itself apart from the allure of ‘flesh and cash’ of the West End cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London, since 2016, focuses on exploring an updated experience of European cabaret within the abandoned British Music Hall and Variety tradition. The wider cultural discourse fails to report on the possibility of different approaches to cabaret. I will draw on particular examples from my practice – how a 60-something performer clad in Y-fronts, for example, was regarded by a certain audience as obscene – to explore the subtleties of contemporary censorship and what it says about our cultural landscape. The ‘body reveal’ – one of the commercial selling points of West End cabaret replica productions – becomes unacceptable in the different context of Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret. This article examines how censorship operates in relation to contemporary experimental cabaret, providing an alternative account of the contemporary development of traditional cabaret and suggesting that there are different angles from which to approach discussion of the genre.

Naked modernisation: the rise and fall of the erotic humour magazines in 1930s Turkey

This article discusses four erotic humour magazines – Piliç (Chick) (1930–1931), Bıldırcın (Quail) (1931), Çapkın Kız (The Flirtatious Girl) (1931) and Güvercin (Pigeon) (1931) – that appeared one after the other between 1930 and 1931 within the political, social and cultural atmosphere of the period in Turkey. It argues that the sudden emergence of these magazines was due to two important factors. The first factor is related to the rapidly reviving nightlife and entertainment scene in Istanbul from the 1920s onwards. The second factor is that the print media gave more space to sexual images of women to recover its sales figures, which suddenly dropped after the adoption of the Latin script in 1929. These magazines, published by well-known publishers in Istanbul and fuelled by the images in erotic magazines and postcards coming from abroad, promoted Western notions of beauty and fashion trends while glorifying monogamous relationships and sexual heteronormativity achieved through marriage along the lines of the modernist elites. This visual and textual erotica, which soon became the centre of controversy and was curbed by criminal sanctions, constitutes an important source to contribute to the literature on women's social position and sexual lives in early republican Turkey.

Korean K-Pop Band BTS and the Iranians: An Online Exploration

The meteoric ascent of the Korean music ensemble BTS has captured the attention of audiences worldwide with their distinctive fusion of pop, hip-hop, and R&B. Their ability to weave religious elements into their music has propelled their success far beyond mere musical band, breaking through cultural and linguistic confines. Their impact reshapes the music industry and presents an intriguing case of cultural exchange within the global entertainment scene. This data-mining study explores BTS’s remarkable ability to cultivate a vast fanbase in Iran. However, the findings indicate a waning influence in the region, as evidenced by a decrease in tweets about BTS from 39,237 to 23,697, and finally to 9,215 over three consecutive years leading up to 2024. Despite this decline, the core group of BTS enthusiasts in Iran, predominantly loyal teenage girls, continues to actively support the group.

An Analysis of the Impact of Malpractices on Social Media Platforms on Society: Examining the Role of Social Media Platforms Mitigating Misinformation, Cyberbullying, and Privacy Breaches

This paper will analyze the effect of misbehaviors via web-based entertainment stages on society, zeroing in on the job of these stages in moderating falsehood, cyberbullying, and security breaks. With the developing universality of web-based entertainment in present day culture, these misbehaviors have become progressively pervasive, and the results can be critical, going from mischief to people to more extensive cultural outcomes. Information investigation strategies will incorporate both expressive and inferential measurements, as well as satisfied examination and topical examination of subjective information. The outcomes will be orchestrated to give an exhaustive examination of the effect of web-based entertainment misbehaviors on society and the viability of virtual entertainment stages in relieving these issues. By and large, this exploration paper plans to give important experiences into the effect of acts of neglect via virtual entertainment stages on society, analyzing the job of these stages in alleviating falsehood, cyberbullying, and security breaks. By distinguishing powerful systems for resolving these issues, the review expects to illuminate strategy and practice, at last adding to the improvement of a more secure and more capable virtual entertainment scene.

Exploring the Impact of Virtual Anchor Features and Live Content on Viewers' Willingness to Pay for “Superchat” in Live Entertainment Scenarios

With the Internet, the Virtual anchor industry has flourished, gaining a wide fan base and creating eye-catching economic benefits. The new form of reward “Superchat”, which is born with the development of Virtual anchors, has not been studied yet. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influence of the features of Virtual anchors and live content on viewers' willingness to pay for Superchat in the live entertainment scene. The results showed that: (1) Virtual anchor features are significant, and viewers' willingness to pay for Superchat is strong, and different features will have different effects on willingness. (2) Viewers' perceived recognition and internalization mechanisms mediate the process from virtual anchor features to the willingness to pay for Superchat. Different features correspond to different mechanisms to influence the willingness to pay for Superchat. (3) The type of live content will have a moderating effect on the mechanism of viewers' perception. (4) In summary, in the hedonistic live broadcast, the attractiveness, technical capability and character property of the virtual anchor influence the willingness to pay for Superchat through the mediating effect of the recognition mechanism; in the utilitarian live broadcast, the professionalism of the virtual anchor influence the willingness to pay for Superchat through the mediating effect of the internalization mechanism.

THE PRINCIPLE OF OPENNESS TO THE AUTHORITY OF WAHANA MUSIK INDONESIA COLLECTIVE MANAGEMENT INSTITUTIONS (LMK) (WAMI) IN MANAGING THE ECONOMIC RIGHTS OF SONG AND/OR MUSIC CREATORS

On March 2022, the entertainment world, especially the music industry in Indonesia, was shocked by the release of musician Ahmad Dhani from the Collective Management Institute (LMK WAMI), where he has been taking shelter so far in managing royalties for his economic rights as a songwriter and musician. As we know that Ahmad Dhani is the frontman of the Dewa 19 music group and also oversees several famous musicians and artists in Indonesia, even his work in the music industry has gone international where he founded the band TRIAD with musicians from Australia. There is no doubt about Ahmad Dhani's achievements in the music industry. The works that he created with the band Dewa 19 or Ahmad Dhani himself have graced the entertainment scene and music lovers in Indonesia since the early 90s. His works, entitled Kangen, Cukup Siti Nurbaya, Elang, Pupus, Roman Picisan, Risalah Hati and many others are always included in the Top List songs of the best songs in Indonesia. Even his songs are timeless, where there are still many millennial generations who know and recreate Ahmad Dhani's songs

Crack and Complicity – Bai Xianyong's The Last Night of Madam Jin Text and Film Adapting the Feminist Paradigm of Existence in a Double

The group image of females in the entertainment world constructed by Bai Xianyong is an important part of the contemporary Chinese female literature. Characterized by gender manifestation, objectification and psychological reflection, it mainly studies the destiny of females in the entertainment scene world in the change of time and space. It makes multi-angle polishing on the distorted discourse of females under the pressure of materialism and females’ subjective understanding of self-identity. This not only brings the study of the image of females in the entertainment world, which is different from the traditional one in recent times, into a new feminist value category, but also provides a more three-dimensional space to explore the gender identity of this group under multiple perspectives. Apart from that, a more three-dimensional space is offered to explore the gender identity of this group in multiple perspectives. With the maturity of film adaptation, the female characters in the entertainment world, represented by “Madam Jin”, have both textual and cinematic critical perspectives, which jointly enrich the context of Oriental females’ studies and break the stereotyped, single impression of these females in mainstream culture. However, there are also inevitable cracks in the discourse.

Exploring Possible Legal Reforms in Creating An Enabling Environment For The Nigerian Entertainment Scene

Exploring Possible Legal Reforms in Creating An Enabling Environment For The Nigerian Entertainment Scene

Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts

Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts

The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History, by Pablo Palomino

<i>The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History</i>, by Pablo Palomino

Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

Reviewed by: Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone Robin C. Henry Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 212 pp. $45.00 (cloth). The examination of queer spaces in U.S. history has led to a greater understanding of the relationship between marginalized people and public space. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone’s Queering Kansas City Jazz expands this understanding, moving beyond the identification of queer space and people in the famous Missouri Midwest jazz city. Indeed, she argues that Kansas City jazz has a fluid and intersectional identity; it originated, she stresses, in brothels and working-class bars frequented by immigrants and Black people. She further argues that the relatively unknown nature of the connection between jazz and gender nonconformity can be traced to jazz histories that have systemically erased queerness and gender experimentation, including gender nonconforming dress and presentation, in jazz performances and spaces. The reclaiming of these voices, personalities, and spaces forms the heart of her project. Clifford-Napoleone’s book is divided into two parts. The first provides a history of Kansas City, focusing especially on the rise of the Pendergast family. That family not only ruled the city’s political scene, but also shaped the nightlife of saloons, clubs, and brothels in its West Bottom section. This is well-trod history, but Clifford-Napoleone shows the ways in which people of color, working-class people, and gender nonconforming people were always part of the city’s fabric. Kansas City, she explains, rested at the edge of the much-mythologized American frontier, whose diverse residents—reformers and temperance activists on the one hand and individuals who wanted to keep the city’s entertainment district as open to new acts and people as possible on the other—found space. Kansas Citians’ conflicting agendas, however, led city leaders and planners to make strategic choices that, over time, narrowed spaces for experimentation. This analysis in the section of her book lays the foundation for later chapters by emphasizing [End Page 169] that these happenings were choices, not inevitabilities. As the city developed, discordant messages caused conflict over whose city and whose jazz and entertainment scene it really was. At every turn, marginalized people, especially those who experimented with gender, lost their connection to and place within jazz. It is Clifford-Napoleone’s presentation of this conflict within the oft-told history of Kansas City that reminds readers that the city’s origin stories did not conform to a standard rhythm. Rather, they resembled the experiments in syncopated time that made the city’s music so famous. Clifford-Napoleone’s argument develops most fully and her major contribution is most clear in the second half of her book. She examines two tracks: first, the historical record and, second, how that record was created. In her analysis, the historical record continues to show more evidence of queerness in the jazz scene than previous historians of jazz and of Kansas City have identified. It is here that Clifford-Napoleone’s work truly moves into new spaces. For her, queerness is not limited to same-sex acts or homosexual identifications. Instead, she opens up queerness to also encompass race and class identities that lie beyond White middle-class norms, as well as to include nonconforming professions, such as prostitution. The result is a portrait of Kansas City’s jazz scene that is truly intersectional and much queerer than previously known. In Clifford-Napoleone’s study, that scene becomes a space where understandings of gender experimentation, class, and race cannot be separated from one another or removed from the whole. Throughout the book’s second section, Clifford-Napoleone points out that much of this intersectional, queer space is not only neglected in standard jazz and Kansas City histories but also missing in jazz archives. She argues that the process of collecting some types of archival material but not others has effectively erased the existence of queer performers and places. The former include Mr. Half and Half; the latter include Dante’s Inferno and the Paradise Club. Possibly worse, Clifford...

"Where are the Botocudos?" Anthropological displays and the entanglements of staring, 1882-1883.

This article proposes an entangled perspective on nineteenth-century anthropological exhibitions. Whereas the existing scholarship mostly focuses on the receiving end of such displays or the agency of indigenous performers, this article argues for more stopovers and contextualization to grasp both the ambiguous position of non-metropolitan exhibitors like Brazil and the semantic transformations of traveling exhibits. In 1882, a group of Botocudo Amerindians was first taken to Rio de Janeiro and later put on display in Britain. Their presence in Rio sparked great interest, with lasting effects on the popular entertainment scene. Yet staring at them became a contested issue once they were taken to Europe, since Brazilians were concerned about becoming an object of Europe's exoticizing voyeurism.

Recovering Miss Rose: Acting as a Girl on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

This is a portrait of five-year-old Miss Rose, who shone brightly albeit briefly on the London stage in the years 1769–70 before fading away into the gloom of historical obscurity (Fig. 1). She stands here as Tom Thumb, the eponymous diminutive hero of Henry Fielding's farce. With impressively plumed helm, her beautiful black eyes fierce, chin set in a determined tilt, padded right leg stretched out aggressively, and her somewhat chubby hand gripping the hilt of her sword, Miss Rose looks ready to engage some unseen enemy just outside the picture frame. Impressive as she looks, however, there is something poignant about this little girl's confidently heroic stance in the context of her prematurely terminated theatrical career. Miss Rose appears on the Haymarket stage in the summer of 1769, garners much praise and a small degree of celebrity, and then disappears from the theatre by 1771. Her departure is shrouded in nebulous but persistent accusations by her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti, that she was being blackballed by the powerful theatre managers David Garrick and Samuel Foote, who for some reason refused to employ her despite her talent. After lingering a few years on the offstage London entertainment scene of concerts and variety shows, she drops out of historical view altogether before she is nine years old.

Mapping ‘the whirligig of amusements’ in colonial Southeast Asia

This article assesses the interconnected nature of Southeast Asia around 1900, the transnational entertainment scene in Southeast Asia, and the role of Singapore as a hub for commerce, shipping, and entertainment. The global and regional development of transportation and communications technology and networks facilitated the movement of people, goods, ideas, and amusement forms. The article is based primarily on archival research from colonial newspapers in the region. It surveys and maps more than one hundred itinerant entertainment companies that travelled throughout Southeast Asia around the turn of the century, thereby creating and visualising a circuit of entertainment.

Performing Ghana: the politics of being a black woman on the stage, 1966–1979

ABSTRACTThis article examines the politics of belonging for women in Ghana’s entertainment scene. As a result of instability while a series of different military and civilian leaders controlled the country between 1966 and 1979, Ghanaian women were scrutinized in local newspapers for actions that were deemed inappropriate, such as provocative dancing. Yet, these same Ghanaian journalists contradicted their own language and respectability ideals by celebrating the sexualized images and performances of Caribbean and African American women visiting Ghana during this period. By distinguishing between the actions of Ghanaian women and women of African descent, their language demonstrates that journalists prioritized national identity politics over the claims of respectability expected of all women in their country. Through the use of what I describe as ‘Ghanaianness’, a term indicating that ‘authenticity politics’ were at stake, I argue that journalists purposefully excluded diasporic women from Ghanaian belonging.

Sydney's Lockout Laws: Cutting Crime or Civil Liberties?

The catalyst for the Institute of Criminology's Forum on 'Sydney's Lockout Laws: Cutting Crime or Civil Liberties?' was a rising tide of concern that measures introduced by the New South Wales ('NSW') Government in 2014, primarily designed to reduce alcohol-related violence, may have misjudged the balance required to simultaneously deliver on two community expectations: that residents and visitors in places likes Kings Cross and the Sydney CBD should have access to a dynamic entertainment scene supported by a healthy night-time economy and that those same residents and visitors should be, and feel, safe from violence. Language: en

Moving pictures across colonial boundaries: the multiple nationalities of the American Biograph in Southeast Asia

This article assesses the transnational exhibition, distribution, and marketing of films in Southeast Asia, primarily the Netherlands Indies and British Malaya, around the turn of the last century, by using the American Biograph as a case study. We have found various ‘American Biographs’ in the region – some directly linked to the American parent company, which was one of the world’s leading companies in early film distribution and projection, and others apparently using the Biograph as a branding tool. This article is divided into three sections, each devoted to an itinerant American Biograph company we have chosen to highlight: their Indian subsidiary, and their subsidiary from the Netherlands, the Java Biorama. By considering their film programming choices and ticket price categories, we map and discuss how early film pioneers, with their cinematographic devices and films, moved between colonial borders, as well as how they were received by their audiences and the local press in Southeast Asia. Their exhibitions created spaces where people from different ethnic backgrounds within the colonial societies could come together as film spectators, yet were segregated within that cinematic space through price levels and racial politics. Finally, the article reflects on the impact of the American Biograph companies on the film exhibition circuit in Southeast Asia, signalling that moving pictures were to become a permanent fixture on the popular entertainment scene.

Jim Copp's playhouse

Jim Copp wrote, performed, and produced a series of children's phonograph records during the 1950s and 1960s. These records are stunning achievements in magnetic tape-era sound art, and were released and distributed by Playhouse Records, an independent record label operated by Copp and his business partner Ed Brown. The history of Playhouse Records adds to our knowledge of postwar sound art and independent media production, and reveals the potential for children's media to serve as an outlet for artists working on the fringes of the mainstream entertainment scene. In this essay, I situate Playhouse within the context of the postwar record industry, and listen to Copp's recordings with an ear to the intersection of sound studies, queer theory, and children's media culture.

Cocaine users and self-regulation mechanisms

Purpose – The prevalence of cocaine use has been increasing since the mid-1990s in many European countries, Italy included. There is a large variety of patterns of cocaine use in natural settings, but on the whole, the existence of different patterns of cocaine use remains widely unknown to drug professionals, as well as to public opinion. The purpose of this paper is to investigate patterns and trajectories of use, the meaning of use within the context of users’ life styles, the perception of controlled/uncontrolled use, personal strategies to keep drug use “under control”. Design/methodology/approach – This paper illustrates findings from a qualitative study among 115 cocaine users. Participants were recruited using the snow ball sampling (a minimum lifetime experience of 20 instances of cocaine use was required). Findings – The findings confirm the variability of cocaine use trajectories and the prevalent tendency towards more moderate patterns of use. Such variability is in patent contrast to the disease model of addiction and its assumed predetermined linear trajectories. Set, and particularly setting and all the environmental factors, such as life events, appear to be the variables that can better explain the dynamic course of patterns of use. Research limitations/implications – The main limit concerns the non-randomisation in the selection of the nominees. Participants were recruited in the night entertainment scene of the main Tuscan cities through personal contacts of staff from risk reduction facilities: in spite of the personal and confidential approach, the number of “non institutionalized” users willing to collaborate was too low, therefore the authors decided to omit the randomisation. Social implications – The findings bear social implications as they can contribute to a change in the social representation of users so as to reduce the stigma. They can also prompt innovation in the operational models of drug services. Originality/value – It is the first qualitative research from the “control” perspective ever led in Italy.

The Evolution of a Masterplan: Brisbane's South Bank, 1991–2012

South Bank is now a well-established part of Brisbane's lifestyle and entertainment scene. From the preparation of Expo 88 as part of Australia's bicentennial celebrations to the redevelopment of the site post-Expo, South Bank has been intensely masterplanned. This qualitative research is a longitudinal study of the evolution of the South Bank masterplan described by tracking the masterplanning responses to crises. The evolution of South Bank masterplanning is related through its leaders who participated in a semi-structured telephone interview. The interviews and archival masterplans chronologically illustrated the responses to crises and effects of masterplanning for certainty and uncertainty.