Itinerant Troupe Research Articles

Companhias de Arlequins: o resgate de uma tradição popular esquecida nas feiras de Lisboa

ABSTRACT In Lisbon, the fairs and their amusements were one of the most popular manifestations of popular culture during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Among the entertainment on offer, theater was one of the most appreciated, but history has only kept the memory of the shacks that, in the fairs, began to feature a recited repertoire (comedies, parodies, magic and revues). The tents of harlequins and saltimbancos, itinerant troupes that went from place-toplace performing acrobatics, pantomimes, and comic sketches, were forgotten. This article aims to highlight popular theater practices that were once ‘forgotten’, such as the troupes of harlequins and their shows, redefining their importance in the context of the time and the history of theater in Portugal.

Zwischenfälle im Reichsland: Überschreiten, Polizieren, Nationalisieren der deutsch-französischen Grenze (1887–1914)

The imperial government’s establishment of a border police station in Altmünsterol (Montreux-Vieux), Alsace, on 1 April 1888, marked a milestone in the history of German policing, official and public understandings of national boundaries, and Franco-German relations. The emergence of the border between France and Germany as a material, visible and experienceable phenomenon from 1887 to 1914 is the subject of Sarah Frenking’s monograph, Zwischenfälle im Reichsland. The Reichsland encompassed the territory of Alsace and Lorraine annexed by Germany following the Franco-Prussian War. Unlike other German states, the emperor directly ruled the region. As Frenking adroitly shows through the case of border security, the region’s unique administration and geographic position encouraged its use as a laboratory for programmes later adopted in other parts of the Kaiserreich. Drawing from border- and nation-building studies, Henri Lefebvre’s work, and extensive archival sources, she demonstrates that physical borders and their perception are the product of a complex interplay of actors, discourses, routines, symbolisms, experiences and material objects. The Franco-German border never existed in an ‘open’ or ‘closed’ dichotomy. Instead, its permeability depended on the border crosser’s official classification. Locals and well-documented travellers might experience the national frontier as a minor annoyance or event to mention in a postcard back home, but it was a potentially insurmountable obstacle to ‘undesirable’ individuals, such as suspected spies, foreign soldiers and the itinerant troupes that border authorities referred to collectively as Zigeunerbanden (bands of gypsies). As a result, there was no universal passage experience nor a single form of agency. By focusing her analysis on the Altmünsterol border police station, Frenking aims to illuminate the multifaceted, evolving, transnational and non-linear process through which borders are made, territory is nationalized, public perception is shaped, and the resultant experiences engendered on the ground (pp. 11, 29, 32, 34, 394).

Prince(ss) Charming of the Japanese Popular Theatre

Prince(ss) Charming of the Japanese Popular Theatre

A Dive and a Dance with Kabuki Vaudeville: Taishū Engeki Comes Back!

Taishū engeki occupies a niche in Japanese popular theatre between the all-male troupes of state-subsidized Kabuki and the highly commercial, all-female troupes of the Takarazuka Revue. Its origins are disputed: while some scholars trace it back to the thirteenth century, others say it is mostly a post-war phenomenon. Family-based, itinerant troupes comprising both sexes book theatres for a month at a time. They live in the theatre, sleeping onstage or in the house. They perform twice daily for largely working-class audiences. Tickets are cheap, but troupes supplement their box office with merchandise sales and with generous tips which patrons deliver in mid-performance. The form draws heavily on onnagata performance in Kabuki, less heavily on the otokoyaku (women in men’s roles) of the Takarazuka Revue. In taishū engeki, however, actors of both sexes often cross-dress with star performers appearing en homme and en femme in quick succession. Like vaudeville, whose demise was repeatedly announced in the early decades of the last century, taishū engeki has often been pronounced dead. Yet despite its notorious geriatric core audience, there are signs that taishū engeki is coming back. Robert Schneider is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois. He is also a playwright and translator whose articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, American Theatre, and Plays International & Europe. Nathan Schneider is a writer and translator who lives in Tokyo.

Komiske og historiske pantomimer rundt 1800

Between 1750 and 1850, several itinerant troupes visited Norway. The theatrical plays they presented belonged to popular entertainment genres. In this article I examine the pantomimes these troupes performed in Norway: comical and historical pantomime. The aim of this examination is to provide a broader understanding of the two kinds of pantomimes presented by itinerant troupes in Norway around 1800. I end the article by looking at historiographical reasons as to why these performances have been more or less excluded from written, Norwegian theatre histories.

Ester Rokhl Kaminska and the legitimization of Yiddish theatre

ABSTRACTEster Rokhl Kaminska (1870–1925) was the star of the Warsaw Yiddish theatre scene. She began her acting career in the early 1890s, performing shund (cheap) operettas in small, itinerant troupes. In 1905 she established a theatre in Warsaw with her husband, in which she served as leading actress and manager, until her death. She belonged to the first generation of Yiddish theatre artists who introduced the medium of theatre into Eastern European Jewish society and facilitated its legitimization. After her death, colleagues and critics designated her as “the mother of Yiddish theatre.” In this article, I investigate the motherly image of E. R. Kaminska. I argue that this image was not merely a matter of nostalgic yearning for a beloved actress in the golden age of Yiddish theatre. It was Kaminska herself who, while playing a variety of mothers’ roles in the course of her career, formulated her own multilayered, motherly, public image. Her mothers’ roles, to my mind, had a wide-reaching effect not only on Kaminska’s acting career, but also on the canonization of Yiddish theatre altogether, as they turned the theatre – the very medium in which they were created – into an acceptable art form, suitable for a respectable bourgeois Jewish audience.

The Rise of Cantonese Opera by Wing Chung Ng

Reviewed by: The Rise of Cantonese Opera by Wing Chung Ng Zheng Guohe THE RISE OF CANTONESE OPERA. By Wing Chung Ng. Urbana: Univer-sity of Illinois Press, 2015. xv + 266 pp. Cloth, $60. Wing Chung Ng’s The Rise of Cantonese Opera is a study of the history of Cantonese opera, one of the 360 regional operas in China popular in Guangdong and among Cantonese-speaking immigrants overseas. It reconstructs that history from its beginning to the outbreak of the Pacific War. The book consists of eight chapters divided into three parts examining that period from three different perspectives. Part 1 deals with the title theme, the formation and rise of Cantonese opera in South China. The origin of popular theatre in Guangdong is traced back to the mid-Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Readers are told that the earliest artists performing in Guangdong came from elsewhere with different performance systems, including yiyang musical drama from Jiangxi; the bangzi clapper style from Shanxi, Shenxi, and Hebei; and kunqu from the Lower Yangzi. By the mid-sixteenth century, Guangdong natives started to join the rank of performers, learning particularly from yiyang and the bangzi styles while incorporating local tunes and dialects to better entertain the local people. Opera troupes from other provinces, called waijiang ban, ascended to dominance in Guangdong in the eighteenth century due to the patronage of government officials and literati, all from northern provinces and favoring drama of their home regions. As a result, local troupes, called bendi ban, were pushed out of Guangzhou to perform in the countryside. Local opera suffered disastrous setbacks in the mid-nineteenth century when it was ruthlessly cracked down on for its involvement in the Taiping Rebellion. The last half century of the Qing period, however, witnessed a sweeping revival of the local theatre, which laid the foundation for Cantonese opera as a distinct genre with a strong flavor of the pihuang style from Anhui and a solidifying system of role types. Two institutional landmarks played an important role in the process: the red boats that transported itinerant troupes to rural markets and temples across the Pearl River Delta, and the founding of guild organizations of Jiqing Gongsuo and the Bahe Huiguan. After the turn of the century, Cantonese opera became urbanized in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, a process driven by merchant capital. The enclosed urban theatres led to not only the use of local dialects for better audience comprehension, but the birth of xiban gongsi, whose merchant capital controlled opera productions as business. Chaos in the countryside in the early Republic era forced actors to congregate in urban areas, but only a small number of troupes managed to perform in cities regularly, the Sheng Gang troupes that defined Cantonese opera in the modern era. The constant demand of city theatregoers for novelty raised the status of scriptwriters and creators of new plays, and made actors’ individual distinctions the biggest selling point, giving birth to superstars such as Qianli Ju, Bai Jurong, Chen Feinong, Xue Juexian, and Ma Shizeng. From the mid-1920s, Cantonese opera underwent a series of crises. It suffered a lull in activities in 1925 and 1926 during the sixteen-month strike in Hong Kong. Although there was a dramatic recovery in 1926–1928, the [End Page 510] subsequent theatrical downturn was stunning thanks to the Great Depression and the retraction of merchant capital. The downturn continued, in part due to the competition from the emerging motion pictures, until it hit a nadir in 1932–1934 when natural disasters and political and social disorder closed the rural markets as well. Three positive developments kept Cantonese opera afloat through this difficult period: the growth of entertainment publications; the star power of Xue Juexian and Ma Shizeng, whose virtuosity and flair fascinated audiences more than others in the period before Pacific War; and the reform measure by the guild to eliminate minimum troupe size, which allowed Cantonese opera to regain its footing in the latter half of the 1930s. The rise of Cantonese opera took place in the context of upheavals in China accompanying the fall of the Qing dynasty and the subsequent nation building and modernization in the Republic era...

SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture by Nathan Hesselink (review)

SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture. By Nathan Hesselink. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: Uni ver - sity of Chicago Press, 2012. [xiv, 201 p. ISBN 9780226330969 (hardcover), $75; ISBN 9780226330976 (paperback), $25.50.] CD, music examples, illustrations, figures, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index-glossary.Since its first performance in 1978 at the Space Theater (Konggan Sarang), the percussion quartet SamulNori has created a sensation among both professional and amateur traditional music performers in Korea and abroad. As SamulNori became overwhelmingly popular and famous, the genre samulnori emerged into the wider Korean culture. Named after the number of musical instruments employed, the SamulNori quartet plays four percussion instruments, the changgo (two-sided hourglass drum), kkwaenggwari (small gong), ching (large gong), and puk (barrel drum). The members of SamulNori knew exactly what Korean society of its time wanted: a strong sense of Korean identity. They and their music offered a way to aesthetically reconfigure and manipulate this identity in an urbanized context, in a way that was innovative yet still drew from tradition.In his book, SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture, Nathan Hesselink explores the ways in which SamulNori maintains connections with the old while creating something new, popko ch'angshin. Hesselink offers a groundbreaking historiography of SamulNori, as well as an analysis of the music that shows how SamulNori makes its own innovative sonic features. Given that this book is the first sociological and musical-theoretical examination of SamulNori/samulnori (p. 10), it complements cultural studies of Korean music and ethnomusicological studies of the turbulent Korean society from which SamulNori emerged and accumulated tremendous attention.Chapters 1 and 2 sketch the historical and sociocultural contextual backgrounds in which SamulNori was formed in the midst of a rapidly changing and economically developing Korean society. Looking into the history, organization, and activities of namsadang, which is an itinerant performance group, Hesselink traces the roots of SamulNori. He suggests that the professionalism and presentation-style music making of SamulNori can be credited to namsadang. As this itinerant troupe traveled as far as Manchuria as well as to all the provinces of the Korean peninsula, the group embodied pan-regional performance styles. He demonstrates that p'ungmul, a Korean genre of percussion music and dance, was performed as part of the opening of the group's performance. Namsa - dang has been revived, especially thanks to the scholarly attention of a Korean folklorist, Shim Usong, and of cultural institutions since the 1960s. Despite the wealth of historical accounts of namsadang, more detailed description of how SamulNori and samulnori connects with namsadang historically and aesthetically would be helpful to understanding and placing SamulNori and/or samulnori within the larger contexts of namsadang.Chapter 2 is one of the most compelling chapters, in that Hesselink examines the ways in which sociocultural activism, higher learning institutions, concert halls, different contributions from scholars in folklore, musicology, and architecture, and folk music associations in the 1970s brought forth something new musically within the framework of the traditional. This chapter investigates the influences of urbanization and modernization during the time of SamulNori's formation and the appreciation it found among the new and younger generations. While the Space Theater performance has been widely mentioned in the history of the SamulNori, other concert halls, including the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, its predecessor the Seoul Civic Center, the National Theater, and the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, have not often appeared in historiographies of SamulNori and/or other folk performing arts groups. …

Talking to Slaves in the Plautine Audience

Based on a full reading of the Plautine corpus in light of theories of class resistance (Michel de Certeau, James C. Scott), this essay argues that the palliata grew up in the 200s bce under conditions of endemic warfare and mass enslavement, and responded to those conditions. Itinerant troupes of slaves and lower-class men performed for mostly humble audiences, themselves familiar with war and hunger; the best of these troupes were then hired to perform at ludi in the cities of central Italy. The first sections of the essay look at types of speech and action in the plays in which slave or poor characters make use of these shared experiences: jokes about flogging and hunger, fantasies of revenge and escape, double speech. The latter sections examine the evidence for lower-class constituencies in the 200s bce and for actors, writers, and venues to match, arguing that none of these categories can be treated monolithically.

School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial Russia by Murray Frame (review)

Il6 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g Frame, Murray. Schoolfor Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in ImperialRussia. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2006. x + 262 pp. Illustrations. Appendix. Bibliography. Notes. Index. ?30.00: $50.00. Murray Frame's School for Citizens is the latestmonograph to appear in a series ofworks thathave given serious attention to the role of theatre in transform ing late Imperial Russian society. Frame's work adds to this scholarship by situating theatre within a broader discourse of civil society and professiona lization. Schoolfor Citizens succeeds in bringing Russian theatre to life in a multi-dimensional, compelling and pithymonograph. Frame argues thatby cultivating a sense of citizenship among itsemployees and playing an intermediary role between the state and society at large, theatre contributed to a blossoming of civil society that an increasing number of scholars are recognizing took place in late Imperial Russia. One of the overarching themes of Frame's work is the tension between conceptions of theatre as a public space outside of the state, and the close relationship between state and stage that characterizes the history of Russian theatre. Frame begins his discussion, for instance, by looking at how eighteenth century government officialswho were close to the ruling elite used the dra matic form as a 'vehicle for the expression of certain political and moral principles' (p. 13) that theywanted to air inpublic, but could not do so through conventional forums of public debate. Audiences, however, continued to see theatre more as a place of sociability and entertainment than of political education. The loftygoals of playwrights were further undermined by the majority of serf theatres, itinerant troupes and commercial theatres that used the stage to perform popular French operettas rather than theRussian politi cal commentary of the enlightenment, and that exploited actors and theatre personnel in the process. As theatre developed over the course of the nineteenth century with the construction of public theatre buildings inMoscow and St Petersburg, it began to develop 'into a locus of respectability' as well as 'an affront to the authori ties' (p. 32). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the censorship regime soon turned itsattention to theatre.Under the reign ofNicholas I, the state began to consolidate the Imperial Theatre monopoly and to co-opt the stage as a tool for the promotion of conformity and the portrayal ofRussian lifeand national identity.This new repertoire, epitomized by Griboedov's Woe from Wit and Gogol"s The Government Inspector, balanced itspromotion ofRussian national ideals with critical comments on society. By the end of Nicholas's reign 'the stage had emerged as a significant factor in public life' (p. 73). By mid-century, the Imperial Theatres were beginning to see competition from the pleasure gardens, cabarets, fairgrounds and masquerades that could be found not only in the provinces, where themonopoly was not in effect,but in themetropoles as well. With the 1882 abolition of the Imperial Theatre monopoly, the gates were opened for thewidespread proliferation of private theatrical ventures in Moscow and St Petersburg. Frame argues convincingly that the initial motivation for the establishment of the monopoly was economic, and only in themid nineteenth century did itbegin to be justified with moral arguments. Alexander Ill's abolition of the monopoly, Frame reviews 117 points out, is actually consistent with his disdain of the type ofWesternized culture the Imperial Theatres were promoting. The opening up of theatre to private ventures, therefore, can be seen as part of Alexander's conservative agenda rather than as a liberalization of the art form. The net result, over time, though,was that control of theatre in the capitals was wrested from the state and handed toRussia's 'fledgling civil society' (p. 106). With the abolition of the monopoly, Moscow and St Petersburg were filledwith entrepreneurs, impresarios and theatrical innovators, all ofwhom 'contributed to thewider social trend thatwas gradually challenging the state as the curator of artistic culture and the arbiter of identity' (p. 108). By the last decade of the century, though, intellectuals were becoming disappointed with commercial theatre, which they believed had failed in itsmission of developing citizenship. Although it is difficult to judge the role that theatre played in transforming social...

Samulnori, Wőrn-pang-kak, and Cosmological Didacticism

Through scientific understanding, our world has become de-humanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man's life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbors a great demon … His immediate communication with nature is gone forever, and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious. (Jung 1976:255)At the heart of the resurgence and popularity of traditional music in South Korea during the closing decades of the twentieth century lie the concerted efforts of an intimate group of friends and musical colleagues who came of age in the late 1970s. Inspired by their mentors and artistic forbearers borne of itinerant troupe performance traditions and bound together by the common goal of saving Korean music from obscurity in a nation that was catapulting itself toward Western cultural hegemony, the percussion quartet known as SamulNori emerged from its humble beginnings to become an internationally acknowledged phenomenon.

Introduction to the Fifteenth Annual International Commercial Arbitration Workshop: Arbitral Advocacy

WELCOME TO the Fifteenth Annual Workshop of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration. We are going to begin this Workshop with some advice that many of you, maybe all of you, have heard before, from Shakespeare's masterwork Hamlet . At this point in the play, an itinerant troupe of actors has come to the castle at Elsinore, and Hamlet hatches a scheme to use their performance to ‘catch a king’ – that is, to expose his uncle's perfidy in murdering Hamlet's father and marrying his mother. Before the players begin, Hamlet gives them some advice about the craft of acting. He says: ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness’. He continues: ‘Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you overstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is far from the purpose of playing, whose end, …

Literature and Education

N the mid-sixties an Anglo-Indian film, directed by James Ivory, had a brief showing in a few major cities. Shakespeare Wallah portrayed the dwindling fortunes of an itinerant troupe of English Shakespearean actors doing the circuit of the Indian hill towns in the years following independence. In the last scene of the movie, a class of Indian schoolboys emerges from a performance of Othello and eagerly waits to catch a glimpse of a sexy Indian screen actress, who is scheduled to pass by. The teaching of literature, until very recently at least, seemed as well established as the British Raj once was in India. Even now, in our time of austerities and cutbacks, departments of language and literature, graduate and undergraduate, still dot the academic landscape more thickly than Indian Army barracks were once scattered over the landscape of the subcontinent. The MLA-the professional organization of university teachers of modern languages and literatures-has so many thousands of members that only two or three cities in the country have enough hotel rooms to accommodate those who attend its annual conventions.