A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939: Citizenship, Surveillance and the Body

Description

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. 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