Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Burlesque (Theater)"

Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs under the alias of La Chica Boom. She uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, and Mexicanidad. Her practice integrates performance, sex acts, and burlesque with video, photography, and objects. Her work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe’s Pub (NYC), PPOW Gallery (NYC), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and The Burlesque Hall of Fame (Las Vegas), to name a few. She was awarded the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Award, ReGen Artist Fund, Theater Bay Area Grant, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award.

Devised theater genealogies too often take shape around a set of primarily white, Western “ensemble-based” theater companies and training schools working in modes that emerged in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s in response to contemporary political circumstances and eventually found acceptance in the high-brow, avant garde cultural milieu. This cowritten, copresented article works to trouble that narrative by taking up the forms of queer and trans cocreated performance associated with underground queer spaces that have been excluded from histories of devised theater (drag, burlesque, ballroom, cabaret, parties, etc.). Using three case studies written in three different voices—the Chicago Kings, Sean Dorsey Dance and Fresh Meat Productions, and The Fly Honey Show—we examine what an alternative genealogy of devising, one that centers queer and trans artists, might look like.

AbstractEquestrian ballet was a spectacular genre of musical theater popular in the Baroque court. A phenomenon with military roots, the ballet communicated both the might and grace of its organizers, who often played starring roles. This essay explores the ballet’s centrality by tracing the itinerant opera singer and writer Margherita Costa’s use of the genre as a means of securing elite patronage: from an elegant manuscript libretto presented to Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici and later revised in print for Cardinal Jules Mazarin in Paris, to occasional poetry written for the Barberini in Rome, and even burlesque caricatures.

Histories of ballet have tended to pay little attention to Victorian theatre dance that was not performed in the opera house or the music hall. A great deal of dance was embedded in such popular theatrical genres as melodrama, extravaganza and burlesque, and is therefore best understood in the context of the wider theatrical culture of the period. This essay examines two ballet burlesques performed at the Adelphi Theatre in the 1840s: The Phantom Dancers (a version of Giselle) and Taming a Tartar (based on Le Diable à quatre). When located in relation to the generic qualities of other theatrical burlesques of the period, their particular combination of parody and serious attention to classical dance is clarified. In both plays classical dance is set against more demotic dance styles. This serves as a way of mocking the excesses of the original ballets, but also as a way of interrogating the nature and significance of the danse d’école when presented to a popular theatre audience.

The article deals with the phenomenon of theatricalization of the artistic picture of the world in the works of authors-representatives of the group “Bu-Ba-Bu”, (Yuriy Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak, Oleksandr Irvanets) who carry out a large-scale renewal of Ukrainian literature by dramatizing reality. That is why the mode of theatricality best shows the basic artistic principles of the group (burlesque-balagan-buffoonery). The relevance of the study is due to the need to analyze the work of representatives of Bu-Ba-Bu in the mode of theatricality. The subject of research is the poetic features, the system of characters and the principles of characterization of the group. The purpose of this article is to identify the ideological identity of the literary work of the group “Bu-Ba-Bu” in terms of revealing the theatrical discourse, which provides the research novelty. Research methods: comparative, comparative-historical and descriptive were used. Results of the research. Yu. Andrukhovych’s great prose and O. Irvanets’ drama are considered in the context of the postmodern concept of “theater society”, which treats various forms of social and cultural life as a kind of performance, as well as in connection with the concept of camp, which is characterized by ironic reflection on mass culture and aestheticization of everyday life. Dimensions of theatricality are realized by groups primarily in the form of carnival, which is a means of overcoming postcolonial trauma and a special space of existence (active involvement of the public in theatrical action, blurring the line between “theater” and real life). Addressing the main tenets of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival revealed the peculiarities of the aesthetics of “crisis periods” in prose and drama of modern authors (opposition to official discourses, total freedom and familiarity, accentuation of the bodily “bottom”). Particular attention is paid to corporeality, which reveals carnival features (grotesqueness, fluidity, dynamism) and at the same time becomes a means of rehabilitating human freedom and vitalistic energy, correlating with postcolonial social context. It is proved that the national originality of artists’ creativity is manifested primarily in the constructive nature of the carnival, which, formally correlated with the rhizome, implicitly affirms the value vertical.

Background. The modernist dramaturgy of Fernand Crommelynck allows some literary critics to attribute it to symbolism: continuing the symbolist traditions, the author builds his works “on the development of an abstract position, personified by dramatic characters that can be perceived both as living people and as figurative designations of concepts” [8]. Other researchers believe that the F. Crommelynck’s works are expressionistic, since the Crommelynck Theater is “poetic, but full of pathos, hyperbolized images, in the characteristics of his personages exaggeration is brought to the point of absurdity” [2]. Some scientists attribute Crommelynck to surrealism because the playwright is one of the burlesque theater renovators [3]. At the same time, there is an opinion that a number of later plays by the playwright anticipate the aesthetics of the theater of the absurd [11]. Ambiguously critics evaluate the genre features of Crommelynck’s plays. They are also interpreted as “psychological dramas that combine farce and tragedy”, therefore “the characters of Crommelynck’s plays are tragic jesters, the embodiment of the “eternal” principles of love, jealousy, and stinginess. His highlight is human passions, paradoxes, absurdity” [15]. His pieces are considered and as varieties of drama filled with elements of the grotesque, and “characters often act as personifications of certain moral qualities: jealousy (“Le Cocu magnifique” – “The Magnanimous Cuckold”), stinginess (“Tripes d’or” – “The Golden Womb”), played out virtues (“Carine, ou la jeune fille folle de son âme” –“Carine, or the Mad Girl of self soul”)”, etc. [11]. Neither Vsevolod Meyerhold (production of the play “The Magnanimous Cuckold” in 1922), nor Les Kurbas (production of the play “The Golden Womb” in 1926), who were innovators in theatrical field, revolutionists of the Soviet theater, could not pass by the creativity of the contemporary modernist playwright. The purpose of this study is to identify the peculiarities of the Crommelynck’ dramas produced by stage directors and the lines of the pioneering searches of two great representatives of the theater went when staging Crommelynck’s plays. Methods. The basis of the research methodology is historical analysis. Results. Meyerhold, as shown by his notes and the memoirs of his contemporaries, moved in the 1920s in his theatrical searches went towards formalist experiments, in particular, constructivism and biomechanics. According to the director, the Crommelynck’ grotesque-farcical play “The Magnanimous Cuckold” on the theater stage, saturated with complex diverse physical movements of the actors, was supposed to show one of the workers’ leisure activities. Les Kurbas, also seeking to radically renew the Ukrainian stage, relied on a completely different theatrical concept. Speaking for an active-revolutionary life installation, for the restructuring of social psychology and, consequently, for spiritual and moral values, Kurbas in his articles and conversations called for fighting the limited outlook of the Nepmen and provincial inhabitants who only think about endless prosperity [9; 10]. Realizing his concept in life, it is not by chance that the director chooses for the premiere of the first season of “Berezil” in Kharkov the play “Tripes d’or” (“The Golden Womb”) just written by Crommelynck (1925). Note that “Tripes d’or” in its content is much more complicated than the “Le Cocu magnifique”. In our opinion, the playwright, using allusions to the work of European prose writers of the XIX century, seeks to show that even an honest and decent person, becoming the owner of a large inheritance, will begin to degrade morally; gold, sooner or later, will become a fetish. Moreover, in “Tripes d’or” it is quite clearly shown that the uncle of Pierre-Auguste himself (the hero of the piece) – AnnaRomainHormidas deGutem– passed through the temptation of wealth. Hormidas’ niece Melina, who eventually got the “throne” with a pottery filled with gold dust, will also pass along this path. In addition, Crommelynck in his play reveals a number of stages of Pierre-Auguste’s painful struggle with the attractive power of gold: from understanding that gold will soon turn into a dragon that will kill a knight, through the realization that “gold in itself is fascinating”, to recognition: “I want to destroy everything ... what is near money .. so that there is no – neither the past, nor the present, nor the future ...” [7: 149, 160]. At the same time, the author in a number of scenes departs from the tragic pathos and appeals to the grotesque, which allows in the “Tripes d’or” to organically combine the real and the fantastic. Thoughtfully approaching the text of the play, Kurbas saw in its plot not the single tragedy of Pierre-Auguste, on which a huge inheritance had suddenly fallen, but a rather common phenomenon in the world of ordinary people thinking only of profit. Therefore, the director chooses not a psychological disclosure of characters, but a grotesque beginning, which allows exposing the thinking of the Nepmen and bourgeois living in petty, personal interests. The original design of the play “The Golden Womb”, semi-grotesque and half-realistic costumes of the actors, their playing and characters’ associations with animals to clarify the understanding of the stage images – all this, on the one hand, exposes the mercantile consciousness of the modern tradesman, on the other – discloses the original approach of the director to modernist text. Conclusions. By turning to modernist dramaturgy and relying on the modern possibilities of the avant-garde theater, both outstanding directors created original productions. If Meyerhold, during this period, was interested in formal experiments and revealing the possibilities of constructivism and biomechanics, so for Kurbas, who was also interested of constructivism, nevertheless, other tasks came to the fore. It was necessary for him to bring up a new theater audience in a short time: to change philistine psychology demonstrating new horizons for the development of public life and the wide possibilities of man in it. It is evidently, that the analysis of the new European dramaturgy and new experiments in the Soviet theater of the 1920–1930s is not limited to what has been said, and further careful study of these problems is required.

Dance was ubiquitous on the early Victorian stage but theatre dance of the period has received little critical attention. Examination of the repertoire of the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1840–1860 shows that dance occurred in a wide range of theatrical contexts including melodrama, farce, extravaganza and burlesque. The Adelphi also specialised in adaptations of Romantic ballets that combined spectacle, narrative, dance and song. In such theatre pieces dance could be not only decorative, but also fully integrated into the structural and thematic contexts in which it was embedded. In The Enchanted Isle, for example, dance makes a suggestive contribution to the political agenda of the play.

Montreal’s early experiences of Black theatre go back to the minstrel shows of the 1850s at the Odd Fellow’s Hall and the Garrick Club Theatre. These shows seldom involved Black artists. The companies consisted of white performers, who painted their faces black to adopt the facial traits of the Black performer. These minstrel shows presented caricatures of Blacks, in an extremely racist and demeaning light. In 1851, a Black group, called the Real Ethiopian Serenaders from Philadelphia, added to this buffoonery and the demeaning of Blacks, through its Shaker burlesque act. Garry Collison writes that parodies like the [Real] Ethiopian Serenaders’ “Shaker Burlesque” or the standard comic lecturer who spouted gibberish “played flagrantly to the white racist beliefs in the intellectual inferiority of blacks” (Collison 180). Far from educating its audiences as to the social value of Blacks and Black culture, the shows served to implant images of Blacks as childlike, of low intellectual capacity, and incapable of being assimilated into white society and civilization; as capable merely of a clownish, clumsy imitation of white culture (Collison 180). The minstrel shows continued to be a very popular form of theatrical entertainment throughout the later part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Their racist social content received very little critical disapproval in the press of the time. In fact, historian Robin Winks considers this to be one of the principal instruments by which Canadians had, by the end of the nineteenth century, learned to be racist in their perception of and attitudes towards Blacks. It took approximately eighty years, after the 1851 appearance of the Ethiopian Serenaders at the Royal Theatre, before we began to see the emergence in Montreal of the social, political and economic conditions from which a theatre movement initiated by Blacks, for Black expression, development and pride could take root.

Abstract: This article examines the figure of former King Juan Carlos I in recent Spanish cultural production and how the narrative of his reign (1975–2014) has evolved. Teatro del Barrio’s El Rey (2015) represents one of the first plays that directly problematizes the figure of Juan Carlos, presenting him as an implicated subject, as defined by Michael Rothberg. In The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019) Rothberg seeks to replace the binary design of guilty perpetrators vs innocent victims, by joining those who theorize the roles of bystanders, beneficiaries, and accomplices with the umbrella term of the “implicated subject” or “the one who participates in injustice, but in indirect ways” (20). This kind of nuanced analysis includes a wider range of involvement in violence and injustice than crimes that can be prosecuted in court and seeks to better foment a solid collective historical and political responsibility. This narrative model goes against the official hegemonic account solidified after 23-F that painted the former monarch as a hero of the transition during his reign, but also against the burlesque parody of his person that we often see today in cultural production. This article will analyze the repercussions and effectiveness of this particular narrative model in theater and compare and contrast it with other contemporary theatrical and mediatic productions that feature the monarch such as Andrés Cavestany’s Urtain (2008), Luïsa Cunillé’s El bordell (2008), and Alfonso Plou and Julia Salvatierra’s Transición (2012). Resumen: Este artículo examina la figura del exrey Juan Carlos I en la producción cultural española reciente y explora la evolución en la narrativa de su reinado (1975–2014). El Rey (2015) de Teatro del Barrio representa una de las primeras obras que problematiza directamente la figura de Juan Carlos, presentándolo como un sujeto implicado, tal como lo define Michael Rothberg. En The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), Rothberg busca reemplazar el diseño binario de perpetradores culpables frente a víctimas inocentes, uniéndose a quienes teorizan los roles de espectadores, beneficiarios y cómplices con el término general del “sujeto implicado” o “el que participa en la injusticia, pero de manera indirecta” (20). Este tipo de análisis matizado incluye una gama más amplia de participación en la violencia y la injusticia que los delitos que pueden ser procesados en los tribunales, y busca mejor fomentar una responsabilidad histórica y política colectiva. Este modelo narrativo va en contra del relato hegemónico oficial solidificado tras el 23-F que pintaba al ex monarca como un héroe de la transición durante su reinado, pero también en contra de la parodia burlesca de su persona que hoy vemos a menudo en la producción cultural. Este artículo analizará las repercusiones y la eficacia de este modelo narrativo en el teatro y lo comparará y contrastará con otras producciones teatrales contemporáneas protagonizadas por el monarca como Urtain (2008) de Andrés Cavestany, El bordell (2008) de Luïsa Cunillé y Alfonso Plou y Transición (2012) de Julia Salvatierra.

Students’ Classical Theatre Sfinga debuted with comedy Miles Gloriosus in 1997. Over the years they staged various plays of Plautus in order to prove themselves and their audience that certain themes and Plautine humour were not only still alive but also deeply emerged into the temporary culture. The main purpose of Sfinga has always been to familiarize their audience with Plautus and pay special attention to the care of ancient taste. The article discusses the following plays by Plautus: Miles Gloriosus, Amphitruo, Asinaria, Casina and Curculio. The authors present how, thanks to the available theatrical elements (costumes, music or scenography), Sfinga managed to make some performances take on new, fresh meanings, and others turned into musicals, burlesque or operetta.

Nearly a century-and-a-half after urban professional entertainers first attained instant popularity for music, dance, and humor performed in blackface, amateur minstrels in the rural Midwest continued to pack school auditoriums and smalltown theaters with their homespun variety. Blackening their hands and faces with storebought makeup (the modern equivalent of the burnt cork of the nineteenth century), farmers and schoolteachers sang spirited renditions of “There's Nothin Like a Minstrel Show” mechanics and school board members donned tutus in an exotic ballet burlesque; and a realtor with a rich baritone sang his version of “Mammy,” a perennial favorite.

Vaudeville theatre was an important visual form of popular culture and entertainment that featured such specialty acts as comedy and song and dance, as well as lectures, lantern slide shows and motion pictures with subject matter from faraway lands, and themes of American patriotism. American vaudeville began in nineteenth-century saloons as floorshows and burlesque, but it was eventually upgraded to family entertainment, which appealed to middle- and upper-class audiences, before individual theatres were subsumed by franchised theatre chains. Vaudeville theatre directors, who were known as impresarios, programmed an innovative spectrum of acts that ranged from classical music and art to folk songs, and to acrobats, which appealed to a wide range of social classes. Following the theories of Henri Lefebvre, the social space of the theatre became a conceptually dynamic space, where class distinctions blurred and audience members could then dream of life in a higher social station, or what American Mid Victorians knew as ‘self-improvement’. A conundrum emerges, however, when we see that most of the programmes were plentiful with racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes, which were entertaining to White audience members. The vertical social climb of the gilded age in the 1900s was complicated with the social relations of uneasy, decadent consumerism. Individuals driven by desire thought their ‘un-comfort’ might be remedied by entertainment, as they looked for an upswing to something better.

The Athenian Captive (1838) was to constitute the last significant use of Greek tragedy on the professional stage in Britain for a radical political purpose until Gilbert Murray's stagings of Euripides in the Edwardian era.Edith HallI believe in the Revolution.Robert Brough, 1855The fiercest political debates in 1850s Britain were inextricably bound up with the Classical past. Traditionalists and eulogists, priests and pamphleteers, doctors and revolutionaries all set their arguments and their ideals within a Classical framework. Amongst those who sought to use the ancient for decidedly contemporary purposes, Robert Brough was one of the most passionate. He was a revolutionary, a playwright, and a Classicist—though up until the performance of his burlesque Medea (on July 14th 1856), he had never been all three at once. This article will explore how, at the time, the myth of Medea was the perfect vehicle for radical politics—and how Brough exploited its potential to the full. It will frame his play within some of the most controversial debates of the period. It will explore Brough's (on the face of it, startling) claim that his burlesque would give the audience more to think about than any play they had seen before, that it would be ‘a conjugal lesson, surpassing in intensity anything ever before presented’. Brough wrote his Medea believing in ‘the Revolution’. And, as I hope to show, he wanted his audiences to leave the theatre believing in it too.

Restoration theatre theory, polemic, and practice are closely concerned with questions of value, although they have received little attention in recent criticism that considers the formation of the English canon up to and during the eighteenth century. The main issue addressed concerns the legitimacy of dramatic form, which dominates the metatheatre of 1668–75, but also appears unexpectedly in the political drama (especially the comedy) of the early 1660s and the antitheatrical rhetoric of the 1690s. In all these instances, the complexity, integrity, and completeness of drama-in-performance are seen to determine the value of plays as well as playwriting. While the attack on heroic drama in metatheatrical plays such as Shadwell's The Sullen Lovers (1668) and Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1671) is directed by authors of one persuasion against another, Thomas Duffett's burlesque attack on the theatre of spectacle in the 1670s paradoxically is reinforced by the self-criticism of his targets. Moreover, Jeremy Collier's antitheatrical offensive in the late 1690s shows an atypical concern with specific dramatic content, especially in comedy, suggesting that both metatheatre and antitheatre in the Restoration focus their oppositional energies on the particulars of genre.

There is a long-standing tradition in theatre criticism of disparaging medieval farce as an essentially vulgar, inconsequential, and even immoral genre. As many scholars both past and present would have it, these short, comic “crowd pleasers” not only thematize moral corruption but actually injure public morals by pandering to the baser instincts of the lower classes. In her bold revisionist study of the genre, Bernadette Rey-Flaud cites Arthur Pougin's 1885 definition of farce as an “exemplary” one: “Short little plays, of a low, trivial, burlesque comedy and for the most part very licentious; plays that sought above all to incite the coarse laughter of the rabble.” According to Rey-Flaud, this definition encapsulates the four centuries of criticism that precede it and anticipates the consensus of much contemporary scholarship as well: “Farce has not been rehabilitated in our time” (8, emphasis mine).

This article demonstrates the general principles in the work of S. S. Prokofiev and S. M. Slonimsky, artists who are brightly individual and bold in their creative search. This thesis is confirmed by the two composers' memoirs: Prokofiev's Autobiography and Slonimsky's "Burlesques, Elegies, Dithyrambs in Despicable Prose". The author touches upon the theme "the Composer and the Drama Theater", which reveals the approach of the director (G. A. Tovstonogov) and the composer (S. M. Slonimsky) to the musical design of the performance based on the novel "Quiet Flows the Don" by M. A. Sholokhov. The paper provides excerpts from the book of the famous actor, screenwriter and director A. V. Batalov, as well as his views on radio dramaturgy as the director of a radio play about the childhood of Sergey Prokofiev. It is emphasized that A. V. Batalov made an accent on the leading role of the composer's works in compositional dramaturgy of the radio performance.

The article focuses on the phenomena, developments and potentials of small arts (Kleinkunst) in the Slovenian space. Small arts are a form of artistic response that, through diverse performance genres – such as cabaret, new burlesque, improvisational theatre, stand-up, interventions in public space, contemporary circus, drag, queer and LGBTQI+ stage events – provides a social commentary on the existing traditionalist, heteronormative, patriarchal and capitalist society. The article elaborates the term small arts and its artistic and social elements and tries to identify it concretely in the local space. This broad umbrella term is characterised by the heterogeneity of its themes and aesthetics. In Slovenia, it has an even more specific undertone and position, as its development and influence are hampered by a small population. When selecting the creators of small arts, the author focused mainly on those working in the sphere of the non-governmental sector, who create continuously, have artistic credibility and are not market-oriented.

AbstractThis paper describes the 1912–13 case ofR.v.St. Clair, which concerned a Congregationalist minister's attempt to regulate the goings-on in a notorious burlesque theatre in Toronto. A “clean stage” was a goal of the moral reform movement of the time, and the criminal justice system was one of the avenues reformers took to attempt to achieve it. However, obscenity and indecency in theatres posed unique challenges. Two of the most important reasons were that under the influence of artistic and philosophical trends in the modern world, obscenity and indecency were becoming unstable concepts, and the nature, purpose and possibilities of art were being contested. TheSt. Claircase shows Toronto's legal apparatus grappling with these concerns at a time when the authority to judge and to decide what others might and might not view was slipping away from the Protestant churches and toward secular parties, including the courts. Ultimately the case suggests why the difficulties with censorship of verbal and visual representations may be an intractable dimension of our artistic, philosophical and legal position even now.

It is obvious that broad world view provided by education can douse tension, discrimination, reduce hate speech and minimize aggression. Education is a weapon of mass instruction and has been powerful enough to push ignorance to the background. More so, it has become a prime function of education to illuminate the world with ideas and in its nature to unite the world through inventions and technological developments. Arguably, education has also introduced strange norms and vices especially among youth circles. But, because habits are hard to modify, the onus falls on the theatre that thrives on burlesques, parody, polar attitudes and modification of character to use the stage effectively for correction and preservation. Methodically, this paper x-rays selected theatre performances that have tried to reduce ethnic conflicts in Nigeria using the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO) as theoretical backings. Through role playing on stage and in the classroom, the paper redirects the attention of the youth and government towards reorientation and sustainable values. The findings reveal that theatre has the capacity to influence minds and can engineer behavioral change which by extension ensures peaceful co-existence and sustainable developments. Thus, the paper recommends that History, Culture and Youth Education be incorporated in the secondary school curriculum. Also, if theatre performances with topical themes are sponsored for the benefit of the youths, it will increase tolerance. The research concludes that performing youth education in the classroom, at grass root level and public spaces will subtly promote nation building and integration.

In this article, Michael Goron examines the working lives of the ‘refined girls’ employed in what was popularly referred to as the ‘D'Oyly Carte Boarding School’ – the working environment in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company of the 1880s and 1890s, in which backstage gender segregation was strictly enforced, and where a patriarchal management personally regulated the private behaviour of female performers. Here, the attempted ‘gentrification’ of the West End theatrical milieu in the later nineteenth century was transposed by Richard D'Oyly Carte to the popular musical stage. Just as ‘unwholesome’ elements of late-nineteenth-century burlesque were absent from both the content and presentation of comic opera at the Savoy, so the ‘respectability’ of its female performers, offstage as well as on, was actively promoted to forestall middle-class antitheatrical prejudice. The working lives of these performers helped to create an image of theatrical respectability which transformed public perceptions of musical theatre in the final decades of the Victorian era. Michael Goron is a PhD student and part-time Associate Lecturer at Winchester and Southampton Solent Universities.

From 13 to 15 January 2005, the SuicideGirls Live! burlesque show appeared as part of the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, Alberta. Straddling the boundaries of feminism, popular culture and, indeed, definitions of performance art and theatre, the SuicideGirls performance highlights the diversity of the festival phenomenon in Canada. Performing any kind of work at a festival invites a contextual analysis. As Jill Dolan writes in Presence and Desire, in reference to heterosexual and lesbian spaces, “[C]ontexts make the terms of the performative exchange very different, even if the images used or roles played are the same” (127). In a Canadian context, festivals range from the populist Fringes to the high art Festival de Théâtre des Amériques to the venerable Stratford and Shaw to the brand new Magnetic North. Women’s work has a place at all of these to varying degrees, seldom in a major or central capacity. On the other hand, works by women in these contexts take on the attributes of the festival and are read as enacting the mandate of the curator, whoever she or he may be.

The article discusses the variety of ways in which the terms “popular” or “populist” could be associated with postwar Shakespearean transcreations in the Central and Eastern European region, pointing out how performers and adaptors challenged the canonical, highbrow status of Shakespeare and used his oeuvre as raw material in experimental forms and genres. Following a discussion on the variety of socio-historical contexts which inspired noteworthy popular and/or populist reworkings in several Central and Eastern European countries, the article takes a more in-depth look at a few specific comic genres, particularly the burlesque and the cabaret in a theoretical framework, and concludes by examining post-1989 experimental theatre practices. The publication of the article was supported by the International Visegrad Fund, project no. 22210007, titled “Crossing Borders with Shakespeare since 1945: Central and Eastern European Roots and Routes.” The project is co-financed by the Governments of the Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants. The mission of the Fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

Early Stages, the eighth theme study in The Ontario Historical Studies Series, explores in six thoughtful essays the evolution of Ontario theatre from 1800 to 1914. Historian J.M.S. Careless sets the stage with a background study titled “The Cultural Setting: Ontario Society to 1914”, in which he analyses the role played by “the growth of settlement, the rise of towns and cities, constant improvements in communications by land and water, and the sweep of technological advance”, all of which created the conditions which made theatrical activity viable. Leslie O’Dell chronicles the activities of the regimental theatrical troupes which, between 1815 and 1870, provided the garrison towns of Kingston, London, and Toronto with a major source of entertainment. Robertson Davies surveys the theatrical menu offered audiences, reminding us that “the hopes and the fears and the unfocused terrors of our forebears show through the lace curtains of their plays as they do not always show through their novels or their poetry”. In upholstered productions of Shakespeare, costume dramas, melodramas, comedies old and new, farces, and operas grand, light, and bouffe, Ontario entertainment proclaimed at once its bourgeois prejudices and its kinship with the age. The bulk of theatrical performances were provided by touring companies, and Mary M. Brown casts a knowledgeable eye over the circuits, proprietors of local theatres, itinerant actor-managers, and the stars, native and foreign, who were at the heart of the system. Gerald Lenton-Young, in a remarkably well-researched and informative piece, ventures into the neglected field of variety, which, in the early decades of this century, serviced in Toronto an audience five times larger than that of the legitimate theatre (183,000 weekly capacity as compared with the legitimate theatre’s 35,000). His account of the puppet shows, panoramas, menageries and circuses, minstrel acts, dime museums, burlesque and, latterly, vaudeville extravaganzas offers a welcome antidote to the pervasive overemphasis by historians on Canada’s legitimate theatre. The volume’s final study, Robert Fairfield’s record of Ontario’s major theatres and performance halls over a 140-year period, is statistically satisfying, yet wonderfully readable. We come away with a solid sense of construction costs, architectural styles, the size and seating arrangements of auditoria, the depth, breadth, and height of stage areas. Even sanitary facilities (or, more often, the lack of them) are not overlooked.

In his tetralogy Enderby (1959-1984), Anthony Burgess dwells on a comic topos of contemporary British fiction : a typical representative of high culture is unwillingly evicted from his literary ivory tower and finds himself swallowed up in the storm of the cultural industry. Pop music, women’s magazines, Hollywood’s show biz and American culture as a whole become Burgess’s (anti)hero’s threatening Nemesis : lured, looted, exploited, alienated, shamefully prostituting his talent while protesting his inalienable artistic purity and inveighing against contemporary decadence, Enderby embodies the anti-modern, post-romantic/high-modernist resistance to mass culture’s retrieval, recycling and re-appropriation of the Western canon. In the fourth volume of the tetralogy, Enderby’s Dark Lady, the hero is lured into participating in the elaboration of an American musical based on the life of Shakespeare. Through a series of mise-en-abyme effects and chain identifications between Burgess, Enderby and Shakespeare, the dialogic interplay between contemporary popular culture and Elizabethan theatre has more to offer than mere burlesque counterpoints, as the latter breaks the shell of cultural/ academic canonisation to return to its original entertaining, popular nature.

Near the end of his solo pieceThe Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion, prominent playwright and performer David Greenspan presents a pair of scenes in which he investigates, from a queer perspective, the question of time in the theatre. In the spirit ofThe Myopia's own temporally disruptive mechanics, I will describe the second scene first: an Orator and his Doppelganger, who “bears a striking resemblance to the actress Carol Channing,” have a conversation in which they explain to the audience that the overlong fourth act, in whose stead they appear, has been cut from the play. The Doppelganger, who is particularly concerned with keeping good time (and whose “striking resemblance” to Channing is camped in performance as an uncostumed Greenspan does an uncanny vocal impersonation of the actress), looks impatiently at her wrist—as if at a watch—and says that audiences will put up with “telling” in the theatre, as distinct from “showing,” only if the telling is “not too long. People—who of course apprehend words by either reading or listening—might be willing to sit a long time apprehending words by reading but might not be willing to sit a long time apprehending words by listening. Even if they're simultaneously seeing.” Here the Doppelganger, like the Orator, speaks in rhythms explicitly modeled on those of Gertrude Stein, whose essay “Plays” is invoked earlier in the scene. Likewise concerned with the pacing of showing and telling and the phenomenology of audience responses to that pacing, Stein complains famously in “Plays” of theatre's “syncopated time,” its inability to produce an identity between “the emotional time of the play” and spectators' “emotional time as audience.” Stein's own plays do not exactly solve the problem of syncopated time but rather attempt to circumvent the problem altogether by rejecting the theatrical apparatus that, in her view, produces syncopation—that is, “by blurring beyond recognition the distinctions among dialogue, didascalia, and other diegetic language that seems to belong to the province of neither dialogue nor didascalia.”

A general survey of the contemporary Nigerian theatre and drama reveals that several contemporary Nigerian dramatists have harnessed the art of abuse—invectives— as a device for conveying meanings in their works and achieving their satiric goals. These dramatists create characters that engage abuse to articulate the thematic concerns of their drama, accentuate the conflicts in them, and establish the socio-cultural and political setting of their drama. Although extant works on satiric plays have focused on the use of language, and other satiric devices such as grotesque, irony, burlesque, innuendo, sarcasm, among others (Adeoti 1994; Adenigbo & Alugbin 2020; Mireku-Gyimah 2013; Nyamekye & Debrah 2016), sufficient scholarly attention has not been given to the art of abuse as a trope in Nigerian drama. The article explores the artistic significance of abuse and its forms in selected works of two contemporary Nigerian dramatists: Femi Osofisan’s Altine’s Wrath (2002) and Ola Rotimi’s Who is a Patriot? (2006). These two plays are selected because they manifest ample deployment of the art of abuse and engage various sociopolitical issues. Hence, the article discusses how the art of abuse in these plays projects and addresses such sociopolitical realities as oppression, exploitation, resistance, self-interest versus national interest, and capitalism, among others. The article engages the principles of superiority theory of humour as espoused by Henri Bergson (2003) for textual analysis. It contends and concludes that abuse, as an inherent part of social and human interactions, has been an effective tool in satirising ills in individuals and society at large.

In the 1853 travel account Constantinople, Théophile Gautier describes the parodic and popular Turkish Karagiozis theatre. Made up of flat 2D puppets played behind a curtain, this type of show is performed during the festive period of Ramadan. The stories present the characters and traditions of the population in a burlesque and subversive style. By contrasting the licentious figure of Karagiozis with established norms, Gautier shows that his experience as a traveller can be imaginatively shared even with readers who have remained in France.

What is the effect of the dance scene in Tom Robertson's play Caste? Little emphasis has been placed on the contribution of dance to Victorian theatre practice. Yet dance was ubiquitous, featuring prominently in such genres as melodrama and extravaganza, and providing the source material for burlesque. Dance was employed as a component of the mise-en-scène, as a marker of transformation, and to express what could not otherwise be expressed in a censored theatrical environment. In Caste these functions serve to provide a counterweight to, and enable a critique of, the play's prevailing naturalism.

This article explains the continued popularity in Russia of the 1967 Soviet film Wedding in Malinovka by analyzing its reliance on the traditional Russian cultural stereotype of Ukraine embedded in the burlesque style of kotliarevshchyna. The threat that the Ukrainian Revolution historically represented to Soviet Russian identity is normalised in the film, as well as in the 1936 eponymous operetta on which it is based, by framing it as an ethnic musical sitcom with dances. Although the two main yokels of the musical hail from a long line of Ukrainian and Jewish characters of popular theatre, both are also deeply ambivalent: one is a trickster who suddenly embraces the Bolshevik cause, while the other is the funniest and least threatening villain in Soviet film.

What exactly is operetta? As a genre it seems defined by its lack of definition, by its inherent in-betweenness. On an aesthetic scale defined by opera at one end and music hall, revue and burlesque at the other, it lies somewhere in the middle. But where? True, it is difficult to disentangle operetta from the various kinds of variety theatre; it shares their fondness for a chorus line and a catchy refrain. On the other hand, the name operetta suggests a love–hate relationship with opera, its high-brow relative. ‘Little opera’ is generally shorter than opera (though what about concise classics of ‘big opera’ such as La bohème?), funnier than opera (though what about comic touchstones such as Il barbiere di Siviglia?) and less serious than opera (though the satirical bent of some operettas can be taken seriously). Perhaps, then, the difference is that it takes itself less seriously, with fewer pretensions to grandeur and more concessions to popular taste. Capitalising unashamedly on its popularity through promotional tie-ins, flaunting musical numbers poised to become well-known hits on the bandstand or on the mechanical piano, and almost invariably giving spectators the happy ending they desire: operetta is selling out, in all senses of the phrase.

A Māori-Pasifika dance crew called Torotoro was formed in 2000 to help create a song and dance show called Mika HAKA.[1] The dancers were in their teenage years and early twenties. The show sought to amplify, for British stages, the burlesque performance of takataapui (gay Māori) identity, through which Mika (then aged 38) had carved out a unique niche for himself in the UK fringe festival circuit. I was his international collaborator, supporting creation, development and touring of Mika HAKA. On the surface, Mika HAKA was a flirtatious, sexualised, glamorous and just-about family-friendly reworking of the concert party show format that is the core of touristic renderings of Māori culture. At the same time, it integrated hip-hop and other contemporary pop references. This reflected Mika’s commitment to the juxtaposition of Māori-Pasifika performance with aesthetics and forms circulating globally as an expression of the complexities of (his) urban Māori identity. [1] Mika HAKA debuted 25 January 2001 at the Maidment Theatre, Auckland (New Zealand). Its international premiere was 1August 2002 at Dance Base – National Centre for Dance, Edinburgh (Scotland). The production toured widely in New Zealand, and in 2003 visited Adelaide (Australia), and revisited Edinburgh.

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 plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. 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New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Lake, Marilyn. “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project”. Australian Historical Studies 122 ( 2003): 346–63. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Moore, Richard K. “Democracy and Cyberspace”. Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age. Eds. Barry Hague and Brian D. Loader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 39–59. Neville, Richard. “Crass, Corny, But Still a Woodstock Moment for a New Generation”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2004. Pittinger, Peach R. “The Cherry Sisters in Early Vaudeville: Performing a Failed Femininity”. Theatre History Studies 24 (2004): 73–97. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. ———. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–165. Waterhouse, Richard. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990. Watson, Bobby. Fifty Years Behind the Scenes. Sydney: Slater, 1924. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bellanta, Melissa. "Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/02-bellanta.php>. APA Style Bellanta, M. (Apr. 2008) "Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/02-bellanta.php>.

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 plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Lake, Marilyn. “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project”. Australian Historical Studies 122 ( 2003): 346–63. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Moore, Richard K. “Democracy and Cyberspace”. Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age. Eds. Barry Hague and Brian D. Loader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 39–59. Neville, Richard. “Crass, Corny, But Still a Woodstock Moment for a New Generation”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2004. Pittinger, Peach R. “The Cherry Sisters in Early Vaudeville: Performing a Failed Femininity”. Theatre History Studies 24 (2004): 73–97. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. ———. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–165. Waterhouse, Richard. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990. Watson, Bobby. Fifty Years Behind the Scenes. Sydney: Slater, 1924.

Briefs and Hot Brown Honey are two Brisbane based companies producing genre-bending work combining different mixes of circus, burlesque, hiphop, dance, boylesque, performance art, rap and drag. The two companies produce provocative performance that is entertaining and draws critical acclaim. However, what is particularly distinctive about these two companies is that they are both founded and directed by performers from Samoan cultural backgrounds who have leap-frogged over the normative whiteness of much contemporary Australian performance. Both companies have a radical political agenda. This essay argues that through the presentation of diverse alternative bodies, not only through the performing bodies presented on stage but also in the corporate bodies of the companies they have set up, they profoundly challenge the structure of the Australian performance industry and contribute a radical re-envisaging of the potential of circus to act as a vital political force.Briefs was co-founded by Creative Director, Samoan, Fez Fa’anana with his brother Natano Fa’anana in 2008. An experienced dancer and physical theatre performer, Fa’anana describes the company’s performances as the “dysfunctional marriage of theatre, circus, dance, drag and burlesque with the simplicity of a variety show format” (“On the Couch”). As Fa’anana’s alter ego, “the beautiful bearded Samoan ringmistress Shivannah says, describing The Second Coming, the Briefs show at the Sydney Festival 2017, the show is ‘A little bit butch with a f*** load of camp’” (Lavers). The show involves “extreme costume changes, extravagant birdbath boylesque, too close for comfort yo-yo tricks and more than one highly inappropriate banana” (“Briefs: The Second Coming”).Briefs is an all-male company with gender-bending forming an integral part of the ethos. In The Second Coming the accepted sinuous image of the female performer entwining herself around the aerial hoop or lyra is subverted with the act featuring instead a male contortionist performing the same seductive moves with silky smooth sensuousness. Another example of gender bending in the show is the Dita Von Teese number performed by a male performer in a birdbath filled with water with a trapeze suspended over the top of it. Perhaps the most sensational example of alternative bodies in the show is “the moment when performer Dallas Dellaforce, wearing a nude body stocking with a female body drawn onto it, and an enormously long, curly white-blond wig blown by a wind machine, stands like a high camp Botticelli Venus rising up out of the stage” (Lavers). The highly visible body of Fez Fa’anana as the gender-bending Samoan ringmistress challenges the pervasive whiteness in contemporary circus. Although there has been some discourse on the issue of whiteness within the context of Australian theatre, for example Lee Lewis arguing for an aggressive approach to cross-racial casting to combat the whiteness of Australian theatre and TV (Lewis), there has however been very little discussion of this issue within Australian contemporary circus. Mark St Leon’s discussion of historical attitudes to Aboriginal performers in Australian circus is a notable exception (St Leon).This issue remains widely unacknowledged, an aspect of whiteness that social geographers Audrey Kobashi and Linda Peake identify in their writing, whiteness is indicated less by its explicit racism than by the fact that it ignores, or even denies, racist indications. It occupies central ground by deracializing and normalizing common events and beliefs, giving them legitimacy as part of a moral system depicted as natural and universal. (Kobayashi and Peake 394)As film studies scholar, Richard Dyer writes,the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity … In fact for most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general. Research – into books, museums, the press, advertising, films, television, software – repeatedly shows that in Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all, are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard. Whites are everywhere in representation … At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race. (3)Dyer writes in conclusion that “white people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words whiteness needs to be made strange” (541). This applies in particular to contemporary circus. In a recent interview with the authors, ex-Circus Oz Artistic Director and CEO, Mike Finch, commented, “You could make an all-round entertaining family circus show with [racial] diversity represented and I believe that would be a deeply subversive act in a way in contemporary Australia” (Finch).Today in contemporary Australian circus very few racially diverse bodies can be seen and almost no Indigenous performers and this fact goes largely unremarked upon. In spite of there being Indigenous cultures within Australia that celebrate physical achievement, clowning and performance, there seem to be few pathways into professional circus for Indigenous athletes or artists. Although a considerable spread of social circus programs exists across Australia working with Indigenous youth at risk, there seem to be few structures in place to facilitate the transitioning between these social circus classes and entry into circus training programs or professional companies. Since 2012 Circus Oz has set up the program Blakflip to mentor and support young Indigenous performers to try and redress this problem. This has led to two graduates of the program moving on to perform with the company, namely Dale Woodbridge Brown and Ghenoa Gella, and also led to the mentorship and support of several students in gaining entry into the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. Circus Oz has also now appointed an Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Program Officer, Davey Thomson, who is working to develop networks between past and present participants in the Blakflip program and to strengthen links with Indigenous Communities. However, it could be argued that Fez Fa’anana with Briefs has in fact leapfrogged over these programs aimed at addressing the whiteness in contemporary circus. As a Samoan Australian performer he has not only co-founded his own contemporary performance company in which he takes the central performing role, but has now also established another company called Briefs Factory, which is a creative production house that develops, presents, produces and manages artists and productions, and now at any one time employs around 20 people. In terms of his performative physical presence on stage, in an interview in 2015, Fa’anana described his performance alter ego, Shivannah, as the “love child of the bearded lady and ring master.” In the same interview he also described himself tellingly as “a Samoan (who is not a security guard, football player nor a KFC cashier),” and as “an Australian … a legal immigrant” (“On the Couch”). The radical racial difference that the alternative body of Shivannah the ringmistress presents in performance is also constantly reinforced by Fa’anana’s repartee. At the beginning of the show he urges the audience “to put their feet flat on the floor and acknowledge the earth and how lucky we are to be in this beautiful country that for 200 years now has been called Australia” (Fa’anana). Comments about his Samoan ancestry are sprinkled throughout the show and are delivered with a light touch, constantly making the audience laugh. At one point in the show resplendent in a sequined costume, Fa’anana stands downstage in front of two performers on their knees cleaning up the mess left on the stage from the act before, and he says, “Finally, I’ve made it! I’ve got a couple of white boys cleaning up after me” (Fa’anana). In another part of the show, alluding to white stereotypes of Indigenous performers, Fa’anana thanks the drag artist who taught him how to put his drag make-up on, saying “I used to put my make-up on with a burnt stick before he showed me how to do it” (Fa’anana).In his book on critical pedagogy, political activist and scholar Peter McLaren writes on approaches to developing the means to resist and subvert pervasive whiteness, saying, “To resist whiteness means developing a politics of difference […] we need to re-think difference and identity outside a set of binary oppositions. We need to view identity as coalitional, as collective, as processual, as grounded in the struggle for social justice” (213). One example of how identity outside binary oppositions was explored in The Second Coming was in an act by drag artist Dallas Dellaforce, who dressedin a sumptuous fifties evening dress with pink balloon breasts rising out of the top of his low cut evening dress and wearing a Marilyn Monroe blonde wig, camped it up as a fifties coquette, flipping from sultry into a totally scary horror tantrum, before returning to coquette mode with the husky phrase, ‘I love you.’ When at the end of the song, stripped naked, sporting a shaved bald head and wearing only a suggestive long thin pink balloon, the full potential of camp to reveal different layers of artifice and constructed identity was revealed. (Lavers)Fez Fa’anana comments at the end of the show that The Second Coming was not aimed at any particular group of people, but instead aimed to “celebrate being human.” However, if this is the case, Fa’anana is demanding an extended definition of being human that through the inclusion of diverse alternative bodies pushes for a new understandings of what constitutes being human and how human identity can be construed. His work demands an understanding that is not oppositional nor grounded in binary opposition to normative whiteness but instead forms part of a re-thinking of human identity through alternative bodies that are presented as processual, and deeply grounded in the struggle for the social justice issue of acceptance of difference and alternatives.Hot Brown Honey is another Brisbane based company working with circus in conjunction with other forms such as burlesque, hip hop, and cabaret. The all-female company was recently awarded the UK 2016 Total Theatre Award for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form. The company was co-founded by dancer and choreographer Lisa Fa’alafi, who is from the same Samoan family as Fez and Natano Fa’anana, with sound designer Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers, a successful hip hop artist, poet and record producer. From the beginning Hot Brown Honey was envisaged as providing a performance space for women of colour. Lisa Fa’alafi says the company was formed to address the lack of performance opportunities available, “It’s plain knowledge that there are limited roles for people of colour, let alone women of colour” (quoted in Northover).Lyn Gardner, arts critic for The Guardian in the UK, describing Hot Brown Honey’s performance, writes that the company fights “gender and racial stereotypes with a raucous glee, while giving a feminist makeover to circus, hip-hop and burlesque” (Gardner). The company includes women mainly “of Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Indonesian heritage taking on colonialism, sexism, gender stereotypes and racism through often confronting performance and humour; their tagline is ‘fighting the power never tasted so sweet’” (Northover).In their show Hot Brown Honey present a straps act. Straps is a physically demanding aerial circus act that requires great upper body strength and is usually performed by male aerialists. However, in the Hot Brown Honey show gender expectations are subverted with the straps act performed by a female aerialist. Gardner writes of the performance of this straps act at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a “sequence that conjures the twisted moves of a woman trying to escape domestic violence,” and “One of the best circus sequences I’ve seen at this festival” (Gardner). Hula hoops, a traditionally female act, is also subverted and used to explore the stereotypes of the “exotic notion of Pacific culture” (Northover). Gardner writes of this act that the hoola hoops “are called into service to explore western tourists’ culture of entitlement”. Company co-founder Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers, talks about the group’s approach to flipping perceptions of women of colour through investigating the power dynamics in gender relations, “We have a lot of flips around sexuality,” says Bowers. “Especially around the way people expect a black woman to be. We like to shift the exploitation and the power” (quoted in Northover).Another pressing issue that Hot Brown Honey address is a strange phenomenon apparent in much contemporary circus. In addition to the pervasive whiteness in contemporary circus, relatively few women are visible in many contemporary circus companies. Suzie Williams from Acrobatic Conundrum, the Seattle-based circus company, writes in her blog, “there are a lot of shows that feature many young, fit, exuberant guys and one flexible girl who performs a sensual/sentimental/romantic solo act” (Williams). Writing about Complètement Cirque, Montreal’s international circus festival which took place in July 2016, Williams says, “this year at the festival, my least favorite trend was … out of the 9 ticketed productions only one had more than one woman in it” (Williams, emphasis in original).Circus scholars have started to research this trend of lack of female representation both in contemporary circus schools and performance companies. “Gender in Circus Education: the institutionalization of stereotypes” was the title of a paper presented at the Circus and Its Others Conference in Montreal in July 2016 by Alisan Funk, a circus choreographer, teacher and director and an MA candidate at Concordia University in Montreal. Funk cited research from France showing that the educational programs and the industry are 70% male dominated. Although recreational programs in France have majority female populations, there appears to be a bottleneck at the level of entrance exams to superior schools. The few female students accepted to those schools are then frequently pushed towards solo aerial work (Funk). This push to solo aerial work means that the group floor work and acrobatics are often performed by men who create acrobatic groups that often then go on to form the basis for companies. (In this context the work of Circus Oz in this area needs to be acknowledged with the company having had a consistent policy over its 39 year existence of employing 50% female performers, however in the context of international contemporary circus this is increasingly rare).Williams writes in her blog about contemporary circus performance, “I want to see more women. I want to see women who look different from each other. I want to see so many women that no single women has to stand as a symbol of what all women can be” (Williams).Hot Brown Honey tackle the issue Williams raises head on, and they do it in the form of internationally award winning circus/cabaret that is all-female, where the bodies of the performers offer a radical alternative to the norms of contemporary circus and performance generally. The work shows women, a range of women performing circus-women of colour, with a wide range of bodies of varying shapes and sizes on stage. In Hot Brown Honey no single women in the show has to stand as a symbol of what all women can be. Briefs and Hot Brown Honey, through accessible yet political circus/cabaret, subvert the norms and institutionalized racial and gender-based biases inherent in contemporary circus both in Australia and internationally. By doing so these two companies have leap-frogged the normative presentation of performers in contemporary circus by speaking directly to a celebration of difference and diversity through the presentation of radical alternative bodies.ReferencesAlthusser, L. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1965/2005.Beeby, J. “Briefs: The Second Coming – Jack Beeby Chats with Creative Director Fez Faanana.” Aussie Theatre 2015. <http://aussietheatre.com.au/features/briefs-the-second-coming-jack-beeby-chats-with-creative-director-fez-faanana>.“Briefs: The Second Coming.” Sydney Festival 2016. <http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2017/briefs>.Dyer, R. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. Fa’anana, F. Repartee as Shivannah in The Second Coming by Briefs. Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, Sydney Festival, 7 Jan. 2017. Performance.Finch, M. 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