In a 1950 letter, choreographer Katherine Dunham mentions trouble keeping dancers with her troupe “[i]n spite of the fact that we are the only non-subsidized professional group that has remained self-supporting over these years, and in spite of the fact that we are loved and respected all over the world and work more weeks out of the year than any other dance group in existence.” Although some of these claims would be challenging to validate empirically, Dunham is not exaggerating when she describes the amount of work it took for her and her dancers to keep going without the benefit of public funding or an enduring private patron. This essay is part of a larger critical mixed methods project on historical dance touring and transmission: Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. We turn here to the scale of the “everyday,” beginning by building a daily itinerary of Dunham's travels so as to understand better the global method necessary for her company's survival, and how the ongoing pursuit of solvency propelled her, her performers, and her work into the world.

The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.

Almost as soon as Paris was liberated from Nazi Occupation on 25 August 1944, Yiddish actors took back the stages on which they had once performed. In fact, on 20 December 1944, while war and the Holocaust still raged, a small cohort of actors produced what they advertised in the Naye prese as the “first grand performance by the ‘Yiddish folks-bine.’” This performance was to take place at the four-hundred-seat Théâtre Lancry, a performance space located in Paris's 10th arrondissement, not far from the Place de la République and the Marais. “Lancry,” as it was known, had played host to Yiddish theatre as early as 1903 and, during the interwar years, it was the center of Parisian Yiddish cultural activity: dozens of theatre performances occurred there and it was where the Kultur-lige pariz was based, among other institutions. During the postwar years, it also went by the name Théâtre de la République after 1947 and Théâtre du Nouveau-Lancry after 1951, but many still referred to it simply as “Lancry.”

On 29 January 1956, a new play by up-and-coming Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt had its world premiere at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. From the stage of the venerable playhouse, the young playwright's “tragic comedy,” Der Besuch der alten Dame (lit.: The Visit of the Old Lady—a title I shall employ to distinguish it from a well-known but much-changed English adaptation), presented the story of billionairess Claire Zachanassian's return to her impoverished hometown after forty years. During those intervening decades, she used a string of strategic marriages to amass considerable financial assets, but lost a hand and a leg in various transportation accidents. The people of Güllen, a rundown town whose claim to fame is that Goethe once spent the night there, start off the play finalizing their plans for a strategic grand reception at the train station: they have high hopes of convincing their prodigal daughter to save them from poverty and return them to their former glory. That daughter, however, has justice—not salvation—on her mind for the cruel town that exiled her as an unwed, pregnant teenager. After secretly using her fortune to buy and close each of the town's factories, Claire has returned. At a banquet held in her honor, she offers the bankrupt town “one billion” in exchange for the communal murder of Alfred Ill, beloved citizen and father and heir apparent to the mayorship. He also happens to be the high-school sweetheart who perjured himself to betray Claire and the child they conceived all those years ago.