The Lenin Memorial mass meeting, organized by the newly formed National Council of American–Soviet Friendship (NCASF) and featuring scenes from the Soviet play adapted and directed for the Theatre Guild, followed quickly on the heels of a similar mass meeting and rally, “Salute to Our Russian Ally,” staged at Madison Square Garden on 1 November 1942 and attended by twenty thousand supporters. Both events presented speeches by American political, military, and arts leaders and Soviet dignitaries, along with theatrical scenes and musical performances. The rallies concluded when the crowd had been effectively emotionally aroused and asked to stand for the playing of the national anthems of the United States and the USSR. The crowd was asked to approve statements on US–Soviet cooperation and peace to send to President Roosevelt and General Stalin, and it apparently roared back to the stage its approval.

Gwendolen Bishop is a name that appears in the margins of my recent account of the English avant-garde theatre. Prior to that she barely made it even into the margins, and then often with some rather significant indecision as to how actually to spell her name. The aim of this essay is to retrieve her from the margins and bring her more centrally into view. In doing so I consciously weave together her arts practices and her personal life, for these are deeply connected. The making of an avantist culture in early twentieth-century England was done not simply by arts experiments but also by kinds of behavior that challenged dominant ideas. In our Western twenty-first century we note and make much of Edwardian behaviors that contested assumptions about gender and sexuality, but we should note, alongside that, some equally striking challenges to ideas about class. Both are apparent in the Bishop story, which I tell more or less as a biographical narrative. The danger when one recovers a person from the shadows is that, in trying to situate them among their contemporaries, one writes overmuch about those contemporaries, such that our person fades again into the mists. With our biographical focus fixed solidly on her we can, I hope, discover how Gwendolen Bishop made her very particular contribution to this exciting cultural period on the eve of modernism.

Reading the news about theatre in Germany during the past few years, it is hard to avoid the impression that something new is happening: a theatre culture that long emphasized politics now just as often emphasizes ethics. There were the 2022 protests in Munich over claimed anti-Semitism in the play Vögel (Birds of a Kind) by Wajdi Mouawad, which led the Metropoltheater to cancel its planned production. Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blomberg tried to make programming and ensemble changes to the Schauspielhaus Zürich, which they co-led, but the institution's governing board decided not to renew their contracts amid accusations that the theatre had become too “woke” for its audiences. Most prominently, a new artistic team at the prestigious Theatertreffen festival in Berlin curated in 2023 a series of events to coincide with its traditional presentation of the year's ten “most notable” productions. These events included a “Responsibility Treffen” that looked “at how we can show our responsibility toward those who have lost the personal and structural circumstances necessary for working in the theatre.”

One of the world's most enduring and successful cultural diplomacy organizations, the British Council (BC) has played a prominent role in promoting and exporting British theatre, literature, and language across the globe since its founding in 1934. A key component of the BC's self-proclaimed remit of “forging links between Britain and other countries through cultural exchange,” the organization's Drama Division has over its lifetime worked to sponsor and facilitate the overseas touring of a significant number of British theatrical enterprises, exporting both large-scale national company productions with substantial casts and a repertoire of shows, as well as individual actors, directors, and academics embarking on speaking tours. From the stage, renowned actors and star names such as Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Vivien Leigh, Peggy Ashcroft, and John Gielgud were routinely chosen by the BC to appear in series of “theatrical manifestations,” serving in dual capacities both as actors in productions and ambassadors for a nation—the word “manifestation” being the BC's own preferred terminology used to refer to the export of a cultural event during the middle of the past century. Yet unlike comparable accounts of the relationship between the Arts Council and theatre, we possess no systematic study of the BC's involvement in this field, meaning that fundamental questions about the nature, range, and impact of the BC's cultural activity remain unanswered. Indeed, until comparatively recently, the history of the BC has failed to generate much scholarly interest at all, but the nature of its imbrication within British theatrical culture in particular remains severely occluded.

With brightly colored papel picado (cut paper banners), tissue flowers, and Latin American flags festooning the performance area at San Francisco's Z Space, David Herrera Performance Company's September 2023 event, ÓRALE!, promised fun and festivity. On its surface, the performance resembled a typical dance program, with an ensemble of ten dancers performing eleven separate pieces choreographed to songs from the catalog of El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, but an exciting hybrid form of movement theatre emerged through the interplay of live music, dance, and El Vez. Built around the music and performances of Robert Lopez, who has performed as El Vez for more than thirty years, ÓRALE! offered an opportunity for an intergenerational community of artists to find themselves in El Vez's work, and for Lopez to see his own vision reflected in the interpretations of the young dancers and choreographers involved. This article considers how ÓRALE! harnesses the creative possibilities of resisting the implied disciplinary borders that too often separate music, dance, and theatre performance. We begin by discussing the creative invitation that El Vez offers, to make clear how he uses his art as a form of world building, using popular culture to critique US American society, make visible the disparate cultural traditions that exist within US American cultural forms, and to envision new ways of being. We then discuss ÓRALE! following two different through lines: process and product. The collaborative process of ÓRALE! was a site of cultural, intergenerational, and geographic exchange, inviting both performers and audience into a genre-defying performance that raised critical questions around intermediality and transtemporality in the arts. As a process very much in development, the collaboration experimented with learning through doing that led to a performance event that was at times messy and at times magical. Following Elizabeth Ellsworth, ÓRALE! was an example of “knowledge in the making,” a fluid experience through which “the self is understood as a becoming, an emergence, and as continually in the making. This . . . moves us beyond a contemporary politics of difference based in semiotics and linguistics toward an experimental ‘pragmatics of becoming’ based on making and doing.” The event embodied a Muñozian process of disidentification to bring into being a utopian present, residing in this space of becoming and of knowledge in the making to reveal the complexities of Latinx subjectivity while rejecting essentialist understandings of race, ethnicity, and culture.

In 2010 film and theatre historian David Mayer urged researchers to look to early film for evidence of continuing traditions of Victorian pantomime, arguing its “audiences tolerated, even enjoyed, the same sight-gags and hackneyed routines that amused their Victorian ancestors.” This article is a response to his challenge and in the process explores wider interconnections. The harlequinade was the portion of the pantomime that occurred after key characters from the narrative pantomime opening are transformed into Clown, Harlequin, Pantaloon, and Columbine. These stock figures, originally derived from commedia dell'arte, perform a series of comic scenes via mime, dance, and physical action rather than dialogue. Having been an important feature of Regency and Victorian pantomimes, by the end of the nineteenth century the harlequinade had largely vanished (with certain exceptions such as the Britannia Theatre), causing Clement Scott to lament that it is “a pleasure lost for ever and denied to the generation of to-day.” My contention is that there is a direct line of inheritance from the harlequinade through stand-alone comic ballets to chase scenes in early film. All demand a particular type of physical performance, choreographed fast-paced action, and humor. Uncovering the tradition allows us better to understand this form of popular amusement and see how Harlequin's antics were reinterpreted for new audiences. Starting from a seemingly unremarkable comic entertainment produced in 1871 at a minor London theatre, the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, and bearing the intriguing title of Ki-Ki-Ko-Ko-Oh-Ki-Key, I trace its heritage as embodied culture, establishing its links to early nineteenth-century pantomime harlequinade and to simian performance, tracking the appearance of comic or dumb ballets in theatres and music halls in Britain, France, and the United States through one family of performers, the Lauris, and finally identifying the legacy of the complex trap work in silent film of the early twentieth century by examining Lupino Lane's Joyland (1929).

In the winter of 1845–6 the United States Army languished on the border waiting for an opportunity to provoke what would be the Mexican–American War, or, as the Mexicans would come to call it, La Intervención Americana. To break the dull monotony, the army turned to theatre. In January, Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in a production staged for the troops and the local community. Grant would later be the victorious general in the Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. He was not yet that person. In 1846 he was a twenty-four-year-old, newly commissioned officer, only three years out of the US Military Academy. His peers, a cohort of junior officers who would become the senior military leadership on both sides of the Civil War, were also actors in the production, as well as its producers. The anecdote is humorous in large part because the Grant of national record and memory is the least Desdemona-like figure anyone can conceive. It has been repeated multiple times across the nineteenth century and still holds in the imagination almost two hundred years later.

The story of influential French stage director Jacques Copeau's 1917–19 residency in New York City was documented at the time by Copeau himself and subsequently analyzed by Copeau scholars.1 Copeau (1879–1949) is remembered today for his innovative, experimental theatre work in the early twentieth century; he developed core practices that became foundational for modernist stage artistry, including mime and physical theatre as well as devised theatre techniques.2 In 1913, he established his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, breaking away from traditional ornate design practices and envisioning an ensemble of actors trained in methods comparable to those used by Konstantin Stanislavsky, although Copeau knew comparatively little of his techniques at this time.3 Copeau's “‘attempt at dramatic renovation’”4 included staging plays to be performed in repertory and maintaining modest budgets and ticket prices to secure financial stability. In these and other regards, his vision paralleled those of other modernist colleagues not only in Europe, but also in the United States, where the Little Theatre movement was already underway,5 although Copeau similarly had little knowledge of US theatre at this early moment.

One day in 2018, I arrived at Playwrights Horizons in New York City excited to see a new play by Lindsey Ferrentino called This Flat Earth. I did not know much about the story aside from the fact that it had teenage actors playing teenager characters, but I quickly realized that it was about two teens trying to make sense of a recent mass shooting event as their school. The most striking part of this experience was watching Ella Kennedy Davis playing a thirteen-year-old white girl named Julie who takes out her anger, grief, and confusion about this senseless violence on those around her. Davis spent much of the play on the emotional limits of anguish, screaming, crying, and shaking to the point where she continued to do so throughout the curtain call. Both my discomfort with the actor's obvious distress, and my genuine dislike for the whiny, sad, one-dimensional role—whose main characteristic is her ignorance of previous school shootings—were enough to distract me from the play itself. But what created this distancing effect? I first thought of Bert O. States's phenomenological observation that children onstage often break our illusion of the theatrical world, but I noted that my phenomenological response was distinctly different from what I feel when I see children acting onstage. Instead of wondering if the actor understood the play she was in, I instead feared she understood all too well.

Utopia might always prove impossible. But it should not be entirely abandoned as a concept, or as a goal toward which work might be directed. It is hard to see how meaningful change could arise without at least some sense of utopian possibility. The architectural historian Nathaniel Coleman argues in this vein that simply “making-do with reality may be compensatory, but limits possibility, transforming apparent pragmatic agency into its capture by enclosing realism.”1 Dealing with reality—often enough by making do—while keeping an eye on more magical possibilities has sometimes appeared, and has certainly been claimed, as the founding experience of making theatre. Theatres have seemed unique places where much might happen. If they are indeed special places, able to achieve special things, then they are not simply ebullient, but like Foucault's “heterotopias” able to combine dissident elements at the margins. Even when viewed at considerable historical distance, theatrical companies can appear truculent, wayward, and unsettling, even when they remain exploitative, manipulative, hierarchical—as many utopias are.2 Inequities and exclusions based on race, sexuality, gender, and class are not absent from theatrical life. Coleman's point, however, is really to argue that that it ought to be possible to imagine sites and patterns of work that are not already foreclosed by the demands of the market, the law, or other forms of curtailment. It should be equally possible to imagine people coming together, bringing their skills, and working out how they might be combined. Reality and its utopian antithesis might then valuably contradict and coalesce. The combination is never easy. Imperatives, financial and otherwise, loomed large over theatres in Georgian England, as they do today. But improvisation and collective effort could both respond to and yet resist such downward pressures, to make something that is at least potentially dissident, as much a way of working as the work produced.

Quickly Ascending to Heaven,
Hermaphrodite Beauty
of the celestial magic,
You descend to animate
Angelic aura,
alone in your clear, eternal beauty
all other beauties stand before you.
While ANNA's voice,
In Deidamia converses,
a musical passage dissolves
in the aura, a most divine ray
although enclosed within an earthly veil,
it knows the harmony of heaven on earth.1

In June 2022, after a two-and-a-half-year COVID-19 hiatus, I joyfully returned to Europe for a research trip. My purpose was to develop further my next monograph on queering animal symbols, specifically investigating the history of the Dalecarlian (Dala) horse [Dalahäst]. Dala horses are brightly painted wooden toys that were carved and decorated by farmers through the long Swedish winters as early as the seventeenth century. Thereafter, Dala horses became a national icon and symbol of Sweden at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Scheduling also allowed me to attend Midsommar (Midsummer) celebrations in Dalarna (Dalecarlia) County,1 Sweden (Fig. 1). This is the region not only where Dala horses first appeared, but also where many of the traditions surrounding the folkloric, highly theatrical, and now de facto Swedish national holiday of Midsommar most likely originated.

Germany's amateur agitprop theatre movement produced some of the most popular, pervasive, and politically contentious art in the Weimar Republic, not least because of the way performers inserted themselves into the fabric of working-class life with the unequivocal intention of politicizing audiences. Germany's first agitprop troupes formed within youth clubs affiliated with the Communist Party (KPD) around 1925, but the movement quickly grew beyond established club culture, with troupes sprouting up “like mushrooms,” as one critic of the period put it. By 1929 police estimated there were about two hundred self-proclaimed agitprop troupes spread across Germany, all pursuing a transparently aggressive political agenda: to turn the theatre into a site of revolutionary class struggle. If the Weimar period saw an unprecedented mixing of art and politics, agitprop took this tendency to the extreme by declaring theatre to be a weapon in the hands of the proletariat. As the slogan of the 1931 International Meeting of Agitprop Troupes in Cologne put it: “Workers’ theatre is class struggle.”

For French theatre history, the seventeenth century paradoxically stands out as both the Grand Siècle, or golden age, in which Pierre Corneille, Molière, and Jean Racine produced their masterpieces, and as a period of intense antitheatrical sentiment in which Jansenist theologians like Pierre Nicole and Catholic bishops like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet composed treatises against the stage and its players. French historiographers have given the name la querelle de la moralité du théâtre, or the quarrel over the theatre's morality, to the diverse episodes that called into question the theatre's place in public life in prerevolutionary France.1 This quarrel merits a performance analysis. Whereas theatre scholarship has devoted careful attention to the material features of early modern theatre practice, antitheatrical sentiment's story has largely been told as a progression of ideas.2 In works that remain essential reading, scholars such as Moses Barras, Marc Fumaroli, Jonas Barish, Simone de Reyff, Jean Dubu, Sylviane Léoni, and Laurent Thirouin have examined the rise and development of French arguments against the stage, reconstructing French antitheatrical sentiment's intellectual history from antiquity through the French Revolution.3 As demonstrated by titles such as Dubu's Les Églises chrétiennes et le théâtre [Christian churches and the theatre] and de Reyff's L’Église et le théâtre [the church and the theatre], enough of the period's antitheatrical fervor had religious roots that French theatre polemics are often also conceptualized as a conflict between the church and the theatre.

In 1901, the popular American actor and playwright, William Gillette, arrived in the United Kingdom to tour his new play, Sherlock Holmes. Born in Connecticut in 1853, Gillette was by this time a well-established actor and playwright in his native United States and not unknown to British audiences. Just a few years earlier, he had brought his play Secret Service to London, where his performance as an American Union spy had “created a sensation.” Despite his prior reputation and relative celebrity, there was a seeming belief at the time in a natural accord between Gillette and the character that would go on to define his career. A tale recounted by Harold J. Shepstone in the Strand magazine—already the fictional home of the world's most famous sleuth—underlines the belief in the symbiosis of William Gillette and Sherlock Holmes:

Bend your ear to Saturday, 23 July 1853. On that morning, America's first Black concert vocalist and operatic singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, performed at Stafford House, home of prominent English Abolitionist the Duchess of Sutherland, during her UK tour. Born into captivity on a plantation in Mississippi and raised free in Philadelphia, Taylor Greenfield's voice sounded out the fever pitch of America's conflict over slavery. A multioctave singer, she smashed boundaries for race and gender as a Black woman who sang “white” vocal repertoire across registers heard as both female and male. Writing on an early public performance in 1851, one newspaper reviewer summed up the revolutionary threat of Taylor Greenfield's voice by stating “we can assure the public that the Union is in no degree periled by it,” meaning of course, that the Union was. Whether received by pro- or antislavery audiences, Taylor Greenfield's voice was understood to peal out Black emancipation. In his 1855 review of Taylor Greenfield's New York Tabernacle performance, James McCune Smith went as far to compare Taylor Greenfield's voice to the firearms employed by escaped slaves defending their freedom against the Fugitive Slave Act.

The New York Hippodrome theatre brought together many different types of performance on its massive stage. Its opening production in 1905, for instance, included circus acts, a ballet, and a fictionalized Civil War battle (Fig. 1). Many of the acts focused on a key feature in the theatrical environment, a water tank beneath the apron of the stage that could be filled to a fourteen-foot depth. High divers plunged into the tank; in shows with an “ice ballet,” its water was frozen into a skating rink; for a production of HMS Pinafore, a replica ship floated in its water with Brooklyn Navy Yard sailors in the rigging. Yet one tank act repeated and was recalled more than any of the others: a phalanx of women in martial costumes who marched solemnly, row after row, into the water and disappeared.