This new edition of the innovative and widely acclaimed Theatre Histories: An Introduction offers overviews of theatre and drama in many world cultures and periods together with case studies demonstrating the methods and interpretive approaches used by today's theatre historians. Completely revised and renewed in color, enhancements and new material include: a full-color text design with added timelines to each opening section a wealth of new color illustrations to help convey the vitality of performances described new case studies on African, Asian, and Western subjects a new chapter on modernism, and updated and expanded chapters and part introductions fuller definitions of terms and concepts throughout in a new glossary a re-designed support website offering links to new audio-visual resources, expanded bibliographies, approaches to teaching theatre and performance history, discussion questions relating to case studies and an online glossary.
Historians of theatre face the same temptations and challenges as other historians: they negotiate assumptions their own and those of others about national identity and national character; they decide what events and actors to highlight--or omit--and what framework and perspective to use for telling the story.
Personal biases, trends in scholarship, and sociopolitical contexts influence all histories; and theatre histories, too, are often revised to reflect changing times and interests. This significant collection examines the problems and challenges of formulating national theatre histories. I am also greatly indebted to Pirkko Koski of Helsinki University for hosting the conference in Tuusula with the assistance of the faculty and students of the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies in Finland under the auspices of the historiography working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
Lastly I want to thank my former students Fiontan Walsh and Alice Coghlan for their help in preparing the manuscript. Introduction s. While admitting that it sounded like a fascinating topic, I confessed that I knew nothing about these rituals and naively asked whether the early Celts had even come to Ireland. Whether the early Irish Celts existed or whether Irish writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invented them in order to create a coherent picture of a timeless and homogeneous national identity to overcome the demeaning British depictions of them as wild and uncivilized is hotly debated at the moment.
This dispute has even resulted in skeptics such as Simon James being accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Zealous nationalists in many countries have constructed national histories and notions of national character to suit their perspectives, grounding them in a prehistoric past and shaping the evidence to advance their ideologies.
National theatre historians often have to ix x introduction negotiate assumptions their own and those of others about national identity and national character. In addition, they have to decide what types of theatrical events to record, which artists to feature, and what method to use in telling the story. Similarly, the social context, such as the redrawing of national boundaries and the ideological changes in the country, affect their choices. Today, as a result of the changes in political ideologies and borders in Europe since , the expansion of the European Union, and the process of globalization, scholars have taken a renewed interest in nations and nationalism and the construction of national identity.
Despite greater transnational communication, the nation-state remains an important frame for organizing knowledge. The authors of this book are leading theatre scholars from many parts of the world. The succeeding articles examine the theatre histories of individual nations. While it is impossible to represent very many countries in such a book, there has been an attempt to cover a wide geographical area Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North and Central America and to contrast large e.
The book also examines a variety of social and political issues, such as the polarization of language groups in Belgium Peeters and Canada Filewod , the importance of s. While asked to focus on the ways in which theatre histories have been written and need to be rewritten and to examine the assumptions and biases in existing works, the contributors have approached the topic in their own individual ways, with different emphases depending on their own interests and the idiosyncracies of the countries about which they are writing.
London: British Museum Press, , p. James points out that Celtic origins have been used by different peoples for different purposes. In the Venetian exhibition I Celti in , for example, the Celts were shown to be a people who spread all over Europe and therefore constituted the ancestors of the European Union. Ishay, eds. New Jersey: Humanities Press, , p.
Only history remains, uninterrupted, on the scene. What are we talking about when we employ the term theatre? Its usage was extended to cover the most varied events of exhibition, demonstration, and spectacle. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the term theatrum meant a raised place where something that was regarded as worthwhile was shown, so that it could be applied to an execution, a theatrum anatomicum, a Kunst- und Wunderkammer, or a theatre performance. In each case, independently of the breadth of the underlying concept, the more or less well-documented theatrical events of the institutionalized literary spoken theatre in the large cities is generally what is presented.
The indication — which appears as a genuine topos — that one is not aiming for completeness also seems to point in this direction. It is probably to be understood as an insurance clause against the embarrassing possibility that one might miss an event which is then mentioned by another author. In my view, however, a partial perspective is a condition of the possibility of a history of theatre.
Today the statement that we no longer have a universalist concept of history available is practically a truism. The totalizing and teleologically oriented constructions of history have long since become obsolete. The discipline of history has drawn its consequences from this. On the one hand, it reacts against attempts to revive traditional strategies for making sense of history and, for example, return to the epic procedures of a narrative historiography.
In the place of macrohistory — the single, comprehensive history of the modern world — appears the microhistory of the many small histories, each of which has its own importance.
The partial nature of the perspective was made into a condition of the possibility of historiography: every theory explains a different form of microhistory; every method relates to a different level.
These developments in the discipline of history have also had farreaching consequences for the historiography of theatre. The early theatre histories of the eighteenth e. The history of the German theatre, for example — or the theatre of Hamburg or Frankfurt — was presented as a continual progression upward from primitive and rough origins toward an ever more civilized and perfected state. More recent theatre histories, however, proceed from different concepts of history and different methodological approaches.
These determine theatre history as cultural history Kernodle , social history Craik, Kindermann , history of ideas Knudsen, Nicoll, Stamm or as moral and political history Raszewski. Despite such proclamations, most theatre histories then proceed in a largely historicist fashion e.
One often gets the impression that the only criterion for the choice and breadth of material used was that it was available. This means that the partial nature of 6 erika fischer-lichte the perspective is not really accepted as the condition for the possibility of theatre historiography — the historicist ideal of completion comes through at every point. In any case, theatre history can be carried out only with a problem-oriented approach.
There is currently widespread consensus about this approach. In the monographs the subject chosen is usually studied within a limited stretch of time. The emphasis is then placed on its synchronic structure within this stretch of time , and the results of the investigation into structure then determine whether the stretch of time chosen can be seen as a period in relation to the problematic or not.
In theatre histories, by contrast, the process — in other words, the diachronic change that the object of study goes through over a long space of time — has to be examined. The problem can only be ignored — or, better, disguised — if one draws up a factography with a purely chronological approach, listing or presenting, in sequence, what happened after what.
Only by presenting material about events that happened one after another in a chronological order can one avoid the problem of delineating periods, but one thus denies — or at least ignores — the processual nature of theatre history. Within a chronologically developing presentation, the vocabulary is thus one of baroque theatre or seventeenth-century theatre, of Enlightenment theatre or eighteenth-century theatre, and so forth, as if a period were meant by this.
One will thus have to select differing criteria according to the problematic. Hence, for example, a change in the social responsibility for the institutional theatre could act as a criterion, or a change in its social function; an alteration of the norms, values, and attitudes propagated by the theatre would be just as thinkable a criterion as an alteration in its aesthetic principles; a shift in the hierarchical structure of the individual theatrical systems could be a criterion, as much as a fundamental change within one of these systems in acting methods, in drama, in music, in scenery, in theatre architecture, etc.
Here it has to be borne in mind that the criteria can only contribute to answering the question of whether a change of periods has occurred, but not of why it has occurred. However, one will not be able to do without such explanations if theatre history is to be written as a history of process, that is, as a history of diachronic changes. Regarding this problem, it is rather common — even if not too widespread and, by no means, common practice — to relate theatre to other art forms such as architecture, painting, music, literature.
A change within one of the other arts, to a certain extent, may result in a change in theatrical practice. Thus, the new theatre buildings in northern Italy 8 erika fischer-lichte as well as those in Elizabethan England demanded other modes of perception than the performances of mystery plays on the markets and in the streets of medieval towns.
The invention of central perspective and its transfer to the newly erected Italian theatre buildings after the invention of the wings also greatly contributed to a change in the perceptual modes and habits of the spectators. A new kind of music led to the invention of a new theatrical genre, namely, the opera; and a new genre of literature, the domestic play, had as its consequence the development of a new acting style: a realistic-psychological acting style came into being.
Instead of a history of the work of art in the sense used in the other disciplines of art history, which produce this history via analyzing and interpreting the artifacts that are handed down, we are given a history of events. This does not mean, however, that theatre history cannot be carried out as a history of performances. Rather, they derive from the analysis and interpretation of documents about the performance. In other disciplines of art history, these sorts of documents are of course also used as a source, but are seen as somewhat secondary by comparison with the handeddown works; for theatre history they are the primary, and only, sources.
If, however, theatre history takes the works of other arts into consideration — play texts, scores, sketches for sets, character portraits, and so on — these lose their character as works of art and take the status of documents, which are evaluated in relation to the performance — which is not available. Their status is also that of documents about the performances. Theatre history has in general only documents, no monuments. The works of art, the performances, are irretrievably lost.
It means only that the analysis and interpretation of works of art is excluded as a procedure, as is, just as naturally, the possibility of reconstructing the work or performance, as some critical remarks on theatre historiography 9 is regularly attempted by researchers with a historicist orientation. Since this is so, quite another approach might seem promising, namely, to relate theatre performances to other genres of cultural performance. So what was the relationship between the performances of mystery plays, the celebration of Christian holidays through the towns and cities, and the rituals of the church?
Were there processes of exchange going on between them and what did they effect? When did such exchange processes come to an end and what was the result of that? What happened so that such a change could take place? Why was it no longer possible to conceive of a public execution, a court festival, a public demonstration of experiments, the performance of a game, and many other kinds of performances as theatre? Why did it seem necessary to make strong differentiations and to delimit performances of plays, operas, or ballet from all the other genres of performance?
This is not the place to deal with such questions. After the upheaval in Central and Eastern Europe around , an upsurge of nationalism sprang up. Thus, the question of how to write a national theatre history became urgent, in many European countries but not in Germany. This was for good reasons. For, regarding our history, from a German point of view, even an attempt to write a national theatre history proves futile.
Such an enterprise, inevitably, would raise questions about geography and nationality that can hardly be answered. Therefore, the conception of German like theatre continues to evolve. Since , we live again in a united Germany, which, concerning its borders, is not identical with the national state of Since the sixteenth century, Italian, English, and Dutch troupes toured through the German-speaking countries.
Until the eighteenth century, German theatre was a truly European theatre to an extent that hardly can be matched by any other European country. At the courts, Italian opera companies and French comedians prevailed. Although German troupes also played at courts, they were in a much less favorable position than their Italian and French colleagues. Quite a few princes — like Frederick the Great from Prussia — openly despised the German troupes not because of a lack of skills, because there were a number of troupes that were praised for their high standards of act- some critical remarks on theatre historiography 11 ing.
The reason was that they performed in German, a language that many German princes held to be barbaric. At both Protestant and Catholic schools, Latin plays were performed. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the repertoire comprised very few German plays.
Such theatre was called a national theatre because it should be founded on plays written in the national language, which the Frenchspeaking nobility despised and which nevertheless was the only factor uniting the people of the different German-speaking countries. Loewen, who participated in the entreprise and also persuaded Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to take part as a dramaturg.
In this way, the famous Hamburg Dramaturgy was written in — In his history Loewen used historical material collected by one of the best German actors of his time, Conrad Ekhof, to prove that there had been German plays even before the advent of the English comedians, namely, the Fastnachtspiele. These court and national theatres were founded by the princes, who could no longer afford the expensive Italian and French companies and so decided to make do with the much less expensive German troupes.
These theatres were directed by noblemen and open to the general public. Opposing such a development, Goethe proclaimed a German theatre that would perform the most important plays of all cultures and nations. However, he did not dare to present to his audience one of his favorite plays, Sakontala by the Indian poet Kalidasa. He was afraid that the customs, habits, and ways of thinking of his audience were much too different from those in which the Indian play was imbued, and so he doubted that it could be received adequately.
On the other hand, from the eighteenth century onward, German troupes expanded their sphere of activity into regions where even the princes would appreciate and support them. They toured to Poland, to the Baltic states, and to Russia. Petersburg; she also wrote plays that were performed by these troupes.
Louis, and other places by the beginning of the twentieth century. Since the foundation of a German state in , there has been an ongoing exchange of actors, stage directors, designers, plays, and so forth between the theatres of Germany or the German states respectively, and Austria and Switzerland.
Thus, there are many reasons why it makes no sense to write a German national theatre history. A German theatre history, quite necessarily, would therefore have to remain partial even in this respect.
Eine Einleitung Berlin: Reimer, , pp. Stuttgart: Metzler, — ; Oscar G. Munich: Piper, ; Jacqueline de Jomaron, ed. Xolodov, ed. Moscow: Iskusstvo, — The debate in historiography on the issue of history as a narrative construction or even as a fiction was set in motion by Hayden White.
Theatre history has also already discovered this approach to historiography for itself. Inge Buck [Berlin, ]. Beck, , pp. The most important approaches are discussed in Ulrich Raulff, ed.
Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, eds. See ibid. Eduard Devrient, Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst, 5 vols. This charge naturally excludes those theatre histories that are explicitly designed as collections of facts or documents. Einaudi, —. On the problem of distinguishing epochs see also my Kurze Geschichte des Deutschen Theaters, as well as vol. Fink, In considering how to write national theatre histories, it is useful to examine the process of selection and assess the impact of such decisions on past theatre histories.
In order to do this, I will investigate problems of selection according to four important categories — geography, language, ethnicity, and aesthetics — and provide illustrations from Ireland and a few other countries mainly in Europe and North America to exemplify the problems. Geography What constitutes the geographical boundaries of the nation often poses a problem for the theatre historian.
This problem is particularly applicable to theatre histories about nation-states whose borders have frequently changed, such as Slovenia, Germany, and Poland. For example, Heinz Kindermann divided his volumes on European theatre history into national sections, but he treated Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia as separate nations rather than as part of the nation-state of Yugoslavia that was created after the First World War.
The historian also has to decide how much to emphasize theatrical activities within the theatre capital as opposed to the regions. In most countries the theatre capital is also the political capital — Helsinki, Paris, Dublin, London, etc. However, in some countries, such as Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany, for historical or political reasons, the theatre infrastructure in the state is more decentralized and there is arguably no theatre capital.
Similarly, national theatre historians usually privilege the work of the National Theatre in countries with such an institution as the main exponent of theatrical expression within the nation, especially for nationstates emerging in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Irish theatre histories, for example, virtually ignore the work of popular theatres in Dublin at the turn of the century, such as the Gaiety, the Olympia, the Queens, and the Theatre Royal, and concentrate almost exclusively on the work of the National Theatre.
Thus, regardless of whether they were producing the most innovative or popular or professional work, the National Theatres, such as the National Theatres in Dublin, Prague, Helsinki, and Bergen, have been part of the national ist apparatus to establish a hegemonic interpretation and appreciation of the nation. The work of these theatres is related ideologically to the project of cultural nationalism, and, by emphasizing their productions, national theatre histories have tended to reinforce the dominant ideology of the nationalist movement or the state.
National theatre histories have helped strengthen national borders by simulating a national fortress of artistic activity despite the fact that writers, directors, designers, and performers have frequently crossed those borders. This is an especially pertinent issue for an Irish theatre historian. But for the purposes of this national theatre history, they are considered Irish. More recently, Martin McDonagh author of The Beauty Queen of Leenane created similar problems for theatre historians and critics in that he grew up in London and only visited Ireland occasionally.
Generally, national theatre historians look for the connections between different generations of national artists rather than their transnational links to show the continuity in national themes and discourse and the links with other national artistic work. As an extreme case, Greek national theatre history, following the strategy of nineteenth-century national historians who wished to assert a distinct Greek national identity for the new nation-state despite centuries of subjection to the Ottoman empire, has jumped over two thousand years of Byzantine and Ottoman history to emphasize the links between ancient and modern nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek theatre.
However, one could also infer that Erenstein, who has referred to his study as a national theatre history, was presenting the nation as a linguistic entity and that the borders between the nation-states that were created in the early nineteenth century when Belgium became a separate state from the Netherlands do not coincide with the borders of the nation.
In the late eighteenth century, Johann von Herder developed a theory of the organic growth of the nation, its language, and its volksgeist national spirit , as something distinct and unique as the result of its environment and history and in need of cultivation and development by the people of the nation.
However, in virtually every country with a theatrical tradition, theatre has been performed in more than one language. The theatrical events that are performed in the dominant language have been given greater importance in national theatre histories. For example, Slovenian theatre historians have written only about theatre in the Slovenian language and ignored German-speaking theatre in Slovenia, which was the majority form when Slovenia was part of the Austrian empire.
Also, though we tend to think of drama as monolingual with notable exceptions such as Sanskrit, South African, and Chicano plays , European Union EU funding bodies have recently encouraged European integration by subsidizing multilingual theatrical works. The language issue is particularly pertinent in the United States, which in the nineteenth century projected the image of a united and s.
Many American theatre histories have concentrated on English-language productions and have conveyed the impression that most, if not all, theatre expression occurred in that language, but some have deliberately addressed the vast array of such non-English-speaking work e.
In these countries, theatre historians have written about the theatrical activities of one language group, with only occasional acknowledgment of the existence of a quite separate theatrical tradition within the country in one or more other national languages. In Finland the problem is different from the one in Belgium in that the audience and to some extent the artists, especially the directors and designers cross language barriers.
In Canada separate theatre histories have been written of the French-speaking and the English-speaking theatres, but immigrant such as Ukrainian theatre and Native American theatre have largely been ignored until very recently. The Abbey Theatre in Ireland was exceptional in that actors, according to their contracts, had to speak both Irish and English on the same stage until permanent contracts were phased out in the s.
The Belgian National 22 on writing national theatre histories Theatre, which was established in Brussels after the Second World War, was also unusual, with two separate companies, one French-speaking and the other Flemish-speaking, and with very little communication between the personnel of the two companies. An interesting recent departure from a national to a transnational approach to U.
Ethnicity In addition to geography and language, historians are faced with the choice of which ethnic groups to feature in a national theatre history. As mentioned earlier, the United States has a rich history of theatre productions by a variety of ethnic groups in English and other languages. For example, it is unlikely that a theatre historian today would exclude African American theatre from the history of United States theatre though it was quite often done before the civil rights movement.
Similarly, Native American theatre and performance is of increased interest. As in many other countries, autochthonous performance traditions have been studied by anthropologists and ethnologists, but largely as a result of the development of performance studies and ethnic studies as well as the increased visibility and political clout of such groups as Native Americans, more theatre historians have included the song and dance traditions of indigenous peoples.
In Europe the notion of a nation as a group of people with a common ethnicity and language is still pervasive. In Ireland, nineteenthcentury nationalists fostered the belief that the Irish were a distinct and homogeneous Celtic people, and this has informed much of the writing about the nation since then.
Irish theatre historians have to decide how visible to make the British or to what extent to frame their histories as records of the contributions of Irish artists. Because of the importance of the distinction that is drawn between the Irish and the British, the role of the Anglo-Irish or Protestant ascendancy is problematic. An argument could be made that the National Theatre was originated and initially run by people who were as much part of British society as Irish society.
Another problem is that theatre was not an indigenous art form in Ireland but was imported by the British, and drama was apparently not performed in the Irish language before Equally, the historian has to decide whether to stress the nationally generated rather than the colonial elements in theatre, especially as Ireland was part of Britain at the time.
Some theatre historians choose to emphasize dramatic literature rather than performance. National theatre histories written in the emergent nations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries highlighted and helped canonize historical and folk drama, as it was considered more worthy of discussion and examination.
Similarly, the work of female playwrights was neglected. Generally, national theatre histories e. The danger of such a selection is that it further marginalizes the already marginal cultures in society that cannot afford to produce their work professionally. It also minimizes certain kinds of work that are important indicators of social and political history. Furthermore, the importation of plays from other countries in the form of adaptations or translations or in the original language is often excluded from theatre histories even though foreign plays may have outnumbered domestic plays.
Additional Information. Historians of theatre face the same temptations and challenges as other historians: they negotiate assumptions their own and those of others about national identity and national character; they decide what events and actors to highlight--or omit--and what framework and perspective to use for telling the story.
Personal biases, trends in scholarship, and sociopolitical contexts influence all histories; and theatre histories, too, are often revised to reflect changing times and interests. This significant collection examines the problems and challenges of formulating national theatre histories. The essayists included here--leading theatre scholars from all over the world, many of whom wrote essays specifically for this volume--provide an international context for national theatre histories as well as studies of individual nations.
The essays contrast large countries India, Indonesia with small Ireland , newly independent Slovenia with established U. The essays also explore such sociopolitical issues as the polarization of language groups, the importance of religion, the invisibility of ethnic minorities, the redrawing of geographical borders, changes in ideology, and the dismantling of colonial legacies.
It follows the far-reaching development of the form over more than two centuries to This is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region.
It investigates the aesthetics and politics of collaboration to propose a new transnational model for the analysis of Sinophone theatre cultures and to foreground the mobility and relationality of intercultural performance in East Asia.
The research draws on extensive fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, and direct observation of performances, rehearsals, and festivals in Asia and Europe. It offers provocative close readings and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.
This book examines the intersection between sound and modernity in dramatic and musical performance in Manila and the Asia-Pacific between and During this period, tolerant political regimes resulted in the globalization of capitalist relations and the improvement of transcontinental travel and worldwide communication. This allowed modern modes of theatre and music consumption to instigate the uniformization of cultural products and processes, while simultaneously fragmenting societies into distinct identities, institutions, and nascent nation-states.
Taking the performing bodies of migrant musicians as the locus of sound, this book argues that the global movement of acoustic modernities was replicated and diversified through its multiple subjectivities within empire, nation, and individual agencies.
It traces the arrival of European travelling music and theatre companies in Asia which re-casted listening into an act of modern cultural consumption, and follows the migration of Manila musicians as they engaged in the modernization project of the neighboring Asian cities. This collection addresses key questions in women's theatre history and retrieves a number of previously "hidden" histories of women performers.
Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre. Transatlantic Broadway traces the infrastructural networks and technological advances that supported the globalization of popular entertainment in the pre-World War I period, with a specific focus on the production and performance of Broadway as physical space, dream factory, and glorious machine.
This book is the first ever transnational theatre study of an African region. Covering nine nations in two volumes, the project covers a hundred years of theatre making across Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania, and Uganda.
This volume focuses on the theatre of the Horn of Africa. The book shows how the theatres of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, little known in the outside world, have been among the continent's most politically important, commercially successful, and widely popular; making work almost exclusively in local languages and utilizing hybrid forms that have privileged local cultural modes of production. A History of African Theatre is relevant to all who have interests in African cultures and their relationship to the history and politics of the East African region.
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