Pantomime

Monsters within British pantomime are ubiquitous creatures, from the ogre in the castle of Puss in Boots to the Giant at the top of the beanstalk, and as personified in the monstrous acts of Wicked Stepmothers, frightening Barons and diabolical henchmen. The popularity of pantomime means that it is often the first encounter that a child has with a monster in material form, sharing the same physical space: a theatre. Bruno Bettelheim (1991) argues that fairytales, from where many pantomimes are drawn, are our first negotiations with the monstrous. In pantomime, the audience are complicit in the act of finding, chasing and dealing with the monster, and the ethical positioning of this by writers and directors is paramount in guiding us to understand how we may deal with the 'other' in our own lives. This paper critically interrogates the threat posed by these monsters when invested with a materiality in performance. In the first instance, I explore the interplay between stage space and the representation of the monster and how this relates to my professional experience of directing over twenty-five professional pantomimes in the United Kingdom since 1999. Tracing this spatial dynamic between monster and audience to the medieval stage and the ludic dimension to the staging of the devils in the mystery play, the paper argues that there is a long-reaching historical antecedent to the staging of evil that informs and inspires spatial practices in modern-day pantomime. Key questions are: to what extent have pantomimes historically presented and rehearsed the threat posed by the monster in order to contain that threat?; What ethical considerations do producers, writers and directors now face in the contemporary pantomime? Finally, to what extent does the popular form of pantomime itself matter as a vehicle for enabling audiences both young and old to confront the monstrous Other?

... Page 5. The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage Gennaro Magri and His World Edited by Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Bruce Alan Brown THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS Page 6. ... 4. Ballet — Italy - History — 18th century. L Harris-Warrick, Rebecca. II. ...

The paper explores Tati's use of new film media in 'Playtime' in ways that reveal more fundamental modes of social, mimetic and situational mediation as performed in the film by architects, and architect-like characters, and by the architectural settings which Jacques Tati devised.

Paper on a little funerial altar from Laus Pompeia (now in the Ambrosiana Library), representing the pantomime Teocritus Pylades performing in two different costumes. The paper examines the history of the image of the pantomime, its inspiration from the iconographic tradition of the actor and the close relationship between iconographic and danced schemata. The altar offers an important contribution to understand the visual aspects of the pantomime's performance. About also collecting of Antiquities in modern Lombardia (Talenti collection).

Besides the doltishly clumsy, amusingly simple and happily idiotic type of clown, there is the evil violent clown. Violent clowns can be traced back to the (circus-)pantomimes of the nineteenth century, to circus tradition and circus literature. Thus, on the basis of the popular corpo-eccentric clown-theatre presented by the French Théâtre des Funambules between 1819 and 1846, as well as the pantomimes of the brothers Hanlon-Lee, this article presents Batman’s Joker as descendant of a specifically violent circus tradition and its reflection in literature. Baudelaire and Adorno understand the aesthetic of violence characteristic of these circus pantomime clowns as the essence of modernity. The appearance and playful rearrangement, montage and reinterpretation of historical (circus) clown elements are typical for Batman’s Joker. Thus, he can be described as a neo-modern clown of violence.


Jürgens, A.-S. (2014): The Joker, a neo-modern clown of violence, in: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5/4, 441–454.

The goal of this study was to determine the effect of using some dramatic
activities on developing the oral performance skills of second year prep
school students in English. The dramatic activities included storytelling,
story-acting, pantomime, puppetry, role-playing, reader’s theater and choral
reading. The oral performance skills were pronunciation, vocabulary, wordformation,
grammar and language functions.
To investigate the problem of the study, the experimental design was
adopted. Seventy-eight girls of second year prep students in two classes from
Sammanoud Prep School for Girls were chosen as the subjects of the study.
The two classes were randomly assigned to either the experimental or the
control group. The experimental group was taught the first term units
including stories of Hello! 4 using the dramatic activities. On the other hand,
the control group studied these units as recommended by the Ministry of
Education. The two groups were pretested and posttested on their oral
performance skills.
For investigating the differences between the mean scores of the
experimental group and those of the control group on the oral performance
pre- and post-test, the t-test for independent samples was applied. The results
demonstrated that there were statistically significant differences between the
mean score of the experimental group and those of the control group on the
oral performance post-test favoring the experimental group in the oral
performance in general and in the skills of pronunciation, word-formation,
grammar and language functions.
Based upon these findings and in

In this study, we will examine street art, street artists and the social impact they create
in public sphere. The study will be a qualitative research and will be conducted with
interviewers. The main aim of the study is to be able to observe the street art that exists in
society and the impact of street art on society qualitatively.
We will conduct the study in three parts. First, we will make a theoretical introduction
with the literature research. Then, we will collect and analyze the data we obtained from the
interviewers. Lastly, we will make a general summary of our study and finalize it.
Our study will be read as a reflection of the subculture created by the street and from
the street, by taking into consideration the literature research we have done. Therefore, the
study will be carried out in close contact with the facts of the street in the center of social life.
Furthermore, this study aims to understand the worlds of street artists and examine them from
different perspectives.

two bronze inscription from Halaesa (Sicily), of the Augustan age, testify to the involvement of more than 800 priests of Apollo. The international net of Apollonian priests is mirrored by Propertius and other poets, who mention contributions and presents to Apollo Palatinus from famous temples of the Greek world

My paper examines wordless comic books and woodcut novels by focusing mainly on the following works: Milt Gross' He Done Her Wrong, Peter Kuper's Mind's Eye, Shaun Tan's The Arrival, and Lynd Ward's Gods' Man. Beneath the visual surface of these works lies dormant, as I would like to argue, a linguistic aspect that only a thorough analysis can unravel. By exploring the narrative tech- niques employed in these pictorial narratives, the interdependency of visual and linguistic signs be- comes evident. The study aims to identify and name methods at play in the aforementioned works that borrow and appropriate narrative techniques from other media by utilizing their own media- specific means. The (failed) attempt to fully dispense with language, as I suggest in my essay, has called forth an innovative visual vocabulary and distinct narrative techniques that can only be en- countered in wordless graphic and woodcut novels.

Versão expandida de tese de doutorado de 2005, eca/usp, Gestual, Teatro e Melodrama. Performances, Pantomimas e Teatro nas feiras. Maria Lucia Puppo resume: Para o autor, o melodrama não se configura exatamente como um gênero, mas sim como uma estrutura dramática em constante transformação, graças aos contínuos diálogos travados com as diferentes formas artísticas que historicamente com ele coexistiram. Interagindo com modalidades dramáticas diversas como a tragédia, a comédia, a novela de cavalaria, a ópera cômica e a comédia lacrimosa entre outras, o melodrama simultaneamente as contêm e é incessantemente modificado por elas, constituindo-se uma forma cuja especificidade é o hibridismo.Nosso autor desvela as restrições veiculadas pelo senso comum em torno dessa modalidade teatral, enquanto cuidadosamente vai desmantelando uma a umas essas percepções apriorísticas. Aquilo que comumente é qualificado de clichê, gestos previamente demarcados, repetições desnecessárias passa a ser visto agora por um outro prisma e gera implicações inesperadas. A partir de considerações dessa natureza, Robson Camargo formula uma relevante constatação: a crítica teatral contemporânea no apogeu do melodrama não dispunha de instrumentos de análise suficientemente finos que pudessem dar conta de uma modalidade de espetáculo tão dinâmica, dentro da qual estilos diferentes se influenciam reciprocamente.

Praca bada relację cyrku i pantomimy zarówno w kontekście historycznym, jak i artystycznym i terapeutycznym.
Pierwszy rozdział opisuje dzieje pantomimy i cyrku od czasów prehistorycznych aż do XXI w. Autor stawia tezę, że na przestrzeni dziejów te dwie sztuki drugiego nurtu wspomagały się wzajemnie, by dotrzeć do jak najszerszej grupy odbiorców. Po osiągnięciu tego celu ich drogi rozchodziły się, by poszukiwać własnych środków wyrazu.
Drugi rozdział opisuje realizację projektu "móve", w ramach którego przeprowadzony został cykl warsztatów świadomej pracy z ciałem i rekwizytem.

"Pomiędzy pantomimą a cyrkiem - w poszukiwaniu własnego sposobu pracy" to praca dyplomowa napisana w Państwowym Pomaturalnym Studium Kształcenia Animatorów Kultury i Bibliotekarzy we Wrocławiu "SKiBA" pod kierunkiem mgr Katarzyny Łuczyńskiej.

This essay contends that young Americans were so omnipresent as performers and audience members during the nineteenth century that virtually all forms of popular theater from this period—including the pantomime, the extravaganza, the melodrama, and the minstrel show—can profitably be considered children’s theater. HUMPTY DUMPTY, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, RIP VAN WINKLE: many of the century’s biggest theatrical hits were enacted by mixed-age casts for mixed-age audiences, because the general population was not yet convinced that children needed to be shielded from paid labor and provided with their own separate and specially sanitized leisure activities. Too often, we presume that nineteenth-century children were so strongly associated with innocence, dependency, and vulnerability that no significant conflict over this bourgeois ideal took place. Yet as the controversies that swirled around all-child troupes such as the Viennoise Children in the 1840s and child stars such as Buster Keaton at century’s end attest, the nineteenth-century stage was a site of struggle over how to define the categories child and adult. Just as conflicting attitudes about women and African Americans were on display in burlesques and minstrel shows, so too deep uncertainties about what it meant to be a child played themselves out in nineteenth-century productions aimed at “children of all ages.”

Abstract in english
Between 1820 and 1846 the mime actor Jean-Gaspard Deburau was Pierrot in the Parisian Théâtre des nambules. His reckless and impassable acting style was read as a new poetic and dramatic pattern by two generations of poets.
The Romantic Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier created the myth of the ‘white man’, whose melancholic and cruel gesture interpreted the disease and the spiritual vacuum of an entire group of artists in search for a new ‘poetic drama’. It was nevertheless Charles Baudelaire who built a new theory of drama out of this mute play mode: his essay De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts (1855) defines pantomime as the life synthesis, quintessence of comedy, pure comic element: the grotesque. Pantomime shows human tragic greatness, balanced between the vacuum of reality and the light of dream.
Théodore de Banville and Jules Champfleury took up (?) Baudelaire's suggestions and elaborated two dramatic theories that would be seminal for Symbolist and Naturalist Drama.

Abstract in french
La deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle a recueilli les suggestions contenues dans la réflexion baudelairienne sur le rire (« significatif » : imitation du réel ; « grotesque » : absolu) ; l’engouement démontré par les Romantiques et par Baudelaire lui-même pour le mimodrame de Deburau a donné lieu entre 1870 et 1895 à ce que j’ai appelé dans cet article la pantomime naturaliste et la pantomime symboliste. Dans les deux cas la pantomime est considérée comme le genre par excellence de la synthèse et partant de la possibilité d’une réforme de l’art dramatique.
Synthèse de la vie pour les Naturalistes (qui à la suite de Champfleury continuaient le comique significatif), synthèse de l’idéalité de l’homme et de son mépris pour la nature pour les Symbolistes (Mallarmé, Huysmans, mais Paul Margueritte aussi, dans une certaine mesure). Dans les toutes dernières années du siècle toutefois les deux écoles semblent se fondre ou plutôt se confondre dans une sorte de cynisme résigné, où le réel, mais le rêve aussi, sont morts : les cas de Hennique et de Laforgue en témoignent. Pierrot est grivois, sarcastique, glacial : un imposteur. Sa face blanche est désormais le moule parfait de la modernité.

The article analyses a number of late antique Christian sources that use choreutic gesture to highlight the cultural alterity of pagan cults, Judaism and heretical movements. The Christian intellectual critique of dancing is not interpreted as an aversion to the practice per se, but as part of an anthropological process that encouraged men to become perfect imitators of the angelic choreia in the Platonic framework. This Christian choreia did not only characterize a presumed Ideal City, but also had to be performed during life on earth. It excluded infames, pagans, Jews and heretics, namely all those that did not comply with the new gestural and behavioural schemata defined by Christian intellectuals.

Le conte de fées, qu’il soit politique, moral, scientifique, didactique, féministe ou psychanalytique, a fait l’objet de multiples études qui envisagent ce genre le plus souvent au prisme de la littérature, à travers l’histoire fertile de ses réécritures, de circulations en traductions jusqu’à ses adaptations.
Mais qu’en est-il de la valeur esthétique du conte en dehors du texte littéraire ? Comment les arts se sont-ils appropriés le conte ? Existe-t-il une esthétique proprement féerique ? Le conte a-t-il une couleur, un goût, une texture ? Quels rapports entretient-il avec l’art pompier, le kitsch, l’art romantique ou le surréalisme ? Quelles sont ses affinités avec la musique ?
Cet ouvrage consacré au conte de fées dans l’art cherche à interroger la dimension esthétique plurielle de la féerie pour mettre en évidence l’influence du conte de fées sur d’autres champs et pratiques artistiques, sans pour autant se limiter à une période ou à une aire géographique.

Attached is the Introduction to *The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain* (Oxford UP:2016).  For the full text, copies are available for sale via OUP website.  You can message me for a discount code.  The book is also available through Oxford Scholarship Online.

The first book-length study of the relationship of science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores crucial role of spectacle and performance in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was “staged” in a double sense.  On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic.  But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the ways in which eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that reverberated across the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of science and scientists in eighteenth-century plays influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play in modern life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, what was then called natural philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves.  In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Focusing on the revue 8d a Mile (1913), this study looks at how London West End revue constituted a particular response to mounting social, political and cultural inse- curities over Britain’s status and position at the beginning of the twentieth century. Just as musical comedy had in many ways reflected Britain at its zenith, revue by comparison captured a feeling of decline. In revue’s shapeless and haphazard version of modernity, anxieties about degeneration and the condition and character of modern England became deeply problematized, providing a cultural expression of a fragile and changing social and political order.

There is a general assumption that the development of professional dance in the 18th-century European musical theatre can be attributed principally to the influence of la belle danse, an academic dancing style created and treasured by the Royal Academy of Dance (Académie royale de danse), which was established by Louis XIV in Paris in 1661. This paper then does not aim at refuting the aforementioned supposition, rather it will highlight the impact that the masterful movement of Italian commedia dell’arte performers indisputably exerted on technical skills required of professional dancers in the 18th century.

В статье рассматривается природа человеческого движения в его связи с языком и вне этой связи, то есть семиотическая и несемиотическая стороны движения. Анализируются различия движения и жеста, дается определение жеста. Движение сравнивается на с «языком» как формализованной системой знаков, а с «речью» как живым исполнением этой системы. Кратко характеризуются семиотический и структуралистский подходы к движению. Им противопоставляются подходы, условно называемые «феноменологическими», в которых движение берется как практика или производство опыта.  В таких подходах акцент делается на переживание движения, его ощутимость, на чувство движения – кинестезию, лежащее в основе практических навыков и телесного знания.

The subject of this article is the monumental tomb of the pantomime artist Krispos which is found the necropolis area of the ancient Heraclea Pontica city and which is protected in the garden of the Karadeniz Ereğli Museum. 19 line Greek inscription on the marble forming the monumental tomb is located. There is also a bust in the aedicula shaped temple which today is missing. The inscription has been previously published by Sencer Şahin. Trilby hat with a similar goods located, in the upper part of the aedicula is located in the middle of the pediment. From this point of view on this motif and inscription, the art of pantomime will be analyzed in this
article.

An emblematic example of the convergence of genres is the Sinfonia di introduzione to Europa riconsciuta (Milan, 1778) which was used again in Cesare in Farmacusa (Vienna, 1800) as somewhere to experiment the connection between music and gesture.

Salieri used the ‘sinfonia in azione ’ of Europa riconosciuta (1778) for Cesare in Farmacusa (1800). The two theatrical compositions actually belong to two different genres; the first defined in the libretto as «serious drama» the other as «heroicomic drama», a close relative of comic opera.
The fact that Salieri explained the intention of many of his Overtures with personally written notes is very interesting, which were additions to many of his scores that were written in his own hand. In the Overtures the composer purposely mixes the styles together, using them as manifests for the varieties of genres that his compositions belong to.
Many of his Overtures illustrate an action, sometimes are imagined through the music and others created on the stage, but in all cases the ideal place to experiment the widespread interest in the new relationship between music and gesture, which the new pantomime dance genre produces and, more generally, the new attention for scenic action and movement.
Salieri’s Overtures are a demonstration of how classic Viennese composition techniques at that time were instruments that helped the public to identify the sense of the musical situations beyond the text.

In 1855, Nadar and his brother Adrien Tournachon produced a series of large format photographs of the mime Charles Deburau in the costume of Pierrot. These photographs severed the figure of Pierrot from his previous environmental ground, as this ground had been produced and mythologized by the authors Jules Janin and Champfleury. Prior to 1855, Janin and Champfleury had successively insisted upon the relationship between Pierrot and the “popular” milieu of a working class theater on the Boulevard du Temple. Yet the photographs, for technical, aesthetic, and cultural reasons, exclude this milieu. Instead, the photographs perform and reform Pierrot’s identity, detaching the identity of the character from the popular and attaching it to the distinctive features of Charles Deburau. Through the photographs, Pierrot loses the particularity of a historically specific cultural ground – however mythologized that ground had become – and is now free to move between any ground whatsoever. This transformation of the character thematizes one of the effects of photography as an emergent technology, which was to exacerbate the fissures between figures and grounds that haunted nineteenth-century art. Pierrot proved only too ready to lose a determining historical ground and to float instead into the immateriality of spectacle.

L’epiteto di ‘decima Musa’, com’è noto, venne conferito a Saffo dagli antichi stessi, a tal punto preda dell’incanto soffuso nei suoi versi da ricondurli a un’origine divina, olimpia. La decima Musa ebbe tuttavia un differente destino, rispetto alle sue nove ‘sorelle’: divenne infatti fonte di ispirazioni innumerevoli non solo in virtù della facoltà poetica, ma anche grazie alla sua persona (o meglio, personaggio), che fu ri-creato – spesso in chiave leggendaria – dagli autori che a lei si volsero. Seguire nel tempo le orme di una Musa è impresa sempre ardua; particolarmente ardua, nel caso in cui la Musa risorga di continuo, non esclusivamente come spirito e afflato di bellezza, ma, si è detto, anche e soprattutto in qualità di personaggio.
I testi riuniti nel presente volume, che risalgono tutti ai decenni fra Settecento e Ottocento, offrono una testimonianza (senza pretese di esaustività, ma rappresentativa della coeva scena letteraria italiana) delle continue rinascite del personaggio-Saffo. Lo studio e la cura di tali opere costituiscono un attraversamento di generi letterari molteplici e compositi: dalle traduzioni ai liberi rifacimenti delle liriche attribuite a Saffo sino alle biografie, dal teatro tragico al ballo mitologico (con varie ibridazioni e contaminazioni) è la storia di un’intera stagione di cultura a dispiegarsi, sul filo di un unico motivo conduttore, sotto gli occhi di chi legge, specialista o appassionato che sia, a conferma della vitalità inesauribile di Saffo quale sorgente non solo di racconto, ma anche di nuove idee sulla poesia, di nuovi modi di fare poesia.

Since the late 1990s, interest in anime and cosplay in Australia has grown to the point that in 2010 there were fifteen anime and Japanese popular culture conventions held throughout the country, with more than twenty planned for 2013. This article will investigate the attitudes towards Boys Love or BL narratives within the Australian cosplay community, both in terms of the consumption the production of BL narratives. Also known as <i>shōnen ai</i> or <i>yaoi</i>, BL narratives, such as those found in manga and anime, depict same-sex love affairs between (usually) beautiful boys or young men. As part of this research, an online survey has been conducted using Survey Monkey. This survey was live between November 2010 and January 2011 and was open to Australian cosplayers over the age of eighteen years. Additional data has been collected from various networking sites frequented by cosplay practitioners in different cities around Australia.

La publication du Portrait de l'artiste en saltimbanque, de Jean Starobinski, a mis en lumière un thème cultivé par les artistes depuis le Romantisme : le saltimbanque sert à attaquer l'honorabilité bourgeoise, en même temps qu'il figure le double grimaçant du créateur. L'attention de Starobinski s'est surtout focalisée sur les arts plastiques. Mais un univers avait échappé à l'attention des critiques : c'est celui de la littérature et, plus précisément, du roman. Sa richesse égale sans aucun doute l'importance des témoignages iconographiques, qu'il accompagne et qu'il complète. Car les romanciers, souvent amis des peintres fascinés par le cirque, furent autant qu'eux sensibles à la magie de la piste. Comme l'indique l'exemple de Gustave Kahn et de Gustave Coquiot (les premiers admirateurs, respectivement, de Seurat et de Picasso), le regard des artistes et celui des écrivains se conjuguent au point d'apparaître souvent indissociables. Remettre en lumière les plus beaux de ces romans revient donc à restaurer l'ensemble d'une sensibilité esthétique, qui connut son apogée entre la proclamation de la Troisième République et la Première Guerre mondiale. Depuis le Romantisme, les poètes affirment leur prédilection pour les saltimbanques, en qui ils reconnaissent leur double : Banville, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue, Apollinaire, hantent les cirques et les fêtes foraines. Mais c'est entre les deux guerres de 1870 et 1914 que le cirque, comme tous les lieux de plaisir, devient un véritable objet de fiction.
Ce volume restaure l'ensemble d'une sensibilité esthétique : celle qui régna au début de la Troisième République, encore fiévreuse du désastre de Sedan et décidée à s'étourdir, dans Paris vaincu mais qui reste la capitale du cirque. Toutes les écoles littéraires se donnent rendez-vous autour de la piste pour encenser une représentation qui ne ressemble à aucune autre, et surtout pas au théâtre : entraînés par les déclarations de Théophile Gautier, des frères Goncourt, de Barbey d'Aurevilly, de Zola, de Mallarmé, les écrivains glorifient l'authenticité du cirque, ce lieu où les acteurs ne trichent pas et où la médiocrité se solde par la mort.
L'ouvrage est précédé d'une longue introduction sur la présence du cirque dans la littérature depuis le Romantisme, suivie d'une chronologie mettant en rapport, année par année de 1870 à 1914, les principaux événements du cirque avec les événements historiques et artistiques. Chaque roman est entièrement annoté et précédé d'une analyse spécifique. L'ouvrage comprend un index des noms de personnes.