Annual Meeting
Please join us in Toronto for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2024 Annual Conference!
The Theater and Performance Studies (TaPS) Caucus sponsored panels for 2024 are:
Performance Beyond the Metropole [Theatre and Performance Caucus] Chairs: Julia Fawcett, University of California, Berkeley, [email protected], Fiona Ritchie, McGill University, [email protected]
In recent years scholars such as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Fiona Ritchie, Kathleen Wilson, Lauren Clay, and Angelina Del Balzo have asked us to extend our geographies of the 18th-century theater to cities, towns, and stages far beyond London and Paris: from Kingston to Calcutta and from Brazil to Mozambique. This panel invites papers that explore theater and performances outside of these two metropoles and/or performed in languages other than English. How did these works repeat, revise, or challenge assumptions about city, nation, or empire as they were introduced in London or Paris? What additional voices do they bring to the stage (or the platform, or the town square)? How might a greater attention to these works reshape the way that we understand the contours of theater and performance in the long eighteenth century?
Keywords: Asia/Africa/Latin America, Atlantic World, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Race and Empire, Performance
Motion Pictures before Cinema: Enlightenment Stagecraft [Theatre and Performance Caucus]Chair: Joseph Roach, Yale University, [email protected]
For Lessing, theatre was the dynamic meeting place for the otherwise incommensurable arts-in-time (music, poetry) and arts-in-space (painting, sculpture). For ASECS, it might also prove to be the meeting place for historians of visual culture, material culture, and performance, including dance and opera as well as drama.
From 1660 to 1830, the development of Enlightenment stagecraft challenged rival producers and playwrights alike to compete in the creation of the whole stage picture. That included innovations in moveable scenery, machinery, lighting, special effects, pictorial compositions, expressive stage movements and gestures, and bespoke costuming. Until recently, this hybrid art form has been under-theorized and under-researched as the source of an ensemble of effects in service of dramatic action. That has remained so despite its overlap with well-established interests of ASECS and TAPS members. For instance, as stage designers turned their gaze on distant peoples and places, a number of their most ambitious efforts represented spectacles of empire and empire-to-be. And speaking of visual ideologies, the tragic actress, accessorized from high tête to bejeweled footwear, enveloped by paniers and brocaded mantua, and followed by train-and-parasol-bearing pages, made her show-stopping entrances like a gendered, classed, and oft-racialized float, leading her own intersectional parade.
2024 seems like it might be an auspicious moment to call together scholars working independently on different aspects of the whole stage picture to explore anew the storyboarded dramaturgy of Enlightenment stagecraft.
Keywords: Art/Art History, Cultural Studies, Material Culture, Visual Culture/Studies, Performance
The Theater and Performance Studies (TaPS) Caucus sponsored panels for 2024 are:
Performance Beyond the Metropole [Theatre and Performance Caucus] Chairs: Julia Fawcett, University of California, Berkeley, [email protected], Fiona Ritchie, McGill University, [email protected]
In recent years scholars such as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Fiona Ritchie, Kathleen Wilson, Lauren Clay, and Angelina Del Balzo have asked us to extend our geographies of the 18th-century theater to cities, towns, and stages far beyond London and Paris: from Kingston to Calcutta and from Brazil to Mozambique. This panel invites papers that explore theater and performances outside of these two metropoles and/or performed in languages other than English. How did these works repeat, revise, or challenge assumptions about city, nation, or empire as they were introduced in London or Paris? What additional voices do they bring to the stage (or the platform, or the town square)? How might a greater attention to these works reshape the way that we understand the contours of theater and performance in the long eighteenth century?
Keywords: Asia/Africa/Latin America, Atlantic World, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Race and Empire, Performance
Motion Pictures before Cinema: Enlightenment Stagecraft [Theatre and Performance Caucus]Chair: Joseph Roach, Yale University, [email protected]
For Lessing, theatre was the dynamic meeting place for the otherwise incommensurable arts-in-time (music, poetry) and arts-in-space (painting, sculpture). For ASECS, it might also prove to be the meeting place for historians of visual culture, material culture, and performance, including dance and opera as well as drama.
From 1660 to 1830, the development of Enlightenment stagecraft challenged rival producers and playwrights alike to compete in the creation of the whole stage picture. That included innovations in moveable scenery, machinery, lighting, special effects, pictorial compositions, expressive stage movements and gestures, and bespoke costuming. Until recently, this hybrid art form has been under-theorized and under-researched as the source of an ensemble of effects in service of dramatic action. That has remained so despite its overlap with well-established interests of ASECS and TAPS members. For instance, as stage designers turned their gaze on distant peoples and places, a number of their most ambitious efforts represented spectacles of empire and empire-to-be. And speaking of visual ideologies, the tragic actress, accessorized from high tête to bejeweled footwear, enveloped by paniers and brocaded mantua, and followed by train-and-parasol-bearing pages, made her show-stopping entrances like a gendered, classed, and oft-racialized float, leading her own intersectional parade.
2024 seems like it might be an auspicious moment to call together scholars working independently on different aspects of the whole stage picture to explore anew the storyboarded dramaturgy of Enlightenment stagecraft.
Keywords: Art/Art History, Cultural Studies, Material Culture, Visual Culture/Studies, Performance