‘First-Class Evening Entertainments’: Spectacle and Social Control in a 
Mid-Victorian Music Hall

First-Class Evening Entertainments was the title given to a variety programme presented at Hoxton Hall in East London when it first opened in 1863. In 2000 Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook were commissioned by Hoxton Hall and the English National Opera Studio to make a new music theatre piece for the Hall, which led to an investigation of the content and context of the original programme. In the following article Nicholas Till offers a reading of the 1863 programme as an example of the mid-Victorian project to exercise social control over the urban working classes. Nicholas Till is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Wimbledon School of Art, and co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (Faber, 1992), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Opera.

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Staging the Delinquent: Edwardian Theatre and The Hooligan

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x20000639 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 36 (4) ◽

pp. 344-354

Author(s):

Martin Heaney

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Cultural Production ◽

Drama Education ◽

Senior Lecturer ◽

Working Classes ◽

Commercial Theatre ◽

And Performance ◽

The University ◽

Participatory Arts ◽

Urban Working

W. S. Gilbert is best known as a dramatist and librettist who produced fourteen comic operas with his collaborator, composer Arthur Sullivan. Less familiar is his last work The Hooligan (1912), one of the first realist representations of the young urban working-class male seen on the twentieth-century British stage. This article explores the Edwardian conditions of social and cultural volatility reflected in the authoring and production of this play. It discusses the period as one where narratives of gender and class that underpin contemporary perspectives were shaped and contested. It demonstrates how hegemonic systems of cultural production created binary distinctions between the ‘ideal’ of the ‘Imperial Youth’ and the alien, working-class ‘other’. Gilbert’s authoring of the working-class male subject and his representation in a commercial theatre were subject to both market controls and middle-class ‘anxieties’. This historical perspective indicates continuities between these factors and the contemporary representation of the young urban working classes. Martin Heaney is a senior lecturer in Drama, Applied Theatre and Performance at the University of East London. He is co-director of the Centre of Applied and Participatory Arts and has published articles in various journals, including Research in Drama Education. His book chapter ‘Edward Bond and The Representation of Adolescence’ is forthcoming in The Routledge Guide to Theatre for Young People (2021).

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Decontamination Double-Bill: #12 – fragmentation and distortion / #13 – Lecture about sad music and happy dance

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298218000384 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 72 (286) ◽

pp. 74-77

Author(s):

Michael Baldwin

Keyword(s):

Experimental Music ◽

New Music ◽

North West ◽

Music Community ◽

Artistic Director ◽

Sad Music

Over the last decade, Larry Goves, composer and lecturer of music at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), has been steadily enriching the experimental music community in Manchester, UK. As an artistic director and curator, Goves regularly presents his and other's work through the ensemble The House of Bedlam, the annual New Music North West festival, and the Decontamination series. This review covers the twelfth and thirteenth instalments of the Decontamination series, presented as a double-bill at RNCM's Carol Nash Recital Room on 28 February 2018.

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I COULDN'T MAKE A PIECE AS BEAUTIFUL AS THAT: A CONVERSATION WITH ALLISON CAMERON

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298218000323 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 72 (286) ◽

pp. 17-30

Author(s):

Anna Höstman

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

San Diego ◽

Experimental Music ◽

New Music ◽

Bang On A Can ◽

Artistic Director

AbstractThe composer Allison Cameron (b. 1963) lives in Toronto. Her music has been widely performed at festivals such as Emerging Voices in San Diego, Evenings of New Music in Bratislava, Festival SuperMicMac in Montréal, Newfoundland Sound Symposium, New Music across America, Bang on a Can Marathon in New York, New York, and Rumori Dagen in Amsterdam. A dedicated performer of experimental music in Toronto, Allison co-founded the Drystone Orchestra (1989) and the Arcana Ensemble (1992). She has been improvising since 2000 on banjo, ukulele, cassette tapes, radios, miscellaneous objects, mini amplifiers, crackle boxes, toys and keyboards, in collaboration with Éric Chenaux, the Draperies, Ryan Driver, Dan Friedman, Mike Gennaro, Kurt Newman, John Oswald, Stephen Parkinson and Mauro Savo, among other musicians. In that same year she became Artistic Director of Toronto's experimental ensemble Arraymusic, a position she held for five years. In 2007, she founded the Allison Cameron Band with Eric Chenaux and Stephen Parkinson, and in 2009, the trio c_RL with Nicole Rampersaud (trumpet) and Germaine Liu (drums). Allison has experimented with graphic and notational scores that will soon be gathered and published as a collection. Additionally, she is the winner of the 2018 KM Hunter Award for music in Ontario.

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A Conversation on Directing Opera

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x21000142 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 37 (3) ◽

pp. 246-255

Author(s):

Katie Mitchell ◽

Mario Frendo

Keyword(s):

Performing Arts ◽

Musical Score ◽

Senior Lecturer ◽

Contemporary World ◽

Art Form ◽

Don Giovanni ◽

National Opera ◽

Dramatic Text ◽

Theatre Studies ◽

And Performance

Katie Mitchell has been directing opera since 1996, when she debuted on the operatic stage with Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the Welsh National Opera. Since then, she has directed more than twenty-nine operas in major opera houses around the world. Mitchell here speaks of her directorial approach when working with the genre, addressing various aspects of interest for those who want a better grasp of the dynamics of opera-making in the twenty-first century. Ranging from the director’s imprint, or signature on the work they put on the stage, to the relationships forged with people running opera institutions, Mitchell reflects on her experiences when staging opera productions. She sheds light on some fundamental differences between theatre-making and opera production, including the issue of text – the libretto, the dramatic text, and the musical score – and the very basic fact that in opera a director is working with singers, that is, with musicians whose attitude and behaviour on stage is necessarily different from that of actors in the theatre. Running throughout the conversation is Mitchell’s commitment to ensure that young and contemporary audiences do not see opera as a museum artefact but as a living performative experience that resonates with the aesthetics and political imperatives of our contemporary world. She speaks of the uncompromising political imperatives that remain central to her work ethic, even if this means deserting a project before it starts, and reflects on her long-term working relations with opera institutions that are open to new and alternative approaches to opera-making strategies. Mitchell underlines her respect for the specific rules of an art form that, because of its collaborative nature, must allow more space for theatre-makers to venture within its complex performative paths if it wants to secure a place in the future. Mario Frendo is Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is the director of CaP, a research group focusing on the links between culture and performance.

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The royal New Wave: Aubrey Mellor and Queensland Theatre Company, 1988–1993

Queensland Review ◽

10.1017/qre.2015.28 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 22 (2) ◽

pp. 157-167

Author(s):

Karen Hands

Keyword(s):

Artistic Identity ◽

New Wave ◽

National State ◽

Cultural Planning ◽

Theatre Company ◽

Artistic Director

AbstractWhen Aubrey Mellor returned to Brisbane in 1988 to become the second artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company (QTC), the company had been under the direction of a British-born and trained director since its formation in 1969. QTC was part of the national state theatre company network established as a result of postwar cultural planning. The network was charged with promoting national drama and producing theatre to a high artistic standard, but this objective imposed very specific constraints around the companies' programming. This was particularly observable at QTC: the company had been culturally and geographically distant from the New Wave movement that emerged in Sydney and Melbourne between 1968 and 1981. Mellor brought his experience of working in key institutions during this movement to QTC where he pursued a personal mission to develop Australian playwriting. During his five-year leadership he transitioned the artistic identity of the company to a more contemporary artistic framework.

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I Love You with an Asterisk: African-American Experimental Composers and the French Jazz Press, 1970-1980

Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation ◽

10.21083/csieci.v1i2.18 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Stephen H. Lehman

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Art Music ◽

Experimental Music ◽

New Music ◽

The Other ◽

The Political ◽

Political Climate ◽

Western Art ◽

Improvised Music ◽

The Impact

Beginning in the 1970s, the French jazz press became the first community of critics seriously to consider the new African-American experimental music being put forth by musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). More than any other aspect of their music, the incorporation of instrumentations, concepts, and musical forms normally associated with Western art music challenged assumptions within both the European and the American jazz communities. The response to these musicians in publications like Jazz Magazine and Jazz Hot was complex and multi-dimensional. A genuine fascination with this new music was nevertheless tempered by received notions about race and musical idiom. The political climate in France after the student demonstrations of 1968 provided a context which also may have been important for at least some French jazz critics. The impact of the French jazz press on the field of improvised music in France in the 1970s was only one component of a transactional process of resistance by critics and conscious counter-resistance by key musicians/composers who wanted to expand notions of what jazz could encompass. Based on archival research and interviews with both musicians and French critics and scholars I intend to examine this dialogue between the French jazz press and the musicians themselves, in an effort to better understand how each community affected the other in France from 1970 to 1980.

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Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar Period

William Wordsworth and Modern Travel ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789621181.003.0008 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 207-238

Author(s):

Saeko Yoshikawa

Keyword(s):

National Parks ◽

Interwar Period ◽

Driving Force ◽

Lake District ◽

World War ◽

Working Classes ◽

The First World War ◽

Global Tourism ◽

First World ◽

Urban Working

Chapter 7 explores how the cultural identity of the Lake District was redefined and preserved after the First World War through two trends: new global tourism, and the advent of outdoor movements. First it focuses on foreign visitors, including American and Japanese tourists, who have made no slight contribution to the re-invention of ‘Wordsworth Country’. Then it explores some of the new walkers’ guides, including those by William Thomas Palmer, Maxwell Fraser and Henry Herbert Symonds, that were particularly attuned to foot-stepping through Wordsworth’s Lake District and encouraged readers to go back to Romantic pedestrianism. The chapter also pays attention to how the hiking and cycling boom among urban working classes changed the tourist landscape in the Lake District, becoming the driving force behind conservation and access campaigns and the new National Parks movement. Taken as a whole, the chapter investigates how Wordsworth’s legacy was preserved and then rehabilitated in the interwar era of mass motoring.

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Daring to Think Seriously: the Need for Aesthetic Judgements

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x10000084 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 26 (1) ◽

pp. 77-80

Author(s):

Jon Hewitt

Keyword(s):

Romeo And Juliet ◽

The Arts ◽

The World ◽

Theatre Company ◽

East End ◽

Europe Today ◽

Artistic Director

The issue of attitudes towards the arts in England is here compared and contrasted with those evident in the rest of Europe today. This article was written in June 2009, following discussions in Wroclaw during the festival ‘The World as a Place of Truth’, part of the Year of Grotowski. Jon Hewitt is Artistic Director of Admiration Theatre Company, based in London. He has directed several productions, the most recent being Romeo and Juliet Docklands, set in the East End of London. In February 2010 his latest production, Tower Hamlet, opens at the Courtyard Theatre.

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