Feigned and Distorted Bodyscapes

Creative interdisciplinarity in performance and scenography permeate the masking and disguising of the avant-garde. Chapter Four highlights the artistic collaboration of choreographers, composers, visual artists and writers in Paris and beyond, beginning with the production of Parade in Paris (1917) and concluding with work of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in the 1920s. Popular performance disguising by Liesl Karlstadt and Karl Valentin in Munich, as well as Alexander Vertinsky’s Ukrainian Pierrot, contrast with much of the abstraction proposed in other urban bodyscapes. The bold distortions of Aleksei Granovsky’s mises en scène with the State Yiddish Chamber Theatre complement the masquerading described in Paris with the Swedish Ballet and the Ballets Russes. This chapter parades a line-up Charlie Chaplin, Clowns and Pulcinella interpreters alongside the omnipresent Pierrots who offer an escape from the troublesome years of war. In this era, disguising also proliferated in domestic and military circumstances as malingerers and ‘Aspirants and Pretenders’ displayed Chaplinesque masquerading skills throughout the belligerent communities and battlefields of Europe.

Between Formal and Infinite Time: Labor Law and Revolutionary Futures in Kenyan Popular Performance

Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the most important responses to this history is that offered by novelist, activist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Recognizing that the state and the oral artist are “rivals” in articulating and disseminating the law and, further, that orature played “the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Kikuyu and other Kenyan oral traditions in addressing the history of exceptionalized labour law and its lasting effects in the postcolonial period. Through workers’ songs, revolutionary hymns, proverbs, and myths, Ngũgĩ’s theatre draws on the performative force of oral jurisprudence to challenge the temporal foundations of colonial labour law and also explore alternative models of democratic work that embody a vision of Kenya’s future. Specifically, I argue that through oratorical strategies (including formal open-endedness) in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and “Mother, Sing for Me” (1983), Ngũgĩ and his co-authors “[break] the barrier between formal and infinite time,” constellating (in the Benjaminian sense) past moments of revolution with both the present and possible revolutionary futures.

“Real” Wrestling

Professional wrestling is an unsporting sport, a theatrical entertainment that is not theatre. Its display of violence is less contest than ritualized encounter between opponents, replayed repeatedly over time for an exceptionally engaged audience. To watch wrestling and write about its performance is to attempt to come to terms with the significance of a highly popular performance practice as it intersects, exploits, and parodies the conventions of both sport and theatre. Rather than simply reflecting and reinforcing moral clichés, professional wrestling puts contradictory ideas into play, as with its audience it replays, reconfigures, and celebrates a range of performative possibilities. Beyond its spectacular elements, professional wrestling is an athletic performance practice, constructed around the display of the male body and a tradition of cooperative rather than competitive exchanges of apparent power between men as directed by the promoter. The fight is fixed, in the squared circle as in life.

Personating the Ripper: Civilian Performance and the Melodramatic Mode

This article illuminates how the Ripper murders and their 1888 coverage re-theatricalised not only London, but many provincial towns. It looks beyond canonical theatrical contexts for, and responses to the Ripper, exploring extra-theatrical, popular performance ‘scenarios’ by civilian men, outside professional sites of theatricalised or medicalised spectatorship. It examines how civilian men personated key figures in the Ripper ‘scenario’: the plain-clothes detective, the Ripper's female victims, and the Ripper himself. These civilian performances illuminate our understandings of fin-de-siècle masculinity and its intersections with the melodramatic mode in theatre and culture. Simultaneously interrogating these performances through the lenses of fin-de-siècle theatre culture, the periodical press, and the anthropology of ritual magic reveals the cultural complexities of the ‘personations’ happening in streets and homes across the United Kingdom.