Dances in the park: The pre-history of the Maynardville Open Air Theatre

There is a popular belief that Cape Town’s Maynardville Theatre was founded in 1955, and first used in 1956, as the brainchild of the two professional actresses Cecilia Sonnenberg and René Ahrenson. While this is true of the Shakespeare-in-the-Park productions over the years, the use of Maynardville as a performance venue dates back to 1950 and the efforts of Margaret Molteno, the Athlone Committee for Nursery School Education and the University of Cape Town Ballet Company. This article traces the evolution of the popular theatre venue from the first production of a triple bill (comprising Les Sylphides, St Valentine’s Night and Les Diversions) in a makeshift theatre in the Maynardville Park grounds in 1950, to the introduction of Shakespeare in 1956, and ultimately the outdoor theatre of today with its annual Shakespeare and ballet productions. The Shakespearean history is already well-documented, so this article focuses more specifically on the somewhat forgotten role played by ballet productions in that history. The article includes a short history of the original property and the creation of the public park, as well as a full list of the ballets and plays performed at Maynardville since 1950.

Towards a New Popular Theatre (?). Reflections After the Completion of UBUmaterial Performative Archive on Instagram

The article describes the building of UBUmaterial performative archive on Instagram during the COVID-19 lockdown by Papalangki Theatre Company in Greece (2020–2021). Through an innovative format, UBUmaterial started as the attempt of three actors-narrators isolated due to pandemic to rehearse and somehow present Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry. However, exploring the Instagram and play’s potentialities, the three actors soon would be transformed into narrators of their own effort, using their households and adopting a commenting stance on their everyday situation. Thus, the dramaturgy of UBUmaterial’s posts (videos) integrated most of the traditional popular theatre’s features and strategies. After a reflection on the contemporary meaning of “popularity” in theatre/performance, the article suggests that UBUmaterial (as well as other digital forms of theatre) may be considered a form of modern popular theatre.

Conclusion

Taking the 1903 death of Pope Leo XIII as its starting point, the conclusion extends beyond the legal separation of Church and State (1905) in order to trace the ways in which the processes of transformation that were set in motion during the late nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth century. Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieu de memoire illuminates the numerous ways that the sites of Catholic and French memory that the book explores—whether as opera, popular theatre, or concert—found an extraordinary ally in the Republic as it collectively harnessed the power of memory. From its “origin” in the French medieval era, to its transformations throughout the fin-de-siècle, to the response to the devastating fire at Notre-Dame in 2019, the Catholic Church provided (and continues to provide) a new mode of expression for the French Republic. In effect, the success of the twentieth-century renouveau catholique was set in motion by its nineteenth-century forbear: the path was paved by the Republic’s musical Ralliement and the memorialization of its Catholic past as a fundamental cornerstone of its modern existence.

Covid Conversations 4: Stacy Klein

The ecology of the rural setting in which Double Edge Theatre lives and works is as integral to its artistic work as to its principles of social justice, and these qualities mark the ensemble’s singular profile not only in the United States but also increasingly on the world theatre map. Stacy Klein co-founded the company in Boston in 1982 as a women’s theatre with a defined feminist programme. In 1997, Double Edge moved its work space to a farm that Klein had bought in Ashfield, Massachusetts, commuting from there back to Boston to show its productions. Within a few years, Klein and her collaborators were acutely aware of their separation from the local community, which necessitated a change of perspective to encompass personal and creative engagement with local people and to develop audiences within the area, while not losing sight of their international links. Carlos Uriona, formerly a popular-theatre activist from Argentina, had joined Double Edge and facilitated the local immersion that ultimately became its lifeline, most visibly during the Covid-19 pandemic, as Klein here observes. Klein, who had been a student of Rena Mirecka in Poland (starting in 1976), has maintained her friendship and professional relations with this founding member of the Teatr Laboratorium led by Jerzy Grotowski, inviting Mirecka to run wokshops at the Double Edge Farm. Collaboration with Gardzienice (also from the Grotowski crucible) through the Consortium of Theatre Practices (1999–2001) extended Klein’s Polish connections. She expanded her research on community cultures in Eastern and Central Europe and developed these experiences in her probing, distinctly imaginative explorations of theatre-making, while taking a new approach to participatory theatre-making in Ashfield. Her highly visual and sensual compositions are driven by her sense of the fantastic, no more strikingly so than in Klein’s Summers Spectacles, which are performed outdoors, in concert with the Farm’s natural environment – fields, trees, water, birds, animals, and heaven’s firmament. Double Edge’s profound commitment in the past decade to what it now terms ‘living culture’ and ‘art justice’ has taken root in multiracial collaborations, primarily with the indigenous peoples of Western Massachusetts. This Conversation took place on the winter solstice, 21 December 2020, a date that Maria Shevtsova, Editor of NTQ, had chosen symbolically. It was transcribed by Kunsang Kelden and edited by Shevtsova. Many thanks are extended to Travis Coe of Double Edge for assembling with such loving care the photographs requested.

From stage to street: The #Endsars protest and the prospects of street theatre

Globally, the issues of extrajudicial killings are on the increase. From racial killings in the West to wanton human rights violations in Africa, the pains are the same. Thus, protests has always been a channel employed by many including activists, labour and union leaders among others, to press home grievances and demands against unfavourable policies and social malaise. This paper draws attention to how youths in Nigeria utilised the physical space to spark a protest, in October 2020. Notable actors, musicians, comedians, activists and the international community in their numbers, moved to the street in defiance of security orders to protest against police brutality and harassment. In view of the outcome of the protest, which was later hijacked by hoodlums, the paper examines a non-violent alternative which can be used to address societal issues. It is in this context that the paper examined the role of theatre as a tool for activism, advocacy and communication with specific reference to street theatre, a type of improvised street drama performance that addresses unfavourable socio-political and cultural issues. The data for the study is obtained mainly from the internet, print media, observations, interviews and literary works. For its methodology, the study utilises the popular theatre approach. The study concludes that street theatre has a major role to play in addressing socio- political issues without resorting to violence.

Cervantes and Genre

In Don Quixote I.47 and 48, Cervantes sets out his most sustained exposition of literary theory. This chapter points out that the dialogue staged in these chapters between the canon from Toledo and the priest from Don Quixote’s village contains in embryonic form the primary tensions that infuse Cervantes’s attitude toward literary genre as revealed in his fiction. The critical exchange is divided into two parts: the canon’s critique of the romances of chivalry that have caused Don Quixote’s insanity, and the priest’s appraisal of the state of contemporary popular theatre. In both cases, which are complementary, the characters’ criticisms are harsh without being completely uncompromising. Also, in both cases, the artistic precepts expounded accurately describe Cervantes’s actual practice of composing literary fiction, with the non-trivial caveat that they also contain important limitations.

Civil War as Musical Comedy: The Representation of the Ukrainian Revolution in the Soviet Film Wedding in Malinovka (1967)

This article explains the continued popularity in Russia of the 1967 Soviet film Wedding in Malinovka by analyzing its reliance on the traditional Russian cultural stereotype of Ukraine embedded in the burlesque style of kotliarevshchyna. The threat that the Ukrainian Revolution historically represented to Soviet Russian identity is normalised in the film, as well as in the 1936 eponymous operetta on which it is based, by framing it as an ethnic musical sitcom with dances. Although the two main yokels of the musical hail from a long line of Ukrainian and Jewish characters of popular theatre, both are also deeply ambivalent: one is a trickster who suddenly embraces the Bolshevik cause, while the other is the funniest and least threatening villain in Soviet film.

The story of what might have been: Interrogating Romeo and Juliet under the Portuguese dictatorship

In 1969, Teatro Estúdio de Lisboa performed Anatomy of a Love Story, an interrogation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for a generation politicized by their struggles against the dictatorship. This article delineates a narrative of what might have been if this incipient attempt to stage a more inclusive political theatre had prevailed, illustrating how attributions of success and failure to performances during this period need to be contextualized within the limitations imposed by censorship on the one hand, and, on the other, an evocation of a class-based popular theatre that excluded questions of gender and sexuality.