Missionaries and Borderlands: «The Mission Play» and Missionary Practices in Alta California

This essay takes up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? With respect to the California missions, historical treatments of colonization revolve around a dualism shaped by moral dimensions of the missionary enterprise—did the missions help California Indians or harm them? Theatrical representations, like the wildly successful early twentieth century pageant drama, The Mission Play, staged a version of mission history that argued for the former. As a representation of the mission past, the play conflated missions, as institutions, with the moral character of missionaries, thus edifying a fantasy and entrenching the dualism. However, attention to missionary practices, like keeping time using the mission bell, reveal how the missions were sites where indigenous and colonial realities were in constant conflict. Through practices, relations between missionaries and indios produced a space that was neither strictly colonial nor indigenous, and yet both—a borderland. As a mode of spatial dialectics, borderlands thinking can unsettle the duality underlying representations of the mission past to question how that dualism has come into being.

This Is England 2021: Staging England and Englishness in Contemporary Theatre

This article explores the ways in which contemporary theatre is engaging with English national questions. In the context of the current devolutionary movements in Britain, I apply a national specificity, focusing on plays and performances which address the politics of just one of the three nations within Britain: England. While this study of the specifics of England and Englishness is already well-established in literary studies (Gardiner) and political science (Kenny; Nairn), there is yet to be a sustained critical engagement with England in theatre studies. Following a discussion of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) in light of its planned West End revival in 2022, I then turn to two recent theatrical representations of England in Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017 and 2020) and the Young Vic’s My England shorts (2019), which I propose offer more rigorous, reflexive explorations into English national identity. As questions over England’s cultural and political representation become increasingly loaded and difficult to navigate, I suggest that the beginnings of this English national register in the theatre marks an attempt to nuance these debates, opening a productive space for critical inquiry.

The establishment of bessarabian scenographic art in the modern period

From time immemorial by practicing customs and rites in their collective forms of manifestation, the inhabitants of the Mioritic space felt the need for theatrical representations, where rudimentary elements with a spectacular character can be discerned. This cultural spirituality background, emanating across centuries, favored the establishment of a dramatic art much cherished by the natives. Thereby, the distant origins of theatrical art are to be found in the depths of the mythological and folkloric substratum of our nation, the materialization of myths and magical rituals fueling its subsequent evolution. Namely, the popular theater has inscribed in the traditional Romanian culture an original species of folklore that leads to the discovery and knowledge of the evolution of the theatrical image, to the reconstruction of archaic theatrical visions and the valorization of this cultural heritage. All the performances could not but be dressed in the guise of a scenography, supported by the ensemble of stage costume. Although the performances were often played on improvised stages, they were not without scenery and stage arrangement. Gradually, these enactments evolve and acquire full-fledged forms and features of a professional scenography.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Decadence, an unhealthy deviation from an undefined norm, is necessarily in the eye of the beholder, and this was never more apparent than in theatrical representations of the modern woman. Through analyzing the performance history and reception of two fin-de-siècle plays centered on a rebellious woman—Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891) and Sudermann’s Magda (1893)—this article examines the instability of the notion of decadence as applied to the heroines of avant-garde drama. As professionals, themselves negotiating assumptions about their sexual and moral status as public performers, the actresses who chose to perform these roles were well aware of the artistic and moral debates that surrounded them. Their performances can thus be understood as active interventions in debates about literary, cultural, and social notions of decadence and the role of women within them.

Parading the Temporary: Cosmoramas, Panoramas, and Spectacles in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris

The revolution of 1789 prompted various socio-cultural changes that deeply affected French society. Alongside the sense of instability that these events provoked, there are a number of open-air amusements, shows, exhibitions, and theatrical representations, from the Directoire and through the Napoleonic era. This chapter aims to analyze the mechanisms that allowed the development of these spaces. Ephemerality and temporality are central to this investigation, often determining the development of the space, its construction and functions, but also the cultural practices this comprehension of the space engendered. My objective is to discuss the visual models and cultural references enabling the rearrangement of existing areas and the rise of new “spheres” devoted to the consumption of entertainment.

Coda: Performing Conversion in an Early Modern Future

This chapter considers similarities between early modernity and the present era in terms of theatricality and practices of conversion. Examples of conversional practices from the past hundred years include the forced conversion of Aboriginal children in Canadian residential schools, the so-called ‘conversion therapies’ purporting to ‘cure’ LGBTQ people, and the conversions imposed on Jews by entrenched structures of anti-Semitism. In readings of three 21st Century plays that explore these issues, the author emphasizes the unique ability of drama to bring critical analysis and insight to the performative nature of conversional social practices. His study asserts the centrality of dramatic and social performance to the ongoing evolution of conversional phenomena, drawing lines of connection between the theatrical representations explored in the preceding chapters and similar offerings in our own age.

On Guilt and Ghosts

This paper reviews Grzegorz Niziołek thought-provoking book The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust (London: Methuen Drama Press, 2019), and the key questions and issues it addresses. Focusing on Polish perspectives, theatrical representations and performative reactions to the extermination of the Jews during WWII, the book analyzes six decades of theatrical creation. Within this scheme, the victims and perpetrators are casted in the role of actors, while the Polish people are allotted the role of passive spectators, witnesses to the atrocity. This review sheds light on the ethical and aesthetical implications of Niziołek’s study, by attending to the material aspects of the catastrophe, and its theatrical representations. It seeks to recuperate and integrate the Jewish perspective into the theatrical analysis.

Tawny fronts: Colonial whiteness, Orientalism and representations of Cleopatra on the Australian stage

This article traces how notions of colonial identity have played out in theatrical representations of Cleopatra on the Australian stage in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries – focusing on culturally produced costumed bodies as a site on to which ideas of colonial whiteness, Orientalism and modernity are projected. These representations of the ‘exotic’ Other also absorb popularly accepted ideas of femininity and female power in the circulation of familiar visual tropes. In the temporal space of the twentieth century, Anglo-Australian’s dominant theatrical references shifted from those associated with its European colonial subject’s cultural origins to those of a more globalized and culturally diverse nation still struggling to decolonize its cultural edifices. Close examination of the costumed bodies of Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Brayton as two touchstone versions of Cleopatra on the Australian stage at the dawn of the modern period, reveals the nascent creation of an aesthetic and stylistic cultural vernacular that would slowly develop throughout the twentieth century in the circulation of meaning between costume, bodies and audiences. For the contemporary practitioner, this provides some insight into the historical context of stereotypical costume tropes in which Orientalist ideals are circulated, as well as drawing attention to a particular political and ideological aspect of the complex relationship between the performing body and performance costume.