Focusing on examples from medieval theatre, women's suffrage
campaigns, and the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, this is the
first book to offer a critical overview of pageant as a dramatic
form. By enacting highly selective historical episodes, pageants
manipulate audiences' sense of the past. Through iconic music,
affecting images, and vernacular forms, pageants express and, in
turn, shape religious, civic, or political allegiances. Freely
appropriating elements of history plays, patriotic celebrations,
opera, and film, pageants create spectacles of sensory overload.
Impressive recent scholarship recognizes pageants as public
history, but this is the first authoritative account of the
origins, characteristics, and techniques of pageants as a
theatrical idiom. Performed in sporting arenas, the open air, or
purpose-built theatres, these paratheatrical events express
identity through what Erika Fischer-Lichte calls "the
re-theatricalization of theatre." Pageants are intimately connected
with power-they either assert and celebrate it or seek and demand
it. Medieval religious pageants were so popular and powerful that
they were suppressed and extinguished. The vogue for pageantry that
swept through the English-speaking world in the decade before WWI
was closely tied to the expansion of the franchise. Many early
twentieth century pageants celebrated localities; others
subversively advocated for women's suffrage. First performed in
1909, Cicely Hamilton's A Pageant of Great Women depicted
historical personages from the near and distant past as well as
allegorical figures such as Justice and Prejudice. Today, the
Olympic Games mandate an opening ceremony that "details the
country's history, culture, and overall importance for the global
community." London delivered just such a pageant in 2012. This book
features a wide-ranging introduction that maps the cultural
evolution of this enduring theatrical form and covers popular and
readily accessible pageants from medieval England, the early
twentieth century, and our own day.
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