Nationalism and Theater

• This course is Theatre History II, THE 4111, Spring 2025, Full Term.
• Earning 3 credits is possible.
• Class meets on Tuesdays & Thursdays: 11:00am-12:20pm.
• Instruction comes from Gretchen Suárez-Peña, MFA.

Attendance and Learning Styles

• Attendance includes a daily check-in.
• Students discuss their favorite way to learn.
• Visual learning is a preferred method.
• Auditory learning is also a preferred method.
• Reading may also used in learning

Agenda

• Attendance/Check in forms part of the daily start
• A Midterm Review is on the schedule.
• There is a period allotted to Prep for Next Class.

Chapter 8 Terms

• Volksgeist literally mean "spirit of a nation", a Romantic belief in highly distinct national indentities, opposing Enlightenment universalism.
• Minstrel shows were racist blackface performances popular in the US from the 1840s until vaudeville's rise in the 1880s.
• A variety show form, minstrel acts featured white men imitating slave festivities, musical numbers, and parody.
• Nationalism is a political ideology believing a nation with shared territory, language, and/or culture has the right to live and flourish in its own state.
• Nationalism originated in 17th-century Europe, taking various historical forms since.
• Liberal nationalism commits to Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and constitutionalism.
• Cultural nationalism centers on belief in a language-based culture's uniqueness and greatness.
• Racial nationalism combines racial superiority with cultural nationalism, asserting a nation's superiority based on racial purity.

Chapter 8 Review

• Nationalism is a new idea; before 1700, it would have been viewed absurd.
• People share a common language or culture from a similar region.
• They have the right to geographical and political power.
• Nationalism is a constructed political idea, an "imagined community."
• Nationalism had to be reaffirmed to surpass other bounds like family or social class.
• Cultural secular nationalism grew in Germany, with a strong notion of arts creating a national identity.
• Friedrich Schiller quotes the idea in Germany of a national stage
• The French Revolution shattered expectations of life playing out like neoclassical drama or sentimental comedy.
• Those traumatized sought solace in melodrama.
• Melodrama stirred memorable emotions.
• It validated their experience.
• Melodrama reassured them but did not fully heal wounds, assuage fears, or soothe moral panic.
• Before 1848, Tsar Alexander I clamped down on stage performances and printed dramas and held a monopoly on the productions.
• Russian censorship severely restricted theatrical expression; government critics tried to evade it.
• The Russian imperial court and aristocrats mainly enjoyed performances while, few of the bourgeoisie did.
• Russian theatre was less influenced by nationalism because loyalty remained to the Russian Orthodox Church, local noblemen, aristocracy, and the Tsar.
• Richard Wagner, a German Romantic, imagined a unified, utopian Germany.
• His operas were shaped by German language, mythology, and ethnic origins.
• King Ludwig supported Wagner, building a national theatre to realize his operas.
• Wagner was often pushed towards racial nationalism more than cultural nationalism.
• He integrated music, drama, singing, scenery, lighting, and other theatrical arts into Gesamtkunstwerk, a unified production.
• Gesamtkunstwerk had a lasting influence on theatrical productions.
• Liberal nationalism spread and brought forth new nation states in North and South America.
• Cultural nationalism played a small role in Latin America
• Racial nationalism grew, differently from Germany.
• During this time, traditional songs and dances were unchanged among Native and African descendants
• European descendants looked to Europe as a model for their theatre
• Spanish and French troupes came and toured Latin American cities.
• Mexico City built new permanent theatres in the 1840s & 50's
• Mexican began touring circuits

More of Chapter 8

• Costumbrismo theatre became popular in regions like Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Nicaragua.
• There were plays featuring picturesque locations, with stories of exotic personages.
• In Brazil, Romanticism became popular, with Roussea-inspired belief in the primitive simplicity.
• Virtue was linked to natives of Brazil
• Amazonian tribes were idealized.
• Those in Brazil embraced cultural nationalism, a turning away from past racist ideas of power.
• In the US, Puritanism preached that America might separate from Europe's decadence and lead world salvation.
• This reinforced self-righteousness and claims of moral exceptionalism.
• This led to anti-entertainment/anti-theatre sentiment.
• Minstrel Shows became a successful popular entertainment form in the northern US, both before and after the Civil War.
• They showed blacks as unequal in liberal and democratic US .
• Those shows became essential to racial imagining and white nationalism in the Northern US states.
• Minstrel shows complex stories...
• Thomas Dartmouth Rice popularized the Jim Crow character.
• Rice's Jim Crow pieces sometimes featured abolition of slavery songs.
• Other troupes pandered to poor white urban workers wanting assurance of their racial superiority in the US- Irish immigrants escaping the Irish potato famine and newcomers arriving from rural farm
• Black characters were often portrayed as foolish, grotesque, and sentimental victims.
• By the end of the 1850s, minstrel shows broadened their audiences and became the cultural norm
• Troupes started touring beyond northern cities into smaller, medium-sized towns in southern regions.

Chapter 9 Terms

• Orientalism refers to Western countries representing the East (Middle East to Japan) as weak, cunning, culturally backward, feminine, dangerous, and exotic.
• Edward Said coined the term Orientalism.
• Social Darwinism is the discredited assumption that cultures evolve and can be viewed hierarchically, from primitive to great civilizations.
• Vaudeville is a variety theatre form that gradually replaced the minstrel show in the US during the 1880s.
• Realism in theatre responded to photography, presenting observed material realities with accurate costumes and box sets.
• It was later adapted by Naturalists and is still the dominant style in the West.
• Shimpa means "new style", referring to adapting Western dramatic forms like the well-made play to Japanese taste in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Positivism is the philosophy that scientific knowledge derives solely from measurable sensory experience, allowing detection of general laws.

Chapter 9 Review

• Japan's opening was quick and influenced all aspects of life
• A play in 1895 showed suggestion Asians welcome Japanese conquests
• That opening led to Orientalism.
• Orientalism has two basic forms: portraying the other as weak, childlike, uneducated, naïve, submissive, and portrayed the other as uncivilized, barbaric, powerful, sexually terrifying, scheming, and intellectually incomprehensible.
• The 1851 London Exhibition at Crystal Palace was the first of many world fairs presenting the non-Western world as marketplace for Western tourists and capitalists.
• Besides science and art, performances were also included
• The 1901 World's Fair in Buffalo, NY, exhibited Native and African Americans alongside other primitive peoples.
• Native Americans performed war dances in traditional attire.
• African Americans were hired to portray happy slaves in the popular Old Plantation exhibit.
• Britain organized 33 major expositions in India, Australia and Great Britain, using Indian craftspeople and traditional dancers.
• Darwin's evolution theory led to Social Darwinism.
• Whites “fittest" and had to instruct “primitive" people.
• This manifested in the St. Louis World Fair of 1904 featured Philippine villagers classified representing civilization.
• P.T. Barnum circus showcased non-Western people as savages.
• Social Darwinism led to positivism and the development of naturalism.
• Varieties theatre was new popular entertainments in lower and middle society
• It had no theme, story, or star.
• It has incorporated singers, acrobats and performing animals
• Since the Renaissance, it had been a tradition in between acts, but in the mid-19th century showmen strung together these acts.
• Burlesque shows grew in popularity, with parodies of shows with scant costumes and comic sketches.
• Music Halls became a variety theatre Britain
• In the U.S. it was known as vaudeville.
• Beijing Opera
• Upper classes and royals supported clapper opras than kunku
• Later then the genres mixed and created the Beijing opera
• Class opera began enjoyment even in the emperor's courts.

Chapter 9 Concludes

• Westerners collected both real and fake Chinese and Asian items.
• Chinoiserie are items that looked or supposedly had Chinese originals.
• Popular entertainers, like magicians, rushed to add orientalist imagery to their acts.
• Japonisme is a French term to describe the influence of Japanese art on Western art after 1850, used by art historians
• Unlike Orientalism, Japonisme does not try to control "the other", it has a strategy with the idea art often includes elements of Japanese origin.
• Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan satirized English politics with yellow face.
• Madam Butterfly is nuanced as adherence to Western expectations and Japanese patriotic fervor entailing a passionate ritual sacrifice.
• Photography became a tool of imperialism just as printing presses.
• Talbot invented it in England in 1839.
• Photos captured the world
• People perceived world moving from irrational to rational
• Playwriting and acting moved mainstream but towards idealism
• Naturalism was realism's apex after 1850.
• Basically same with difference: general realism is just regular style, naturalism theater influenced between 1880 and 1914.
• Zola wrote Naturalism in the Theatre (1881) expressing that plays needed visible cases
• Natural Methods to show characters
• Naturalism had leaders like Emile Zola, using rational artistic methods
• Theatre artists use naturalism to express views
• Liberalism involves the rights of the individuals
• Realism and Producer Director
• First one George II
• Realism and socialism should drive economics
• Stanilasky saw realist directing for Duke
• Realism was brung to Russia by MAT (1898)

Even More of 9

• Japanese replacing female artists in theatre was discouraged.
• They felt it encouraged female promiscuity and ruined traditions.
• Some in Japan embraced the shingeki new style from France
• Sumako also played Ibsein and her character that would Western dramas
• The military defeat in China by japan pushed Chinese drama to be European
• The chinese style dramas became popular
• Well-made plays have selective focus in realism
• Realism focuses on the realistic expression
• Chekhov had critiques on photography and expression

Chapter 10 Terms

• Avant-garde borrowed a French military term Artists since the 1880s see themselves as fighting the bourgeoisie- new aesthetic- for utopian change.
• Copyright is legal protection extended to authors giving them control over their work's publication and performance. The first copyright law was in France in 1790.
• Auteur director is a figure who takes author-like control of all production.

Chapter 10 Review

• Photography drove positivism
• Objectivity materialized
• But that led to the opposition of realism etc
• Symbolism
• Gustav wrote for the symboly community others then followed

All chapter 10

• Audiophonic media interested a new way of showing the world with telephones and such
• Art became realistic because theatre needed its realism
• Symbolize wanted to be more audiphonic
• Avant Garde "fighting lines" started on stage
• The style was anti- captitalistic
• The world spread manifestos
• Electricity became an art new tool
• Lights were not to inlight the audince in the dark

Even more of Chapter 10

• Prominent avant-garde movements included Symbolism, Aestheticism, and Expressionism.
• Gustav Kahn wrote the first Symbolist Manifesto, and others followed the example from this.
• Pierre was one of em
• Importance in the voice
• Aesthetics cared for unification
• Russia had a different name retro

Concluding 10

• First made known and used term was Francois
• Early german played for realism things

Additional 10 notes

• Conservativism was in American culture and world

Chapter 11 Terms

• Globalization involves economies in the world that has brought to rise in culture
• Futurism that was launched in 1909
• Socialist Realist policy soviet union

Chapter 11

• Biomechanics - a mode of training actors
• Agit meant a form of propadanda

And MORE

• General writing and language was the form of arts
• Gestus- the way the actor moves

Reviewing Chapter 11

• The 20th century was a movement of change
• Globalization economy changed the way the world was
• It influenced the way of the community
• Movies lead to modernize way of self

Continuing 11

• Before socialists used nativism for their arts
• Shaw was then a writer and activist
• He had a community for Fabian
• Many changed world in London
• Futurim was Italy's

Last 11

• Russias work with M
• He also wanted propaganda

Another page from Chapter 11

• Meyer hold was a Russian director for things
• There was a study to help people with acting
• It meant for people to think of ways of movement and intention
• Germany brecht and him were friends
• He used poetry and music to express things
• People and society became avant grades
• Modernism wanted people to see voice

Now Last of Chapter 11

• Modernism made people realize character words over actions