The website of our new ERC project Developing Theatre: Building Expert Networks for Theatre in Emerging Countries after 1945 is online now. Check it out and learn more about the agenda of the project and the work of our international team of researchers.
GTH Journal: Vol.1, no. 2 out now. Focus on “Theatrescapes”
The peer-reviewed online Journal of Global Theatre History has recently published its 2nd issue with special focus on Theatrescapes. Global Media and Local Publics. Explore this new issue and learn about the Denishawns in Asia, Sarah Bernhardt in Brazil, a female Jockey from the Rio de la Plata region, and German actor Daniel Bandmann performing Shakespeare globally.
Contributors are Monize Oliveira Moura on “Sarah Bernhardt in Brazil (1886 and 1893)”, Catherine Vance Yeh on “Experimenting with Dance Drama: Peking Opera Modernity, Kabuki Theater Reform and the Denishawn’s Tour of the Far East”, Johanna Dupré on “‘Die erste Jockey-Reiterin der Welt, aus Süd-Amerika’: Rosita de la Plata, Global Imaginaries and the Media”, and Lisa J. Warrington on “Herr Daniel Bandmann and Shakespeare vs the World”. With an introductory comment by Nic Leonhardt.
We would like to thank all authors for sharing their research and ideas and allowing us to publish their stimulating papers.
The topic of the next issue of the journal (May 2017) will be Translocating Theatre History. Papers are due on 15 March, 2017.
Negotiating the Entertainment Business: Theatrical Brokers around 1900
Special focus issue of the Popular Entertainment Studies Journal, Vol 6, No 2 (2015)
Guest Editor: Nic Leonhardt (Munich)
“Between the artist who seeks for an engagement and the manager always on the look out for an extraordinary ‛novelty,’”, write Hughes Le Roux and Jules Garnier in Acrobats and Mountebanks (1890), “a third person necessarily intervenes, the middle-man, who arises everywhere between buyer and seller. And, in fact, at the present time all the principal cities of the world have their agents for performing artists of every kind. These personages are very important, and make large profits.”
Profits, Copyright, Royalties, Networking… From a transnational historical perspective, neither theatre as an art form nor theatre as a business can work without the patronage of professional mediators. When French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) toured Europe, South and North America in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, she could not do so without professional agents and managers. They were responsible for arranging her contracts, negotiating her royalties, taking care of the travel logistics, (ship, train, accommodation, customs), arranging her itinerary, the transport of her costumes, and the press work. Despite their enormous influence , the practices, connections and circuits of artistic brokers in the period under consideration have been, in the main, under-researched.
The current issue of the Popular Entertainment Studies journal gathers a selection of papers from the international symposium “Cultural Brokers. Nomenclature, Knowledge and Negotiations of (Performance) Agents, Managers and Impresarios (1850-1930)”, which took place in October 2014. This conference, organized by Nic Leonhardt, and generously funded by the Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the German Research Foundation, brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds such as English and American Studies, History, Theatre Studies, and History of Law, in order to exclusively and intensively discuss the profession of brokerage in the larger theatrical world in the period under discussion. The focus was therefore on the profession of theatrical brokers, agents, and impresarios who functioned as crucial cultural mediators in the fields of the performing arts and media in Europe, the United States, Asia, Australia, and Africa between 1880 and 1930.
Table of Contents
Nic Leonhardt: Editorial
Christopher Balme: Managing Theatre and Cinema in Colonial India: Maurice E. Bandmann, J.F. Madan and the War Films’ Controversy
meLê yamomo: Brokering Sonic Modernities: migrant Manila musicians in the Asia Pacific, 1881-1948
Tracy C. Davis: International Advocacy for Fire Prevention: Calculating Risk and Brokering Best Practices in Theatres
Louis Pahlow: Industrialised Music Brokers as Competing Market Players: The Administration of Music Rights in Germany (ca. 1870-1930)
Theatrical Agents in Asia and Europe: GTH Panel at the Annual Conference of the Cluster of Excellence in Heidelberg
Three members of the GTH team, Nic Leonhardt, Christopher Balme, and meLê yamomo, have been invited to organize a panel at the annual conference of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia & Europe in a Global Context” (8-10 October, 2014, Heidelberg) They will present and discuss hitherto unknown facets and new findings on Theatrical Agents, Managers and Impresarios in Global Theatre Histories (1850-1920) in Asia and Europe.
Conference Theme: “Cultural Mediation: Creativity, Performance, Display”
Conference Organisation: Cluster of Excellence, Research Area B: C. Brosius, M. Trede,L. Abu-Er-Rub, H. Harder
http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en