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| INTRODUCTION TO BALLROOM |
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Within most historical periods and many different cultures, the performing arts have occupied a special place in the world.
The stage has been the site of illusion where public and private dreams take shape and dimension of the stage assumed the circular form of the orchestra in the open air, as in the great public theaters of ancient Greece, the portable stage cart hauled from town to town, the raised platform within the "Wooden O" of Shakespeare's Globe, or the elaborately equipped picture frame stages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the orchestra, the platform, or the stage provided a space where the fantasies, the anxieties, the injustices, the social transactions of the moment could be given a voice--imagined, articulated, tested, reinforced, or exorcised.
The theater, as well, has provided a place of private dreaming where the individual spectator, in the midst of a public audience, could identify with the performer and, for the space of two or so hours assume the idealized shape of an epic-scaled hero, the virtuosity of a skilled musician or the grace and physical facility of the dancer. Despite the fact that performers have been given the responsibility of voicing the fears and hopes of their cultures--actors, dancers, musicians have usually lived on the margins of society, beyond the limits of the proper, the socially accepted, the respectable. Consequently, the public has perceived performers as freer from social restraint, subject to fewer laws in their social and sexual behavior; and, consequently, the private lives of performers have commanded keen interest as the images of vicarious forbidden pleasure within the theater and without. Admiration and interest, of course, have lifted some performers out of their fringe society into a kind of acceptability as they interact with the aristocracy and prominent figures in all fields.
Many of the engravings, etchings, and lithographs of performers were produced to satisfy a public demand for pictures of performers that today is met by the popular magazines and television. Other prints testify to the cultural status achieved by some major figures, often in retrospect, who have become icons of culture. The wood-engravings from the nineteenth century popular illustrated magazines and papers frequently displayed the portraits of the significant cultural heroes and heroines of the past as part of the journalistic mission to educate the public, as well as scenes from contemporary productions intended to draw an audience to the theater.
Occasionally a special marriage exists between the skill of a graphic artist and an interest in the theater as a social phenomenon. Hogarth's polemic celebration of British theater and its audiences is clear in his depiction of the laughing audience and the orange girls. His deprecation of Italianate opera produced his interesting pieces on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and his interest in Garrick and Shakespeare give us the famous illustration of that actor as Richard III. Thomas Rowlandson's designs for the series of aquatints that document the interior of major eighteenth century theaters in The Microcosm of London give us a sense of what it would have been like to be a spectator within them. Sometimes the illustration provides the means for disseminating the work of the avant-garde. Edward Gordon Craig, the son of Ellen Terry, changed the course of modern scene design, but his production work took place outside the venue of the British commercial theater, and the larger world saw his work principally through the illustrations of his radical treatises on the theater. This catalog contains some of the plates from the famous designs illustrating his Towards a New Theater and includes a plate fo his design for the controversial production of Hamlet for Konstantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theater, as well as offering a 1913 edition of this important work.
Before the development of photography, of course, the various graphic processes--engraving, etching, the aquatint and mezzotint, lithography--provided the only means of producing multiple images for scientific and scholarly illustration. Many of the depictions of musical instruments, theater architecture and scenographic machinery were created to document or to record, to be useful for later study. Many served as illustration for highly specialized studies. Other material constitutes the residual ephemera of our culture: playbills, broadsides, programs, autographs. The survival of these items, meant to have only a limited life, gives them a special value. A playbill marking a performance by the Barrymores, for example, the announcement of a new opera by Rossini, connect us to the past in a specific and immediate way.
Satirists often used the intense interest in the performing arts to make a social or political judgement, using theater as a way to satirize. Thomas Nast led the way for American political satire in graphic art, and he often exploited his knowledge of Shakespeare to make his point.
Lyons Ltd. has assembled a broadly based and extensive collection of material on the performing arts over the years. Enjoy!
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