Pageant

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Joan FitzPatrick Dean (University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA) Simon Shepherd (Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London, UK)

Pageant

Joan FitzPatrick Dean (University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA), Simon Shepherd (Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London, UK)

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Paperback

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English

Methuen Drama
07 October 2021

Series: Forms of Drama

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.

By: Joan FitzPatrick Dean (University of Missouri-Kansas City USA)
Series edited by: Simon Shepherd (Royal Central School of Speech & Drama University of London UK)
Imprint: Methuen Drama
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm,
Weight: 232g
ISBN: 9781350144514
ISBN 10: 1350144517
Series: Forms of Drama
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 07 October 2021
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Joan FitzPatrick Dean is Curators' Distinguished Teaching Professor of English Emerita at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA. Her books include All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry (2014), Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2005), and the Cork/Irish Film Institute‘s Dancing at Lughnasa (2004). She was Fulbright Scholar at University College Galway (1992-93) and Fulbright Lecturer at Université de Nancy (1982-83).