Dover Street to Dixie and the politics of cultural transfer and exchange
- Submitting institution
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Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33-24-1800
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1017/CBO9781107279681.013
- Book title
- Popular musical theatre in London and Berlin 1890-1939
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 9781107051003
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- My contribution to Popular Musical Theatre investigated the origins and evolution of British revue, across the popular performance traditions of minstrelsy, cabaret, and Pierrot.
I provided a critical analysis and evaluation of revue as part of a national and transnational culture, drawing on an extensive archival research of revue manuscripts from the Lord Chamberlain’s collection at the British Library, within the specific socio-historic context of Britain, 1890 to 1939. In the co-authored introduction, my research challenges historical readings of revue by investigating past and current debates around, theatre, nation and identity, theatre history and music theatre. In doing so, I locate revue within an expressive popular cultural tradition in the historiography of performance. This highlighted revue as a specific type of performance practice, which is multidisciplinary in its creation and realisation, using dance, music, art, theatre, and film incorporating new techniques, innovation, and frameworks. I argue that revue performance of the interwar years expanded and experimented with the form of the musical genre incorporating satire and parody as a standard element, which engaged audiences politically, aesthetically, socially, and culturally, and helped to expand our performance vocabulary.
In the chapter Dover Street to Dixie (co-authored with Len Platt), I analysed revue in relation to formations of cultural identity, (Benedict Anderson 1991) and looked at British national and colonial identities and representations of the ‘other’ (Stuart Hall 1964, Paul Gilroy 1993). I explored how revue negotiated essentialised notions, responding to wider changes in gender, class, race, and sexual identities by challenging or affirming them. My contribution examines how the ideas of ‘Britain’, ‘Empire’, and ‘Americana’ were engaged, formed and expressed, in revue performance, as cultural expressions of the political and social hierarchy of power.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
