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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance

Modernist DisguiseMasquerade in Modern Performance and Visual Culture

By Ron J. Popenhagen

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About this book

Analyses the expansion of head and body masking from nineteenth-century Paris to its international maturity in contemporary culture
  • Looks at the presence and development of masquerade in the modernist era - via performance history - with parallel references to theatricality and performativity in visual arts and visual culture
  • Comments upon masquerade’s foundation in popular performance throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, frequently alluding to significant images from the history of photography
  • Theorises masquerade within the context of European theatre and drama scholarship, as well as British and European conservatory arts and performance training
  • Employs critical thinking influenced by phenomenological and semiotic analyses of performance

This book highlights that masquerade can be regarded as a distinct genre of performance activity that employs elements of the carnivalesque, circus, dance, gestural theatre and theatre of objects. Popenhagen traces artistic disguising from fin de siècle Pierrots in Paris, Marseille and Vienna to early twentieth-century masquerading in Moscow and Zürich. He explores identity play and display through the complementary lenses of image studies, cultural history and performance theory.

Reviews

Spanning modernism this book affords a refreshed lens on masquerade as character play, embodiment and theatricality. A timely argument for amplified attention to disguise, bodyscapes and performative aspects of the image in this chaotic and unpredictable world.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

1. Impressions of the Covered Body2. Facing Change and Changing Masks3. Re-formed and Uni-formed Bodies4. Feigned and Distorted Bodyscapes5. Actor-Effigies and Photo-Portraits6. Fractured and Effaced Façades7. Other Places

BibliographyIndex

About the author

Ron J. Popenhagen

Ron J. Popenhagen is Professor of Visual Culture and Performance at California State University. He formerly lectured in Theatre at the University of Southern California and the Sydney University Conservatorium of Music. Dr Popenhagen is a specialist in Actor-Training, Mise en scène, Masks and Masquerade. He has published on French and Swiss actors, choreographers, directors, playwrights and scenographers, and also on Irish literature. Popenhagen has staged opera and theatre productions of Cocteau, Ionesco, Molière, Shakespeare and Wilde in Australia and the States. He has toured devised theatre projects to festivals in Adelaide, Ankara, Edinburgh, Houston, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Vilnius. Ron has written, devised and directed theatre projects for the Australian Theatre for Young People and toured ‘Informances’ for Young Audiences, Inc. to American cities.