Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850-1960: Making Tracks

This collection uncovers connections and coincidences that challenge the old stories of pioneering performers who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It investigates songlines, drama, opera, music theatre, dance, and circus—removing traditional boundaries that separate studies of performance, and celebrating difference and transformation in style, intention, and delivery. Well known, or obscure, travelling performers faced dangers at sea and hazardous journeys across land. Their tracks, made in pursuit of fortune and fame, intersected with those made by earlier storytellers in search for food. Touring Performance and Global Exchange takes a fresh look at such tracks—the material remains—demonstrating that moving performance does far more than transfer repertoires and people; it transforms them. Touring performance has too often beenconceived in diasporic terms, as a fixed product radiating out from a cultural centre. This collection maps different patterns—ones that comprise reversed flows, cross currents, and continually proliferating centres of meaning in complex networks of global exchange. This collection will be of great interest to scholars and students in theatre, music, drama studies, and cultural history.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgment Introduction: Kate Flaherty and Gilli Bush-Bailey Vanishing cts and Making Tracks 1: Diana James and Inawinytji Williamson Kungkarangkalpa: Travelling Women of the Seven Sisters Songline Part 1: Ephemerality and creative methodology 2: Joanne Tompkins and Liyang Xia Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cantonese Opera Performances in the Victorian Goldfields 3: Jacky Bratton and Gilli Bush-Bailey Bodies of Evidence: The unremarkable history of Emma Stanley (1816-1881) 4: Anna-Sophie Jürgens Lady Clowns: Clown-Ballerinas, Dancing "Clownesses" and Female Clowns on the Popular Stage around 1900 5: Jane Woollard (University of Tasmania) Tracks, Knots, Stage Tact and Boots: A Reflection Part II: Peril, illness and ageing 6: Marlis Schweitzer "It Was a Most Beautiful Moonlit Night...": Mrs. John Drew’s Shipwreck Narratives 7: Peta Tait Risk and Colonial Touring: Female Circus Performers in Aerial and Lion Acts 8: Janice Norwood Reading Race, Repertoire and Transcontinental Reception through Madame Celeste’s Colonial Encounter 9: Kerry Murphy "Covent Garden on Wheels" Thomas Quinlan’s Operatic tours of 1912–1914 and beyond 10: Laura Ginters "Let me come to Athens [/Lamplough], shelter me, accept me in your home": Medea Transported to the Goldfields and Beyond in Nineteenth-Century Australia. Part III: Reversing flows and Cross currents 11: Kate Flaherty Fanny Kemble, Slavery, and Transatlantic Commodity Trade 12: Katherine K. Preston Women Take Control: Managers of English-Language Opera Companies in Late 19th-Century America 13: Sarah Balkin Transporting Humour: Artemus Ward and American Comedy in Britain 14: Gillian Arrighi Australian Child Actors on Early Twentieth-century Touring Circuits 15: Mark Houlahan Crossing the Ditch: Trans-Tasman Stages 1841-1896 16: Veronica Kelly (University of Queensland) Between the "Theatre Game" and Anthropology: International and Indigenous Black Women Entertainers Perform Modernity in Australia 1950s-1960s