Existing archival material: Papers, letters and photographs belonging to Sheila Martin have been copied and scanned and are either available as digital files or as photocopies in the Unfinished Histories Archive: Companies File/ Contemporary Theatre. Introduction: Early Modern Theater History: Where We Are Now, How We Got Here, Where We Go Next. Thus the works of such great playwrights as Sophocles and Aristophanes formed the foundation upon which all modern theatre is based. He ran WEA film appreciation courses and his play Vigo (1999) staged by Foolsyard touring theatre, celebrates the life of surrealist filmmaker, Jean Vigo. Reason: From 1960 Martin was teaching at Chace Boys’ School, Enfield and staged ambitious school productions that would work with all male casts such as Billy Budd, Emil and the Detectives and an original adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Bracknell New Town, Southgate Technical College, Bury St. Edmonds Theatre Royal and Joscas Little Theatre Oxford. Like our children, our sources often achieve unearned perfection in our eyes simply because they are ours, and we tend to resist when our preferred narratives for them are upset by new data. Musical theatre uses song, dance and dialogue to tell a story. They place Germany in the forefront of contemporary theatre. Other teachers began teaching lyrical dance classes separately from ballet and Jazz. For Vince, a home for theater history that encompassed both literary study and theater practice was the desideratum. Greg did indeed urge the importance of ‘the development of method’ (Greg 1904–8, vol. Dance teachers struggled with whether to include the new style, alongside jazz, and ballet. Our assumption that the final written and signed document reflected the testator's actual desires is often an act of faith. Modern Theater, especially the type that could be called Realism, began in the 1880s. Perhaps Ganymede does so as well in her anatomy of Oliver and Aliena, who ‘no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved’, and so on, passing swiftly from one marker to the next, ‘and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage’. Experimental theatre began to flourish. Is theater history a distinct and definable Weld, with a set of commonly agreed—or at least energetically debated—methodological premises, or is it merely the uncritical sum of what practicing theater historians happen to be doing at any given time? And social historians, in turn, are major players in the ongoing debate over the place of theory in historical writing, according to Gabrielle Spiegel, because ‘the deepest challenge posed by the ‘linguistic turn’ was to the practice of social history’. Martin ran improvisational sessions  ‘free-for-alls which many found liberating and enjoyable … at the root of our work was a concept of play’. Bibliography: Exploration Drama, Bill Martin and Gordon Vallins, publ. While some stage players remembered their fellow players in their wills, others did not; we devise our own explanations for these inclusions or omissions, which often reflect no more than our desire to write the kind of narrative we want to write. Interpreting the Theatrical Past, a ground-breaking collection of essays published in 1989, raised a number of cogent questions about the theoretical underpinnings of our discipline, questions that remain healthily unresolved, and continue to be discussed in ever widening circles, as evidenced by the publication in 2003 of another collection of essays, entitled Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, with a largely different set of contributors. And they do this on the basis of an interpretation of life that emphasizes the truth of hat historical reality is an array of particulars, heterogeneous and unstructurable’ (Perkins 1992: 48, 59). ... Not until the end of the decade did rock musicals such as “Hair” begin to sway the direction of musical theatre toward the dominant styles today. After Contemporary In 1975, Bill Martin then concentrated on play-writing, receiving a Northern Arts Playwriting Fellowship and relocating to Hexham, Northumberland. Technological advances have also led to the notion of globalization and a higher awareness of international concerns. For Ronald Vince, theatre is without question ‘a sociocultural phenomenon’, and its study ‘in some major aspects a branch of social history’. (p. 13) This formulation generally prevailed through the twentieth century—witness Stone—despite its being assaulted (though not killed) in France by the Annales school, which rejected it for being overly concerned with such trivial and insignificant issues as individual events; it was dismissed as ‘l'histoire événementielle’, inferior to their own preferred narrative mode, ‘l'histoire de la longue durée’ (Otter 2005: 113; Stone 1979: 3). Recent plays included Drifters, Young Ibsen and an adaptation of Peer Gynt. The company also toured Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs around London youth clubs. The work we're doing now, as reflected in the essays in this volume, furnish ample material for a response to these charges. A few years As Martin’s student performers left school, he set up a youth theatre group – 1520 Theatre to enable their work to continue. Sewell, considering these remarks, found them a fair description of his own earlier practice, and concluded that only after exploring the methodologies of other disciplines did he ‘recognize events as a category in need of theoretical work’ (Sewell 1996: 264; Sahlins 1991: 15). Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to assume that the texts we label as ‘historical’ have any greater value as evidence. Not simply that two deponents may disagree over the same matter, but the deeper question of whether the depositions as written represent unambiguously what the deponents actually said or meant to say. Oliver was bringing in visiting theatre groups to the Oval from the emerging alternative scene and this was to influence the direction of the company’s work. Modern musical theater began in the mid- to late-1800s, the result of major social and technical changes. expanded to absorb many Oval habitués – from the thriving drama scene that existed there already. The proportion of everything seemed more right….. My play is not a sophisticated West End play, and your company is not a sophisticated West End company … I hope the experience didn’t break too many spirits in your company’. Since that time, judging from recent books by historians with titles like Practicing History, or The Methodology of History, or History and Tropology, or Historical Representation, or Language and Historical Representation, or The Writing of History, or New Methodologies in History Writing, most historians nowadays are quite ready to see ‘What is history?’ as a complex question, meriting serious conversation rather than what Keith Thomas took to be impatient tolerance. They would wonder not merely at the increasing centrality of theater history, but even more at historians concerning themselves with ‘linguistic turn historiography’, or at serious scholars like White or LaCapra or Ankersmit or Spiegel analysing narrativist strategies and asserting that ‘no historical account is possible without some form of troping or emplotment’ (Spiegel 2005: 23). If this ‘accrual’ brings with it a heightened interest in methodological issues of the kind historians themselves see as important, then we should be pleased that we're at such an interesting juncture in the development of our own discipline. But we should expect such upsets and should welcome them, and skepticism of our existing sources is the first step. The rare exceptions are noted below. Although I don't believe causal arguments are useless, I would certainly maintain that the attribution of causes is a construction, one manner of being historical, and it ought not to be privileged over functional historical narratives. Among the common charges levied against theater historians by those who are not their friends are the following: that they are anti-theoretical; that they are overawed by ‘facts’; that they believe documentary evidence always trumps imaginative hypotheses; that their discourse remains linear while the discourse of those around them grows richer and more complex; that they are more interested in the questions for which they have answers than in those ‘other’ questions, and that they are often scornful of colleagues who, lacking data, nonetheless tackle the other questions; that there is an unconscious Bardic teleology in their premises, shown by their valuation of the origins of Shakespearean associations—the Globe, the Blackfriars, the King's players, Stratford—above those phenomena that led elsewhere, e.g. He also reminds us, almost as an aside, that engaging in the practice of theater history ‘is not the same as understanding or theorizing’ it (Holland 2004a, pp. This culminated in a performance Square, Round or Dead? Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre first visit to London in the Spring 1968 was described by Martin as ‘ a landmark…. What is research?’ (Ankersmit 1983: 207; Zammito 2005: 156; Jackson 2004: 242). Reviews: ‘Events …. Modern Theater 2. If this is the case, then we may have a fairly straightforward answer to the first part of the question: those social historians and cultural historians who were trained as historians are quite likely as caught up in the questions I've already addressed, as are any other group of historians; perhaps more so. Almost two decades ago William Sewell said, ‘most historians take the effectivity of events so much for granted that their accounts of events tend to lack a theoretical edge’. Structure: The company was led by Bill Martin, who described his role as being ‘a sort of chairman’. Even by the middle of the twentieth century this gap was still apparent, as was the clear distinction between dramatic history, a subset of literary history, and theater history, still a kind of handmaid or orphan. The ‘event’ has been for some time a vexed category in historical thinking. For Ronald Vince, theater is without question ‘a sociocultural phenomenon’, and its study ‘in some major aspects a branch of social history’ (Vince 1989: 14). The activity we call theater history, which was born of a literary impulse in the midst of this nineteenth-century historiographic transition, was for a long time uncertain of its own status. (p. 5) All Rights Reserved. History of Modernism: click to see a PowerPoint presentation: Modernism: Characteristics Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize the way modern civilization viewed life, … Working initially with the North East Derbyshire Young People’s Theatre in Chesterfield on The Long and Winding Road , he then worked with Leicestershire Youth Theatre on what became Vacuees. This attack upon philology was a kindred manifestation of the Romantic spirit at work among the historians; as history was to be untethered from literature, so literary study was to be untethered from philology. These attitudes, revolutionary in their day, are the background noise of our own thinking, and the entailment is that we see history today almost reflexively as a scholarly discipline devoted without question to archival research and documentation. Joining the chorus, Stephen Orgel has usefully reminded us that theater history ‘is no different from any other kind of history’, which ideally would mean (though it doesn't yet seem to) that theater historians engage in the same kinds of methodological debates as do other historians (Orgel 2004: 1). through the interpretive creation of and with evidence; and from the ‘outside’ because they then proceed to explain it. Fifteen years after co-editing the earlier volume, Thomas Postlewait asked—and not for the first time—if we can ‘specify a vital academic rationale’ for theater history, ‘distinct from the definitions and rationales that shape each of the other disciplines in the arts’ such as humanities and social sciences. This proliferation is one way to avoid what Hans Kellner describes as our tendency ‘to eliminate rather than to entertain possibilities’. But this doesn't go nearly far enough. In the spirit of such circling, and with my second epigraph as an exemplar, let me now return to the first of my opening questions: Is theater history a form of social or cultural history, and if so, do those disciplines have theoretical underpinnings (however contested) that ought to be of interest to theater historians? History is perhaps the most thoroughly hermeneutic creation of all culture: from the ‘inside’ because historians begin by creating a text, the Past, Problems and solutions are the stuff of narrative, whether fictional or historical. Even in the most austere scholarly report from the archives, the inventive faculty—selecting, pruning, editing, commenting, interpreting, delivering judgements—is in full play. However, due to the enjoyment people got from performing and watching such displays, it didn’t take long for theatrical performance to … Nancy Partner concurs, reminding us that everything regarded as ‘evidence’ is of course evident simply by virtue of its existence, but it is not thereby ‘evidence’. Martin involved the company in extensive research – visiting courts, talking to magistrates and probation officers, visiting approved schools and borstals and although there had initially been no intention of making ‘a play’, ultimately the idea of a lecture was abandoned: ‘Acting out the situations seemed a much better way of demonstrating them than just talking about them’.