Chapter 12 - Actors and Animants

Summary

Beth Holmgren charts the modes in which men functioned as gatekeepers in nineteenth-century professional theatre, which showed not only the parochialism of their views but a deep anxiety around sexuality that required the disciplining of women’s bodies on and offstage. She reveals how actresses pioneered new ways of living that escaped entrapments of conventional marriage and which allowed some financial autonomy. Beata Guczalska details the treatment of actors from the twentieth century to today; although not persecuted as in other European contexts, actors were still subjected to a lack of social recognition and stability, poverty and a dependence on patrons. A history of acting is also shown to be one of shifting technologies: lighting, photography, radio, illustrated newspapers and cinema. Marek Waszkiel explores both the political and satirical valences of puppets as well as their aesthetic forms. He also analyses the development of acting in relation to objects that thinks acting through dialectical relationships. In this way, the history of puppetry is embedded in a history of ‘acting’, and this offers a new mode of considering performer training, craft and profession.