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The Scenography of Popular Entertainment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2021

Brooks McNamara
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Extract

There have been few attempts to seriously examine the architecture and design of traditional popular entertainments. For the most part, popular forms have not been thought to involve a high level of design or systematic organization of performance space. Yet, over the years, there. has emerged a distinctive scenography of popular entertainment. It has borrowed from conventional theatre, festivals, and folk performance. Essentially, however, it constitutes a highly independent scenographic strain While interest in that strain continues to grow, the scenography itself is rapidly disappearing. Increasingly, traditional popular forms are influenced by the scenography of the newest popular entertainments, television and film. The scenographic base of these new forms is quite different from that of traditional amusements: film and television are naturalist in their orientation. They are concerned more with presenting a seemingly coherent reality than with creation of spectacle and fantasy for their own sake—and the naive art of traditional popular forms is gradually giving way to the orderly and precise scenography of mass culture.

Type
Popular Entertainments Issue
Information
The Drama Review , Volume 18 , Issue 1: Popular Entertainments , March 1974 , pp. 16 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 The Drama Review

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Footnotes

Title illustration is of William Hogarth's “Southwark Fair (1733),” an eighteenth-century “entertainment environment.” Hogarth shows a number of open-air street performers, including a peep-show operator, a slack-wire walker, and a musician who exhibits puppets and a trained dog. In the rear, are improvised “fitup” theatres.