Performing Bohemia
- ️https://qub.academia.edu/RichardSchoch
CITY: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2013
This paper is a reflection on bohemia, both as a historical and a contemporary phenomenon. It explores bohemia as an expression of and a response to the contradictions of both 19th-century bourgeois society and present-day neo-liberal society. It begins with an examination of the origins of bohemia in 19th-century Paris and follows its expansion and popularisation through the 20th century. The paper then focuses on Berlin as a paradigmatic example of present-day bohemia in its globalised and industrialised form; Berlin is significant in this context for two reasons: first, because it has become a global destination for followers of a bohemian lifestyle as described below, and second, because the concept of bohemia has been incorporated into property speculation and economic development policy discourses. Drawing on Barthes' definition of myth as an imaginary solution to unresolvable contradictions, Elizabeth Wilson characterises bohemia as a ‘cultural myth about art in modernity, a myth which seeks to reconcile art to industrial capitalism, to create for it a role in consumer society’ (Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, 3. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). The author is in agreement with Wilson, but would add that for contemporary bohemia, there is a further contradiction to be resolved: between the desire for a personally meaningful, exciting and glamorous lifestyle and the lucrative nature of this lifestyle for post-industrial capitalism. The author originally came from an arts practice background, then entered academic research as a way of trying to understand the incorporation of culture into capitalism. This text forms part of this investigation.
Victorian Studies, 2012
W hat do we know about Victorian amateur theatricals? in Victorian studies, the impressions with which we are most familiar are novelistic. We may think, for example, of Becky sharp as Clytemnestra, entrapping a second high-society husband in Vanity Fair (1847-48), or Mansfield Park (1814), or Daniel Deronda (1876. These classic cases present theatricals as the invasion of the gauche, the excessively public, and the inappropriate over the demure, the decent, and the private. i want to suggest that we take these theatricals more seriously.
Theatricality and Performance in Victorian Literature and Culture
2011
Performance and theatricality have become key terms for scholars working across wide reaches of Victorian studies. Closely related and multiply resonant as they are, I will not attempt to disentangle them here. Thomas Postlewait and Tracy Davis in defining just one of these terms suggest that: the idea of theatricality has achieved an extraordinary range of meanings, making it everything from an act to an attitude, a style to a semiotic system, a medium to a message. It is a sign empty of meaning; it is the meaning of all signs. Depending on one's perspective, it can be dismissed as little more than a self-referential gesture or it can be embraced as a definitive feature of human communication. Although it obviously derives its meanings from the world of theatre, theatricality can be abstracted from the theatre itself and then applied to any and all aspects of human life. 1
MUSICAL NETWORKING IN THE ‘LONG 19TH CENTURY’, 2023
The aim of this paper is to illustrate the work of theatre companies in the 19th century in the area of today's Central Europe in terms of cultural transfer between the metropolis and the province and subsequent duplication of artistic activity in other provincial cities. And at the same time to demonstrate the role of theatre in social life of municipal elites through the participation of theatre companies in creating urban culture. The term metropolis, which was used for Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg monarchy, and later for Budapest, the capital of Kingdom of Hungary, determined the direction of cultural transfer within provincial cities and created the theatre landscape in the long 19th century. At the same time the theatre buildings as the places of cultural transfer formed one of the most important music networks in this period.