The Shamanistic Origins of Popular Entertainments

Abstract

A special category of theatrical activity includes types of performance that appear to be unrelated, or only indirectly related, to each other and to drama proper. Ropewalking, conjuring, juggling, sword-swallowing, and other such acts associated with the wandering mountebank, the fairground, circus ring, side-show, and music hall represent particularized skills developed as a means of popular entertainment. One link with drama is an origin of clowning and comic performance amid activity of this type. Tumblers figure prominently in the Chinese theatre, and the Italiancommedia dell'artewas probably created by acrobats. The techniques of the stage magician contributed to the illusionism of nineteenth-century drama, and trained animal acts were employed in its hippodrome-like spectacle. Performances of this kind, such as acrobatics or magic acts, when practiced as popular entertainments, seem to relate to the esthetics of drama only through the use of skill and through a common theatricality; they seem independent of considerations of narrative form or of the representation or enactment of another reality.

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