HISTORY REPEATING
Thanks to some friends, I had a chance to attend an unusual art event in Laguna Beach California called the "Pageant of the Masters". Understanding the concept behind this event at first was kind of like first encountering Twitter, the communication service that has enthralled most geeks everywhere. It initially takes a little experiencing to get at the heart of what it's really about.
This Wikipedia entry explains the Pageant as follows (image source):
"The Pageant of the Masters is an annual festival held by the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, California. The event is known for its tableaux vivant or "living pictures" in which classical and contemporary works of art are recreated by real people who are made to look nearly identical to the originals through the clever application of costumes, makeup, headdresses, lighting, props, and backdrops.
The first Festival of Arts occurred in 1932, and the first presentation of the Pageant occurred in 1993. Since then, the two events have been held each summer, apart from a four year interruption caused by World War II. "
This year represents the 75th Anniversary of this unusual Art Festival. Each staged piece is accompanied with live orchestral music from the period, and a narrator explaining the context of the piece for about 90 seconds. It reminded me of the 140-character limit on putting up a message on Twitter. You either get the piece in that short period or not.
It may help to view this 3:40 minute behind-the-scenes video of the Festival to get a better sense of what's special about the experience (embedded link not available unfortunately).
The whole thing is experienced in an outdoor amphitheater, with a live orchestra playing under the stars as various famous works of art through the ages are cleverly staged on the various outdoor stages (image source).
The whole thing is about reliving something called the "tableaux vivant" experience, which as this other Wikpedia entry explains, was really how people got entertained for centuries, long before we were spoiled by radio, TV, and the internet.
"Before radio, film and television, tableaux vivants were popular forms of entertainment. Before the age of colour reproduction of images the tableau vivant (often abbreviated simply to tableau) was sometimes used to recreate paintings "on stage", based on an etching or sketch of the painting.
This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series of tableaux presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings of a "live" theatre performance. They thus 'educated' their audience to understand the form taken by later Victorian and Edwardian eramagic lantern shows, and perhaps also sequential narrative comic strips (which first appeared in modern form in the late 1890s)."
An amusing part of the history of this type of art involves Victorian censorship:
"Since English stage censorship often strictly forbade actresses to move when nude or semi-nude on stage, tableaux vivants also had a place in presenting risqué entertainment at special shows.
In the nineteenth century they took such titles as "Nymphs Bathing" and "Diana the Huntress" and were to be found at such places as The Hall of Rome in Great Windmill Street, London. Other notorious venues were the Coal Hole in the Strand and The Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane. In the twentieth century London the Windmill Theatre (1932-64) provided erotic entertainment in the form of nude tableaux vivants on stage."
As long as the performers were perfectly still, but nude, the work was considered "Art", and was OK to be shown in public. But the slightest physical twitch by a performer could get the actor and the producers thrown in jail for breaking the public decency laws.
And we thought our rules and rulings around "wardrobe malfunctions" were draconian. History just keeps repeating itself.
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