IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB937226770

Enter Electricity: An Allegory's Stage Appearance between Verité and Varieté (2015)

Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Volume: 57
Issue: 3
Pages: 192-211
Publication date: 2015
Language: English

DOI: 10.1111/1600-0498.12091

URI: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12091/abstract

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

At the end of the 19th century, electricity made its entrance on stage, embodied and personified by female dancers. Analysing one such entrance of electricity in a celebratory ballet-pantomime, shown during the 1891 International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt, the paper contextualizes the allegorical appearance within an in-depth discussion of the exhibition and its aesthetics. Stressing the ideological implications of the gendered embodiment, and its imaginary and dissimulative potentials, the analysis focuses on the necessity of the spectacular arrangement for electricity's entrance at the end of the 19th century and shows that it is not only indebted to traditions of allegorical personifications but also to the vulgarized presentation of the naked female in popular theatrical setups like the café chantants, music halls and Tinteltangel. A mixture of sparsely clad limbs and antique-style drapery served to naturalize the new electric power and obscure the underlying social tensions. The unseen engineers in the audience who made the dancers appear and shine with the help of the machinery they prided themselves on were faced by women on stage, openly and seducingly returning their gaze. Deviating from the voyeuristic theatre dispositif of the literary bourgeoisie, the industrial intelligentsia was rehearsing an exhibitionist theatricality that reconfigured how power was exercised in spectacles.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB937226770

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Doron Galili; (2020)
Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (/p/isis/citation/CBB331609842/)

Multimedia Object Mark Klobas; Doron Galili; (2020)
Doron Galili, “Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939” (Duke UP, 2020) (/p/isis/citation/CBB292308610/)

Article Colley, Ann C.; (2014)
Portrait, Empire, and Industry at the Belle Vue Zoo, Manchester (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201804/)

Thesis Sayers, Jentery; (2011)
How Text Lost Its Source: Magnetic Recording Cultures (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567268/)

Article Sam Halliday; (2015)
Electricity and Homosexuality: from 19th-century American Sexual Health Literature to D. H. Lawrence (/p/isis/citation/CBB472705485/)

Book David Trippett; Benjamin Walton; (2019)
Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination (/p/isis/citation/CBB965706511/)

Book Timothy R. White; (2015)
Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater (/p/isis/citation/CBB584510447/)

Chapter Sarah Hibberd; (2017)
Good Vibrations: Frankenstein on the London Stage (/p/isis/citation/CBB599500609/)

Article Fillerup, Jessie; (2013)
Ravel and Robert-Houdin, Magicians (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320651/)

Book Bailey, Peter; (1998)
Popular culture and performance in the Victorian city (/p/isis/citation/CBB001181154/)

Book William B. Worthen; (2020)
Shakespeare, technicity, theatre (/p/isis/citation/CBB490734516/)

Book Yuji Nawata; Hans Joachim Dethlefs; (2022)
Performance Spaces and Stage Technologies: A Comparative Perspective on Theatre History (/p/isis/citation/CBB845799418/)

Article Meszaros, Beth; (2005)
Infernal sound cues: Aural geographies and the politics of noise (/p/isis/citation/CBB001181295/)

Book Marlis Schweitzer; (2015)
Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance (/p/isis/citation/CBB276062856/)

Review Russell, Andrew; (2016)
Review of unknown publication (/p/isis/citation/CBB100069195/)

Book Peter Adey; (2017)
Levitation: The Science, Myth and Magic of Suspension (/p/isis/citation/CBB255782789/)

Article Hughes, Stephen Putnam; (2007)
Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema (/p/isis/citation/CBB001031018/)

Article Tkaczyk, Viktoria; (2014)
Listening in Circles. Spoken Drama and the Architects of Sound, 1750--1830 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001451116/)

Book Philip Steadman; (2021)
Renaissance Fun: The Machines behind the Scenes (/p/isis/citation/CBB931177181/)

Thesis Peter John Weise; (2015)
Voice Beyond Language: Rethinking Sound Studies for British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB216825984/)