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- Title
Nineteenth-Century Repertoire.
- Authors
Davis, Tracy C.
- Abstract
This essay builds on the foundational idea of intertheatricality, proposed by Jacky Bratton as a concept which 'seeks to articulate the mesh of connections between all kinds of theatre texts, and between texts and their users' (New Readings in Theatre History, 37) to argue the concept of repertoire as a corpus of work from which a community knowingly chooses in order to do things with what is selectively extracted. Repertoire draws attention to the factors that matter in making intertheatricality intelligible. The connection 'between texts and their users' forces the question of what is appropriate evidence of an historical audience's competence to interpret performance. In the nineteenth century, repertoire came to denote something beyond an individual's proprietorship, as in the repertoire of a theatre company, or even a repertoire company, and is proposed here as a theorised descriptor of nineteenth-century performance practice. The essay argues that repertoires are multiple circulating recombinative discourses of intelligibility that create a means by which audiences are habituated to understand one or more kinds or combinations of performative tropes and then recognise and interpret others that are unfamiliar, so that the new may be incorporated into repertoire. Thus repertoire – as a semiotic of showing and a phenomenology of experiencing – involves processes of reiteration, revision, citation and incorporation. It accounts for durable meanings, not as memory per se but in the improvisation of naming which sustains intelligibility.
- Subjects
ESSAYS; 19TH century drama; THEATER history; PERFORMING arts repertoire; MINSTREL shows; BURLESQUE (Theater); MATHEWS, Charles; AFRICAN Americans in popular culture
- Publication
Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film, 2009, Vol 36, Issue 2, p6
- ISSN
1748-3727
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.7227/NCTF.36.2.4