Toronto Eighteenth-Century Group (TECG) Event with Marlis Schweitzer
When and Where
Speakers
Description
"Screen Performances"
Presentation by Marlis Schweitzer, Professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance, York University
In Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 film EMMA. Mr. Woodhouse’s aversion to drafts is comically rendered through the actions of two male servants who hasten to arrange a series of folding screens to his liking. In a scene deleted from the film, Mr. Woodhouse, portrayed by the incomparable Bill Nighy, sits in his chair completely encircled by screens, only to complain that “it’s dark in here,” at which point the two servants scramble to bring him a candelabra. This running “screen” gag not only affords Nighy the opportunity to metaphorically “chew the scenery” but also gestures towards the affordances of folding screens in eighteenth-century British life. Taking a cue from Nighy’s onscreen performance, my talk will offer a performance history of the folding screen. Bridging material culture, design history, theatre history, and performance studies, it will analyze a range of performances that transpired around, with, on, and through folding screens. These include performances of comfort and privacy in domestic spaces; performances with screens – perhaps none more famous than David Garrick’s salon performance in Paris; performances of sexual frivolity in public theatres – vividly rendered in She Stoops to Conquer (1773); the documentation of performance practices via portrait prints pasted onto screens; and the corresponding representation of screens in political prints where they function as metaphors for the corruption and lies of political actors. At a time when so many of us spend hours “glued” to our screens, how might a performance history of the folding screen shed light on our own complicated yet deeply personal relationship with objects?
Bio: Marlis Schweitzer is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. She is the author and editor of several books, including When Broadway Was the Runway: Theatre, Fashion and American Culture (2009) and Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century (2020), recipient of the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. With the support of an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, she is undertaking a revisionist analysis of George Alexander Stevens’s Lecture on Heads (1764) and the emergent cultures of celebrity and conspiracy that surrounded it.
Light refreshments available prior to the event at 4:00 pm
For more information about the Toronto Eighteenth-Century Group (TECG), please visit: https://sites.utoronto.ca/tecg/