British Art Studies (Mar 2019)
Theatres of War: Experimental Performance in London, 1914–1918 and Beyond
Abstract
This special issue of British Art Studies is conceived as an online exhibition. At its heart is the first-ever staging of The Ballet of the Nations, a film made by Impermanence in 2018, which brings Lee’s theatre-of-war to life a century after it was first imagined. The material trace of their art and community is scattered through disparate archives, illustrated books, press reports, flyers, programmes, posters, memoirs, stage designs, film and audio recordings, and art collections, both public and private. The purpose of this exhibition is to excavate and collect that material, showing how objects, music, and movement connected in an intricate, sometimes entangled, pattern of collaboration and signification. Threads running through the different sections include the new religion of Theosophy with its theology of universal brotherhood; the Bomb Shop on Charing Cross Road with its list of radical literature; the photographer E.O. Hoppé as an active participant in the little theatres, who also photographed its leading players; Arthur Ransome, whose first successful book was a cultural history of Chelsea; the launch of new magazines during the war such as Colour and London Vogue; and a distinctive performance style which emerged from both a shared commitment to ideas of artistic synthesis and natural movement, and comedic qualities of lightness and naivety that point to a more serious underlying aesthetic. All the exhibits presented here tell stories which connect them with the artistic and political ambitions of the London little theatres. Cumulatively, they work to change the story of the arts in Britain in the early twentieth century, by demonstrating the reach, persistence, and vitality of experimental theatre in the period of the First World War.
Keywords
