Chapter 4 examines the dialectical relationship between the rhetorical tactics of modern advertising and the performance strategies of the avant-garde. While scholars have established the influence of print advertising on Dada’s collage aesthetic, little attention has been paid to the industry’s influence on the theatrical provocations of the historical avant-garde. This chapter demonstrates how the performance repertoire of early twentieth-century advertising - in the joking assault of the street tout, the insinuated intimacy of the shill, the manufactured cultural authority of the puff, and the provocation of plants in the audience - offered a model of social engagement that avant-garde artists adopted in order to reveal the internal logic and rhetorical strategies of consumer capitalism. Entering into critical debates about the so-called neo-avant-garde, this chapter concludes by establishing a line of continuity between the historical and contemporary avant-gardes, demonstrating how avant-garde artists in post-socialist China likewise inhabit advertising’s performance repertoire when they emulate the abject logic of the shanzhai (“copycat”) to reveal how transnational capitalism is transforming social relations within the globalizing economy.

In an 1879 production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the esteemed British actor Henry Irving offered a new interpretation of Shylock, sparking a debate that roiled the London press.1 Instead of portraying the Jewish miser as a comic scapegoat as had been tradition, Irving lent dignity and pathos to the misunderstood figure, soliciting an unexpected sympathy from many in the audience.2 By all accounts, the scene that created the most striking effect was one of Irving’s own invention.

In an epilogue that examines the current shift from human to animatronic performers in film and video, this book concludes with a meditation on the contemporary ambition to “go viral.” The history of computer-generated imaging (CGI) technology suggests that, in its pixelated form, a new - if also contested - concept of self has emerged for the twenty-first century. While fantasies of disembodiment and photo-realistic avatars of domination and destruction persist in contemporary media, pixilation offers us an alternative model of self that presages a post-Anthropogenic era. By fracturing the contours of a reified identity, the pixelated image invites us to re-envision ourselves as multi-celled organisms capable of co-existing with other such life forms within a shared biosphere. Inscribed in this new performance form, in other words, is yet more evidence for the ways we seek to comprehend and adapt to changes in our ever-modernizing world.

With a helpless victim tied to its tracks, the railroad has figured prominently on the modern stage, serving as an ambiguous image of modernity - at once a force of social disruption and a platform for social mobility. Chapter 2 considers the nineteenth-century vogue for stage naturalism in relation to a deepened sense of space and an accelerated experience of time introduced by railroad travel. As a means by which whole productions - including actors and scenic effects - were transported into the provinces from the city centers where new plays were first mounted, the railroad introduced new productive relations that changed the dynamic of the actor-audience relationship. With new spatio-temporal dimensions represented both on stage and off, audiences began to shift from attending to the iconographic “landscape” of scene-ending tableaux vivants to the “panoramic” perspective that railroad historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch identifies with modernist perception. As plays and productions changed to accommodate this shift, actors did likewise, with Konstantin Stanislavsky urging his actors to redirect the railroad’s propulsive energies inward to explore their characters’ “motivations” along the play’s narrative “throughline.”

Noting that theatres were among the first public buildings to install air-cooling technology, Chapter 5 demonstrates how cold compressed air helped audiences engage with actors whose gestural restraint marked the “cool” style of psychological realism. Historicizing mid-twentieth-century models of self, it shows how air conditioning helped facilitate cross-racial identification by priming audiences to project themselves into the enigmatic interiority of characters that were rendered through psychological-realist techniques. With a focus on Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Orfeu Negro, it demonstrates how Marpessa Dawn and Breno Mello’s psychological-realist acting helped white audiences identify with their Black characters and reject habituated (racist) ways of looking at Black bodies that were also encoded in the film. Paradoxically, it finds that, even as they were sealed within the contours of their own air-cooled skin, individual white audience members could imaginatively experience a sense of self not premised on the socially symbolic barrier of skin, and were thus conditioned to respond as an intersubjective “thou” to the “I” of Black liberationists in this moment of Civil Rights advocacy and postcolonial struggles throughout the American and Global South.

After a year spent in Algeria, composer and music pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze returned to his native Switzerland, where he developed a series of movement exercises to help students learn the rhythmic and harmonic principles of (Western) music. Known as “eurhythmics,” the method drew from insights the former Paris bohemian discovered in the Arab music and Islamic mysticism he encountered in French-occupied Algiers. Chapter 3 demonstrates how eurhythmics gave visual form to both musical and social relations at the turn of the twentieth century, outlining a map of “social harmony” that helped consolidate group identities and affiliations. While Nazi pageants such as Rudolf Laban’s A Spring Wind and a New Joy (1936) modeled themselves after Jaques-Dalcroze’s own civic festivals to express the organic unity of a collective social body through uniform mass movements, other modernist works - such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s Star of Ethiopia pageant (1913, 1915, 1916, 1925), and the Ballet Russes’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) - set complex movement patterns on performers to enact both consensus and difference within a nationalizing body politic.

Chapter 1 examines British playwright Henry Milman’s 1815 play Fazio, within the context of a series of nineteenth-century banking crises in the United Kingdom and the United States. Reading the play’s love triangle as an allegory for changing relations among specie, banks, and paper money, it demonstrates how the play not only staged a crisis in (moral) value, but also enacted an imaginative solution to that crisis in its performance form. Taking Fanny Kemble’s performance as Bianca as its case in point, this chapter shows how Romantic actors used their signature “point” technique to help audiences accept a shift from material to abstract value. Tracking the rise and fall of the play’s popularity against the uneven development of modern banking on both sides of the Atlantic, this chapter reveals how, in a moment when gold and silver specie was being replaced by a paper currency backed by the modern nation-state, the dynamic exchange between actor and audience facilitated even as it figured an exchange of a fiction for the real.