Brand New Worlds: Disney's Theatre Assemblages

The significance of brands within our media-intensive culture can hardly be overstated. Having emerged in the mid-20th century as platforms for the distribution of commodities, brands have since become, as scholar Celia Lury argues, “the logos of the global economy.” Brand interfaces not only differentiate mass production, but produce cultural assemblages that rewrite social and political relations. This dissertation concerns itself with the meaning of theatrical production within brand performance, with a specific focus on the Walt Disney Company. Although there are many corporate producers in commercial theatre today — Warner Brothers, MGM, Universal, and Cirque du Soleil, to name a few — Disney has the distinction of being the first to make live theatre a cornerstone of its brand relationships. Disney has also had, in branding terms, the most depth, breadth and consistency of any global entertainment brand. Using the concept of assemblage as an applied framework, I consider how Disney’s brand theatre functions as a form of communicative/affective capitalism, as an interface for consumer interactivity and exchange. Following Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda and Lury, I argue that Disney’s theatre assemblages are heterogeneous, contingent, emergent and most of all generative. At the heart of this project is the question of how Disney’s theatre assemblages cohere – the question of identifiable, intensive continuities. What kinds of historical contingencies are replicated in Disney’s texts and territories? How does the company code cultural flows? In what ways are Disney’s theatre assemblages networked to social formations like childhood, gender, race, sexuality, and nation? What kinds of consumer interactions and socio-technical conditions are most important to the ongoing process of developing brand relations? Although Disney’s multi-modal theatre assemblages are a function of neoliberal logic and labor norms, and sustain dominant modes of production, they are also highly mutable, often supporting contested claims of intelligibility and citizenship. The company produces a vast range of theatre experiences. This dissertation focuses on character encounters, children’s theatre, Broadway musicals, a re-creation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and animal/safari performance. The chapters are composed as a nested set of assemblages, starting with theatre for Disney’s most important demographic: children. I then move into larger social fields/assemblages, considering theatre that addresses the nation, theatre that reframes transnational/global space, and finally, animal/ecological theatre. Taken together, the chapters present an argument for the significance of brand theatre as a localized, expressive, collaborative and extremely flexible site of cultural affiliation, agency and assembly

Buffy, Ballads, and Bad Guys Who Sing: Music in the Worlds of Joss Whedon

Edited Collection of essays on music in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blo

Trial by Farce

Was there more to comedy than Chaucer, the Second Shepherds’ Play, or Shakespeare? Of course! But, for a real taste of medieval and Renaissance humor and in-your-face slapstick, one must cross the Channel to France, where over two hundred extant farces regularly dazzled crowds with blistering satires. Dwarfing all other contemporaneous theatrical repertoires, the boisterous French corpus is populated by lawyers, lawyers everywhere. No surprise there. The lion’s share of mostly anonymous farces was written by barristers, law students, and legal apprentices. Famous for skewering unjust judges and irreligious ecclesiastics, they belonged to a 10,000-member legal society known as the Basoche, which flourished between 1450 and 1550. What is more, their dramatic send-ups of real and fictional court cases were still going strong on the eve of Molière, resilient against those who sought to censor and repress them. The suspenseful wait to see justice done has always made for high drama or, in this case, low drama. But, for centuries, the scripts for these outrageous shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources. In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but philologically faithful vernacular. Newly conceived as much for scholars as for students and theater practitioners, this repertoire and its familiar stock characters come vividly to life as they struggle to negotiate the limits of power, politics, class, gender, and, above all, justice. Through the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce, we gain a new understanding of comedy itself as form of political correction. In ways presciently modern and even postmodern, farce paints a different cultural picture of the notoriously authoritarian Middle Ages with its own vision of liberty and justice for all. Theater eternally offers ways for new generations to raise their voices and act

Bowdoin Orient v.117, no.1-24 (1987-1988)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1980s/1008/thumbnail.jp

Trial by Farce

Was there more to comedy than Chaucer, the Second Shepherds’ Play, or Shakespeare? Of course! But, for a real taste of medieval and Renaissance humor and in-your-face slapstick, one must cross the Channel to France, where over two hundred extant farces regularly dazzled crowds with blistering satires. Dwarfing all other contemporaneous theatrical repertoires, the boisterous French corpus is populated by lawyers, lawyers everywhere. No surprise there. The lion’s share of mostly anonymous farces was written by barristers, law students, and legal apprentices. Famous for skewering unjust judges and irreligious ecclesiastics, they belonged to a 10,000-member legal society known as the Basoche, which flourished between 1450 and 1550. What is more, their dramatic send-ups of real and fictional court cases were still going strong on the eve of Molière, resilient against those who sought to censor and repress them. The suspenseful wait to see justice done has always made for high drama or, in this case, low drama. But, for centuries, the scripts for these outrageous shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources. In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but philologically faithful vernacular. Newly conceived as much for scholars as for students and theater practitioners, this repertoire and its familiar stock characters come vividly to life as they struggle to negotiate the limits of power, politics, class, gender, and, above all, justice. Through the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce, we gain a new understanding of comedy itself as form of political correction. In ways presciently modern and even postmodern, farce paints a different cultural picture of the notoriously authoritarian Middle Ages with its own vision of liberty and justice for all. Theater eternally offers ways for new generations to raise their voices and act

Herod the Great in Medieval Art and Literature.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the treatment of Herod the Great in medieval art and literature. Since the iconographic and other traditions of the subject are European, the scope of this study is European, except that the chapter on late vernacular non-dramatic literature, when the traditions are well established and more or less stereotyped, is confined to English sources. The opening chapters examine the accounts given by early historians, patristic commentators and the church liturgy for the traditions which they established and the interpretations which they sanctioned, and thereafter chapters deal in chronological sequence with the art and literature of the medieval period in their response to these traditions and interpretations. The most creative period in the iconography of scenes involving Herod in the visual arts was the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Artists of the Early Christian period were relatively conservative in their treatment of Herod the Great; not until the twelfth century did artists give visual expression to the early dramatic commentaries on Herod's violence and evil. A full flowering in the visual arts took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when a vast array of motifs related to Herod in the Meeting with the Magi scene as well as that of the Massacre of the Innocents was developed. Other events from his life were introduced into art at this time, his suicide and death being the most important. Earlier artistic attempts to represent him as a regal and aloof emperor were abandoned in favour of more ingenious pottrayals of this king who was associated with devils and accustomed to wielding a sword. This was true for both English and Continental art. The art of the fifteenth century does not reflect the same vitality in its treatmen