New approaches to women and popular performance in the long 19th Century

Alissa Mello, The Judy Project

From fairgrounds to seaside resorts, Punch and Judy is perhaps the most iconic English puppet tradition that simultaneously conjures images of beach holidays, laughter and ice cream alongside violence, misogyny, abuse and sometimes racism. For many, it is a men’s performing practice about the leading male character, Punch. Yet its historiography and meaning across time are significantly more nuanced and complex revealing a diverse range of social activism and anxiety(ies) at volatile historical moments. This presentation draws on creative historiography to image if and how women may have engaged with form in the 19th century, and to juxtapose early seaside and middle-class drawing room shows with those performed at suffragette fairs in the early 20th Century.

Kate Newey, Making Theatrical Empires: Women’s Transnational Theatrical Exchanges in the Nineteenth Century

Theatre has always been a global industry, with actors, playwrights, and managers often travelling great distances. It was one of the most vital forms of cultural transmission for the nineteenth century, yet until relatively recently, most scholars have overlooked its significance. What was the work of women and how did women’s theatre work shape imperial and transnational exchanges? These are the questions I’ll open up in this paper, which is part of my European Research Council-funded project, WomenTheatreNet. I'll focus on the web of connections between the London theatre, one of the first plays to be written in the colony of New South Wales after European invasion, and Irish folk tales manufactured for metropolitan audiences.