Pageant

Focusing on examples from medieval theatre, women¿s suffrage campaigns, and the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, this is the first book to offer a critical overview of pageant as a dramatic form. By enacting highly selective historical episodes, pageants manipulate audiences¿ sense of the past. Through iconic music, affecting images, and vernacular forms, pageants express and, in turn, shape religious, civic, or political allegiances. Freely appropriating elements of history plays, patriotic celebrations, opera, and film, pageants create spectacles of sensory overload. Impressive recent scholarship recognizes pageants as public history, but this is the first authoritative account of the origins, characteristics, and techniques of pageants as a theatrical idiom. Performed in sporting arenas, the open air, or purpose-built theatres, these paratheatrical events express identity through what Erika Fischer-Lichte calls ¿the re-theatricalization of theatre.¿ Pageants are intimately connected