Theatre History
Comes
to
Life
For American audiences, the words “Renaissance theatre and performance” are likely to invoke mental images of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare, and language patterns that are sprinkled with words like “milady” and lots of “thee, thy, and thou”. The reasons for the dominance of the English Renaissance in the American popular imagination of what “Renaissance theatre and performance” is can be traced to many different factors, not least among them is the commonality of the English language, the historical roots of British theatre traditions in the early formations of American colonial dramatic culture,[1] and the proliferation and popularization of American Renaissance Faires, where actors and guests alike immerse themselves in recreations of Elizabethan England – as performed in an often subversive sensibility, but Anglo-centric nonetheless.
As Rachel Lee Rubin writes in her book Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture, “The American Renaissance faire was from its earliest days well situated to marshala sense of motivated whimsyto serve an anti-establishment
agenda." As Rubin notes, American Renaissance Faires emerged in the 1960s, and for many participants, adhering to a modernist anxiety of technology, the faire grounds offered the opportunity to perform an alternative present by embracing the “authenticity” of a past that was free from mass culture.[3] Unfortunately, this historical “authenticity” was at odds with the concurrent Civil Rights movements, and required a version of Renaissance theatre and performance which was all-white and all-male.
Me
Today, Renaissance Faires present a version of Elizabethan England which includes women and performers of color in performances of Shakespeare and street performances. Despite these anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-establishment interventions on the English “Golden Age” of drama, these performances still center around Shakespeare and reify English practice as the center of “Renaissance theatre and performance”, obscuring all other traditions and practices. Furthermore, the reparative performances of Elizabethan England in American Renaissance Fairs gives the impression that the only way that female and nonwhite performances in the European Renaissance can only exist in alternative reperformances of the European Renaissance and poses the danger of potentially erasing, from the imagination, any legitimate performances where they would have not only been featured, but featured in leading or prominent roles.
It erases instances such as the 1615 Ommegang of Brussels commemorated in six painted panels collectively named “The Triumph of Isabella” by artist Denis Van Alsloot.
If the belief is that Renaissance theatre and performance in Europe did not feature women or people of color – or did not feature them in dignified or prominent ways, the depiction of the 1615 Ommegang disrupts this narrative.The Ommegang, literally translating to “a walk around”, was part of a festival tradition in Brussels began in the 14th Century and featured a day-long parade of religious statues, clergy, military and secular guilds, and performers from the cathedral of Notre Dame du Grand Sablon, through to the city’s Grand Place, or “central market” square. The themes and performances of the pageant were rich in symbolism, and as the festival evolved over the centuries, it became an increasingly secular hybrid of medieval and Renaissance performance conventions. Like many cities in Europe, political control Brussels often shifted from monarch-to-monarch based on a number of factors including everything from war to inheritance. For example, King Charles V of Spain inherited the Netherlands from his father, and the Spanish rule engendered Spanish influences on the festival. Thus, the Ommegang reflected a cultural array of different traditions from throughout Europe that had influenced the city over the years.
These differences would become points of political and
religious tension over the years, culminating in the
Eighty Years War. In this time, Philip III’s sister, the archduchess
Isabella Clara Eugenia became ruler of Brussels and the
surrounding Spanish Netherlands, and her husband
Albert of Austria was her co-ruler. It is under this political
backdrop that the 1615 Ommegang was performed to reinforce
their power, and their status as patrons of the arts. The result was an amalgamation of Renaissance theatre and performance which featured, not only a female leading character, but multiple female performers portraying her (as opposed to the Elizabethan convention of men playing women). For example, in the fifth panel, which depicts the wagons, Isabella is represented three times: first leading the court of Brussels, second as the mythical Diana among her nymphs, and third, “disputing with the learned” as a reference to the story in the Bible where Jesus is found in the Temple debating the priests. Another figure of Isabella holding a crossbow, mounted on a white horse, leads the wagons. Isabella is also featured as a gigantic
puppet in the parade’s giants’ segment, but the incorporation of these
actresses as Isabella in prominent roles from current politics,
mythology, and the Bible is a significant departure
from what an American audience
might imagine Renaissance
theatre to be like.
There are performers of color seen throughout the painting, challenging the notion that Renaissance Europe was all-white – a belief that caused exclusion of performers of color from early American Renaissance Faires in the 1960s because it wasn’t believed to be “authentic.” One black male in the painting is featured riding a horse, and wearing prominent guild livery. Two North African individuals in the fifth panel are riding camels in front of the actress playing Isabella holding the crossbow, and two figures of the same complexion are riding horses further up the processional line, playing large drums. Given the tumultuous history between the Spanish and the North African “Moors”, the fact that the figure of Isabella would be seen riding together with, and not in opposition to North African figures, is significant – and one might read this as a gesture aimed towards the theme of truce, forgiveness, and unity, as their country was torn by civil war.
Isabella
Albert
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I want to be clear that I’m not attempting to position the 1615 Ommegang of Brussels as a politically perfect, progressive alternative to Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. The fact that it promoted Spanish rule, while, at that same time, Spain was in the process of violently colonizing the Indigenous peoples of the “New World” is reason enough to not glorify it, although it should be noted that the Ommegang didn’t include any kind of exhibition or performance of “New World conquest” scenarios. Other aspects of the parade, such as its Orientalist presentation of “exotics” has been critiqued by scholars like Johan Verberckmoes. Nevertheless, inserting the Ommegang into the public imagination of what and who “authentic” Renaissance theatre and performance included presents modern audiences with a (however imperfect) historically accurate and “authentic” inclusivity as opposed to an “alternative” inclusivity.
The Van Alsloot paintings of the festival have been described by art historians as almost “photographic” depictions of this Renaissance mass spectacle, offering a valuable visual archive to theatre and performance historians.
The surviving panels sit in museums and a private collection, scattered across Europe, in locations such as The Victoria and Albert Museuem (the V&A) in London, the Museo Nacionel del Prado in Madrid, The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, with one panel missing entirely. Unlike the textual evidence of a Shakespeare play, the Van Alsloot panels offer theatre historians a wealth of iconographic information on Renaissance theatre and performance, as the festival pageant included both theatrical and non-theatrical entertainments. However, as valuable as the panels are, they are an archival record of a live performance – the figures forever frozen in time. The Ommegang, while highly visual, was designed by Isabella and the city officials to be experienced, not just looked at. While historic reenactment and reperformance is an often-used historiographic strategy for better understanding historic performances, it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to reperform the 1615 Ommegang, because of its massive scale. Even annual modern revivals of the Ommegang festival in Brussels pale in comparison to what is depicted in the Van Alsloot panels. Nevertheless, since 2017, graduate students in the School of Theatre Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, through a collaboration with the International Program for Creative Collaboration and Research and the V&A in London, have taken high resolution scans of the surviving panels, and reunified them with digital animation to bring the roughly 400 year old event back to life for a contemporary public.
The first performance of the Immersive Experience was at the University of Maryland in fall of 2018, and the second was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in spring of 2019.
The practice of animating famous works of art is currently an increasing trend around the world, but what makes the University of Maryland collaboration different is that the “Triumph of Isabella” depicts Renaissance theatre and performance, and the painting is being brought to life by theatre practioners/scholars instead of filmmakers, as is usually done. The team of graduate students including projection design MFA Paul Diezel, and PhD students Q Haeri and myself, directed by Franklin J. Hildy approached the digital reunification as a theatrical production, complete with its own casting process (choosing which figures in the painting would be featured), blocking and choreography (determining the order of the parade, the figures’ movements, and how the cheering “audience” present in the sound design responds to the parade), and incorporating live costumed actors to interact with the animation and provide exposition through monologues. Where the immersive nature of the Renaissance Faire tradition was built in America as a way of challenging theatrical configurations and conventions, and immersive theatre practitioners have begun to explore the potential of new digital technologies for pedagogical and political purposes. This is something that Renaissance Faire culture is reluctant to do because of its roots in anti-technological ideology. Thus, the project from the University of Maryland called “The Triumph of Isabella: An Immersive Experience” was able to combine these two strategies.
For the European performance of the experience at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the dramaturgy of the project shifted knowing that our London audience would have a better knowledge of the history of the Renaissance in Europe. Because the exhibit was in London, we assumed another Anglo-Centric knowledge, but also assumed that the V&A would get non-English speaking visitors from all over the world, and visitors from mainland Western and Northern Europe who would be more familiar with the repertoire of the Ommegang’s performance descendants, and this was, indeed the case. Because we did not have the opportunity to include the full production with costumed actors, musicians, and dancers, the team was able to include much of the historic exposition in a series of gallery talks, answer questions. Knowing the potential for a large percentage of non-English speaking visitors, who would not have accessibility to our gallery talks, the team expanded the animation, adding more figures from the painting, and a wider variety of music in multiple European languages and dialects. For this audience, the idea that there are other Renaissance performance traditions that are non-English was not a major revelation. The conversations that the team had in Europe with visitors and museum curators centered more on specific historiographical choices than on being exposed to something “new”. This aspect of the European performance further emphasized the disruptive elements of the Immersive Experience in the American context.