Horse theater
The Horse Theater , the Ross Comedy or Hippo Drama is a variety of melodrama . Especially in adventure and equipment pieces , which were once called spectacle pieces , crowd scenes with horses were shown on stage in the 18th and 19th centuries in order to increase their sensational value. This combined theater and circus . Battles were popular as fabrics , including current events such as the storming of the Bastille in 1789.
The London circus pioneer Philip Astley was one of the first to perform this since the 1770s in so-called pantomimes with predominantly historical themes. The horse theater was taken over by the Parisian boulevard theaters under Pixérécourt . Even more elegant stage events such as the Grand Opéra were influenced by it. The Theater an der Wien , one of the most modern German-speaking theaters around 1800, had many horse comedies in its repertoire. Members of the cavalry were often available for dressage acts . Formation riding and vaulting could be used in this context.
In the educated bourgeois theater, however, animals on the stage were not valued. In the 20th century, horse theater moved into the genre of coat-and-sword films and westerns .
Horse theater is also the name of a theater project that was initiated in 2003 by the Belgian dressage trainer and theater man Leon Vermeulen and has had a permanent venue in Zirkow on the island of Rügen since 2016 .
literature
- Arthur Hartley Saxon: Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France . New Haven: Yale Univ. Press 1968.
- David Bradby, Louis James, Bernard Sharratt (Eds.): Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theater, Film and Television (1800–1976). New York: Cambridge Univ. Press 1980. ISBN 0521227550
Individual evidence
- ↑ In press reports in the 18th century there was talk of pantomimes: John C. Greene: Theater in Dublin , Lehigh Univ. Press, Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) 2011, pp. 2585 ff. ISBN 978-1-61146-115-2