It’s been 200 years since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the classic tale of creation gone wrong. In honor of the novel’s anniversary – and just in time for Halloween – three undergraduates at Washington University in St. Louis were each invited to bring his own brainchild into being: a piece of music, inspired by Frankenstein, to be performed by WashU’s symphony orchestra.
William Acree helps us envision and understand the lasting significance "Creole dramas," a dramatic craze that swept Uruguay and Argentina in the 19th century.
From today's top 100 Billboard songs to ancient Sumerian scripts, human beings have always sung about love. So how have love songs changed across the ages? Have they evolved to reflect society's understandings of love? Or have we been singing about basically the same things for millennia?
Paige McGinley discusses the blues, tent shows, and the performers that brought them alive.
Associate Professor of Drama Pannill Camp explores the significance of the performance rituals of a group of French Masons.
In this episode of the Hold That Thought podcast, Julia Walker explains the legendary performance of Fanny Kemble and how it connected to historical events and anxieties of the times. Walker's book "Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage" will be published November 2021.
Boston University music professor André de Quadros emphasizes using the arts for social change-including influencing healthy habits in a society.
Robert Wiltenburg takes us through Shakespeare's plays to reveal how the theme of mercy evolves in each genre.
Jami Ake explains why questions of gender and power were prominent in early modern England society and theater and examines the range of roles women take on in Shakespeare's plays.
Robert Henke reveals the influences of the famous Italian theater troupe, the Commedia dell'Arte, in Shakespeare's comedies and the Italian plays and novellas at the heart of some of Shakespeare's most famous works.
Joe Loewenstein shares the stories of Shakespeare's rivals and friends, and discusses the fluid nature of authorship in theater at the time.
English professor Joe Loewenstein shares Shakespeare's relationship with Robert Greene and the culture of imitation and plagiarism in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
English professor Musa Gurnis explains what early modern theater was like for London audiences.
Roman historian Karen Acton and Hold That Thought look together at the book Shakespeare used to write his play, and the texts that survive about the lovers Antony and Cleopatra.
Bruce Longworth and Mike Donahue of the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis come together to talk about the Festival's upcoming projects and their insights on the mainstage play.
As a mathematician and a musician, professor David Wright believes in approaching the world both analytically and artistically.
“Music is too important to be left to the musicians,” ethnomusicologist Christopher Small wrote in 1977. A decade earlier, the experimental rock band the Godz seemed to agree. As Patrick Burke reveals, musicians in the 1960s resisted predetermined categories or simplistic musical identities.
Musicologist Todd Decker explores how every performance of "Ol' Man River" has a political dimension.
In theaters and classrooms around the world, audiences and students experience the stories and emotions behind plays penned thousands of years ago by writers like Euripidies, Plautus, and Terence. But how do these modern encounters compare with original performances, and how are scholars even able to determine what it might have been like to view one of these plays in its original setting?
In the Victorian era, just after the birth of the electric light bulb, a novel remedy was developed for women diagnosed with a mysterious ailment called "hysteria."
Join Pannill Camp and Christine Knoblauch-O'Neal, both professors within the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis, as they discuss the concept of "reperformance."