Melodrama and Immersion on the Nineteenth Century London Stage

In this lecture, Kate Newey wants to think about the nineteenth-century melodrama stage as an experimental three-dimensional space, where managers, playwrights, scenic artists and technicians, and actors collaborated to create a new theatrical language. She is interested in the way we can see melodrama at the forefront of British aesthetic modernity in the nineteenth century, and in the way that melodrama and the melodramatic becomes an epistemology – a kind of knowledge and way of knowing.
Melodrama was the single most important generic innovation of the early nineteenth century theatre, and worked aesthetically and ideologically to resituate human subjectivity within a structure of feeling, seeing, and understanding which was radically altered from preceding classical modes. While there has been a tendency to locate melodrama within a broadly textual field, linked to Romanticism in this paper Newey wants to explore the consequences of placing melodrama in an emergent visual and material culture, and with it, a new kind of affective economy. She is interested in the ways we can interpret the three-dimensional mise-en-scene of early melodrama from the archival record, and find ways to read that record with a focus on the embodied, sensory environment physically created on the boards of the theatre stage.

• Æstetisk Seminar E-2023 Program
• Æstetisk Seminar E-2023 Plakat 

Æstetisk Seminar efteråret 2023 er tilrettelagt af Nicolas Malevé og Jacob Lund, med hjælp fra Annelis Kuhlmann og Jussi Parikka på vegne af 
Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.