Abstract
Hallie Flanagan wanted to challenge and transform herself as a theatre artist. She was stalled and had exhausted the resources available to her in the US. “I can’t tell you how much I feel that I need this European training if I am to do anything distinctive…. I want to rely no longer on the observation of others. I want first hand knowledge of the theatres of the world…. In short, the year of foreign study is indispensable if I am to do work which is of power and value.”1 On 3 December 1925 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation received an application from Hallie Flanagan for its second year of fellows. In her application she shared her fervent belief that her artistic aspirations could not be fulfilled by staying within the geographic boundaries of her home country.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Joseph C. Kiger, Philanthropic Foundations in the Twentieth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000) 42–44.
Irwin Unger and Debi Unger, The Guggenheims: Family History (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) 210.
Barry D. Karl and Alice W. Karl, “Foundations and the Government: A Tale of Conflict and Consensus,” Philanthropy and the Nonprofi t Sector in a Changing America, ed. Charles T. Clotfelter and Thomas Ehrlich (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) 52.
Robert F. Arnove, “Introduction,” Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations as Home and Abroad, ed. Robert F. Arnove (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) 5.
G. Thomas Tanselle, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 1925–2000: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Record (New York: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 2000) 28.
Walter Prichard Eaton, “The Real Revolt in Our Theatres,” Scribner’s 72 (November 1922): 598.
Joanne Bentley, Hallie Flanagan: Life in the American Theatre (New York: Knopf, 1988) 45.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays and Articles (New York: Library of America, 1987 [1903]) 359.
John Houseman was chosen by McClendon as her co-director. Stephanie Batiste notes that “leadership by white man was understood to be fiscally practical given discrimination and segregation in federal administration.” Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) 265, n. 57.
“The NEA has nurtured the growth of cultural institutions that serve both the nation and the needs of local communities. Since 1966, the number of … non-profit theatres proliferated from 56 to 425…. Though the NEA was not directly responsible for the exponential growth in the number of these arts organizations there can be little doubt that it was a catalyst.” Nina Kressner Cobb, Looking Ahead: Private Sector Giving to the Arts and Humanities (Washington DC: President’s Council on the Arts and the Humanities, 1997) 17. One member of the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund, the largest private arts funder in the US at the time, emphasized, “The NEA changed the arts environment completely. It was the major catalyst in decentralizing the arts.” Cobb, Looking Ahead, 18.
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 6.
Geoffrey S. Proehl, Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008) 19.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performance and Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) 2–3.
Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (New York: Henry Holt, 2009) 58.
Joey Adams, On the Road for Uncle Sam: The Bittersweet Adventures of an American Vaudeville Troupe in Southeast Asia (New York: Bernard Geis, 1963) 230.
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) 95.
Waqar Zaidi, “Liberal Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology in Interwar Britain and the United States,” Internationalism Reconfi gured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, ed. Daniel Laqua (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2011) 19.
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003) 84.
Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations (Manchester University Press, 2011) 17.
Susan Pederson, “Back to the League of Nations,” American Historical Review 112.4 (October 2007): 1092.
Robert Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 11.
David W. Ellwood, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford University Press, 2012) 196.
Katharina Rietzler, “Before the Cultural Cold Wars: American Philanthropy and Cultural Diplomacy in the Inter-war Years,” Historical Research 84.2 (February 2011) 154.
W. Scott Lucas, “Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control: Approaches to Culture and the State-Private Network in the Cold War,” The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960, ed. Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (London: Frank Cass, 2003) 53.
David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton University Press, 2011) 108.
Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” 5 March 1946. http://history1900s.about.com/od/churchillwinston/a/Iron-Curtain.htm. Accessed 15 November 2013.
George Coleman the Younger, “Epilogue,” as reported in Sholto and Reuben Percy, The Percy Anecdotes, Vol. 17: The Stage and Music (London: T. Boys, 1823) 161.
For a history of the iron curtain as a political metaphor, see Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2007). Also, Churchill did understand the West as being “in front” of the curtain. “In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety. In Italy the Communist Party is seriously hampered by having to support the Communist-trained Marshal Tito’s claims to former Italian territory at the head of the Adriatic.” Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace.”
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997) 196.
Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Political Economy of American Hegemony 1945–1955 (London: Routledge, 2001) 1.
Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1981) 105.
Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton University Press, 2013) 155.
Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House, 2006) 30.
Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) 67.
Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 6.
Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton University Press, 1997) 108.
Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking, 2014) 333.
Walter Lippmann, “Empire: The Days of Our Nonage Are Over,” Men of Destiny (New York: Macmillan, 1928) 215–16.
Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (New York: Scribner, 1920) v.
Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009) 30 and 37.
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 19.
Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Movements in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 99–100.
Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) 19.
Carl Marklund, “Rationalization and the Modernity of Europe,” unpublished ms (2005): 1. http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=carl_marklund. Consulted 1 July 2010.
Anthony Giddens, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998) 94.
Albert Rhys Williams, Through the Russian Revolution (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921) 243.
Copyright information
© 2015 Charlotte M. Canning
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Canning, C.M. (2015). Introduction. In: On the Performance Front. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543301_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543301_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-58890-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54330-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)