Mel Brimfield
THIS IS PERFORMANCE ART
PART ONE: PERFORMED SCULPTURE AND DANCE
Glossary
Performance Art
Performance, or Live, Art became defined as a form of art, distinct from visual art, in the mid
1960s and is usually an event that employs the artist’s own body as subject matter. As no art
object is made, such as a painting or sculpture, the history of performance art is based on
documentary evidence, such as photographs, films and objects used in the performance itself.
Mel Brimfield
Mel Brimfield is a London-based artist and curator with a particular interest in Performance Art,
and who creates playful alternative histories inspired by real artists, artworks and pop culture
influences. Recognising that performance art is difficult to document and represent accurately,
Brimfield toys with the truth and produces fabricated information, objects and epherema to
support her often comic parallel realities.
Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci (1940-) is a US designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.
His performance and video work was marked by confrontation and Situationism, seen in works
including Seedbed (1971) where he lay hidden beneath a gallery-wide ramp installed at the
Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating while vocalising into a loudspeaker his fantasies about the
visitors walking above him. One motivation behind Seedbed was to involve the public in the
work's production by creating a situation of reciprocal interchange between artist and viewer.
Action painting
Action painting is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dripped, splashed or
smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied – the practice is sometimes called
gestural abstraction. The resulting work often emphasises the physical act of painting itself.
The style was widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, and is closely associated with
abstract expressionism.
John Baldessari
John Baldessari (1931-) is a US artist who makes books, videos, films, billboards and public
works, often incorporating text and photography. A major retrospective Pure Beauty was held
at Tate Modern in 2009.
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys (1921-86) was a very influential German artist and teacher who made sculpture,
video, performance and installation art. He is particularly recognised for his idea of social
sculpture, gesamtkunstwerk, which he claimed could shape society and politics. One of his
most famous works is the performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965).
Lionel Blair
Lionel Blair (1931-) is a British actor, choreographer, tap dancer and television presenter. He is
well known for being one of the team captains on the gameshow Give Us a Clue from 1979
until the early 1990s, and for being the second presenter of the British version of Name That
Tune in the 1980s.
Mel Bochner
Mel Bochner (1940-) is a US conceptual artist and an early proponent of photo-documentation
work, which he describes as creating ‘not so much a sculpture as a two-dimensional work
about sculpture’.
John Cage
John Cage (1912-92) was a highly influential US composer, philosopher, poet, artist and
printmaker best known for his 1952 composition 4’33’’, which is silent but encourages
concentration on the noises of the immediate environment. Cage embraced random elements
and the effects of chance on his work.
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was a US artist who worked with kinetic sculpture, painting,
lithograph, tapestry, jewellery and household objects. As well as his mobile sculptures, he is
known for creating large-scale public works, including 125 for JFK Airport in 1957, La Spirale for
UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Man (L'Homme), commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal.
Lord Chamberlain
The Lord Chamberlain, or Lord Chamberlain of the Household, is one of the chief officers of
the Royal Household in the UK. The position of Lord Chamberlain dates from the Middle Ages,
when the King’s Chamberlain often acted as spokesman in Council and Parliament and is
generally responsible for the conduct and general business of the Royal Household.
Tommy Cooper
Tommy Cooper (1921-1984) was born in Caerphilly, Wales, and became a famous performer
known for his red fez and catch phrase ‘just like that’. Cooper was given a magic set by an aunt
when he was eight, which inspired him to become a magician. His first routine at the age of 16
proved to be a disaster and, when people began to laugh at him, he ran off the stage in tears. In
retrospect he realized that the combination of magic tricks and laughter could be a very good
act, but he never totally overcame his stage fright.
Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) was a US dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront
of the US avant-garde for more than 50 years. He is notable for his frequent collaborations with
artists of other disciplines, including musicians John Cage and David Tudor, artists Robert
Rauschenberg and Bruce Nauman, designer Romeo Gigli, and architect Benedetta Tagliabue.
Vivian Van Damm
Vivian Van Damm (1895-1960) was a prominent London theatre impresario from 1932 until
1960, managing the Windmill Theatre in London's Great Windmill Street. Inspired by the Folies
Bergère and the Moulin Rouge in Paris to introduce nudity to the acts, Van Damm exploited
a legal loophole that naked statues could not be banned on moral grounds. This led to the
legendary Windmill Girls, who had to remain motionless due to the Lord Chamberlain's ruling,
'If you move, it's rude’.
Gene Detroy and Marquis the Chimp
Gene Detroy was an animal trainer active in the 1950s and 1960s and who cared for the
Marquis family, a trio of chimpanzees who starred in the US sit-com The Hathaways in 1961-2.
Valie Export
Valie Export (1940) changed her name from Waltrud Lehner and is an Austrian artist associated
particularly with the feminist movement and whose work includes video installations, body
performances, computer animations, photography, sculpture and books.
Lola (Lolo) Ferrari
Lola (Lolo) Ferrari (1962-2000) was a French performer best known in the UK for appearing on
Eurotrash with presenters Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Ferrari is documented as
having the world’s largest breasts, surgically enhanced to a speculated bust size of either 58F
or 54G.
Fischli/Weiss
Peter Fischli (1952) and David Weiss (1946), often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, are
contemporary artists who have been collaborating since 1979. The duo utilise a large number
of artistic forms, including film and photography, art books, sculptures made out of different
materials, and multimedia installations. They adapt objects and situations from everyday life and
place them into an artistic context – often using humour and irony.
Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda (1937-) is a US actress, political activist and fitness guru who originally achieved
fame through films such as Barbarella. She was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam war and
advocate of the rights of women, starring in Nine to Five with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton in
1980. In the 1980s Fonda released 23 workout videos, famously depicted in skin-tight leotards
and leggings.
Cato Fong
Cato Fong is a fictional character from the comedy film series The Pink Panther, featuring the
French police detective Jacques Clouseau played by Peter Sellers. Cato is Clouseau's houseboy
and an expert in martial arts and a running joke throughout the series sees Cato unexpectedly
attack Clouseau at various points, to keep his combat skills and vigilance sharp. Unfortunately,
Cato takes these instructions far too seriously, repeatedly ambushing Clouseau in his own
house, with hilarious results. Cato was played by Burt Kwouk (1930-), an English-born actor
of Chinese descent who most recently starred in Last of the Summer Wine.
Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) was an Argentinian/Italian artist who founded Spatialism in 1946 in
New York, a visual art initiative concerned with capturing movement and time. He is most
famous for a series of slashed canvases.
Gilbert and George
The Italian artist Gilbert Proesch (1943-) and British George Passmore (1943) have worked
together as a collaborative duo since 1967. They have become famous for their distinctive,
highly formal appearance and manner and their brightly coloured graphic-style photo-based
artworks. Gilbert and George first met in 1967 while studying sculpture at St Martins School
of Art in London. The Singing Sculpture (1970) is an early, important, performance which
sees both artists coated in metallic make-up standing together on a table, dancing and singing
Underneath the Arches – the 1930s music hall song by Flanagan and Allen, which describes
the experiences of homeless men sleeping under railway arches during the Great Depression.
Although they gave up such ‘living sculpture performances’ in 1977, Gilbert and George adopted
the identity of ‘living sculptures’ in both their art and their daily lives, becoming not only
creators, but also the art itself. Since the early 1970s their work has consisted mainly of large
photo works, known as The Pictures. The images are often drawn from the street life of the
East End of London in which they live and the artists themselves frequently feature in these
works. Gilbert and George have become one of the most famous British avant-garde artists of
their generation. Their work has been shown worldwide and in 1986 they won the Turner Prize
and their 2007 retrospective at Tate Modern was the largest of any artist held at the gallery.
Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite ‘Peggy’ Guggenheim (1898-1979) was a US art collector, born in New York, who
inherited a small fortune when her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, died on the Titanic in 1912.
She mixed with, and supported, Europe’s avant-garde artists and commissioned the Yorkshire
born art critic Herbert Read to establish a Museum of Modern Art in London. Read drew up a
list of works for the Museum but their plans were never realised due to the outbreak of World
War Two . This list formed the basis of Guggenheim’s collection, who is believed to have
secured the purchase of one of Constantin Brancusi’s iconic Bird in Space sculptures as the
Nazis entered Paris and she was forced to flee. In 1946 she moved to Venice where she
continued to collect art, shown now in her museum on the Dorsoduro, and lending her work to
exhibitions across Europe and the USA.
Hot Gossip
Hot Gossip were a British dance troupe formed in 1974 by the English choreographer Arlene
Phillips (1943-), recently controversially axed as a judge of BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing. Hot
Gossip spent two years performing in a London nightclub where Phillips, with Michael
Summerton and Iain Burton, developed the group's dance act. The troupe was eventually
spotted by the British television director, David Mallet who invited Phillips to make Hot Gossip a
regular feature of The Kenny Everett Show. In 1978 they made their only hit record, the disco
song I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper featuring soprano Sarah Brightman on lead vocal.
Hot Gossip were particularly noted for the risqué nature of their costumes and the dance
routines, all designed and choreographed by Phillips, and they are often credited as the one of
the UK's early television dance troupes.
Dan Graham
Dan Graham (1942-) is a US conceptual artist. Graham is an influential figure as both a
practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His art career began in 1964 when
he moved to New York and opened the John Daniels Gallery. Graham works in film, video,
performance, photography, and installation art – his work focuses on the relationship between
the viewer and his pieces.
Keith Harris and Orville the Duck
Keith Harris (1947-) is an English ventriloquist born in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, in 1947. Harris
is best known for his BBC television show The Keith Harris Show, which ran from 1982 to
1990 and for various club appearances with his puppet Orville the Duck. Orville, named after
American Inventor Orville Wright, is a green duckling that wears a nappy and ‘speaks’ with
a falsetto voice. There are two Orville puppets that Harris uses, one manual and the other
a radio-controlled animatronic version.
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse (1936-70) was a German artist who worked primarily in New York. Hesse
experimented with new methods and materials, particularly latex, fibreglass and plastic.
Her work is often viewed in relation to the difficulties she experienced, including escaping
the Nazis and the suicide of her mother. She herself said that she was fighting for recognition
in a male-dominated art world.
Rod Hull and Emu
Rod Hull (1935-1999) was a popular entertainer on British television in the 1970s and 1980s. He
rarely appeared without Emu, a mute, highly aggressive arm-length puppet of the flightless
emu bird. Hull's puppet represented a side of his personality that enabled the entertainer to
create havoc, while seemingly being not to blame for it. Hull would make half-hearted attempts
to prevent the badly-behaved bird from attacking its victim, but would often become embroiled
in the fracas, rolling around on the floor to create a scene of mayhem.
Judson Dance Theatre
The Judson Dance Theatre comprised a group of dancers, musicians and artists, so called
because they performed at Judson Memorial Church, New York. Founded in 1962, the group
were active for two years and changed the direction of their discipline, rejecting traditional
form and theory in favour of experimentation.
It's a Knockout
It's a Knockout was a game show adapted from the French show Intervilles. It ran from 1966
to 1988 on BBC1, and made shorter running periods on other UK television channels in the
1980s and 90s, including one for charity with members of the Royal Family in 1987. Originally
compered by Stuart Hall, it featured teams representing a town or city completing tasks in
absurd games, generally dressed in large foam rubber suits, refereed by former international
football referee Arthur Ellis.
Rosalind Krauss
Rosalind Epstein Krauss (1940-) is a US art critic, theorist and curator. She was associate editor
of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and is editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism
and theory, which she founded in 1976. In 1992 she was appointed as the Meyer Schapiro
Professor of Modern Art and Theory in the Department of Art History and Archaeology of
Columbia University.
Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was a US artist and pioneer of conceptual and minimalist art, known
particularly for his simple graphic drawings and constructions, such as 123454321 installed at
Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Richard Long
Richard Long (1945-) is a well known British artist, most famous for creating artwork through
walking, documented in photography, sculpture and text. He won the Turner Prize in 1989 and
has exhibited extensively and internationally, including a retrospective at Tate Britain in 2009.
Bruce McLean
Bruce McLean (1944-) is a Scottish performance artist and painter who studied at the Glasgow
School of Art and St Martin's School of Art, London, where he was taught by Sir Anthony Caro.
In 1965 McLean abandoned conventional methods in favour of impermanent sculptures in
materials such as water, as well as performances of a generally satirical nature directed against
the art world. He has gained international recognition for his paintings, ceramics, prints, and
work in film, theatre and publishing in which humour remains central. McLean was Head of
Graduate Painting at The Slade School of Fine Art London and has had numerous solo
exhibitions including Tate Gallery, London, The Modern Art Gallery, Vienna and Museum of
Modern Art, Oxford.
Georges Mathieu
Georges Mathieu (1921-) is a French artist considered to be a pioneer of lyrical abstraction, a
kind of painting related to US Abstract Expressionism, by artists such as Jackson Pollock and
Mark Rothko, and which celebrated personal expression.
Vsevolod Meyerhold
Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) was a great Russian and Soviet actor, theatre director and
producer. Meyerhold developed an important technique to portray emotion through particular
gestures, but his theatre was closed in 1938, when Stalin clamped down on experimental art.
Meyerhold was arrested a year later and sentenced to death by firing squad for confessing,
under torture, to working for Japanese and British intelligence agencies. He was executed in
1940 and posthumously cleared of all charges in 1955.
Gustav Metzger
Gustav Metzger (1926-) is a German artist and political activist known particularly for his
protest works about politics and art. In 1959 he published the Auto-Destructive Art manifesto,
promoting his belief that art has a lifespan ranging from a few moments to 20 years, and is self
destroying, either by natural or manmade processes.
Mighty Mannequin
Joan Rhodes (1921-2010) was a British stage act dubbed the ‘Strong Lady of Variety’ whose
15 minute routine included bending steel bars, breaking six-inch nails and ripping copies of the
1000-page London telephone directory into half, and sometimes quarters.
Minimalism
Minimalism is a movement, particularly in visual art and music, in which the work is stripped
down to its most fundamental features. It began in the 1950s but is most strongly associated
with the USA and artists such as Donald Judd, John McLaughlin, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin,
Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella.
Morecambe and Wise
Eric Morecambe (1926-84) and Ernie Wise (1925-99) were a British comic double act, who
worked in variety, radio, film and most successfully in television. John Eric Bartholomew, known
by his stage name Eric Morecambe, was born in Lancashire and Ernest Wiseman, known by his
stage name Ernie Wise, near Leeds. Their partnership began in 1941, after they were each
booked separately to appear at the Nottingham Empire Theatre. They first made their name
in variety, appearing in a variety circus, the Windmill Theatre, the Glasgow Empire and many
venues around Britain. They went on to be successful on the radio, transferring to television
in 1954. They had a series of shows that spanned over twenty years, and are best remembered
for the series The Morecambe and Wise Show, which reached UK viewing figures of over
twenty-eight million people.
Robert Morris
Robert Morris (1931-) is a sculptor, conceptual artist and writer born in Kansas City, Missouri.
He and Donald Judd are considered to be the most prominent artists of the Minimalist
movement and he also made important contributions to the development of performance art,
land art, Process Art and installation art. While living in California, Morris came into contact
with the work of La Monte Young and John Cage and the idea that an artwork could be a
record of a performance (inspired by Hans Namuth’s photos of Pollock at work) led to his
interest in dance and choreography. In 1960 Morris moved to New York where he staged a
performance based on the exploration of bodies in space in which an upright square column on
stage falls over after a few minutes. Morris developed the same idea into his first Minimal
Sculptures Two Columns (shown 1961) and L Beams (1965).
Hans Namuth
Hans Namuth (1915-90) was a German-born, US photographer who specialised in portraiture,
photographing many artists, including abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. His photos of
Pollock at work in his studio increased the artist’s fame and recognition and led to a greater
understanding of his work and techniques. Namuth’s outgoing personality and persistence
enabled him to photograph many important artistic figures including painters such as Willem de
Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark Rothko and architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright,
Philip Johnson, and Louis Kahn.
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman (1941-) is a contemporary US artist. His practice spans a broad range of media
including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Much
of Nauman’s work is characterised by an interest in language: the nature of communication and
language's inherent problems, as well as the role of the artist as a communicator and
manipulator of visual symbols.
Nice Style
Nice Style was a collaborative performance group active London in from 1971 to 1979, founded
by the performance artist and painter Bruce McLean. Nice Style was described as ‘The World's
First Pose Band’, which also featured artists Ron Carr, Gary Chitty, Robin Fletcher, and Paul
Richards. Nice Style focused on the increasing role of image and self-fashioning in a modern
society. Their collaborative performances were often elaborate and dramatic works that
simultaneously co-opted and satirised the art establishment and what they saw as the social
pretensions and superficiality of contemporary lifestyles in general.
Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono (1933-) is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist commonly known for
her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as being the widow of John Lennon.
She is a supporter of gay rights and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts,
peace and AIDS outreach programmes.
Dennis Oppenheim
Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011) was a US conceptual artist, performance artist, land artist,
sculptor and photographer. Oppenheim's early work was associated both with performance
and the land art movement. In 1968, Oppenheim became friends with Vito Acconci and he
began producing body art. In the early 1980s, he began his ‘machine pieces’, complex
sculptures with kinetic parts. From the mid-1990s, he created a number of large-scale public art
pieces in major cities around the world, some of which proved controversial.
Orlan
Orlan (1947-) was born Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte in Saint-Étienne, France. She is best
known for transforming her own body, through plastic surgery, into the ideal of female beauty
as depicted by male artists. She has, for example, the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the lips of
François Boucher’s Europa, and the forehead of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.
Alex Owens
Alex Owens is the lead female character in the 1983 US romantic-musical film Flashdance,
with iconic dance sequences that influenced other films and music videos. 18 year old Alex
Owens, played by Jennifer Beals, works as a welder by day at a steel mill in Pittsburgh and as
a bar dancer in the evenings. Her exotic dances consist of experimental and self-expressive
choreography and despite a lack of formal dance training, she aspires to be accepted by a
prestigious school, the fictional Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory.
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century,
famous for pioneering new styles of art including collage that introduced items from the
everyday, such as stamps, and cubism, in which people and objects are shown from different
perspectives in one image.
Charles Ray
Charles Ray (1953-) is a US sculptor based in Los Angeles. Ray’s early work was inspired by
monumental constructions, such as those by Anthony Caro, but incorporated a performative
element. In Plank Piece I-II, for example, he was pinned to a wall by a large piece of wood.
John Rhodes
John Rhodes (active 1624-1665) worked in theatre throughout the English Renaissance drama
period between the reformation and closure of theatres, by Parliament under Puritan pressure,
in 1642. Rhodes is thought to have run a clandestine theatre until licences were officially
granted again during the later stages of the Interregnum under General Monck, when Rhodes
became a manager and producer.
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, politics, and popular culture founded
in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J. Gleason, and named after a
1948 Muddy Waters song. The magazine was known for its political coverage, beginning in the
1970s, with the enigmatic and controversial gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
The Roly Polys
The Roly Polys were a British dance group composed of older, larger ladies, founded in 1980.
They made their first TV appearance on The Les Dawson Show in 1982. After three-years the
group added comedy to their show and developed performances that enabled them to tour the
world for over 20 years.
Rex Roper
Rex Roper is a variety performer who began working as a child with his father Two Gun Rex.
Rex was the world’s youngest roper, throwing big lassos and has worked around the world.
David Rose Orchestra
David Rose (1920-90) was a songwriter, composer, arranger, pianist, and orchestra leader born
in London and raised in Chicago. He first gained a reputation in the 1930s while arranging for
the Frank Trumbauer orchestra, later leading a house band at station WGN. One of his most
famous compositions, The Stripper, was originally recorded as a B-side in 1958 before
featuring in many films and TV series including the breakfast sketch by Morecambe and Wise.
Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was a French artist who progressed from painting to
‘shooting’ her work, in which plaster pictures with paint beneath the surface would explode on
being shot. This led to large, brightly coloured sculptures such as those outside the Pompidou
Centre in Paris. Niki de Saint Phalle was married to the artist Jean Tinguely.
Oskar Schlemmer
Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) was a German artist and choreographer associated with the
important Bauhaus school, which operated from 1919 to 1933 and promoted the ‘total’ work of
art, merging architecture, design, fine art and craft.
Serialism
Serialism is a method of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different
musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique,
where the twelve notes of the chromatic scale form a row or series that provides a unifying
basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations.
Richard Serra
Richard Serra (1939-) is a US minimalist sculptor known especially for working with large-scale
assemblies of sheet metal. Serra studied English literature at the University of California,
Berkeley and later art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He supported himself by
working in steel mills, which has had a strong influence on his work.
Frances Spalding
Frances Spalding (1950-) is a female art historian, critic and biographer who has written
extensively on twentieth-century British Art. In 2000 Spalding returned to academic work to
take up the post of Professor of Art History at Newcastle University. She is a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature; an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was
made a Companion of the British Empire for Services to Literature.
Sophie Taeuber
Sophie Taeuber (1889-1943) was a painter, designer and dancer, who married the fellow artist
(Hans) Jean Arp in 1922. Taeuber trained at various schools and studios of arts, crafts and
dance and became a member of the important Dada movement. She is known particularly for
her abstract, and often geometric, paintings and designs but also promoted the idea of a ‘total’
work of art, merging fine art and crafts.
The Tiller Girls
The Tiller Girls were founded in Manchester in the 1890s by John Tiller, who invented Precision
Dance, in which every movement, kick and turn had to be perfect and simultaneous. The Tiller
Girls were highly trained and were resident at the Folies Bergère, Paris; the London Palladium
and Broadway in New York and who performed extensively across the UK, Europe and US. The
last official routine was held at the London Palladium in 2008. Through the years there were
many Tiller Girls, famously including the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons, Betty
Boothroyd.
Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural
machines in the Dada tradition, known as metamechanics. Tinguely belonged to the Parisian
avant-garde in the mid-twentieth century and was one of the artists who signed the New
Realist's manifesto (Nouveau réalisme) in 1960. His best-known work was a self-destroying
sculpture titled Homage to New York (1960), which only partially self-destructed at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada
from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of
separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts included popular
and classical musicians, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, female and male
impersonators, acrobats, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays,
athletes, lecturing celebrities, and movies. Vaudeville developed from many sources, including
the concert saloon, freak shows, dime museums, and literary burlesque. Called ‘the heart of
American show business,’ vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in
the US.
Vent Haven
The Vent Haven museum holds the world’s largest collection of ventriloquists' dummies. The
current displays grew out of the personal collection of William Shakespeare Berger, a former
president of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists. Every July, the Museum hosts
a convention attended by over 400 ventriloquists from around the world.
Watch Committee
A Watch Committee is the local government committee of a local authority, which supervises
the policing of an area, composed of magistrates and representatives of the county borough
council responsible for the efficiency of the local police force.
Franz West
Franz West (1947-) is an Austrian artist working in ordinary materials such as plaster, wire,
papier-mâché and polyester who also makes portable sculptures called Adaptives or Fitting
Pieces, with furniture and elements that can be worn.
Windmill Theatre
The Windmill Theatre, later The Windmill International, was a British variety theatre in Great
Windmill Street, London, which became famous for its motionless female nudity known as
tableaux vivants (living pictures), and launched the careers of many comedians of the 1950s
and 60s. Vivian Van Damm, the theatre’s manager, produced a series of nude tableaux vivants
based around themes such as Annie Oakley, mermaids, American Indians and Britannia. Later,
movement was introduced in the form of the fan dance, where a naked dancing girl's body was
concealed by fans held by her and two female attendants. At the end of the act the girl would
stand stock still, her attendants would remove the concealing fans and reveal her nudity. The
girl would then hold the pose for about ten seconds before the close of the performance.
Another way the spirit of the law was evaded, enabling the girl to move, and thus satisfying the
demands of the audience, was by moving the props rather than the girls. Ruses such as a
technically motionless nude girl holding on to a spinning rope were used. Since the rope was
moving rather than the girl, authorities allowed it, even though the girl's body was displayed in
motion.
Bill Woodrow
Bill Woodrow (1948-) is a British artist who became well known for his 'cut out' sculptures in
the 1970s and '80s, using old washing machines, car bonnets and similar objects and
transforming them into humorous and inventive sculptures.