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The Form That Fell to Earth: Parisian Fairground Theatre Barry Russell THERE IS A TRADITIONAL VIEW that the Parisian fairground theatre evolved gradually from modest popular entertainments. Such a view is implicit in the work of the Italian scholar, Marcello Spaziani, whose approach to fairground theatre has dominated our understanding since the 1960s.' Spaziani located the historical moment at which change started to accelerate in the year 1697, when the actors of the old Comédie-Italienne were expelled from their theatre at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and supposedly took refuge in the fairs.2 A concomitant of this view is that the new genre should be seen as an Italian phenomenon rather than as essentially French. However, there was one piece of evidence that did not fit comfortably into this picture. It was the text of a play, evidently written in 1678, entitled Les Forces de l'amour et de la magie. Spaziani dealt with the difficulty by seeking to marginalise it. The play's text appeared in the preface to one of the earliest works of French theatre history, published in 1743 by the Frères Parfaict under the title Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des spectacles de la foire.3 Spaziani doubted that the play had ever been published,4 or that it had ever existed in the form in which the Frères Parfaict reproduced it. It was so unlike the plays that came later, he argued, that it could not possibly be authentic: at the very most, it might be based on an outline manuscript scenario of the time,5 which the Frères Parfaict themselves had reworked to give an impression of a polished literary accomplishment. Spaziani claimed that French scholars who had hailed it as the first literary work for the fairgrounds, such as Maurice Albert in 1900,6 had been misled by their anxiety to stress the French, rather than the Italian roots of the genre,7 and he recorded his belief that some day documentary evidence would emerge to justify this hypothesis.8 It was a neat solution to Spaziani's difficulty: so long as we regarded Les Forces de l'Amour et de la Magie as an aberration, or worse, a forgery, we could discount it and continue to live with the idea that the fairground theatres grew from humble origins at the end of the 17tn century when the Italian actors moved in. 56 Fall 1999 Russell But the situation has now changed. It has been my good fortune to discover an original copy of Lei Forces de l'Amour et de la Magie, published in 1678, and offered for sale by the company that created the play.91 have also found two further texts performed and published by the same company in the same year, one entitled Circé en postures ,i0 the other Les Divertissements de la foire." Electronic versions of all three texts may be consulted online at http://foires.net. Now that we know these texts exist, and are authentic, obviously we can no longer be content to begin the history of fairground theatre with the texts published in the early 18m century by Lesage and others. We must account for this earlier body of work. It seems to me that the company that created fairground theatre derived its ideas from court entertainments, specifically from the comédie-ballet, and modeled its business plan on that of the Paris Opera. It may even be that some of the people involved in creating the Paris Opera were also involved in creating fairground theatre. The concept behind these three plays is essentially simple. Each production is structured as a series of entrées, as in a ballet, except that the place of dance is taken by acrobatics or another form of divertissement to create something akin to a variety (or vaudeville) show. There is evidence that acrobatic sequences were choreographed in much the same way as dance sequences. Janet Clarke, of the University of Keele, examined in detail the musical score for the 1675 production of Circé at the Guénégaud, which included acrobatics , and reported that it gave precise instructions for synchronizing acrobatic routines...

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