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156 7  Monkey Business Orangutans on Stage and Screen On March 16, 1825, a young French “character dancer” known simply as Mazurier created a buzz among Paris audiences with his beguiling simian antics in a balletdrama that was to become one of the most influential stage pieces of its time: Jocko, ou le singe du Brésil.1 Although set in Brazil, well away from the known habitat of any great ape, the drama appears to have drawn substantially on existing representations of orangutans. Within months, entrepreneurs had negotiated to bring the production to London to showcase Mazurier’s singular talents as Jocko, the trickster ape of the play’s title, and plans were afoot for a New York version. Jocko parodiesandsingeries (theactof “aping”)rapidlyappearedinavarietyofFrenchvenues, often attributed to fictitious authors such as Sapajou2 or Monsieur Monkey. Acknowledged imitations of the ballet-drama were soon staged at the Royal Theatre in Brussels (1826) and the Stuttgart Opera (1827), among other places.3 One Jocko play, Jack, l’orang-outang (c. 1826), inspired the name of the first orangutan kept at the Jardin des Plantes menagerie; others offered generations of performers in Europe and North America opportunities to impress spectators with intriguing masquerades and virtuoso displays of athleticism. Always responsive to controversial issues, nineteenth-century popular theater had found the vehicle—the “man-monkey” role—through which to engage with growing public interest in the nature and origins of humankind. Despite its misleading name, the man-monkey role was enacted by adults in costumes without tails and was understood as a generic marker for apes, as distinct frommonkeys,whichwerenormallyplayedwithtailsbychildren.Liketheliterary fictions of the era, this form of theater cared little for specificity when it came to representing orangutans or other primates, and even less for realistic plots. Yet, Orangutans on Stage and Screen  157 being an embodied art form, stage performance could never escape entirely into the imaginary realm as literature could; it was confined, but also energized, by the insistent presence of the actor. Whereas real orangutans recruited to perform in circuses and zoos would later come to evoke humanness (see chapter 8), the challenge for human actors in man-monkey dramas was to simulate the ape as animal. The most successful works in this genre excited audiences with the frisson of species similarity through skillfully executed performances, even if their plots were generally unequivocal about where the lines between humans and animals should be drawn. Spurred by Darwinian debates on evolution, the man-monkey character remained popular until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, by which time trained orangutan acts had begun to eclipse the spectacle of human ape imitation. In addition, film was emerging as a new visual technology through which to advance apparently more realistic orangutan dramas. Jocko was not by any means the first performance to harness the theatrical potential of simian roles. Matthew Cohen lists Javanese wayang wong among what appear to be old and widespread genres of acrobatic drama in Indonesia featuring men and women costumed as monkeys. Such enactments, he notes, ennoble the animal as the Hindu monkey god Hanuman.4 By the early nineteenth century, the human-ape performer likewise had a long history in Western fairground entertainments , but largely as a grotesque clown. This character type and the related figure of the ape-as-fool lent themselves well to the popular theater forms of the time and could be readily adapted to probe human fears and foibles in topical narratives. A small number of plays had also taken up the figure of the orangutan as a servant, usually in an exotic location, following enduring debates on whether such apes could be put to useful work. One early drama in this mode, Der Orang Utang, oder der Tigerfiest (The Orangutan, or the Tiger Party), by Karl Friedrich Hensler,premieredattheTheaterinderLeopoldstadtinViennaonthesamenight in September 1791 as Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The play features two Spaniards castawayonthecoastofPeruand,likeMozart’sopera,openswithasceneinwhich a leading character is threatened by a giant snake. He is saved by an orangutan called Danti, who also brings food to sustain the pair. Similarly, the plot of French actorÉdouardBignon’s1806playL’orang-outang,oulesamansdudesert(TheOrangutan , or the Lovers in the Desert), turns on the intervention of a resourceful orangutan. In this case, a pirate marooned on an island rescues the animal from a snare, after which it devotes itself to his service, making a shelter, carrying the fishing equipment, and fighting valorously alongside him against ferocious “savages .” The play was not widely performed...

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