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The medium on the stage: Trance and performance in nineteenth-century spiritualism

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17460654.2011.601166

1746-0662

Simone Natale,

Moravian Church and William Blake

Abstract While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has been given to the fact that spirit communication was also a matter of visual spectacle. This article aims to analyse spiritualist séances as a form of spectacular entertainment. Relying on a wide array of spiritualist sources, it argues that séances were meant not only as moments of religious and scientific inquiry, but also as a brilliant amusement where theatrical effects embellished an exciting shared experience. The intermingling of religion and entertainment can thus be seen as one of the defining characteristics of the spiritualist experience. After sketching the history of the presence of spiritualist mediums on the stage and discussing the involvement of professionalism in mediumship, the article will then focus on the trance as a specific performance strategy. It will examine how the trance combined issues of automatism, theatricality and absorption, and contributed to the coexistence in spirit séances of spectacular features and claims of authenticity. Keywords: spiritualismtranceautomatismperformancestage magic Notes 1. Harry Houdini famously declared that his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, a devoted spiritualist, thought the magician was a powerful medium: 'Sir Arthur thinks I have great mediumistic powers and that some of my feats are done with the aid of spirits. Everything I do is accomplished by material means, humanly possible, no matter how baffling it is to the layman' (Houdini 1924 Houdini, Harry. 1924. A magician among the spirits, New York: Harper & Brothers. [Google Scholar], 165). 2. Ordinary séances usually involved no more than 12, including the medium. 3. There are, however, some interesting exceptions (King 1997 King, W.D. 1997. Shadow of a mesmeriser: The female body on the 'dark' stage. Theatre Journal, 49(2): 189–206. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Bennett 2005 Bennett, Bridget. 2005. Sacred theatres: Shakers, spiritualists, theatricality, and the Indian in the 1830s and 1840s. TDR/The Drama Review, 49(3): 114–134. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Taylor 1996 Taylor, Kelly S. 1996. Exploiting the medium: Anna Cora Mowatt's creation of self through performance. Text and Performance Quarterly, 16(4): 321–335. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). 4. The categories of absorption and theatricality have been employed as an interpretative frame in different fields, including film studies (Rushton 2007 Rushton, Richard. 2004. Early, classical and modern cinema: Absorption and theatricality. Screen, 45(3): 226–244. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2004 Rushton, Richard. 2007. Absorption and theatricality in the cinema: Some thoughts on narrative and spectacle. Screen, 48(1): 109–112. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Wright 2005 Wright, Sarah. 2005. Dropping the mask: Theatricality and absorption in Sáenz de Heredia's. Don Juan Screen, 46(4): 415–433. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).