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Moving beyond the language of comics to wider conventions, Chapter Five considered the approaches adopted by filmmakers to achieve the heightened realism of comics. Among the strategies employed to meet this genre expectation were dynamic framing and composition, expressionistic performances, exaggerated frozen moments, and concise, often stereotypical, character types. These conventions are so heavily influenced by comic books that they could have come from Stan Lee and John Buscema’s 1978 instructional art book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

The high school is one of the most recognisable features of the Hollywood teen movie, one whose setting itself usually guarantees a focus on its teenage inhabitants rather than on the adults that attend to them. However, prior to the mid- 1980s, the genre largely focused on its protagonists’ activities outside of the school, in youth-oriented spaces such as the drive-in cinema and, latterly, the mall. Even Grease, ostensibly set at Rydell High, has one of its narrative’s key junctures – the final reunion between Danny and Sandy – occur at the carnival, an event staged to celebrate the conclusion of the characters’ schooling. That teenagers are now more often portrayed within high school can largely be attributed to the work of John Hughes, who wrote, directed and produced a significant number of teen movies in the 1980s. Chief among these was The Breakfast Club, which established a set of archetypal figures that have remained largely intact to this day.

This chapter opens with derwishes who made a living by charming snakes out of houses, and then moves on to the “Howah,” who performed tricks in the street for voluntary contributions—for example, sleight-of-hand and magic tricks using snakes, knives, and fire breathing. It also looks at fortune telling, done by women who were mostly gipsies, ropedancers and tightrope walkers, who were also gipsies. Finally, this chapter describes the “Kureydatee,” who performed with monkeys, dogs, goats; the ‘farce-players,’ were male actors who performed (often vulgar) comical plays; and puppet-shows done in Turkish.

The second type of reciters, along with poets described in previous chapter, are storytellers (“mohadditeen,”) of which there were around thirty in Cairo. They also did public performances, but their narration was of a work called “The Life of Ez-Zahir,” based on the history of the Sultan Baybars, who reigned in the second half of the seventh century AH. Printed copies of this tale existed in several volumes, written around one hundred years previously in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, but the original author was unknown. This chapter includes a translation of an extract from the second volume, but stresses that the entertainment in large part derived from the improvisation and wit of the storyteller.

This chapter continues with descriptions of public festivals and holidays, including the mulid of El-Hasaneyn, the nearby mulid of El-Salih and the mulid of Sayeda Zeinab, all of which take place in Cairo. It describes the various performances, attractions, and religious rituals to be found at these festivals, such as zikr, storytelling, and music, and the author’s personal observations and experiences in these mulids. It then moves to Ramadan—detailing the customs and everyday life in Cairo during this month—and explains the significance of Leilat al-Qadr. It finally moves the two Eids, and their traditions and customs, as well as the processions of the kiswa and mahmal.

Chapter 2 privileges a number of representative West African dance drumming ensembles in North American universities--UCLA, Wesleyan, Berkeley, York, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Tufts, MIT, Ole Miss, and Binghamton--focusing on their histories, programs, repertoires, symbolism, unique challenges, and instructive models they can provide. Chapter 2, like the subsequent chapters, is based on interviews with relevant ensemble directors and administrators as well as other ethnographic data the author gathered during visits to the preceding campuses and/or at conferences. Regrettably, a few notable universities with great West African dance drumming ensembles are not included in this chapter because of the unavailability of either funds to visit them all, or of their directors for interviewing during busy summer months and other schedules. However, Table 1 provides information on some of the ensembles, directors, and their repertoires, and discussion of some directors not covered in chapter 2 abounds at different stages of the book.

Time: fall 1963 to 1976. China saw an increasingly intense struggle over literature and art, with modern jingju as a primary battlefield. The 1964 Festival of Modern Jingju Performances for Emulation reconfirmed the priority of modern plays in xiqu creation, reinforced the significance of modern jingju in literature and art, and firmly established Jiang Qing as the leader of this movement. Model works were designated as the exemplar of socialist culture construction, exemplifying such creative principles as the Basic Task, the Combination of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism, and the Three Prominences. Chapter 4 includes a close analysis of Jiang Qing’s controversial role in supervising modern jingju creation and an analytical chronicle of five major versions of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy—from the first version in 1958 to the final model version in 1970—as an illustration of changes in plotting and characterization during the creative process of model jingju development.

In this chapter Berg’s service in the Austrian military is outlined. He began as an officer trainee in the infantry, but a health crisis led to his reassignment in guard duty and later in office work at the War Ministry in Vienna. He had a lifelong belief in predestination, which he increasingly perceived in circular patterns and occurrences. His superstitious interest in numbers focused on the number twenty-three, which he saw as his fateful number. His belief in fate and numerology had a growing influence on his music. Berg’s progress on the opera Wozzeck was delayed by his military service and also by major confrontations with those in his family, especially over the sale of family property. Around 1920 Berg even considered making his main profession that of a writer on musical topics, and he wrote polemics attacking the ideas of Hans Pfitzner and Viennese music critics at this time. Eventually he put aside his activity as a writer and returned to composing, to complete his opera Wozzeck.