USA > Illinois > The centennial of the state of Illinois. Report of the Centennial Commission > Part 36
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The same year saw Mr. Stevens' "Historical Pageant of Illi- nois" produced at the Northwestern University in Evanston, to be followed by pageants at Belleville, Edwardsville, the "Pageant of the Old Northwest" at Milwaukee in 1911, the "Independence Day Pageant" written in collaboration with the late Kenneth Sawyer Goodmin in Chicago in 1915, the altogether beautiful and impres- sive "Pageant of St. Louis" in 1014, that in Newark in 1916, an l several more of lesser note. In all, historical scenes with prologues were utilized.
The form into which these works of Mr. Stevens tended to crystallize, the time element playing its necessary part. takes from the history of the community celebrating the six seeuns best lend- ing them- Aves to dramatic portrayal in chronological order, links them with prologues before each scene, limits the scenes to less than twenty minutes and the prologues to not more thin fifty lines, seeks to organize the stage so that stage waits will not exceed ten minutes, and with goed stage management compresses a complete historical celebration well within three hours. They all require the mist expert stage management, are written for out-of-door pro- duction on a temporary stage between 50 and 80 feet wide and cor- respondlingly deep, provide for such dances as assist in explaining local history, admit of songs to the same end, but in the main rely upon their effects by dramatic scenes and prologues. They are best given at night, when darkness can be used as a curtain for the neces- sary scene shifting, and when the effects of modern stage lighting can only be obtained.
"The Glorious Gateway of the West," composed by the late Kenneth Siwyer Goodman and the writer of this for the Indiana centennial at Fort Wayne in 1916, shows this type of pageant in hands cher than those of its originator. So does "The Pageant of the Illinois Country" and "The Siv Little Plays for Ilinois Chil- dren," both written for the Illinois Centennial, and thought to be the first attempts to render the history of a commonwealth as dis- tinguished from a city, as well as the first attempts to fill the inter- vals between the acts with processions of an historical character,
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thu, demanding even more careful organization and expert stage management than before.
"The Pageant of Illinois," de igned for the October celebration at the Auditorium in Chicago, was of a different character. Tim. being denied for adequate rehearsals. the dramatic sernes could net be used. But a chorus of 500 voices was promised as a background to the processions, considerably elaborated, of the pageant previ- ously mentioned, and all the music for the Contennial composed and adopted by Mr. Edward C. Moore, marches, songs. and dan . .. was also available. Much of the procession was to have passed in the singing of the chorus, which was also to serve as an accompani- ment for the dances. The opportunity passed, and will not opt: again until a body of music comparable with Mr. Moore's is again at the disposal of the celebrante. It may be stated with confident. that not less than six weeks' rehearsal should precede any attempt to give such a performance, and that nothing less than the most ex- pert stage management procur. ble can sperre the results desired even then.
It is to be noted further that in designing the several scenes for such a dramatic pageant as has been described, it is desirable to secure the services of as many persons as can be induced to volun- teer. There need not be meny speaking parts, but anything like the economy of characters which must be considered in the com- mercial drama bes no place here. The stage is almost of necessity a large one, and to secure effects it should is a populous one. In his pageant at Newark, New Jersey, the exigencies of seating com- pelled Mr. Stevens into the use of a stage har lee of feet in length in order that with a shallow spicy avalid for his audience as many could be seated as possible. The ren's were not so happy that a stage wider than 80 feet should be again resorted to. It re- quires too long for any given character to teren a position in which the attention of an audience so distributed can be secured, and too long to retreat from it. Mr. Stevens usel what he called "disson. ing fori" to @ferrero the differlty, wherely groups near oft en- trance could give way to groups war the other, but the experiment could not be called successful. Eighty feet is as much as can be effectively controlb 1, and if there is fifty feet of depth it will tea
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a hundred or more elen. bas to make the stage fully interesting. two hundred is not toon at f. and with expert management a still larger mumber can be utilicol to advantage in each scene. With such a number, too, occasional processional effects can be secured, groups made to meet and dissolve into one another, Jater to sepa- rate and take their own courses. And the possibilities of staging actual conflicts, such as coter into the history of most American communities, ale thus given far greater chances for plausibility.
The costs of such a pageant are large and increase with the number of participants. But so does the interest in the commun- ity upon which the attendance depend -. Bring out-of-doors, this attendance is conditioned on the weather, and no date should be set without the assurance of the nearest weather bureau that the chance for a succession of fair and waren rights is better than average. A charge should always be made, sufficient to recoup the projectors of the celebration and. whenever possible, to leave enough to creet a permanent memorial of the event celebrated. The public values little what is given it for nothing, and is actu- ally more interested in going to a performance for which it has to pay. The number of performances inu-t depend upon the size of the cottonunity and the provisions for transportation in its neighborhood. both for coming to atl for going from the grounds where they are given. And publicity is an essential expense to be reckoned on.
The techiie of the pageant is, of course, the technic of the drama with such changes as the essential conditions compel. Work- ing out a dramatic situation in twenty minutes or less. there is, obviously, no time for the introduction and identification of char- actors, such as may le insisted upon in other stage productions. This must be affected by the programnes, and to make it the more certain, these should be given the widest posible circulation in advance. The occasion, too, is a celebration, and no pageant is put on for a run. Resorting to tricks of one sort and another familiar to every produ r of burlesque, revue. musical comedy, and the like, e. if the jameant, too, were making a bill for the continued flow of money from its audiences and were solely de- pendent upon them for its support, is an idle waste of energy.
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Then, too, the facts of history are inexorable, and in this respect accuracy is essential oven at the sacrifice of dramatic opportunity. With a large number of persons on the stage, particular attention should be given to movement, as distinguished from action ; scenes combining both are, it is apparent, to be striven for. This does not mean that local legends, which sometimes have the narrowest basis in fact. may not be utilized; on the contrary, they are fre- quently effective material. Bat they should be noted as legends.
One difficulty stands in the way of securing from an audi- ence the appreciation necessary for dramatic success in any pub- lie celebration through dramatic form from one end of America to the other: The prejudice against the theatre which is found in many of the religious denominations, including some which are immerically powerful. This is the fundamental trouble, lead- ing to inability to grasp the scene even when depicted, to the absence of amatenr actors with experience from which to cast pageants, to lack of voices, especially among women, which can project themselves to the audience, to a lack of conviction in the necessity of repeated rehearsals that the pageant may go aright on the night, and to a hundred minor matters which force the de- mand that the stage manager and his assistants, at least, shall have professional experience and the power to secure obedience to directions hard to gain from quite undisciplined participants in the performance. It cannot be too strongly insisted that if a town or community is worth celebrating. it is worth celebrating well, and any community seeking to celebrate along lines of least resistance will find itself the works, instead of the better, if it docs not secure the best production possible, in spite of the fact that the audiences are dramatically inexperienced. Too many are betraged by the fallacy Doctor Johnson found in the admita- tion bestowed upon a dog walking on its hind legs-"It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all." The writer is entirely of opinion that a poor celebration is worse than none, and that if it cannot be done well. it bad better not be done at all. And if it is to be done upon a stage through any dramatic medium, it cannot possibly be done well by any person or combi-
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nation of persons medfamiliar with stige traditions, methods, and practice.
It is worth remend ering, too, that there is an essential im- morality involved in taking money from an audience and not re- turning it straightway in the form of the money's worth; just as there is an assured immorality in not exacting the full money's worth for a good performance: Governor Altgeld has pointed out. the evils that flow from "getting something for nothing." "Sub- mission to the test of the market," in the vivid phrase of Professor Henry Augustin Beers, has been the test of good literature and good drama from the beginning; and if a community giving a pageant is in a ical sense alde to rely for attendance at it upos something more than a commercial quid pro quo, all the more i- it in honor bment to do so much at least. To do otherwise is to combine the acceptance of public charity with fraud in the means by which the charity is obtained.
Once outside the realm of the dramatic historical pageant, a couture as has been pren of essentially modern birth and growth, for purposes of public celebration the masque immediately pre- sents itself. Democratie and receptive as the pageant idea has always been in this country since its inception, no useful or artis- tre purpose is served by confusion of ideas and terms expressing it. The pageant may very well remain episodic historical Armervisition, with its characters those of history. Its book there- fore will be in prose and may or may not be literature so long as it is dramatic. It rightly includes historical orations and speeches, historical daners to show older customs and manners, historical songs, historical prayers and religious services, as well as dances written to aid in the explication of historical iders and songs to the same enil.
Bat symbolisma and allezory bdong in another field and it requires a more than ordinarily skilful hand to combine the proce of the pageant with the poetry involved in the other medium. It is well, therefore, to call these last masques or masque scenes, and leave the word pageant to describe dramatic productions in strictly dramatie scenes in which there is, nevertheless, a proces- sional idea-of the orderly march of historical events, if nothing
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more, concluding with a return to the stage of all the persons of the scenes upon the close of the last by way of grand finale as in 'The Pageant of the Renaissance,' or, as in 'The Pageant of the Illinois Country,' with processions between the scenes and a final procession of soldiers and sailors and the flags of the Allied Na- tions.
With the masque, writer, ectors, and audience are upon as- sured dramatic ground at last, and dealing with something more than modern invention and ingenious experimentation. More- over, they are all dealing with the only form of dramatic literature which has assured dramatic and literary merit and which -- and this is most important and little taken into account-with a form of dramatic hterature in which accomplished play-writers wrote for amateur, as distinguished from professional, production. Shakespeare himself utilized its methods in "A Midsummer Nigth's Dream" and "The Tempest,," and the great Ben Johnson was its best exponent and placed next himself Fletcher and Chap- man as masque writers. Every student of English literature knows, or should know, of the masques of the later Tudors and earlier Stuarts, and they should be familiar to al attempting to enter this field in our own day; such knowledge could not fril to produce better masques.
In their simpler forms masques closely approached proces- sional pageants in showy display and absence of the spoken word and not infrequently surpassed them in expenditure and splendor. They brought together in a single show when at their best, oratory and dramatic dialogue, the song and de: 26, and the most ingenious and elaborate stage decorations and mechanisms. The dramas of ancient Athens are probably the only stage productions upon which more money was spent, and these they probably exceeded in mechanical ingennity. Let it be said in proof that Shirley's "Triumph of Peace" produced by the members of the Four Inns of Court at London on February 3, 1633-4, cost the modern egniva- lent of more than 81,000.000, of which more than $50.000 went to the music alone, and was probably evere led by Carew's "Coelum Britannica," given fifteen days later, in which King James I acted. The music for both was written by Henry Lawes, the stage ma-
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chinery and effect for both devised by Inigo Jones. And on September 29 of the same year Henry Lawes, whom Milton has immortalized in a sonnet which should be learnt by heart by every modern musician who undertakes to set a poet's words to music, procured for this same John Milton the writing and production of 'Comus' at Ludlow Castle near the Welsh border, Milton having already proved his capacity for such a task three or four years earlier with 'Area les,' played at Harefield, the county seat of the Dowager Duchess of Derby, only ten miles from Horton, the home of Milton and his father, this latter an accomplished musician.
But after these early and must glorious days of the masque it so completely disappeared from view in the English speaking world that the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica can say of it in 1911, "It is strange that later English poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development as the poetie masque."
Here again it is with pride that Illinois can point to the steps here first taken to bring it anew into public favor. William Vaughn Moody, long connected with the University of Chicago, published in 1900 his Masque of Judgment,' a noble poem cast in inasque form and, though written as literature and before its author had turned his attention to the drama properly speaking, capable of stage production in much the older manner. In 1906 Thomas Wood Stevens and the present writer composed "The Chaplet of Pan" for production by the Little Room of Chicago. Owing to the dificulti- not always to be avoided when writing for amateurs, this masque was n'a actually given until produced by Donald Robertson and his company of Players at Ravinia Park on the night of August 29. 1908, following a revival of "Comus" by the same company. The evening was notable for its music also, the Chicago Orchestra furnishing the incidental music for the masque, the songs in which were set to music by Mr. Frederick Stock, its accomplished leader. This masque has been given a number of times since and at many places, including the Chicago Art Institute and the University of Illinois, with the students there filling the cast.
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This was followed during the winter of 1909 by The Topaz Amulet' by the same hands, which had a masque scene, and there- after Mr. Stevens in collaboration with the lite Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, a native of Chicago, wrote and had produced the bril- liant series known as 'Masques of East and West,' which includes .The Daimio's Iread' (1911), "The Masque of Quetzal's Bowl,' written for the opening of the Cliff Dwellers' rooms in the same year, 'The Mas que of Montezuma' ( 1912). "Caesar's Gods' (1913), and 'Rainald and the Red Wolf' (1914), the last three designed to open the annual festival of the students at the Art Institute in Chicago. There is an int resting discussion of the meaning of the word ma- pie by Mr. Stevens and Mr. Perey Mackaye in the volume containing thesc play-, published by the Stage Guild in Chicago, in which is set forth the essential difference between than and the masques or Grove Plays which have been so long the feature of the annual outing of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco in the Bohemian Redwood Grove; "in their form," Mr. Mackaye says, "the masques of California tend to verge upon the domain of opera; the masques of Chicago tend to become plays," and goes on to define a masque as "an actilde poem adapted to special place and occasion," which is alo applicable to the earlier English masques. Mr. Stevens quotes a more familiar definition which says, "Masque is to the play as bas relief is to sculpture in the round," and himself pre-erile sa forumla which reads "dramatic entertainments written for festal occasions, and ending with dane- ing," which the present writer world mlify to include dancing in the masque itself.
Perhaps the essential difference between ma- pie and pageant can be succinctly set forth with the statement tout the emphasis of the pageant is upon the play and the proo -sion, the emphasis of the masque uyon the poem and the danes Yet there is no exclusion in the idea of wither. as has been shown; there may be dancing in the pageant. provisions in the mique, music and songs, stage lighting and deviation in both.
Mr. Stevens has gone on to the gra artistic triumph involved in his masque, "The Drawing of the Sword, perhaps the most in- spiring of all the literature produced in citizens of the United
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States during the war now triumphantly endel. which was given in many American cities in 1912 and 1918, after its first produc- tion at the Carnegie Institute of Technology on June 5, 1917, registration day. Of similar nature is Mr. William Chauncey Langdon's "The Sword of America,' produced in Urbana and Springfield in 1918. Departing from it in essentials but com !- bining opening and closing masque scenes with three pageant epi- sodes is The Wonderful Story of Illinois,' written for the Cen- tennial Commission by Miss Grace Arlington Owen of Blooming- ton. Here may also be mentioned The Masque of Illinois,' per- haps the only attempt recorded to present the continuous history from the beginning of a sovereign State, written for the Conten- nial Commission and played twice at Springfield and once at Van- dalia, in 1918, and The Mesque of Illinois Wars,' written for the Centennial celebration at Chicago in October, 1918, and with its three extended scenes, songs, dances, and stage effects, the most ambitious masque yet projected in the United States.
In closing. something might be said of the dangers attend- ant upon the writing and production of masques and pageants. If the history of any city, community, or stato is so lacking in incident as to require the inclusion of material common to all the world, it is in order. perhaps, to make such an inclusion. But in the West, at least, there is so much that is interesting and roman- tic, Indian, Trench, Spanish. British, that it would seem as if both poetic and dramatic inspiration might readily flow from such sources, and even that a strict limitation to episodes falling within the boundaries of a single place would still have the writer with sufficient material and all of it locally pertinent. Yet Kansas has produced a pageant-masque which included the Glacial Epoch and excluded it- first European discoverer, though he bore the name of Iranuso de Colorado. Nothing could be better than the revival of old dinee- or the composition of rew and symbolic ones for lowal celebrations, but a dancing festival made up of any dances that can Im pressed into service is neither a masque or a pageant. but an exhibition of stock dances with no possible local application and without historical value-even without @esthetic valve unless the dancing is better than ordinary and used with
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the strictest economy and always with a definite end in viow. And so of local talent in general without a close and immediate contact with the event to be celebrated the danger is that it is only too likely to degenerate into much such a concoction as the prudent housewife worriedly puts forth when taken unawares and forced to use what she has in the house. There should be the prime concept throughout the celebration of unity, of a fixed trend toward a certain goal. and the bringing into the modern mind of the ideas and events by which the present state of well being has been reached.
Finally let it be pointed out that when the hundred or more aspirants for honors in mas que and pageant writing and design- ing make their application every year to the Dramatic School of the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Pittsburg. its head. Mir. Thomas Wood Stevens, here shown to be the most distinguished writer of both masques and pageants the United States of America has produced, has one invariable reply: "We offer you a four years' eourso in everything relating to the drama and its pro- duction on the stage. The masque and pageant are department , and those nct of the first importan e, in this wide field. If you wish to learn how to write and pro luce anything, large or small, within this field, our theoretical studies and practical productions will fit you for this, if you have the necess. ry personal equipment. To offer you less would be to leave you ignorant : for you to take less would leave you to impose upon a long-suffering public."
LETTER SENT BY THE CENTENNIAL COMMISSION TO COUNTY OFFICERS URGING THE ORGANIZATION OF COUNTY CENTENNIAL AASSOCIATIONS
June 16, 1916.
Dear Sir:
The Illinois Centennial Commission is desirous of having adequately celebrated in your county in 1918, the one hundredth anniversary of the admission of Illinois into the Federal Union.
To this end, a committee of five, consisting of the County Judge, County Clerk, State's Attorney, County Superintendent
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County Casoi soper of each county lo pour out talatod b. the Conmi In : f committee wollenved to 1 ERsoll to be pub lished in all the paper of the count: invi. The people to meet " a certain & m. enicht time and place, pro to form a Coppy Contennial & reis ion to porgono fe the proper oJobration of the Continuial in your conole Wowpz of thi litter has been sent to och of the above im porel . Print .
It is ques ted that the end for the predo un they in you. county be i med during June or the first hele of lol of the year in order that the vek may be or land I find the non borin .
Klang Haling
telest in the logy of J. K. i
centive ( monde weg )
tailed vik :
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The Centennial Commi sion is preparing a booklet setting forth the general plans of the Commission and offering some defi- nite suggestions for the local celebrations throughout the Stite. A supply of these booklets will be sent you as soon as they are published.
If it is the desire of the County Committee when your pub- lic meeting is called that a representative of the Illinois Centen- nial Commission shall be present and deliver an address setting forth the object of the meeting, you may obtain such a one with- out expense to you, by corresponding with the Rev. Royal W. Ennis, Chairman State-wide Celebration Committee, Hillsboro, Illinois.
The Centennial Commission request. that you notify it through its Secretary as to the date upon which your Committee has called its first general meeting.
Very truly yours, OTTO L. SCHMIDT, Chairman. JESSIE PALMER WEBER, Secretary.
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HALL, ILLINOIS BY WALLACE RICE
By the Flag that's floating d'er us, By our fathers' fame before us, Raise your voices in the choins, Dail Illinois.
Chorus : Ilail, Illinois ! Jail, Illinois ! Thine the story. God's the glory : Hail, Illinois !
By the mem'ries that attend her : Grant. the Union's holl defender; Loyal Douglas; Lincoln's splendor ; Ilail Illinois.
By her hundred years of honor -- Who in all the world ontshone her ? Wreathed like laurel bright upon her. Hail Illinois.
By the fields her sons left gory, Make her past her future story, On and on to greater glory Hail Illinois.
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