The Singing Organ Grinder’s tweet archive for February 2018
Another abundance of redundance. Featuring Russian, German and Italian puppetry, organ-grinding, and other nonsense.
Tag: france
How to perform El retablo de Maese Pedro aka El retablo de la libertad de Melisendra in Don Quixote with one puppeteer and a narrator/bottler
Whether Cervantes saw it or not, it is possible as he describes.
The secret life of organ-grinders
Speculation in French revolutionary fiduciary currency, the murder of the great British ballad-singer, & a revised date (1802) for the start of the supposedly post-Napoleonic emigration of Italian puppeteers & organ-grinders
Organ-grinder tweets for December 2017
More inanity from the Hackney organity.
The 1660 Foire de Saint-Germain
Featuring castanets, monkeys, marionettes, and human and tortoise castles.
London organ-grinder tweets for September 2017
Barrel/street organ stuff.
Napoleon II’s Pulcinella toy & the Empire’s collapse
A tragic gallery dealing with 1832: contemporary/posterior mise-en-scène? Plus images of Napoleon as Polichinelle.
On the French penchant for inventing things already in existence elsewhere
François Dominique Séraphin, Bourbon favourite and reputedly the father of ombres chinoises (shadow puppetry), began operating 15 years later than is generally thought, and may have copied his techniques from an itinerant Italian or a London Alsatian. Featuring the memoirs of the valet to the later Louis XVII, early descriptions of the delights of the renovated Palais Royal (including a pygmy show), jolly old Baron Grimm on the lamentable state of French opera, shadow plays, and marionettes, and William Beckford’s favourite designer of theatrical perversions.
Sister Mary and the Bird
Translations from Welsh and Yiddish revealing ornithomancy amongst the 19th century north Welsh and Jewish Lithuanians.
A sensational 1810 Parisian fire scene on top of an 1840s Russian barrel organ
But who are the three noseless Austrian ladies?
