2025/05/01 by Mary McAvoy · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Theater, Performance, and Music History
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609797
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Histories of labor benefit from more complete pictures of working-class individuals and communities, including how they engaged in the quotidian dimensions of life, how they played and celebrated, and how they exercised their human impulse toward creativity. By considering the cultural and social lives of workers, scholars open new historiographical possibilities in studies of labor and point to more complete and capacious readings of working-class existence. These opportunities are particularly salient in the performance-based arts of dance and theater, where the ephemeral nature and amateur orientation of working-class creativity and leisure often limits historical studies of these aspects of working-class life in extant archives.Accordingly, Catherine Hindson takes up this challenge in her most recent book and offers readers a captivating history of performance events housed within the Cadbury chocolate factory at Bournville. Bournville, an experimental model community anchored alongside the chocolate factory and located near Birmingham, UK, was part of a series of experiments to make workplaces more humane through the creation of industrial communities. Hindson carefully contextualizes these theatrical efforts at Cadbury Bournville, which took place between 1900 and 1935, as part of the company’s experiments in Quaker capitalism and its commitment to demonstrating industry’s responsibility to their workers’ and communities’ welfare. The author notes that theater was a vital facet of both the internal and public faces of the Cadbury company and the literal embodiment of company values: “The Bournville Spirit” (21). Indeed, Cadbury’s theatrical programs “permeated and shaped Cadbury’s factory life” and directly “created and shared a visual language and core company values that remain associated with the Cadbury brand today” (230, 231). Across the chapters, Hindson enlivens an impressively wide-ranging variety of performance events including formal theatrical production; mass and popular entertainments like masques, pageants, cabaret events, and burlesques; parties with singing and speeches; tableaux vivants competitions; and sporting events. She also notes the wide variety of spaces, from the more traditional concert and dining halls to the drained and repurposed girls’ swimming baths, for audiences to participate in theater. Audiences and performers came from inside, outside, and across the factory and community, all working toward the goal of imbricating performance and a healthy social culture in the Cadbury Bournville workplace.Regarding labor and the arts, this period in the early twentieth century was a watershed for the use of performance forms in relation to both workplace cultures and the broader labor movement both in the United Kingdom and beyond. As industrialism churned into the increasingly global twentieth century, concerns about workers’ rights to leisure, pleasure, play, and creativity emerged as vital debates in government labor policy, union agendas, corporate leadership, and arts communities writ large. These debates only intensified with key achievements in the labor movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with notable changes around child labor, workday limits, and workplace safety—all reminders that workers were indeed people who deserved to engage their full humanity. Accordingly, experiments and initiatives that more fully centered the importance of workers’ lives beyond labor via arts and creativity, social engagements, education, and health appeared throughout industrial centers. However, these efforts were largely short-lived. As Hindson notes, “Cadbury’s Bournville was by no means the first of such experiments, although it was to be one of the last” (22). Today it seems almost preposterous that any industrial enterprise would maintain a fully staffed and salaried team to provide for employee arts and culture given the developments in the labor movement and workers’ rights after World War II. Given these realities, Hindson carefully situates her accounts of the Bourneville performances within this political landscape and carefully teases out the subtleties of these well-intended, unique, and largely obfuscated endeavors that set out to provide humane workplaces, acknowledging and materially supporting the full lives of those employed therein.To accomplish this impressive task, Hindson draws on a robust and wide-ranging archival record of Bournville. The author weaves together materials held by Mondelēz International—the global snack-foods conglomerate that now owns Cadbury alongside many other familiar candy, confectionery, and treat brands—including photographs, lightly propagandistic company publications, personal accounts from workers and audiences, and business dealings. While this engagement with the record is impressive, Hindson extends her rigorous analysis of archival documents with a repertoire of lived experience that informs her analysis. Hindson visited the remaining performance sites that still exist in Bournville today, and this perspective adds a corporeal and somatic analysis to the archival documents. This transdisciplinary historiographical method helps render the imperfect but always tantalizing work of translating live performance events across time and place to readers of theater history. The result of this creative labor on Hindson’s part is a deep and close study of working-class creativity. Her analysis captures nuances inherent to these efforts, pointing toward the ways that compulsory leisure, no matter how well intended, produces cascading paradoxical challenges and questions. For instance, what are the ideological stakes of playing at work? How might these efforts, where paid workers and paid theater makers collaborated, trouble and expand notions of the amateur/professional binary that persist in performance disciplines? Why is creative labor viewed as leisure or pleasure, unique from factory work? And, finally, do workers owe their cultural lives to their workplace, even if their employers materially fund those initiatives and provide time to engage in them? All such questions and provocations continue to motivate those of us interested in the histories of arts and labor.The preceding discussion signals Hindson’s project as a key contribution to a growing vanguard of theater history scholarship that brings to bear rigorous historiographical method on working-class theatrical models that have heretofore gone underacknowledged in existing theater history scholarship. As Hindson astutely notes in her conclusion, “Time has not been kind to stories of Bournville’s theatre” (231). Indeed, due to their orientation toward the amateur, their lack of immediately legible archives, and their artistic and aesthetic typicality (if not mediocrity), performances like those created at Bournville have not been treated kindly. Nonetheless, these forms represent one vital node in a vast constellation of performance events that shape the fabric of cultural life. These experiments are consequential and “continue to influence innovative leadership and management today,” even though they were lost for a hundred years in the broader histories of theater and industrialism (231). Moreover, in taking seriously the consequence of Cadbury Bournville’s theatrical endeavors, Hindson reminds readers that deep readings of workers’ cultural lives are vital to our historical understandings of working-class individuals and that with concerted effort we can reconstruct and rehabilitate these highly impactful performance initiatives to better and more fully understand working-class humanity.