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INTRODUCTION. This is the twitter version of the Zoom seminar on #AerialTheatre I gave yesterday to Deakin @Contemp_History entitled "History from below, looking up: aerial theatre, emotion and modernity": https://www.facebook.com/contemporaryhistories/posts/3336419556391513 Rule: max 1 tweet per slide! 1/47
My research mostly revolves around "airmindedness". Many people had hopes that aviation would transform civilisation for the better, by allowing unlimited freedom of movement and promoting understanding and hence (?) peace between the nations https://airminded.org/2007/01/09/airmindedness-a-reading-list/ 2/47
I've mainly looked at fearful airmindedness, especially in response to the bomber, which in the 1920s and 1930s appeared to many to be an unstoppable civilisation-smashing machine. For this was the era of "the knock-out blow from the air": https://airminded.org/2007/11/10/the-bomber-will-always-get-through/ 3/47
If you want to know more about the knock-out blow, read my book! https://www.routledge.com/The-Next-War-in-the-Air-Britains-Fear-of-the-Bomber-19081941-1st/Holman/p/book/9781409447337 Or my PhD thesis which is very similar, and free! https://airminded.org/downloads/download-info/the-next-war-in-the-air-civilian-fears-of-aerial-bombardment-in-britain-1908-1941/ 4/47
So, in Britain in particular, but elsewhere too, airmindedness was partly a hopeful response to the coming of flight, and partly a fearful one. In my work I’m trying to understand how these positive and negative aspects of airmindedness combined and interacted 5/47
I'm inspired by Jan Rüger’s book on the Anglo-German naval theatre around the turn of the 20th century, which was a ritualised perfomance of naval strength played out through public spectacles such as warship launchings and fleet reviews - propaganda as well as entertainment 6/47
So in a parallel fashion, aerial theatre focuses on a performance of some kind by aircraft, such as an air display or a flypast or an air race, by air forces or private flyers. But aerial theatre is more mobile, more dynamic and arguably more spectacular than aerial theatre 7/47
Aerial theatre was huge: the biggest events were seen by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, more than all but the biggest sporting events. It was popular pretty much everywhere there were aircraft, France, Italy, Japan, Peru, Egypt, the USA, the USSR… 8/47
Aerial theatre helps us see airmindedness as a mass emotional phenomenon in which crowds shared a visceral experience of seeing, hearing, even feeling and smelling aircraft in motion in the space above and around them https://airminded.org/downloads/download-info/the-militarisation-of-aerial-theatre/ https://airminded.org/downloads/download-info/the-meaning-of-hendon/ 9/47
Eg Unley Aviation Day, 23 August 1919, when Harry Butler beat up a sportsground in his "Red Devil" monoplane, "rolling, half-rolling, side-slipping, flying upside down, Immelman turns, spiral descents, and, most thrilling of all, spinning nose dives" https://airminded.org/2019/07/14/call-of-the-clouds/ 10/47
But it’s these crowd photos that fascinate me even more than the flying https://airminded.org/2020/05/12/return-to-call-of-the-clouds/ 11/47
In this moment, these people are clearly entranced by what they see: there is amazement, excitement and pleasure on their faces, but also concern, bemusement or even boredom on some others. This is the affect of aerial theatre. That’s what I want to recover in this project 12/47
Of course, these feelings will depend on historical context. These people all brought some understanding of aviation with them, not least from the war they had just gone through. So now I'm going to look at aerial theatre and joy, pride, fear and anger in different periods 13/47
(TBC)
