High and Low Art

High and Low Art. at influential theatre. , On this spot in 1833 stood the Zoological Institute, one of America’s first menageries. Expanding to include equestrian and circus acts, it became the Bowery Amphitheatre. Acts here included the famous clown W.F. Wallett, and “the great Lion Tamer” Issac Van Amburgh, believed to be the first to stick his head into the mouth of a lion., On February 6, 1842, the Amphitheatre saw the first performance of the Virginia Minstrels, four Northern White men in blackface who created the first group minstrel show. An influential theatrical genre for over 100 years, minstrelsy was a supposed recreation of Southern Black music, dance and joke telling. Though it popularized a harmful parade of racist stereotypes, minstrelsy was nonetheless and institution through which characteristically American forms of music, song and dance emerged., With the Bowery the mid-1800s cultural center of Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), the theatre changed its name to the Stadt Theatre. From 1854 to the early 1860s, it alternated between English drama and presentations of German classical music and opera. Many German works had their American premieres on the Bowery, including Wagner’s Tannhauser at the Stadt in 1859., - Lenwood Sloan, Historian/Humanist and Co-author with Mick Moloney, Two Roads Diverged: African and Irish Americans and the Rise of American Popular Culture