On the passage of a man of the theatre through a rather brief moment in time: Henri Robin, performing astronomy in nineteenth century Paris (original) (raw)

2017, Early Popular Visual Culture

After an extensive tour throughout Europe, including venues such as Amsterdam, London and Brussels, the French entrepreneur and magician Henri Robin arrived in Paris in 1862, where he opened a new theatre on the legendary Boulevard du Temple. His arrival remarkably coincided with the destruction of this renowned hub of popular visual culture as it was cleared to make way for Hausmann's far-reaching program of urban modernisation. Nonetheless, Robin started providing scientific entertainment for audiences to be both beguiled and informed, and managed to do so very successfully throughout the following five years. His evening shows consisted of a mix of astronomical sciences, magic and the evocation of ghosts. This article addresses Robin's career in relation to the changing ideas of theatricality and his remarkable persistence in commingling astronomy and magic within a theatrical context. It will show that Robin's initial concept of theatricality is concretized in his explicit demonstration to the spectator that they were at the theatre, and that this was indeed the place where the wonders of the heavens could pry open the matter of their own understanding. Correspondingly, Robin's career fizzled out during the Second Empire, when scientific activities were dispersing rapidly across different public sites, altering and reshaping the appeal of the physiques amusantes. The rise of professional conférences alongside the waning appeal of what the critic Théophile Gaultier termed 'ocular spectacle,' eventually forced theatre and astronomy into fixed and discreet domains. As such, the story of Henri Robin and his science-based spectacles articulates major shifts in the various relationships between art and science, and theatre and astronomy. Notes on contributors Kurt Vanhoutte is professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), where he is also the director of the Research Centre for Visual Poetics (www.visualpoetics.be). He is currently a Principle Investigator in the project 'A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slide Heritage as Artefacts in the Common European History of Learning', funded by the Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage of the European Commission. Nele Wynants is a postdoctoral researcher at the Université libre de Bruxelles (THEA Joint Research Group) and the University of Antwerp (Research Centre for Visual Poetics). Her current research focuses on the interplay of performance, media history and science. She is editor in chief of FORUM+ for Research and Arts (www.forum-online.be), and is preparing a volume on media archaeology and theatre.