ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century historical pageants are often referred to as “Parkerian pageants,” so named for Louis Napoleon Parker (1852–1944), who wrote and staged The Pageant of Sherbourne in Dorset, England in 1905. Intended to commemorate the town’s 1200th anniversary, Parker drew on 900 locals who performed 11 historic episodes chronicling the town’s early history, and so began the historical pageant’s modern form. Not long after Parker’s early effort, communities across the globe were participating in these large-scale, historically focused performance spectacles. The pageant’s form borrowed from the tableau vivant genre (i.e., living pictures that were staged but static), as well as from the long-standing processional pageants (i.e., narrative plays performed on mobile structures, such as wagons) that preceded and overlapped with them. In a sense, they might be thought of as a series of dramatized historical reenactments, but whereas reenactments have tended to refer to stagings of a singular event or moments in time (as in, say, a battle reenactment), modern historical pageants were grand theatrical performances depicting chronological histories that unfolded in carefully crafted episodes intended for mass consumption (pilgrimage).
