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Ventriloquists
Ventriloquism or ventriloquy is an act of stagecraft in which a person (a ventriloquist) speaks in such a way that it seems like their voice is coming from a different location, usually through a puppet known as a "dummy". The act of ventriloquism is ventriloquizing, and in English it is commonly called the ability to "throw" one's voice. History Origins Originally, ventriloquism was a religious practice. The name comes from the Latin for 'to speak from the belly': (belly) and (speak). The ancient Greeks called engastrimythos () or engastrimantis () a person (mostly women) who delivered oracles by this means. The noises produced by the stomach were thought to be the voices of the unliving, who took up residence in the stomach of the ventriloquist. The ventriloquist would then interpret the sounds, as they were thought to be able to speak to the dead, as well as foretell the future. One of the earliest recorded group of prophets to use this technique was the Pythia, the pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Prince (ventriloquist)
Arthur Prince (17 November 1881 – 14 April 1948) was an English music hall entertainer and ventriloquist. Biography Prince was born in 1881 in London. He made his first appearance in Llandrindod Wells, and then joined a beach concert party in which he performed for four seasons. Prince and his ventriloquist doll ‘Jim’ made their London debut in 1902 at the South London Palace. They went on to appear at all the leading music halls in the United Kingdom, including the first Royal Command Performance at the Palace Theatre in 1912. A world tour followed with their comedy act ‘Naval Occasions’. Prince is remembered for having his dummy, Sailor Jim, sing while Prince drank a glass of water or smoked a cigar. A singer off stage made this trick possible. This was made more believable because Prince developed a very lifelike dummy. Prince died at his St John's Wood home on 14 April 1948 and was buried at Hampstead Cemetery. His doll 'Jim' was buried with him. References Exte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fred Russell (ventriloquist)
Thomas Frederick Parnell Order of the British Empire, OBE (29 September 1862 – 14 October 1957), known professionally as Fred Russell, was an English ventriloquism, ventriloquist. He is known as "The Father of Modern Ventriloquism" because in the 1890s he used only one dummy on stage creating a fast moving comedy team rather than a multi-figure act which, at the time, was the accepted format for a ventriloquial presentation. Biography Russell was born in London, and began his career as a journalist, but from 1882 began performing his hobby of ventriloquism in public. In 1896, when he was editor of the ''Hackney and Kingsland Gazette'', he was offered a professional engagement at London's Palace Theatre, London, Palace Theatre and took up his stage career permanently. According to ''The Times'' obituary, he changed his name because of the political flavour of "Charles Stewart Parnell, Parnell". His act, based on the cheeky-boy Ventriloquism, dummy "Coster Joe", broke from th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fred Neiman
Fred Neiman (October 1860 – 25 December 1910) was an English ventriloquist, music hall performer, and variety agent. He was born in Brighton; his father was a tailor, born in Hungary. After touring with a company presenting a panorama of the Russian-Turkish war, he made his first solo music hall appearance in Liverpool in 1878. He became noted for his skills at ventriloquism, developing his performances "to a standard previously unsurpassed in scale and originality". In London in 1883, he presented a show with seven dolls as a minstrel troupe, and "conversed" in a different voice with each one. In 1886 he presented a "Ventriloquial Parliament", with dolls caricaturing leading politicians of the time. In 1887 he travelled to the United States for a two-year tour, and appeared at the White House before President Grover Cleveland. After returning to England, he toured with the Livermore Brothers Court Minstrels, and continued to present his own "Ventriloquial Minstrels ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France in the middle of the 19th century. A ''vaudeville'' was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs and dances. Vaudeville became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, while changing over time. In some ways analogous to music hall from Victorian Britain, a typical North American vaudeville performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts have included popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, ventriloquists, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, clowns, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and films. A vaudeville performer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music Hall
Music hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment that was most popular from the early Victorian era, beginning around 1850, through the World War I, Great War. It faded away after 1918 as the halls rebranded their entertainment as Variety show, variety. Perceptions of a distinction in Britain between bold and scandalous music hall entertainment and subsequent, more respectable variety entertainment differ. Music hall involved a mixture of popular songs, comedy, speciality acts, and variety entertainment. The term is derived from a type of theatre or venue in which such entertainment took place. In North America vaudeville was in some ways analogous to British music hall, featuring rousing songs and comic acts. Originating in saloon bars within pubs during the 1830s, music hall entertainment became increasingly popular with audiences. So much so, that during the 1850s some public houses were demolished, and specialised music hall theatres developed in their place. These t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edgar Bergen
Edgar John Bergen (né Berggren; February 16, 1903 – September 30, 1978) was an American ventriloquist, comedian, actor, vaudevillian and radio performer. He was best known for his characters Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Bergen pioneered modern-day ventriloquism and has been described by puppetry organization UNIMA as the “quintessential ventriloquist of the 20th century”. He was the father of actress Candice Bergen. Early life Bergen was born in Chicago, one of five children and the younger of two sons of Swedish immigrants Nilla Svensdotter (née Osberg) and Johan Henriksson Berggren. He lived on a farm near Decatur, Michigan until he was four, when his family returned to Sweden, where he learned the language. After his family had returned to Chicago, when he was eleven, he taught himself ventriloquism from a pamphlet called "The Wizard's Manual". He attended Lake View High School. After his father died, when Edgar was 16, he went out to work as an ap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Hogarth
William Hogarth (; 10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764) was an English painter, engraving, engraver, pictorial social satire, satirist, editorial cartoonist and occasional writer on art. His work ranges from Realism (visual arts), realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects", and he is perhaps best known for his series ''A Harlot's Progress'', ''A Rake's Progress'' and ''Marriage A-la-Mode (Hogarth), Marriage A-la-Mode''. Familiarity with his work is so widespread that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian". Hogarth was born in the City of London into a lower-middle-class family. In his youth he took up an apprenticeship with an engraver, but did not complete the apprenticeship. His father underwent periods of mixed fortune, and was at one time imprisoned in lieu of payment of outstanding debts, an event that is thought to have informed William's paintings and prints with a hard edge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The GreatLester 1904 - Wielki Lester 1904
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun ''thee' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palace Theatre, London
The Palace Theatre is a West End theatre in the City of Westminster in London. Its red-brick facade dominates the west side of Cambridge Circus, London, Cambridge Circus behind a small plaza near the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. The Palace Theatre seats 1,400. Richard D'Oyly Carte, producer of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, commissioned the theatre in the late 1880s. It was designed by Thomas Edward Collcutt and intended to be a home of English grand opera. The theatre opened as the Royal English Opera House in January 1891 with a lavish production of Arthur Sullivan's opera ''Ivanhoe (opera), Ivanhoe''. Although this ran for 160 performances, followed briefly by André Messager's ''La Basoche'', Carte had no other works ready to fill the theatre. He leased it to Sarah Bernhardt for a season and sold the opera house within a year at a loss. It was then converted into a grand music hall and renamed the Palace Theatre of Varieties, managed successfu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nottingham
Nottingham ( , East Midlands English, locally ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and Unitary authorities of England, unitary authority area in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England. It is located south-east of Sheffield and north-east of Birmingham. Nottingham is the legendary home of Robin Hood and to the lace-making, bicycle and Smoking in the United Kingdom, tobacco industries. The city is also the county town of Nottinghamshire and the settlement was granted its city charter in 1897, as part of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations. In the 2021 United Kingdom census, 2021 Census, Nottingham had a reported population of 323,632. The wider conurbation, which includes many of the city's suburbs, has a population of 768,638. It is the largest urban area in the East Midlands and the second-largest in the Midlands. Its Functional Urban Area, the largest in the East Midlands, has a population of 919,484. The population of the Nottingham/Derby metropolitan a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the semi-exclave of Alaska in the northwest and the archipelago of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The United States asserts sovereignty over five Territories of the United States, major island territories and United States Minor Outlying Islands, various uninhabited islands in Oceania and the Caribbean. It is a megadiverse country, with the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, third-largest land area and List of countries and dependencies by population, third-largest population, exceeding 340 million. Its three Metropolitan statistical areas by population, largest metropolitan areas are New York metropolitan area, New York, Greater Los Angeles, Los Angel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
