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A Pageant of Great Women (by Cicely Hamilton, originally directed by Edith Craig, 1909)

This is an example of a performance sharing new insights into the pageant as a powerful participatory form. The researcher conceived and directed this radical re-presentation of Cicely Hamilton’s 1909 suffrage play A Pageant of Great Women, originally staged by Edith Craig, for a conference entitled ‘The Pioneer Players: Politics and Art of Theatre’ at Hull University.

The researcher writes: “A Pageant of Great Women … fits between Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues and Nic Green’s Trilogy.” Birch introduced multiple strands of contemporary references, including new encodings of Hamilton’s triumverate of symbolic characters (‘Justice’, ‘Prejudice’ and ‘Woman’); the act of film-making (documenting, celebrating, preserving, re-framing) was also an integral strand of the dramaturgy. Finally, Birch gave a voice to the pageant participants who (with one exception) had been silent in Craig’s original. She explains: 'Hamilton's processional cast is broken down into 5 groups of named women: The Learned Women; The Artists; The Saintly Women; The Heroic Women; The Rulers; and The Warriors. In Craig’s original touring productions, local women processed to represent historical figures in each category, while the principal 'Woman' character spoke their lines. In my production, the pageant participants spoke, lending their diverse contemporary voices to Hamilton’s original texts. I also added selected Hull women of achievement to the procession, with new texts written by Katharine Cockin and myself for this purpose.’

The DVD was conceived as integral to the performance; partly a ‘take away’ for participants (again, reframing the pageant in contemporary terms), partly a means of disseminating the insights of this performance. Pageant extends Birch’s iterative and embodied research in-and-through film, live performance and multi-modal documentation to unearth and communicate the hidden and contested histories of women, locally and globally.