Item Detail
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28981
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1
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0
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English
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Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance
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Theatre Symposium
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17
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Greensboro, NC
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Southeastern Theatre Conference
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69-83
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Mormon pageants are dramatizations of important episodes of American history that have been largely ignored by people outside of the Mormon faith. These pageants, outdoor historical dramas, are produced every summer as an evangelical, informational, and celebratory mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). There are seven pageants sanctioned by the Church, and all but one, an Easter pageant based on biblical text, dramatize personalities and events in Mormon history as they relate to the larger history of the United States. The productions are free of charge, are held in enormous outdoor amphitheatres that can accommodate thousands of spectators, and are performed from ten days to one month between June and August. All can be described as “symphonic dramas of American history,” which is the phrase Paul Green used to describe The Lost Colony and subsequent outdoor historical dramas that meld historic personages and events with dramatic storytelling filled with music, movement, and pageantry. They also dramatize the historical events on or near the sites where the events actually occurred so that audiences can “walk on hallowed ground” and have history “made real and alive to them,” which the Institute of Outdoor Drama (IOD) considers a principal ingredient in the success of the genre. The pageants provide an alternative view of nineteenth-century U.S. history that challenges traditional narratives. [From the text]