MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

On March 14, 2016, the original Broadway cast performed songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical at a White House concert hosted by President Barack Obama. The performance aired on CBSN and clips were posted on YouTube, making them widely accessible. In his introduction to the concert, Obama explains, “And that’s why Michelle and I wanted to bring this performance to the White House. Because Hamilton is not just for people who can score a ticket to a pricey Broadway show.” However, while the Obamas may have brought a performance to the White House, it is not the same performance that one experiences at Broadway’s Richard Rogers theatre nor when viewing one of the touring productions. Drawing on Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s cognitive theory of conceptual blending, this presentation explores the, often unconscious and distributed, mental work of watching a theatrical production. It argues that the cognitive ecology of the theatre functions as what Shaun Gallagher terms a “mental institution,” where cognition is offloaded onto the social and physical environment and specialized forms of thinking are created. As Barbara Dancygier argues, the distribution of cognition to the material multimodality of theatre stabilizes audience understanding of the play, its characters, and its broader social and political implications. After an analysis of the conceptual function of costumes in the dual roles of the musical’s staged production of Hamilton, this presentation considers the White House concert; here, the actors, divested of their dramatic anchors, are not wearing costumes, but contemporary dress. I conclude by examining how disrupting the theatre’s cognitive ecology and recontextualizing Hamilton in the White House emphasizes the ideological and parabolic function of the play, foregrounding the musical’s use of a Revolutionary era narrative to make a political statement about race in contemporary America.