curtain-call

Curtain call is a compound English phrase combining curtain (from Old French cortine, from Latin cortina, meaning 'a round vessel,' later 'a cauldron,' and by extension 'a round hanging, a curtain') and call (from Old English ceallian, to cry out, to summon). The curtain of the phrase refers to the stage curtain — the fabric barrier that separates the stage from the auditorium and signals, by its opening and closing, the beginning and end of the performance. The call is the audience's summons: their applause demanding that the performers reappear after the curtain has fallen. A curtain call is not a performance but a meta-performance — the acknowledgment, by both parties, that a performance has concluded and that the social transaction between audience and performer must be formally completed before the relationship can dissolve.

The ritual of the post-performance bow and audience acknowledgment predates the stage curtain that the English phrase references. Ancient Greek theater had no proscenium curtain; the performers acknowledged their audience at the end of the performance nonetheless. Roman theater had a curtain of sorts (the aulaeum, lowered into a trench at the stage front at the beginning of the performance and raised at the end, unlike the modern curtain which rises and falls), but the bow and acclamation were equally central. Medieval touring players performing in inn yards and market squares had no curtains at all but had developed conventions for the formal ending of performance that included direct address to the audience. The stage curtain, which became standard in the proscenium theater of the seventeenth century, simply gave a new mechanical form to the ritual that had always existed: the moment when the fictional world created by performance and the real world occupied by the audience acknowledge each other directly.

The choreography of the curtain call — who appears in what order, how many times the company returns, whether the director takes a bow, whether the principals come forward from the ensemble — is a social language of considerable refinement. In classical ballet, the order of curtain calls is strictly determined by hierarchy: corps de ballet first, soloists next, principals last, the ballerina or danseur who carried the performance final. In grand opera, the same logic applies: the comprimario (supporting) singers appear before the leads, the leads appear before the star, the star may take multiple solo calls while the company watches from the wings. Breaking this protocol — a supporting singer stepping forward out of order, a principal taking a bow during the ensemble call — is a social transgression that can generate backstage conflict of remarkable intensity. The curtain call is the performance's social constitution made visible.

The standing ovation — the intensified form of the curtain call in which the audience rises — has undergone an inflation that many commentators have remarked. In mid-twentieth-century American theater and concert culture, a standing ovation was reserved for exceptional performances: it marked a night that exceeded the ordinary standards of the form, a performance that the audience needed to honor with the full investment of their bodies as well as their hands. The gradual spread of the standing ovation as a default response to any competent professional performance has diluted the signal. When everyone stands for everything, standing loses its distinguishing power. The curtain call ritual, which exists to create the formal transition between the performance and the return to ordinary life, has itself become a performance — another layer of theater requiring its own conventions and its own inflation.