Stunt

Stunt (pronounced stuhnt)

(1) To stop, slow down, or hinder the growth or development of; dwarf; arrested development.

(2) In botanical pathology, a disease of plants, characterized by a dwarfing or stunting of the plant.

(3) A performance displaying a person's skill or dexterity, as in athletics; feat.

(4) Any remarkable feat performed chiefly to attract attention.

1575-1585: From the dialectal stunt (stubborn, dwarfed), from the Middle English stont & stunt (short, brief), from the Old English stunt (stupid, foolish, simple (as in stuntspræc "foolish talk")), from the Proto-Germanic stuntaz (short, compact, stupid, dull).  It was cognate with the Middle High German stunz (short, blunt, stumpy) from the Proto-Germanic stuntaz (short, truncated), and the Old Norse stuttr (short in stature, dwarfed).  It was related also to the Old English styntan (to make dull, stupefy, become dull, repress).

The origin of the noun use of stunt is obscure although all agree it’s of US origin circa 1878 and some sources suggest it was originally college sports slang though without evidence of youthful coinage.  Links have been suggested to the Middle Low German stunt (a shoulder grip with which you throw someone on their back), a variant of the colloquial stump (dare, challenge) (1871), the German stunde (literally "hour") and the Middle English stunt (foolish; stupid) but no documentary evidence exists.  The noun in this sense certainly caught on, applied particularly to aerobatic display by aircraft and gained a new life when Youtube and its imitators provided a platform.  Stunt historically was a verb, the familiar noun a later form, the earlier noun was stuntedness, the adverb is stuntingly and the adjectives stunty & stunted.

Lindsay Lohan with body double in Irish Wish (left) and in Falling for Christmas (centre) in which for the skiing scenes she used a stunt double (right).

In Film & television production, the terms "stunt double" & "body double" are sometimes used interchangeably but by convention they describe different roles.  The classic stunt double is engaged to perform those parts of the script which call upon an actor to do something especially physically demanding which typically requires special skills and may involve some risk; there there has been an injury toll among stunt doubles with deaths are not unknown.  The term body double is usually used of those engaged (1) to appear in scenes in which an actor wishes not to appear (such as those involving nudity) or (2) to permit something to be filmed which would otherwise defy the laws of nature (such as an actor having a conversation with themselves).  Advances in technology mean the laws of nature now are little obstacle to the impossible being depicted but many actors still have "no-nudity" clauses in contracts although the profession is now much concerned the combination of digital editing and artificial intelligence (AI) will soon render even all this obsolete.  Actually, at the technical level, flesh & blood actors might soon be (or already are) obsolete but their hope is audiences will continue to demand real people playing the parts.  Time will tell.  In her recent Netflix projects, Lindsay Lohan used a body double in Irish Wish (now slated for release in early 2024) but in Falling for Christmas (2022) needed a stunt double for the skiing scenes, the role taken by Rian Zetzer (b 1996), a Salt Lake City-based former competitive mogul skier and sponsored free-skier.

The Cunning Stunts (1977-1982)

Feminist theatre, although with identifiable roots in the Weimar Republic (Germany: 1918-1933), came to be recognized, theorized, and practiced during the 1970s in the wake of second-wave feminism.  Although it encompassed diverse theatrical work, it’s always been most associated with the overtly political, a movement motivated by the recognition of and resistance to women’s marginalization within social and cultural systems that reinforce male privilege and dominance.  In this it acted out a resistance to mainstream, male-dominated theatre culture and revived long-neglected works and performances by women from the dramatic texts of Hrotsvitha (circa 935–973), plays by Restoration playwrights such as Aphra Behn (1640–1689), Mary Pix (1666–1709) & Susanna Centlivre (circa 1669-1723) and dramas by the Edwardian activists most interested in suffrage, Elizabeth Baker (1876–1962), Cicely Mary Hamilton (1872–1952), Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952), & Katherine Githa Sowerby (1876–1970).

What emerged from the second wave came largely to be defined by three types of feminism: bourgeois/liberal, radical/cultural & socialist/materialist.  Critics treated the three in a hierarchical construct of respectability, bourgeois/liberal feminism treated as politically the weakest given it neither endorsed radical feminism’s desire to overthrow patriarchy in favor of women’s social, cultural and sexual empowerment, nor advocated the radical transformation of society’s economic, political and social structures as socialist/materialist feminism did.  Each dynamic had its aesthetic counterpart: bourgeois/liberal feminism remained attached to conventional realistic forms, but sought a greater role for women within the confines of traditional dramatic writing; radical/cultural feminism, heavily influenced by French theorists, explored a women’s language; socialist/materialist feminism found its aesthetic in the Brechtian legacies of presentational forms, techniques and performance registers.

In this milieu, the debut in London in 1977 of the feminist performance collective Cunning Stunts was unexpected.  Neither overtly nor even identifiably political, they were something of a reaction to feminist theatre itself, the members noting feminist “alternative theatre” had become elitist and they wanted a more accessible and spontaneous performer’s platform rather than a writer’s or director’s theatre, one which not only displayed the absurdity of male behavior but presented women being funny, flouting the prevailing glamorous image of women as entertainers.  The shows were musical, visual, highly energetic and existed mostly to offer fun rather than any political or cultural critique although later productions, such as Opera, said to use their “…versions of archetypal symbols and mythological characters drawn from astrology, matriarchal societies… to express the experiences of living as wimin (sic) in a male strangulated world” did suggest other agendas remained of interest.

Suffering the internal conflicts perhaps endemic to collectives, the Cunning Stunts dissolved in 1982, having seemingly worked their concept dry.  In the UK, much alternative theatre didn’t survive the 1980s, the Thatcher government dismantling many of the often left-wing local authorities which had provided a substantial proportion of the funding.