Many modern names come from Latin words. Two components of its root can be immediately identified from the word “intermedia”: inter and medius, that is, “located in the middle”. In modern Russian, this term has two main meanings.
Theatrical Sideshow
Initially, this applied only to theatrical art, but gradually the word began to be used more widely.
What is “sideshow” on stage?
In theater, the so-called insertion play is usually of a musical or dance character, not directly related to the main plot of the play and performed, as a rule, during the break of the main performance. Sideshows are mostly played during the intermission, but can be inserted into the main action in the form of a kind of thematic retreat.
History of the genre
Sideshow appeared in the European theater in the Middle Ages, when under the influence of the areal theater, the strict liturgical drama began to turn into the mystery, that is, the secular language began to penetrate canonical religious texts.
Church representatives could not allow the ritual performance of scenes from the Gospel to be violated, so the liturgical drama was expelled to the city squares and finally transformed into a mystery. Under the influence of street performances, the productions became more and more comedic. So, in the end, and there was an interlude.
This genre spread during the Renaissance, especially in the Italian comedy del arte, fully built on improvisation. There were so many comic interludes that they turned into a separate direction called "farce." From them grew another independent genre - comic opera.
In Russia, they learned about "interlude" in the 17th century from foreign guest performers. Small sketches began to appear first in the court repertoire, and later in the performances of school and booth theaters. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in connection with the interest in the Italian comedy of masks, sideshow begin to appear in the plays of Meyerhold "Don Juan" and Vakhtangov "Princess Turandot". Often, with the help of this technique, often containing plots of the past, directors conducted a subtle associative connection with what is happening in the modern world.
What is “sideshow” in the theater, can be illustrated by an example from Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades.
The scene of the reception of guests in one of the houses of St. Petersburg: among the invited are all the main characters of the opera. And suddenly, at this time, the owner invites guests to listen to a pastoral on a topic that is not related to the plot. So begins the "performance in the play": an elegant scene suspends the main opera action and distracts the viewer for a while. This is done in order to achieve even greater tension in the following scenes.
Another meaning of the word "sideshow"
In music, this is one of the elements of the fugue, a complex polyphonic work. In this case, the term denotes an unstable construction between the two conducts of the theme, which connects the tonal sections of the composition. In addition, in this part the elements of the main and opposing themes develop and combine.
This is what “interlude” means in the theatrical and musical sense of the word.