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Eighteenth-century theatre-goers enjoyed a variety of short entertainments of dancing and singing between the acts of their plays, and found little to object to in a comic dance or risqué sung dialogue as an entr’acte to a serious drama However, there were some who thought that there was a line to be drawn, and that the ladder dancers and rope dancers who were popular at the fairs and the summer theatre at Sadler’s Wells were on the wrong side of that line. But the line was sometimes crossed, particularly when a theatre company was in financial difficulties and needed something different to attract a full house. This paper will look at some of these speciality acts that reached the London theatres between 1700 and 1760 that involved dancing with objects ‒ ladders, balancing poles, glasses of wine, violins, etc. and at the specialist entertainers who performed with them, the reactions to their acts and the financial benefit they brought to the theatres.

Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have written extensively on seventeenth and eighteenth-century singers and theatre performers for musical periodicals and for New Grove and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Recent articles and papers include ‘Watching the Maskers: Masquerade Dances in the London Theatre’ (Oxford, via Zoom, 2021), ‘Places for Dancing: Assembly Rooms in eighteenth-century Essex’ (Oxford, 2022) ‘A Hundred Years of the Funeral Procession and Dirge in Romeo and Juliet’ (Theatre Notebook, 2022), ‘Mistresses of Dancing-schools in Edinburgh, 1755 to 1814’ (Historical Dance, 2022); ‘John Hindmarsh, 1758‒1796, Violinist and Viola player’ (Early Music Performer, December 2022), ‘Dancing Sailors and their costumes’ (Oxford, 2023) and Little Braham: the Apprenticeship Years of a Great Singer’ (A Handbook for Studies in 18th-Century English Music, 2024).