ABOVE & BEYOND

Travelogues go back over a hundred years and it’s been my love of travel and live performance that have inspired me to create a new take on a travelogue show experience by incorporating many interesting videos, be them tilt-shift videos, juggling-around-the-world videos, or just short peculiar videos played between my live variety acts. I use two HD projectors with dual screens for the show and go back-and-forth from video clips to live performances ending with a finalé which blends all together.

Travelogues are credited with helping to cultivate broad interest in the travel industry at the same time transportation infrastructure was being developed to make it possible. Travelogues were usually about eighty minutes in length, consisting of two 1000-foot reels of 16mm film, with an intermission in-between to change reels. The travelogue film speaker would usually introduce each reel and narrate the film live from an onstage lectern. Travelogue series were usually offered during the winter months in small and medium-sized towns.

Travelogues stem from the work of American writer and lecturer, John Lawson Stoddard who began traveling around the world in 1874. In 1892, John Lawson Stoddard recruited Burton Holmes as his junior associate. When Stoddard was ready to retire in 1897, he arranged for Holmes to take over the rest of his speaking arrangements. Holmes went on to become the premier travel lecturer of his day and coined the term, “travelogues,” in 1904 when he introduced film clips to lecture series making them wildly popular.

Burton Holmes gave 157 two-hour lectures during the 1945-46 season alone. By the end of his life, Holmes had given over 8000 lectures which were known to draw large audiences in cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

Today, travelogues are most often seen in IMAX Theaters and play a role in fiction film cinematography. IMAX was invented more than 40 years ago. In the 1970s and 1980s, the popularity of traditional travelogues declined. But the advent of cable television channels, such as the Discovery Channel and the Travel Channel and the availability of small, high quality, digital video equipment has renewed the popularity in travelogues.

For a more in-depth reading on the history of travelogue shows, click on this link to Wikipedia.