William Hazlitt on Dramatic Text and Performance

2001 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 695
Author(s):  
James Mulvihill
Keyword(s):  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
And Performance

A Conversation on Directing Opera

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-255
Author(s):  
Katie Mitchell ◽  
Mario Frendo
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Musical Score ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Don Giovanni ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance

Katie Mitchell has been directing opera since 1996, when she debuted on the operatic stage with Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the Welsh National Opera. Since then, she has directed more than twenty-nine operas in major opera houses around the world. Mitchell here speaks of her directorial approach when working with the genre, addressing various aspects of interest for those who want a better grasp of the dynamics of opera-making in the twenty-first century. Ranging from the director’s imprint, or signature on the work they put on the stage, to the relationships forged with people running opera institutions, Mitchell reflects on her experiences when staging opera productions. She sheds light on some fundamental differences between theatre-making and opera production, including the issue of text – the libretto, the dramatic text, and the musical score – and the very basic fact that in opera a director is working with singers, that is, with musicians whose attitude and behaviour on stage is necessarily different from that of actors in the theatre. Running throughout the conversation is Mitchell’s commitment to ensure that young and contemporary audiences do not see opera as a museum artefact but as a living performative experience that resonates with the aesthetics and political imperatives of our contemporary world. She speaks of the uncompromising political imperatives that remain central to her work ethic, even if this means deserting a project before it starts, and reflects on her long-term working relations with opera institutions that are open to new and alternative approaches to opera-making strategies. Mitchell underlines her respect for the specific rules of an art form that, because of its collaborative nature, must allow more space for theatre-makers to venture within its complex performative paths if it wants to secure a place in the future. Mario Frendo is Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is the director of CaP, a research group focusing on the links between culture and performance.

scholarly journals The Relationship between Dramatic Text and Performance with the Centrality of the Body with a Look at Anne Bogart’s Rendition of The Persians

1970 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Samin Gheitasy ◽  
Leila Montazeri ◽  
Simin Dolatkhah
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Physical Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Anne Bogart ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Sociological View

The dramatic text defines, to some extent, the structure of the work but the type of performance and the physical approach to the text can represent different meanings. The body of the actor, as a means of conveying concepts from the text to the audience, can be effective in creating different interpretations and meanings of the text. Since eons ago, directors have used the body of the actor with different approaches, and the application of body on the stage has always been underdoing changes. Anne Bogart is one of the few directors who is less known in the Iranian theater despite possessing the most updated and well-known methods of practice and performance in the world. Using her viewpoint method, she brings live and dynamic bodies to the stage; bodies that are able to convey the hidden meanings of the text to the audience in the most suitable way. The overall purpose of this research is to find the relationship between the dramatic text and the performance with the centrality of the body with a sociological view toward the body. To this end, by presenting Foucault's theories, the researchers defines the role of the body in the society and its extent of effectivity and impressibility. Finally, this study explores the implications of this role in each element of Aeschylus’s The Persians, and it shall show how Bogart beautifully represents them using the bodies of her actors during performance.

The Philosophy of Theater

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Y. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

Theater—i.e., traditional text-based theater—is often considered the art form that most closely resembles lived life: real bodies in space play out a story through the passage of time. Because of this, theater (or theatre) has long been a laboratory of, and for, philosophical thought and reflection. The study of philosophy and theater has a history that dates back to, and flourished in, ancient Greece and Rome. While philosophers over the centuries have revisited the study of theater, the past four decades in particular have seen a noted and substantial increase of scholarship investigating this intersection between philosophy and theater. “Philosophy of theater” is, on one hand, a “field” that is just starting to take shape and is barely over a decade old; on another hand, it is a recognized subfield both of aesthetics and of theater and performance studies. And finally, it is also an amorphous concept, either not yet fleshed out, or intentionally amorphous and proudly organic. Philosophy of theater is also sometimes referred to—or is argued to be subsumed, more broadly, in—“performance philosophy,” which also refers to a network of academics and practitioners that publishes a book series and a journal of the same name. Regardless of what it is called or how it is classified, scholarship has coalesced around some fundamental preoccupations, which are not too dissimilar to questions that arise in other philosophies of. . . (e.g., art, film, dance, etc.). The debates in philosophy of theater mostly fall into three of the main branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. The major metaphysical debates center on an ontological question: What is theater? Epistemological studies tend to focus on audience reception and/or how meaning is made and/or transmitted. Finally, studies in aesthetics focus on two main questions: (1) What is theater as an art form? (2) What is the relationship between dramatic text and theatrical performance? This article is intentionally narrow in its scope, focusing on philosophy and theater traditions that came out of Greek theater and philosophy, in order to ensure a sufficient amount of depth, not (merely) breadth.

Performing Translation

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Littau
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Linear Path ◽  
Meaning Production ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
The Difference ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Relationship

Both actor and translator, and by extension translation and performance suffer the plight of second hand art. Disloyal to their original masters they commit adultery. Thus, translation and performance become the unfortunate bastards of literature. If translation is meant to overcome the difference between itself and its other, performance is accused of playing it out and playing up. Such is the attitude which both have shared in each of their respective literary histories. The emphasis here is on literary history, for it assumes the tyranny of the text, the sacredness of the word. The quest for the origin, the reconstruction of the original greatness will always follow the linear path to the bastardized version, towards its own inferiorization. Precisely because translation and performance share this secondary status, this paper will adopt the metaphor of translation and adapt it to describe the relationship between text and performance. Translation here will be taken as that process which underlies any meaning production; it will not be reduced to a merely linguistic motion, nor seen in the form of an obvious reduplication, but as a complex interrelation between two elements. We will thus examine the translatory processes between text and performance before exposing the most illegitimate member in this affair: the translated dramatic text.

‘What, has this thing appeared again tonight?’

1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-147
Author(s):  
Freddie Rokem
Keyword(s):  
Potential Range ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Independent Work ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Performance Text

Performance analysis and performance theory have to deal in one way or another with the relationships between the written dramatic text and the stage performance of that text. The point of departure for most discussions of this issue is that the drama text through its staging is ‘translated’ or ‘transformed’ into a performance text but since the ontological status of the written and performed texts are fundamentally different it is virtually impossible to set up a clearly delineated hermeneutic procedure through which the new, ‘translated’ work of art, the performance text, can be analysed on the basis of the dramatic source text alone. It is quite evident, moreover, that the staging of a certain text is both a completely independent work of art, presented by live actors for an audience in the total context created especially for that performance and an ‘interpretation’ of another independent work of art, the dramatic text. The performance itself thus creates a special form of intertextuality where the words assigned to the characters on the printed page of the written text are spoken by the actors on the stage. The behaviour of a certain character on the stage is a specific realization of a potential range of meanings which that character contains in the source-text on the printed page.Since the two texts are so fundamentally different any attempt to judge the adequacy of the ‘new’ work of art, the performance text, mainly in relation to the dramatic text is doomed to run into insurmountable hermeneutic difficulties.

scholarly journals Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet's Dramatic Theory and Ours

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-87
Author(s):  
Daniel L. Keegan
Keyword(s):  
Half Century ◽  
Dramatic Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Dramatic Performance ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Past Half

Discussions of the relation between drama and performance have been dominated by two symmetrical, emancipatory impulses. Performance scholars have, for the past half-century, sought to liberate performance from the authority of the drama. Literary scholars have, for centuries, if not millennia, sought to distinguish a “literary” dimension of the dramatic text free of the flux of performance. his essay diagnoses in Shakespeare's Hamlet an alternative story about the relation between drama and performance. Paying refreshed attention to the earlier and less famous of Hamlet's statements of dramatic theory—his blurb for the “excellent play” featuring Aeneas's speech to Dido—I find Hamlet bringing drama, especially in its “literary” dimension, crashing back into performance. his collision does not reinstitute the authority of the text; rather, it radically democratizes the scene of dramatic performance by “indigesting” the behaviors of the participants therein.

scholarly journals Editorial

2004 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER BALME
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Considerable Effort ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
And Performance

The first issue of the journal in 2004, and the first under my editorship, is devoted to a special focus on ‘Postdramatic Theatre’. While this term may not be familiar to many readers, the phenomenon it embraces most certainly is. Coined by the German theatre studies scholar, Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatisches Theater,1 the concept refers to tendencies and experiments defining theatre outside the paradigm of the dramatic text. Also known, somewhat imprecisely, as postmodern theatre, it questions fundamentally the very tenets of the dramatic theatre. Postdramatic performances usually eschew clear coordinates of narrative and character and require therefore considerable effort on the part of the spectator. For this reason, it has been termed, in the words of New York theatre critic Elinor Fuchs, ‘spectator's response theatre: we write our own script out of the “pieces of culture” offered’.2 Like Lehmann, Fuchs tries to find an over-arching frame within which to make sense of the manifold experiments in theatre and performance that were taking place in the 1980s. Whereas Lehmann sees postdramatic theatre primarily as a question of form and history which affect the configuration of time, space and mediality of theatre, Fuchs regards the same developments as a response to the massive critique of Western models of subjectivity that we associate with terms such as poststructuralism and deconstruction.

Integrating multimodal analysis and the stylistics of drama: a multimodal perspective on Ian McKellen'sRichard III

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 309-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan McIntyre
Keyword(s):  
Methodological Problem ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Level Of Detail ◽  
Stylistic Analysis ◽  
Original Play ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
And Performance

Traditionally, stylistic analyses of drama have tended to concentrate on the analysis of dramatic texts rather than dramatic performances. This has been on the basis that no two performances of the same text are entirely alike, and that accurate critical discussion is therefore impossible unless we can be sure that everyone concerned has seen the particular performance we are analysing (Short, 1981). Nonetheless, some performances of plays incorporate production elements that seem to add substantially to the original play script, and which arguably guide our interpretation of the play. In such cases, a stylistic analysis which ignores these production elements is arguably impoverished and incomplete. There appears, then, to be some tension between being methodologically rigorous and producing a complete stylistic analysis of a play which takes into account production and performance elements. However, in the case of plays which have been filmed this methodological problem can be circumvented, since the film version constitutes a permanent record of a particular production of the play in question. In this article I demonstrate the value of taking into account the multimodal aspects of drama by analysing the soliloquy scene from Ian McKellen's film version of Shakespeare's Richard III. I argue that in order to provide a multimodal analysis of the play that matches a traditional stylistic analysis in terms of level of detail, it is necessary to work from a transcript that incorporates linguistic, paralinguistic and non-linguistic elements of the production. As a result of my analysis, I suggest that the multimodal elements of the production contribute to our interpretation of the play as much as the linguistic elements of the dramatic text.

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