scholarly journals Specifics of interpretation of traditional eastern practices in European acting training

Author(s):  
Valeria Shtefyuk

The purpose of the article is to identify the features of adaptation of oriental theatrical, physical, and spiritual practices by representatives of the European theater in the process of developing methods of actor training based on the analysis of acting training of leading directors of the twentieth century. - K. Stanislavsky, E. Grotovsky, E. Barba. Methodology. A typological method was used (to determine the specifics of acting training methods by K. Stanislavsky, E. Grotovsky, and E. Barba; interpretive method and method of comparative analysis (to identify common and different aspects of interpretation of Eastern practices by European directors); phenomenological method (to identify features of Eastern and spiritual practices and their adaptation to acting training), etc. Scientific novelty The specifics of borrowing and interpretation of traditional in East, Southeast, and Central Asia elements of actor training by Russian and European theater directors of the twentieth century are considered. K. Stanislavsky, E. Grotovsky, and E. Barba and revealed the peculiarities of adaptation by theater directors and teachers of elements of hatha yoga and Raja Yoga in accordance with their own understanding of the purpose of training in the art of acting. Conclusions. Various elements of traditional Western and Eastern cultural practices have been the focus of twentieth-century theater directors. in the process of developing innovative methods and techniques of educating the actor. Their research of local theatrical cultures contributed to the search for universal laws of stage conventionality, new acting methods of self-knowledge, and the disclosure of their own creative potential. In their own search for methods of educating the actor theater directors of the twentieth century. turn to the Eastern worldview, because the extraordinary method and a special view of the nature of consciousness and its functioning in the world contributes to the creation of training to solve a number of applied problems in the context of the specifics of acting. Translating material (Eastern practices) into a Western conceptual structure or any kind of synthesis of Eastern and Western concepts, simplifying, does not reveal the full depth of Eastern practices and religious orientations, but contributes to the actor's mastery of innovative methodological approaches, including intuitive insights, contemplation, contemplation. etc.

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.


Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Magdalena Szuster

It was in the mid-twentieth century that the independent theatrical form based entirely on improvisation, known now as improvisational/improvised theatre, impro or improv, came into existence and took shape. Viola Spolin, the intellectual and the logician behind the improvisational movement, first used her improvised games as a WPA worker running theater classes for underprivileged youth in Chicago in 1939. But it was not until 1955 that her son, Paul Sills, together with a college theater group, the Compass Players, used Spolin’s games on stage. In the 1970s Sills made the format famous with his other project, the Second City. Since the emergence of improv in the US coincides with the renaissance of improvisation in theater, in this paper, I will look back at what may have prepared and propelled the emergence of improvised theater in the United States. Hence, this article is an attempt to look at the use of improvisation in theater and performing arts in the United States in the second half of the 20th century in order to highlight the various roles and functions of improvisation in the experimental theater of the day by analyzing how some of the most influential experimental theaters used improvisation as a means of play development, a component of actor training and an important element of the rehearsal process.


Author(s):  
John Evelev

The discourse of the picturesque reshaped how Americans understood their landscape, but it largely ended in the mid-1870s. The decline of the picturesque can be illustrated in two emblematic works: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque” and William Cullen Bryant’s enormous 1874 scenery book Picturesque America. Woolson’s fictional story is a satire of travel in which a young urban woman accompanies her grandfather to the countryside “in search of the picturesque” and instead only finds development. This story signals the shift in literary interest in rural subjects toward regionalism. Regionalism disavowed the earlier focus on picturesque landscapes, instead featuring distinctive regional dialects and cultural practices that reflected the newly created social sciences. Bryant’s Picturesque America was a Reconstruction-era project aimed at reconnecting the divided nation through a nonhierarchical unification under the sign of “picturesque.” Adding not only the West but also the South to the compendium of American scenery, Picturesque America imagined the entire nation as picturesque. In this formulation, the picturesque became synonymous with landscape in general. Although the picturesque lost its appeal as an authoritative discourse for shaping the American landscape in the latter third of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that the spaces that dominated American life in the twentieth century and beyond are owed almost entirely to the transformative project of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque.


Author(s):  
Carrie J. Preston

A performer and teacher of voice and movement, François Delsarte developed a theory of expression that influenced modern dance, actor training, poetic recitation, silent film, and physical culture in the early twentieth century. His ideas and methods were brought to the United States in 1871 by his student, Steele Mackaye (1842–1894), and then adapted by performers, physical culturists, and reformers into a diverse set of movements known as Delsartism. Extremely popular from the 1880s through the 1920s, Delsartism promoted physical exercises and poetic recitation for health and personal development as well as for professional performance. The movement traveled back to Europe to establish trajectories in many fields of modernist aesthetics and education, all emphasizing bodily expression, classical ideas of beauty, and a unique, improvable selfhood.


2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-150
Author(s):  
Jerri Daboo

The Routledge Performance Practitioners series, edited by Franc Chamberlain, is a new set of introductory guides to a range of key figures in the development of twentieth-century performance practice. Each book focuses on a single practitioner, examining his or her life, historical context, key writings, and productions, and a selection of practical exercises. These concise volumes are intended to offer students an initial introduction to the practitioner and to “provide an inspiring spring-board for future study, unpacking and explaining what can initially seem daunting” (Merlin, ii). The list of practitioners in the complete series include Stanislavsky, Brecht, Boal, Lecoq, Grotowski, Anna Halprin, and Ariane Mnouchkine, thus examining a range of performance styles and practices, creating a valuable overview of the development of performer training through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Such interest in the history of specific approaches to training performers has been addressed in other volumes, such as Twentieth-Century Actor Training, edited by Alison Hodge (New York: Routledge, 2000), and Acting (Re)considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, edited by Phillip Zarrilli (London: Routledge 2002). Both those collections contain in-depth chapters focusing on aspects of the selected practitioners' theoretical and practical approaches to the principles and concerns in their work. Where the books in the Routledge Performance Practitioners series differ is that they offer a more general overview of the practitioner in one volume, and in addition to the historical context, they provide a set of practical exercises that can be carried out by the student or teacher, as well as by the actor or director. The books are well presented, divided into clear sections, with relevant photographs and diagrams. There are also sidebars providing definitions and further information on key figures and terms mentioned in the main text. This review covers the first four books in the series, examining the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Jacques Lecoq.


Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nēpia Mahuika

Whakapapa is the Māori term for genealogy. It has been described by some as the skeletal structure of Māori epistemology because all things have their own genealogies. In research, whakapapa has been presented in tribal histories, Māori Land Court records, and consistently as a framework for mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and Māori research methodologies. This essay offers a brief overview of the ways in which whakapapa has been understood and negotiated in research particularly after the arrival of Europeans. Some early ethnographers, for instance, applied their own genealogical methods of dating to whakapapa, which influenced various Māori approaches from the twentieth century. With the advent of literacy and print, Māori experimented with new ways to record genealogy, and yet the underlying oral, ethical, and cultural practices that are crucial to whakapapa have remained integral to how it still lives and operates in Māori communities today.


2006 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-302
Author(s):  
Masaaki Morishita

The conceptual framework of ‘field’ proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and his model of the literary and artistic fields in nineteenth-century France are widely applied to studies of the development of the literary and artistic fields in other regions and the fields of other cultural practices. These researches, while showing similarities to Bourdieu's model, reveal the distinct forms of nomos which those different fields developed through localised contingencies. In other words, their findings highlight the cultural specificity of the cases on which Bourdieu's field theory is based. The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the field theory can be beneficially applied to cross-cultural cases provided that its culturally specific elements are clearly identified. For this purpose, I focus on one particular aspect associated with the nomos of Bourdieu's model – the orientation toward autonomy – to argue for its cultural specificity, which becomes clearer when it is compared to a distinct case of the artistic field in early-twentieth-century Japan. My case study shows that the Japanese artistic field did not develop the same form of autonomy as Bourdieu's model, but it also discloses the processes in which a certain form of nomos was shaped through the struggles between the artistic field and other fields.


1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit Guha

As K. Sivaramakrishnan has pointed out in a paper published in 1993, one of the persistent ironies of postcoloniality “has been the way elites assuming the task of building a national culture and providing it with a liberatory/progressive history have turned to modes of knowledge and reconstruction produced in the colonial period.” And of the varied strands that have constituted the twentieth-century knowledge and self-knowledge of India, none is more central than the notion of the timeless, conservative caste, and its antediluvian ancestor, the unchanging primitive tribe (Sivaramakrishnan 1993; Inden 1990, 70–72). In this view South Asians, like other unprogressive people, did not change—they merely accumulated, with the latest addition to the population overlaying its predecessor, much as geological strata did. This paper will attempt to expose the historic roots and explore the contemporary ramifications of this model.


2008 ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Vitaliy Volodymyrovych Shevchenko

From the year of Ukraine's proclamation of state independence, a qualitatively different one began, without exaggeration - an epochal period of its development. The cherished dream of many generations of Ukrainians to live in an independent Fatherland has finally acquired a real outline, which in the post-Soviet consciousness of the million-minded people of Ukraine has been associated with centuries of cherished hopes for nation-wide peace, harmony, prosperity and happiness. But Ukraine is already in the second half of the 80's, and more recently - in the early 90's of the twentieth century. entered a period of dramatic and all-encompassing changes, which predetermined the rapid dynamics of the acquisition by the Ukrainian ethnos of its substantive self, and in particular that of spiritual and religious literacy, which related to the need for self-knowledge and self-awareness and found expression in the intensification of Ukrainian religiosity. Involvement in the process of broad strata of Ukrainian citizens, and consequently people of different views, religions and beliefs, as well as the intensity of socio-ideological shifts, not only contributed to the enrichment of ideas about spirituality, but in fact led to its value-based revision.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
ELISÂNGELA DE JESUS SANTOS

<p class="Default"><strong>Resumo: </strong>O texto problematiza a construção de conhecimento literário e científico destacando a atuação de intelectuais brasileiros do século XX. Neste exercício, procura refletir sobre a construção do personagem literário Jeca Tatu de Monteiro Lobato integrante da pauta entre intelectuais empenhados na construção do folclore como um problema sociológico ou “objeto” de análise e de poder, tendo em vista as lutas para constituição de campos disciplinares. Para pensar a produção intelectual em contextos contemporâneos, tratamos da produção cultural do século passado enquanto tentativa de tradução das práticas culturais populares, em sutil articulação com valores e concepções etnocêntricas fundadas na colonialidade de poder. Refletimos sobre a construção do conhecimento contemporâneo como legado que implica em rupturas conceituais com o passado colonial.</p><p class="Default"><strong>Palavras-chave: </strong>Folclore; Cultura Popular; Intelectuais; Ciências Sociais; grupos caipiras paulistas.</p><p class="Default"><strong><br /></strong></p><p class="Default"><strong>Abstract: </strong>The text discusses the construction of literary and scientific knowledge, highlighting the activities of Brazilian intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this endeavour, it aims to reflect on the composition of Monteiro Lobato’s literary character Jeca Tatu, part of the agenda among intellectuals engaged in making folklore a sociological problem or "object" of analysis and power, bearing in mind the fights to establish fields of study. Thus, and in order to ponder intellectual production in contemporary contexts, we treat the cultural production of the last century as an attempt to translate the popular cultural practices, in subtle conjunction with ethnocentric conceptions based on the coloniality of power. Reflect on the construction of contemporary knowledge as legacy that involves conceptual break with the colonial past.</p><p class="Default"><strong>Keywords: </strong>Folklore; Popular Culture; Intellectuals; Social Sciences; caipira paulista groups.</p>


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