FROM STATION OF LIFE TO STATION OF DEATH IN THE CHARACTERS OF DANCER AND THE GENTLEMAN OF ONEILLS PLAY THIRST ALONG WITH DIVERSE SYMBOLISM

The Thirst centres on the struggle of three shipwreck victims to survive on a small white raft adrift on a glassy sea. Descending into madness as a result of their thirst, they prey on each other until they sacrifice their humanity to the uncaring, black-stained sea. Despite their common predicament, the three are separated by social, as well as psychological, forces. The Dancer is called young from the stage direction of the play. ONeill described her as figure of pitiful care. The Gentleman has been portrayed by O Neill in The Thirst, as a symbolic agent of the practical civilized world-Virginia Floyd. All through the action of the play he exhibits mostly civilized and dignified behaviour and upholds his morality to the bitter end.- Alfred Routz. While himself suffering, he mostly sympathizes with the unbearable suffering of the delicate young lady that the Dancer is. For, this reason, O Neill presented the European man as the name of Gentleman. Symbolism is indicative of a lot deeper sense in simple and commonplace matter. Conventional well-known materials are used to suggest some deeper sense or truth of life and society through a symbolic treatment. A careful reading of ONeills plays will show that in each play he seeks to communicate his feelings about life. It is invariably true that the natural objects he uses in his plays like the sun, the sky, the sea (p,51)etc. are symbols and images of something. The same thing is true of his stage props and even of the make-ups, costumes, the looks, the important gesture(p,51) and even the vocal nuances of his characters.

Portraits of Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse: Return after Neglect

The article is dedicated to the attribution of two portraits of an unknown German general in the Tsarskoye Selo Museum collection. One of them is a ceremonial knee-high portrait, the other is a small head portrait of the same general. In addition, one portrait was purchased in 1997 at the “Lenfilm” stage properties, the other has always been in the museum. It was believed that the head portrait, by an unknown artist, depicted Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt — father of future Russian Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. The weak inscription at the bottom of the knee-high portrait states that it is a copy done by Heinrich R.Kröh in 1896 in Darmstadt, based on Heinrich von Angeli`s original. On the backs of both canvases, monograms from the personal collection of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna were found: the interwoven Russian letters “A” and “F” under a crown and “№ 8” (ceremonial knee-high portrait) and “№ 65” (head portrait). Both images date back to the famous “Family portrait of Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse”, commissioned by Queen Victoria for the Drawing-room of her Osborne-House in London. In the queen’s letters, it is noted that Angeli had started to work on the head sketches immediately upon his arrival in 1878. Alexandra Feodorovna brought one of them, her father’s head sketch, with her to Russia. Also, in the year of 1878 Angeli painted the knee-high ceremonial portrait with the same regalia for Grand Duke Ludwig’s residence in Darmstadt. The portrait is known in copies executed by Ludwig Hofmann-Zeitz (Royal Collections, London) and Heinrich Kröh (now in Tsarskoye Selo Museum). The fate of Kröh’s replica happened to be tragic. First it was seen in a photograph of the Empress’s study in the Winter Palace of the 1900s made by St. Petersburg photographer Karl Kubesh. The photo shows companion portraits of the Empress’s parents. Both portraits disappeared after the 1917 Revolution. The knee-high portrait of Ludwig was badly damaged and as a result was included into the stage props of the studio as it was deemed unnecessary. After many decades, the portrait was returned to the Tsarskoye Selo Museum collection.

Krzysztof Knittel's chamber opera and Agnieszka Stulgińska's music theatre: Examples of a new syncretistic medium in contemporary Polish music

This essay analyses and interprets the scores, recordings, and media used in Knittel and King's The Heart Piece - Double Opera (1999) and Stulgińska's Three Women for three women and ten instruments (2017), two semi-improvised Polish operas using performance art and interaction between sound, text, choreography, lighting, theatrical form and electronic medium. In Stuglińska's modern music theatre, the listener follows different sound sources and the setting: choreography, performers' and speakers' arrangement on stage, props and lighting, whose intensity dictates the form. The Heart Piece chamber opera is a two - Polish and American - composers' take on Müller's play Herzstück, with separate movements in their native languages. Music and text create an interactive setting, and their notation and semantics make music both seen and heard. These works use the concept of hybridization and, in Wolf's terminology, intracompositional intermediality, where different means of expression create an intermedial discourse, a complementary whole and a new syncretistic medium.

Moving still: Bicycles in Ranchhod Oza’s photographs of 1950s Stone Town (Zanzibar)

Stone Town’s busy streets in the 1950s became a set for photographer Ranchhod Oza, proprietor of Capital Art Studio (1930–83). I was aesthetically drawn to the numerous bicycles portrayed in these Zanzibari images, just as Oza had been at an earlier time and place. I am less interested in reading the subject of bicycles as simply a sign of Zanzibari modernity, an accoutrement that projects a fantasy of advancement via technological things. Instead, I focus on their ability to reflect various material aspects of daily life in Stone Town. Some bicycles carry people, others transport things, while still others appear as stage props, leaning up against walls while waiting (im)patiently for their owners to return. Yet in all these Oza images, they are moving still, ready to reach another chosen destination. What does the content of bicycles say about Oza’s photographic style? Can these bicycles potentially speak to Zanzibar’s placeness as a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean port city?

Theater, Between Technology and Visual Arts

Since Antiquity, there have been biunivocal links between theater, technology and visual arts, each of these branches being, if not decisively influenced by the others, at least stimulated. Technology was put at the service of theater either as a logistical part or in “main” roles, sometimes in competition with the actor, in other words with the man. In the first case we are dealing with elevators, cranes, light or sound devices and so on. In the second, with automatic machines, largely autonomous. Applied arts, costumes, scenery, stage props and everything related to scenography are largely synonymous with the performing arts. On the other hand, the technicalartistic commands and requirements coming from the theater have always been a step forward for those directions. Technology and art have also influenced each other, if we take into account, for example, Leonardo da Vinci’s utopian sketches, endowed rather with artistic qualities, but at the same time often functional as stage props. This article points out the idea written above through several representative case studies for the subject approached in a historically evolutionary perspective, relating them to the philosophical concepts or social phenomena behind them.

„All the resurrected dead” in „the infinite emptiness” of Beckett and Kantor

The article aims to draw some parallels between two great pioneers of the twentieth-century theatre practice: Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) and Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990). Both artists are famous for revolutionary solutions and disturbing stage images overridden with a sense of loss and mourning. The Beckettian spirit will be detected in Kantor’s performance The Dead Class with a special emphasis on stage props that were attributed with great signifi cance in all his artistic ventures. It can be said that Kantor encapsulated the quintessence of particular productions in his stage objects and this study will detect Beckett’s thought as it is conveyed by, for example, school benches, mannequins, Machine of Oppression – the Mechanical Cradle, and a window

Revisiting Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker: a Semiotic Study of the Dramatis Personae

The present article sought to offer a semiotic analysis of Pinter’s The Caretaker’s characters as signifers in their own right. The article also aimed at studying the play’s dramatis personae as loci of multi-coded expressions, with a focus on the various modes of signifcation associated with them. Using semiotics as an analytical method, the author explored the linguistic and paralinguistic features of the characters’ discourses as signs in relation to the play’s pivotal themes, their kinesic and body expressions as indexical signs, as well as their distinctive proxemic behavior(s) onstage. Some attention was also given to the characters’ handling of stage props and the special meanings attached to them as replicators of character personality. The results of the discussion showed that using a semiotic approach to analyze The Caretaker’s characters can yield positive outcomes in terms of comprehensive analysis and interpretation of the characters as dynamic unities of interrelated sign-systems. Keywords: Pinter, semiotics, dramatis personae, linguistic, kinesic, proxemic

Methods of Achieving Stylistic Unity Between Portrait, Costume, and The Theatre Play Space

Creating stylistic unity within a theatre play is more than just a complex process. The original interpretation of the language forms, specific to each artist that becomes part of this creative act, lies within the final aesthetic product. This article starts by analysing the concept of form and movement as a result of syncretism on various levels, from style and movement, to expression and feelings. To achieve this, the author describes the aesthethics of form emphasising the meaning of stylistic unity in achieving the artistic vision of a show. The paper defines compositional laws and theatrical methods that make the muppet play become a harmonic visual ensemble and stylistic unity. Some of these are: stage props and background; the kinetic criterion of moving forms; the ergonomic criterion of forms in space; the criterion of materiality - in creating the clothing and the costume design.

‘Conjuring some magic’: paganism and the musical and visual aesthetics of Florence + the Machine and Bat for Lashes

Magic and mystery shroud Florence + the Machine's and Bat for Lashes's performances and interviews, which frequently frame the two groups’ frontwomen, Florence Welch and Natasha Khan, as ‘witchy’ or magical, or spur comparisons to Pagan aesthetics. This article investigates the unique ways the two bands use Pagan influences to speak to mainstream and Pagan audiences. Ultimately, the two groups set themselves apart from other bands through marketing that fuses commercialism with an esoteric religion. Florence + the Machine and Bat for Lashes create a ‘Pagan chic’ that draws in listeners through videos, instrumentation often featuring harp and tom-tom drums, fantasy-oriented lyrics, and stage props which use a Pagan lens to respond to current political events reminiscent of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Stage Props and Shakespeare’s Comedies

While they might seem like ‘toys’ or ‘trifles’, stage properties in Shakespeare’s comedies subtly unsettle the relationship between human subject and non-human object. Even such seemingly innocuous comedic props as letters (in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost) and rings (in The Merchant of Venice) can be given incommensurate weight by the comic plot. Drawing on both semiotic and phenomenological accounts of stage props as well as the synthesis of these approaches in the work of Erika Lin and Andrew Sofer, this essay explores the broad continuum between the comically disruptive misdirected letter and absent, irreplaceable objects like Shylock’s turquoise ring and demonstrates just how rigorously Shakespeare’s comic props test our investment in comedic narrative and the comic resolution.