Alexander Ostrovsky’s play “Late Love”: from its conception to the implementation

The article examines the contents’ peculiarity of the play “Late Love” in accord with its author’s artistic intentions. For the first time hand-written materials (rough copies and the play’s draft) have been taken into account and brought into academic use; the chirographs make it possible to bring to light the main points of the play and its vital problems. Special attention is paid to still greater importance the author was lending to the love story while working at the play; it helps to reveal the meaning of the play’s title. It is noted that for the first time Alexander Ostrovsky had shown a highly moral heroine who committed crime for the sake of the man she loved. In this connection, a few opinions of some critics are cited who gave negative estimation to the play. Analysing the play’s artistic merits the authors of the article take notice of the fact that the action is concentrated in time and space. The Shablovs’ house where lawyers, a tradesman, a landlady, and a clerk make their appearance, reflects to a certain extent the social strata of the post-reformed Russia and the tendencies typical of that world. The study of the initial draft made it clear that Alexander Ostrovsky thought over at first the play’s “scenario”, the number of personages, determined their characters and their role in the action’s development. The dramatic action and the happy end draw the spectators to the conclusion that a human’s salvation from its moral ruin is love, personal ability to repent and to realise its responsibility for the people close to it and for the world as a whole.

Traditional cultural expressions in theatrical performance: meaning and value

The object of the investigation is the relation between theatrical discourse and traditional cultural expressions. The main objective of the research is to highlight the way traditional art was made use of by directors at different historical stages and the artistic, cognitive, educational meanings and valences of some forms of traditional cultural expressions in the structure of theatrical discourse. Resorting to the comparativehistorical method, through the analyzes of the performances, we demonstrate the polysemanticism of the dramatic action and the variety of artistic functions of the traditional Romanian song, of the nuptial ceremony ”Iertarea miresei” /Forgiveness of the bride”, of the rite of passage “Moşii/Forefathers” in the spectacular universe created by directors in different theaters. These traditional forms promote and affirm identity marks – of the ethnic group and of the creative individuality (playwright, director, set designer, actor), but also the intercultural character of some shows.

"reich an grossen, schauervollen, himmlischschönen und hinreissenden Stellen"

Eigtheenth-century Ballet at the Württemberg court under Duke Carl Eugen primarily associated with one name: the choreographer Jean Georges Noverre - and his concept of a new dramatic action ballet, in which music plays a central role. Today, however, the composers of this music are largely forgotten and their contribution to Noverre's revolutionary ballets is underrated. One of them, the Württemberg court musician Florian Deller (1729-1773), composed the music for many of Noverre's reform ballets, including Orphée et Euridice (1763). A detailed analysis of the score maps the musical movements onto the dramatic scenes and reveals how the music is tailored to the plot and Noverre's dramaturgical concept.

EFEITOS PSICOTERAPÊUTICOS EM UM PARTICIPANTE DE UM ATO SOCIONÔMICO

This article aims to highlight the psychotherapeutic effects of public socionomic acts. A public psychodrama experience took place at the São Paulo Cultural Center in 2018. One of the participants in this act, which brought the protagonist theme in an intense way, was later individually attended to during four psychotherapeutic sessions. During individual consultations, it was possible to elaborate what was experienced in public psychodrama, reaffirming the effectiveness of the work. In the socionomic act in question, we used theatrical language, a fundamental part of the device created by the Gota D’Água group, as a guide for the work. Initially seen as a socio-educational intervention device, I defend, in this article, its psychotherapeutic potential given by the dramatic action.

Ярмарок – торг – обмін як фрейм просторового пограниччя (М. Гоголь – Г. Квітка-Основ’яненко)

A fair – a successful demonstration form of the translation of social experience, tradition, customary rules in the form of collective action. This is an all-public action with the representation of the symbolic series of culture, era, and society.Given the honourable place of the fair in the works of M. Gogol, V. Narizhniy, M. Pogodin, G. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, E. Grebinki, V. Sollogub, etc., it seems expedient to emphasize the modernity of its nature, a radical change in relations between the subject and the object, or between the subject and the predicate, that is, the statement about this subject, its semantic definition. In other words, denotation gives way to a more virtual, fictitious relationship between the participants (subjects) of the fair and its objects.The gallery of fairs is opened with an embodiment of a two-vector-oriented culture by M. Gogol. In his “Sorochinsky Fair” (1831), he allegedly programmed the further reception of this image, and his primacy, the authority of all recognized. Indeed, Gogol creates the fair primarily not in the plane of the narrative, but as a field for experiment, a space of various communicative discourses of pragmatic orientation. Therefore, a literary, verbal-mimetic expression serves here as a powerful tool for constructing a spectacular dramatic action with many acts, scenes and microscales, genre pictures and anecdotal inserts. The effect of suggestive suggestion, literally the modelling of juicy images, facilitates a meeting of human life with the world through experience, communication, knowledge and the discovery of unfamiliar spheres.

can you hear me? by Simona Semenič and the question of no-longer-dramatic writing

In the article, the author analyses three plays by Simona Semenič that were published in the book can you hear me? (2017). At first sight, the three pieces appear to be written in Semenič’s now-familiar writing style with no punctuation marks or upper-case initials and no apparent division between dialogues and stage directions. Content-wise, however, the three plays differ significantly from the bulk of the playwright’s opus as they represent autobiographical texts which once again establish the character and more or less distinct dramatic action. The article focuses on two questions: Are these still no-longer-dramatic texts? And, what is the status of representation and performativity in them? By analysing the formal and content properties of the three texts, more precisely, through an analysis of the drama character, the relationship between dialogue and monologue and dramatic action, the author shows that indeed these texts establish recognisable dramatic characters and relatively strong dramatic action. In this, they move away from no-longer- dramatic texts as defined by Gerda Poschmann, even though their legacy is still very much present, e.g., in the fragmented writing style.

A Study of Dramatic Action and Emotion Using a Systematic Scan of Stick Figure Configurations

Comprehending the meaning of body postures is essential for social organisms such as humans. For example, it is important to understand at a glance whether two people seen at a distance are in a friendly or conflictual interaction. However, it is still unclear what fraction of the possible body configurations carry meaning, and what is the best way to characterize such meaning. Here, we address this by using stick figures as a low-dimensional, yet evocative, representation of body postures. We systematically scanned a set of 1,470 upper-body postures of stick figures in a dyad with a second stick figure with a neutral pose. We asked participants to rate the stick figure in terms of 20 emotion adjectives like sad or triumphant and in terms of eight active verbs that connote intent like to threaten and to comfort. The stick figure configuration space was dense with meaning: people strongly agreed on more than half of the configurations. The meaning was generally smooth in the sense that small changes in posture had a small effect on the meaning, but certain small changes had a large effect. Configurations carried meaning in both emotions and intent, but the intent verbs covered more configurations. The effectiveness of the intent verbs in describing body postures aligns with a theory, originating from the theater, called dramatic action theory. This suggests that, in addition to the well-studied role of emotional states in describing body language, much can be gained by using also dramatic action verbs which signal the effort to change the state of others. We provide a dictionary of stick figure configurations and their perceived meaning. This systematic scan of body configurations might be useful to teaching people and machines to decipher body postures in human interactions.

Theme orientation and the inevitable outcome of structural flaws: Investigating the results of the dominance of theme over action in Farhadi’s The Salesman

In this article, we discuss the importance of unity in the feature film script and the mechanism of its development based on the two elements of dramatic action and theme. We investigate the consequences of prioritizing theme over the action on the foundation of the dramatic structure of the screenplay, considering one of the most famous Iranian films, Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (2016), the winner of the best screenplay at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. In any form of drama, the chain of actions leads to a specific theme, and the theme in turn directs this chain. Therefore, to create an organic structure, the balanced development of action and theme is essential. Manipulating this balance in favour of highlighting the theme, and understanding the chain of actions based on the theme weakens the logical relationship of the actions as well as the dramatic structure, ultimately turning some actions into redundancies that can be eliminated. The study shows that in The Salesman’s screenplay, through prioritizing the theme over the action and disrupting the natural process of perceiving the theme from the chain of actions, a structure is created in which the presence of some actions are only justified by referring to the theme. Therefore, a number of events/scenes in the screenplay can be omitted without interfering with the unity of the narrative and the formation and expression of the theme. As a result, prioritizing the theme over the action in the foundation of the script inevitably leads to a flawed structure.

“Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments”: Embodied Perception in The Changeling

This essay argues that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) draws on debates about sense perception in the period to interrogate the effects of dramatic representation. After a brief overview of early modern perceptual theory, this essay demonstrates that the play's villain, De Flores, manipulates other characters’ perception through language. In fact, De Flores uses theatrical language to manipulate how other characters perceive their environment, indicating the theater's ability to manipulate audiences. By affecting how characters perceive, De Flores affects other characters’ ability to process and react to their environment, which impedes their judgment. The essay argues that much of The Changeling's dramatic action unfolds through a conflict between two models of perception—presentational and representational—that undergird much of the play's dramatic conflict. In the play, pervasive anxiety about judgment, particularly how perception affects judgment, is structured around the distinction between these two models of perception. Considering the play alongside representational and presentational models indicates how early modern dramatists engage with intellectual theories to consider how representation works and how spaces are experienced. In this way, the theater refracts and dramatizes theories about perception.