Literary Drama and Popular Theatre

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

This split between the "literary drama" and the "popular theatre" has become the condition of twentieth-century drama and theatre: plays of the artistic avant-garde are more readily absorbed into the canon of literature, while more conventional entertainments - television screenplays, for instance - remain outside it. The major playwrights from Ibsen to Luigi Pirandello to Samuel Beckett first wrote for small theatres and were produced by experimental companies playing to coterie audiences on the fringes of the theatrical "mainstream". This sense of modernist "art" as opposed to the values of bourgeois culture was not confined to drama and theatre. Modernist fiction and poetry, cubist and abstract painting and sculpture, modern dance, and modern music all developed a new formal complexity, thematic abstraction, and critical self-consciousness in opposition to the sentimental superficiality they found in conventional art forms. This modernist tendency has itself produced a kind of reaction, a desire to bring the devices of popular culture and mass culture into drama, as a way of altering the place of the theatre in society and changing the relationship between the spectators and the stage. Bertolt Bercht's alienation effect, Samuel beckett's importation of circus and film clowns to absurdist theatre, Heiner Muller's pastiche of Hamlet in his postmodern Hamletmachine, or Wole Soyinka's interweaving of African ritual and fourth-wall realism in Death and the King's Horseman are all examples of this reaction. For the theatre has been challenged by film and television to define its space in contemporary culture, and given the pervasive availability of other media, theatre has increasingly seemed to occupy a place akin to that of opera, among the privileged, elite forms of "high culture". As a result, innovation in today's theatre often takes place on the margins or fringes of mainstream theatre and mainstream culture : in smaller companies experimenting in many parts of the world, and in theatres working to form a new audience and a new sense of theatre by conceiving new forms of drama. And yet, as David Hare's Stuff Happens suggests, it's still possible, even for a major institutional theatre like London's Royal National Theatre, to use the space of the stage to interrogate the sphere of contemporary politics.

Reading vs performing a play

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

Theatre audiences are bound to the temporality and specificity of the stage, but readers have the freedom to compose the play in much more varied ways. A reader can pause over a line, teasing out possible meanings, in effect stopping the progress of the play. Readers are not bound by the linear progress of the play's action, in that they can flip back and forth in the play. looking for clues, confirmations, or connections. Nor are readers bound by the stringent physical economy of the stage, the need to embody the characters with individual actors, to specify specfy the dramatic locale as a three-dimensional space. While actors and directors must decide on a specific interpretation of each moment and every character in the play, readers can keep several competing interpretations alive in the imagination at the same time.

Both ways of thinking about drama are demanding, and students of drama should try to develop a sensitivity to both approaches. Treating the play like a novel or poem, decomposing and recomposing it critically, leads to a much fuller sense of the play's potential meanings, its gaps and inconsistencies; it allows us to question the text without the need to come to definite conclusions. Treating the play as a design for the stage forces us to make commitments, to articulate and defend a particular version of the play, and to find ways of making those meanings active onstage, visible in performance. As readers, one way to develop a sense of the reciprocity between stage and page is to think of the play as constructed mainly of actions, not of words.

How the Truth Gets Twisted

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has devoted her career to proving that memories don't just fade, they can also change.

By Ann Marsh and Greta Lorge


http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=57592&CSRT=1444742095335907025

This is an insightful article from the Stanford University Magazine on how memories work, and do not work. It is disappointing and frustrating when we cannot recall something important. It is perhaps painful that one's unreliable memories are actually misleading or lying to oneself. 

An Actor Prepares : Chapter Four

If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically, without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination.

Our work on a play begins with the use of  if  as a lever to lift us out of everyday life on to the plane of imagination. The play, the parts in it, are the invention of the author’s imagination, a whole series of ifs and given circumstances thought up by him. There is no such thing as actuality on the stage. Art is a product of the imagination, as the work of a dramatist should be. The aim of the actor should be to use his technique to turn the play into a theatrical reality. In this process imagination plays by far the greatest part.

An Actor Prepares : Chapter Three

"On the stage it is necessary to act, either outwardly or inwardly." All action in the theatre must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent and real.

The external immobility of a person sitting on the stage does not imply passiveness. You may sit without a motion and at the same time be in full action. Frequently physical immobility is the direct result of inner intensity, and it is these inner activities that are far more important artistically. The essence of art is not in its external forms but in its spiritual content.

On the stage, there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the rousing of a feeling for its own sake. To ignore this rule results only in the most disgusting artificiality. When you are choosing some bits of action leave feeling and spirited content alone. Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer, for its won sake. All such feelings are the result of something that has gone before. As for the result, it will produce itself. You must not copy passions or copy types. You must live in passions and in the types. Your acting of them must grow out of your living in them.

if acts as a lever to lift us out of the world of actuality into the realm of imagination. The secret of the effect of if lies first of all in the fact that it does not use fear or force, or make the artist do anything. On the contrary, it reassures him through its honesty, and encourages him to have confidence in a supposed situation. It arouses an inner and real activity.  if is also a stimulus to the creative subconscious. One fundamental principle of acting is "unconscious creativeness through conscious technique".

To achieve this kinship between the actor and the person he is portraying add some concrete detail which will fill out the play, giving it point and absorbing action. The circumstances which are predicted on if are taken from sources near to your own feelings, and they have a powerful influence on the inner life of an actor. Once you have established this contact between your life and your part, you will find that inner push or stimulus. Add a whole series of contingencies based on your own experience in life, and you will see how easy it will be for you sincerely to believe in the possibility of what you are called upon to do on the stage. Work out an entire role in this fashion, and you will create a whole new life.

Pushkin said, "Sincerity of emotions, feelings that seem true in given circumstances - that is what we ask of a dramatist." 

'given circumstances' mean the story of the play, its facts, events, epoch, time and place of action, conditions of life, the actors' and the regisseur's interpretation, the mise-en-scene, the production, the sets, the costumes, properties, lighting and sound effects, - all the circumstances that are given to an actor to take into account as he creates his role. If is the starting point, the given circumstances, the development.

'sincerity of emotions' means living human emotions, feelings which the actor himself has experienced.

'feelings that seem true' refers not to the actual feelings but to something nearly akin to them, to emotions reproduced indirectly, under the prompting of true inner feelings.

First, you will have to imagine in your own way the 'given circumstances' offered by the play, the regisseur's production and your own artistic conception. All of this material will provide a general outline for the life of the character you are to enact, and the circumstances surrounding him. it is necessary that you really believe in the general possibilities of such a life, and then become so accustomed to it that you feel yourself close to it. If you are successful in this, you will find that 'sincere emotions', or 'feelings that seem true' will spontaneously grow in you.

An Actor Prepares : Chapter Two

The director says the following for acting.
"Side by side we see moments of living a part, representing the part, mechanical acting and exploitation."

"Living a part" are moments when we are creating according to our inspiration, improvising, as it were. Technique is important, because with no technique, if this inspiration does not turn up then neither you nor they have anything with which to fill in the blank spaces.

We need to think about the inner side of a role, and how to create its spiritual life through the help of the internal process of living the part. You must live it by actually experiencing feelings that are analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it.

Our aim is not only to create the life of a human spirit, but also to express it in a beautiful, artistic form. An actor is under the obligation to live his part inwardly, and then to give to his experience an external embodiment. The body depend on the soul. In order to express a most delicate and largely subconscious life it is necessary to have control of an unusually responsive, excellently prepared vocal and physical apparatus. This apparatus must be ready instantly and exactly to reproduce most delicate and all but intangible feelings with great sensitiveness and directness.

Tortsov commented on Paul's acting to explain "representing the part".
"In our art you must live the part every moment that you are playing it, and every time. Each time it is recreated it must be lived afresh and incarnated afresh. This describes the few successful moments in Kostya's acting. For Paul, I was astonished in a number of places by the accuracy and artistic finish of a form and method of acting which is permanently fixed, and which is produced with a certain inner coldness. However I did feel in those moments that the original, of which this was only the artificial copy, had been good and true. This echo of a former process of living the part made his acting, in certain moments, a true example of the art of representation.

"You must be careful in the use of a mirror. It teaches an actor to watch the outside rather than the inside of his soul, both in himself and in his part."

"Mechanical acting" is having rather elaborately worked out methods of presenting the role with conventional illustrations. The origins and methods of mechanical acting is characterize as "rubber stamps". To reproduce feelings you must be able to identify them out of your own experience. But as mechanical actors do not experience feelings they cannot reproduce their external results. With the aid of his face, mimicry, voice and gestures, the mechanical actor offers the public nothing but the dead mask of non-existent feeling.

Whereas mechanical acting makes use of worked-out stencils to replace real feelings, over-acting takes the first general human convention that come along and uses them without even sharpening or preparing them for the stage.

The theatre, on account of its publicity and spectacular side, attracts many people who merely wants to capitalize their beauty or make careers. This is exploitation of art.

An Actor Prepares : Chapter One

Chapter One : The First Test

The writer ( Stanislavski ? ), Paul Shustov and Leo Pushchin had to prepare for a stage performance.  Stanislavski wrote about his preparation for the role of Othello.
Although he was satisfied with his practice at home, he sometimes could not do well in the rehearsal. At home, Iago was not present. At each rehearsal, the stage seemed not exactly the same as the last time.
During the performance, he was most pleased with the part where he flung out the famous line "Blood, Iago, blood !"  He felt approval from the audience, and a sort of energy boiled up in him. Paul seemed to be affected by it, and acted with abandon too.
The chapter ended with a description of another student's performance. She fell and cried "Oh, help me!" in a way that chilled the heart.