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Drama and Theatre
DRAMA ◄► First person narrative◄► NARRATIVE
acting,
dramatic monologue
telling,
showing
reporting
presenting
autobiography
representing
addresseraddress
addressee
'I/we-you'
‘s/he, they, it'
mimesis
diegesis
Drama from Greek draein meaing to do, to act,
means a kind of acting
two meanings: playing roles, performing an action
Peripeteia – reversal of fortune
Anagnorisis – recognition of unknown person or fact
Theatre, from Greek thea (spectacle) and theon (spectator)
requires a 'play space' for the show to go on
division between actors and spectators
sometimes boundaries blurred or deliberatly
transgressed
Displacing the Body
Samuel Weber
•
•
Aristotle, it is well known, stated that philosophical thinking originated in
wonder or surprise, thaumazein. Although the remarks I have to offer today
are far too preliminary and tentative to make any claim at being
philosophical, they do originate in a sense of wonderment. In an age
increasingly dominated by electronic media, a certain theatricality seems
not only to survive, but even to reemerge with renewed force and
transformed significance. From military or strategic thinking to the more
rarefied realms of post-Hegelian philosophy, theatrical perspectives assume
an importance that could be qualified as paradigmatic, if the notion of
paradigmaticity were not itself called into question by the theatrical. For it
seems as if the notion of theatricality emerges precisely in response to an
uncertainty about the conditions under which anything can be exemplified or
indicated, alongside something else (para-deiknúnai: to show side by side).
And since there is no more time available, I will
close by asserting simply that the digitality of the
digital, which, as Negroponte as suggestively
asserted, replaces »atoms« by »bits«, in
an analogous manner points us towards the
ever-present necessity of reconstituting those
bits and pieces into some sort of body or reality,
be it »virtual«.
different types of staging:
arena, in the round, thrust, proscenium arch
(picture book, fourth-wall removed),
Brechtian (all devices and stage hands open
to view -- alienation effect, or
Verfremdungseffekt ), studio and
promenade
Hans Belting, from Florence &
Baghdad
The secular theatre ofo the Renaissance developed a form of staging
that had no equivalent in classical antiquity, and backdrops
represented an even greater departure from the past.
In their performances actors made no overt references to them,
although sometimes children were placed in the background to link
the perspective scene to the action of the play to increase its effect.
The space used by the actors had no connection to the space depicted
in the “prospect.” For a long time actors performed only on a narrow
proscenium adjacent to the footlights, and the entire depth of the
stage was reserved for the scena.
Such a ceasura between audience and stage did not exist yet in the
early days of the theatre. The boundary line tended to run, rather,
between the site of the action and the backdrop, that is, within the
stage itself, while the audience’s spatial relation to the perfomance
space couldl vary.
In England the “prospectives” of the Renaissance stage
were first introduced a century later, when their vogue in
Italy and France was almost over. Shakespeare, who
called the stage “insubstantial” in The Tempest, still had
little to do with the stage prospect. Ben Jonson and the
architect Inigo Jones, however, quarreled over whether
in masques, as some dramatic performances were
called, the stage set (“the body”) or the text (“the soul”)
should take priority. Jones was just as familiar with the
new stage techniques as with the tradition of the
Renaissance prospect...In Jonson’s Masque of
Blackness spectators saw not scenery “dispersed
around the stage” but rather “one indivisible scene where
the action was set.” ... Perspective was something
entirely new in the English theater.
Marshal McLuhan - The Medium is
the Message
The personal and social consequences of
any medium – that is, of any extension of
ourselves – result from the new scale that is
introduced into our affairs by each extension
of ourselves, or by any new technology. (23)
the “message” of any medium or technology
is the change of scale or pace or pattern that
it introduces into human affairs. (24)
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (on
Antoine de la Sale)
It is apparent that the late-feudal epideictic style is able to
produce a visual representation of such a genuinely tragic and
genuinely real scene...This is the more remarkable since in our
case the place of the action is extremely everyday and domestic,
the personages are a married couple, talking over their troubles
at night in bed. In the classical conception of the ancients this is
no proper setting for a tragic action in the elevated sense. Here
the tragic, the grave, the probelmatic appears in the everyday life
of a family. ... Despite the solemn and ceremonious language,
what takes place is very simple and very naive. A few simple
thoughts and emoitons appear, in harmony or in conflict. There
is no question of any stylistic separation between the tragic and
everyday realism. During its heyday, in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, French courtly literature produced nothing so real and
“creatural” (Kreatürliches).
So it is that the essence of mimesis is not
imitation, but production...
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe,
Typography. 1975.