Reviews for Theatre Theory Theatre

The average rating for Theatre Theory Theatre based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-28 00:00:00 Jennifer Bruce Introduction: The Politics of Theatre Theory p.11 - Theatre theory is systematic generalizing, or discourse, about the nature and function of the stage, the composition and performance of plays, and the art of the actor, director, and designer. p.12 - The involvement of theatre theorists in the organized life of society is only natural. Theatre is the most public of the arts, and for centuries the stage has been an institution close to the seats of power and patronage and subject to state control. Rules and regulations affecting plays in performance inevitably have political dimensions. p.18 - For Aristotle, the concept of mimesis includes both strict imitation of nature and a more general perfecting of what nature has left unfinished without the need to reproduce anything that actually exists. The embellishing or perfecting of nature advocated by Aristotle becomes the doctrine of la Belle Nature in French seventeenth-century aesthetics. Aristotle's master plan of politics provides a benign role for theatre. The end or final cause of tragedy is the pleasure given by imitation. Containment of the contagious effect of tragic passion is brought about through catharsis which purges souls that might grow intoxicated on represented desire. p.33 - Symbolist and Avant-Garde Rejection of Mimesis - In the form of realism and naturalism, mimesis - the basis of traditional theatre theory - has been attacked by almost all innovative artistic and intellectual movements from the beginnings of modernism to the postmodern present. The turn-of-the century symbolists and twentieth-century avant-gardists (Futurists, Expressionists, Constructivists) joined the battle against realist mimesis as the entrenched aesthetic of the bourgeois establishment and offered alternative styles in abstraction, discontinuity, disruption, and indeterminacy. p.36 - Brecht's Rehabilitation of Mimesis - In his theory of epic theatre, Brecht proposed an episodic form of narrative drama, mimetic in conception that incorporated techniques of distancing (derived from Chinese acting and Russian formalist notions of "estrangement") in order to provoke a critical response, rather than empathy, toward the characters on stage. The aim was to give spectators an understanding of social environment necessary to effect changes and remake the world. p.37 - In opposition to the Wagnerian integrated work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) designed to produce total hypnotic illusion, Brecht's epic theatre sought to disunify the spectacle and set the different theatrical means of dialogue, gesture, and music one against the other in mutual alienation as critical commentary on the action. Anne-Louise Germaine Necker, Mme de Staël p.262 - The first modern political dissident, Mme de Staël spent more than ten years of her life in political exile. A Swiss Protestant and daughter of Louis XVI's liberal minister of finance, Jacques Necker, Germaine was brought up in the company of Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot. Although an initial supporter of the French Revolution, she was forced to flee during the Terror and was later exiled by Napoleon from 1803 to 1814 for opposing his imperial conquests and tyrannical rule. Mme de Staël wrote De l'Allemagne (Germany) in exile as covert propaganda protesting against the suppression of intellectual freedom in France. p.263 - A keen observer of actors and acting, Mme de Staël ws a theatrical theorist who was also a performer, playwright, director, producer, and theatre owner In Geneva Germaine rented an apartment and remodeled it into a theatre, where she gave a theatrical season, and on the ground floor of her chateau at Coppet she maintained a small professional stage. On the Dramatic Art (1810) p.265 - The theatre exercises a powerful influence over men; a tragedy which exalts the soul, a comedy which paints manners and characters, acts upon the mind of the people almost like a real event; but in order to obtain any considerable success upon the stage, it is necessary for the poet to have studied the public which he addresses, and the motives, of every description, on which its opinion is founded. The knowledge of mankind is even equally essential to the dramatic author with imagination itself; he must touch sentiments of general interest without losing sight of the particular relations which influence his spectators; a theatrical performance is literature in action, and the genius which it demands is so rare only because it exhibits the astonishing combination of the perfect knowledge of circumstances with poetical inspiration. p.267 - The point is only to know whether in being confined, as at present, to the imitation of our dramatic masterpieces, we shall ever produce any new ones. Nothing in life ought to be stationary; and art is petrified when it refuses to change. Twenty years of revolution have given to the imagination other wants than those which it experienced when the novels of Crébillon painted the love and the manners of his time. Greek subjects are exhausted. The taste of the age naturally inclines to historical tragedy. Everything is tragic in the events by which nations are interested; and this immense drama, which the human race has for these six thousand years past been performing, would furnish innumerable subjects for the theatre, if more freedom were allowed to the dramatic art. August Wilhelm Schlegel p.269 - The impression the German theorist made on his audiences has been captured by Heinrich Heine, who as a student in 1819 attended his lectures at the University of Bonn, where Schlegel occupied the chair of Indian studies because of his work on Sanskrit language and literature. Johann Wolfgang Goethe p.277 - Goethe was the first to create a "director's theatre." Performers had to forgo customary typesetting so that the ensemble could be totally subordinated to the dramatist's conception of the work. Although no longer an actor himself, the poet gave impressive performances at rehearsals to show how each role should be played. In raising German theatre out of the rut of popular entertainment and everyday realism, Goethe had as his goal to provide pleasure of a higher sort. "It is my conviction," he declared, "that the highest purpose of art is to show human forms that are sensuously and aesthetically as significant and beautiful as possible." Arthur Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Idea" (1819/1844) p.293 - In tragedy the terrible side of life is presented to us, the wail of humanity, the reign of chance and error, the fall of the just, the triumph of the wicked; thus the aspect of the world which directly strives against our will is brought before our eyes. At this sight we feel ourselves challenged to turn away our will from life, no longer to will it or love it. But just in this way we become conscious that then there still remains something left in us, which we absolutely cannot know positively, but only negatively, as that which does not will life. p.296 - The dramatic or epic poet ought to know that he is fate, and should therefore be inexorable, as it is; also that he is the mirror of the human race, and should therefore present very many bad and sometimes profligate characters, and also many fools, buffoons, and eccentric persons; then also, now and again, a reasonable, a prudent, an honest, or a good man, and only as the rarest exception a truly magnanimous man. Friedrich Nietzsche p.336 - When he transferred from the University of Bonn to the University of Leipzig, he obtained press credentials and went regularly to plays with the young critics. August Strindberg, "Preface to Miss Julie" (1888) p.371 - The theatre has long seemed to me to be, like art in general, a Biblia pauperum, a Bible in pictures for those who can't read what is written or printed, and the playwright a lay preacher hawking the ideas of the day in popular form, so popular that the middle classes, the theatre's primary audience, can understand the basic questions without too much effort. And so the theatre has always been a public school for the young, the half-educated, and women, who still possess that primitive capacity for deceiving themselves or letting themselves be deceived, that is to say, are receptive to the illusion, to the playwright's power of suggestion. It seems to me, therefore, in our time, when rudimentary, undeveloped, and fanciful ways of thinking seem to be evolving toward reflection, investigation, and analysis, that the theatre, like religion, is dying out, a form for whose enjoyment we lack the necessary preconditions. Supporting this assertion is the serious theatre crisis now prevailing throughout Europe, especially in those bastions of culture that produced the greatest thinkers of the age, England and Germany, where the art of drama, like most of the other fine arts, is dead. Vsevolod Meyerhold p.406 - As a youngster, Meyerhold drank in the lively artistic culture of his native Penza, a city 350 miles southeast of Moscow. He saw the great actors of the day at the local theatre where his family had a box. As a law student in Moscow in the mid-1890s, Meyerhold spent almost every evening in the top balcony at the Maly Theatre watching the great tragic actress Maria Ermolova - before embarking on his own career and eventually joining the Moscow Art Theatre, where he would remain four years. p.407 - For Meyerhold, the great theme in art was the confrontation of past with future, which in his own work became the leitmotif of a generation doomed by history. The Russian director discovered too late that he belonged to that generation. His theatre was closed by the authorities in January 1938, and he was arrested in June 1939. After seven months of interrogation and torture, Meyerhold confessed to being a foreign agent and incriminates others, among them Eisenstein and Pasternak, but later denied these accusations. He was executed by firing squad on February 2, 1940, then rehabilitated in the 1960s, but the full truth about the circumstances of his death was not made known until 1989. Bernard Shaw p.428 - As the theatre critic for The Saturday Review from January 1895 to May 1898, Shaw wrote 151 weekly articles and frequented the major London theatres as well as Grein's Independent Theatre and other experimental stages. Shaw was superbly qualified for the job and made a formidable critic-theorist, expert in the related arts of music and painting, highly knowledgeable about the sociology and economics of theatre, a perceptive interpreter of audience psychology, and above all a brilliant student of acting.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-11-17 00:00:00 Kelly Ruggeri drama, theory