Concepts

• Theater
• The word comes from the Greek word meaning theatron, to see or place of seeing
• A building with a stage designed for live public performances
• Subculture of artists and craftspeople who spend their ives in the business of “adult Make-believe”
• Theatrical art
• Art of telling stories by performing them for an audience.
• An exchange of information on the occasion of an event

• Theatre occasion is made up of the Actor, pretend character and audience member
• A = actor X = Character S = audience member

• Ephemeral
• There is nothing left of the performance once it has been preformed
• Traces of the event remain, mostly in the memory, but event has vanished.
• Mimesis
• Representation or an imitation of an event
• Most distinguishable characteristic of drama is the use of dialogue
• Natyasastra wrote in 100 AD that “the purpose of theater is to be a mind altering drug” which helps the audience escape from reality.
• Oscar Brockett discusses the three questions about a performance
• Understanding
• What were they trying to do?
• Effectiveness
• How well do they do what they were trying to do?
• Worth
• Was it worth doing, my time, and what about it is worth doing?
• We read a critics essay to:
• Findout more about the performance and background of a play
• Gain insight to know purpose and meaning
• Hear an opinion as a judgment or argument
• Phenomenology and Semiotics

• Realistic drama help audience get “through” the work
• Reactualist drama wants to look “at” the work

• Two models for How Directors direct
• Top Down Model “Authority”
• Stage Picture
• Process
• Artists
• Collaboration: bottom up organization of the artists themselves.
• The actor is her own instrument made up of
• Body
• Voice
• Mood and tone
• Thought
• Imagination, memory, intelligence.
• Discipline
• Observation, control, style
• 4 approaches between director and text
• Transcription
• Take script to be literal meaning of the writer
• Translation
• Translate spirit while staying true to the text
• Transformation
• Reshape material as seen fit
• Transcend
• Invent in the medium of the stage
• Write in the Mis-en-scene
• Director’s relationship with the team
• Partnership (Saxe-Meiningen)
• Auteur/Visionary (Wilson)
• Collective (Brook, Lecompte)
• Playwright (Mamet)
• Power in the theatre comes from the director, actor, and audience.
• Director controls the image and actors in a way they see will seduce the audience
• The actor must capture and maintain the audience’s attention while constructing a perfect performance.
• The audience chooses what to watch, whether to attend, and how to respond the performance.
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Terms

• Lozze
• Bits and pieces of a sketch spoken at moments notice
• “Utile ed dulce”
• to delight and inform
• Mythos
• Art of building a myth.
• Mis-en-scene
• The overall feeling of the performance
• Saxe-Minagan
• Using stage direction and picture to make a direct reflection on life events
• Agon
• Root of protagonist
• Means struggle or game
• Tragic hero
• Character divided against themselves and are reason for their own demise
• Melodramatic Hero
• May die but for a noble cause from outside forces.
• Subtext
• An example of inner-monolouge
• Realism
• Theater rejecting romantacism and speaks with natural, unforced, style of language
• Way of looking at world with measurable qualities
• Guesanvert
• The total work of art, from Vaugner
• Melodrama
• Drama with music that accompaniew the text. Often a clear sense of good v. evil from iconic clues.
• Exstasis
• Out of body experience. Pleasure or pain, physical or emotional.
• Life Lie
• Often an unspoken.
• Special Lighting
• Area accented by lights for a particular reason
• General Lighting
• Lights that light the whole action area