Why do we preform/attend Rituals/
- to celebrate
- to commemorate or remember
- to solemnize or make something official
- to worship or appease God/Gods
- to build or reinforce a sense of community
Elements of Ceremony
- specific place set aside or prepared for ceremony
- ceremonial objects-location, properties, scenery
- specific dress-costume, mask
- music/dance/ritual movement
- leadership/performance: those who enact or lead ceremonies
- impersonation/assumption of roles
- audience attendance/participation
Storytelling
- like ceremonies, elements of storytelling are crucial to understanding the evolution of Western Theatre
- theatre takes the communicative and emotional aspects of storytelling, and adds per-formative and produced elements to them.
- theatre also takes the idea of inhabiting a character and willing suspension of disbelief further than storytelling.
Western Theatre Traditions
surviving plays from the era of 5th century B.C. (plays form the ancient greek)
Myths
come from people’s early attempts to understand the world around them, especially before the advent or application of scientific method
Legends
come from ancient pasts of our culture
Archetypes
- character types that appear in many different literary forms across time, place and culture.
- they tend to embody ides and ideals common to the human experience.
What is theater?
- the actors and audience are live and in the same place
- any act of theater is ephermeral, it exists only as is being preformed, and can never be repeated exactly.
- theatre is a collaborative art, requiring the creative input and labor of many artists, and of the audience.
Play
the text as the author(s) wrote ir. It exists as literature, but not yet as theater.
Production
the collaborative efforts of a group of artists that create a living embodiment of the play for an audience to see.
Performance
the execution of the planned production at one moment for one audience.
Aristotle’s Poetics
- was written as a way of looking at and critiquing plays, specifically classic Greek tragedies.
- became foundation of european theatrical criticism, and can provide a structure and vocabulary for looking at most theatrical experiences.
Foils for Oedipus
Tiresias and Creon
Antagonist for Hamlet
Claudius
Long passages, usually spoken when a character is alone on stage, give the audience insight into the characters thought and emotional state.
Soliloquy
Comedy that is fast moving, physical action and often involves mistakes/mistaken identity and sexual maneuvering/misbehavior for its comic punch.
Farce
A play that uses and incorporates source material, striving for accuracy as well as impact, would usually be considered a …
Documentary play
What is not generally seen as influencing the emergence of realism in theater
The dissolution of the system of colonial empire
During the neoclassical period, which of the following was not one the classical unities that playwrights were expected to follow in their scripts?
Unity of intention
What style of theater sought to present a dramatization of a slice of life much as the audience experiences, on stage.
Realism
What style theater celebrated the natural world and valued intense emotion and individuality.
Romanticism
Trope
A musical or chanted exchange of dialogue, added to the Christian worship ceremony during the Middle Ages, the seed of what evolved into medieval drama
Commedia dell’arte
An improvisational theatre style developed in Europe in the 1500s. Performers created a story around a scenario, using stock characters and bits of action
Pastiche
The combinations of different styles to create a new work
