Michael Kirby presents a penetrating look a theater theory and analysis.
Author: Michael Kirby
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812205442
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 178
View: 383
Michael Kirby presents a penetrating look a theater theory and analysis. His approach is analytically comprehensive and flexible, and nonevaluative. Case studies demonstrate this unique approach and record performances that otherwise would be lost.part three structuralist theatre Historically , formalism in theatre has been more or less synony- mous with style , with abstraction . It has been a theatre of visual and auditory formalism that related to painting and music and ...
Author: Michael Kirby
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812213343
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 184
View: 198
Michael Kirby was the most outspoken exponent of formalist theater and founded the Structuralist Workshop in the 1960s to explore this style of performance. He called it "Structuralist" (capitalizing the term popularized by Levi-Strauss) to make a distinction between his emphasis on spatial and temporal form (i.e. structure) and the historical association of formalism with styles and abstraction. The book is based on articles written over the course of a decade for the Drama Review, a quarterly journal Kirby edited for fourteen years. In Part I, "Formalist Analysis," analytical continua are developed and applied to acting, style, and structure; Kirby devotes Part II, "The Social Context," to an analysis of the current state of criticism, theatre as a political tool, and the current state of the avant-garde; Part III, "Structuralist Theatre," describes performances produced by Kirby under the auspices of his structuralist workshop as well as several Structuralist films.'Formalist theatre' and imitation In front of paintings by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman or Cy Twombly every viewer understands at once that one can hardly speak of an imitation of a preexistent reality here.
Author: Hans-Thies Lehmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781134496822
Category: Performing Arts
Page: 224
View: 640
Newly adapted for the Anglophone reader, this is an excellent translation of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s groundbreaking study of the new theatre forms that have developed since the late 1960s, which has become a key reference point in international discussions of contemporary theatre. In looking at the developments since the late 1960s, Lehmann considers them in relation to dramatic theory and theatre history, as an inventive response to the emergence of new technologies, and as an historical shift from a text-based culture to a new media age of image and sound. Engaging with theoreticians of 'drama' from Aristotle and Brecht, to Barthes and Schechner, the book analyzes the work of recent experimental theatre practitioners such as Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Müller, the Wooster Group, Needcompany and Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Illustrated by a wealth of practical examples, and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby providing useful theoretical and artistic contexts for the book, Postdramatic Theatre is an historical survey expertly combined with a unique theoretical approach which guides the reader through this new theatre landscape.... 2:343) This conceptual movement was clearly reflected in his perception of the unverisimilar conventionality, and the realism, of traditional Chinese theatre and in his position against labelling the Chinese theatre as formalistic, ...
Author: Min Tian
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9781000737837
Category: Performing Arts
Page: 282
View: 135
This book interrogates anew the phenomenon of tradition in a dialogical debate with a host of Western thinkers and critical minds. In contrast to the predominantly Western approaches, which look at traditions (Western and non-Western) from a predominantly (Western) modernist perspective, this book interrogates, from an intercultural perspective, the transnational and transcultural consecration, translation, (re)invention, and displacement of traditions (theatrical and cultural) in the aesthetic-political movement of twentieth-century theatre and performance, as exemplified in the case studies of this book. It looks at the question of traditions and modernities at the centre of this aesthetic-political space, as modernities interculturally evoke and are haunted by traditions, and as traditions are interculturally refracted, reconstituted, refunctioned, and reinvented. It also looks at the applicability of its intercultural perspective on tradition to the historical avant-garde in general, postmodern, postcolonial, and postdramatic theatre and performance and to the twentieth-century "classical" intercultural theatre and the twenty-first-century "new interculturalisms" in theatre and performance. To conclude, it looks at the future of tradition in the ecology of our globalized theatrum mundi and considers two important interrelated concepts, future tradition and intercultural tradition. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies.It is absurd , then , to put a formalist label on experiments with forms of theatre that ... new perspective on things , just as it is absurd to believe that content has remained invariable throughout literary history ( formalism * ) .
Author: Patrice Pavis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802081630
Category: Performing Arts
Page: 492
View: 300
An encyclopedic dictionary of technical and theoretical terms, the book covers all aspects of a semiotic approach to the theatre, with cross-referenced alphabetical entries ranging from absurd to word scenery.British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and producer Cameron Mackintosh seemed to understand the theatrical appeal of ... The New Formalism A formalist theatre privileges the external form or structure of a piece over specific content .
Author: Don B. Wilmeth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521669596
Category: Drama
Page: 608
View: 811
This is an authoritative and wide-ranging history of American theatre in all its dimensions, from theatre building to playwriting, directors, performers, and designers. Engaging the theatre as a performance art, a cultural institution, and a fact of American social and political life, the history addresses the economic context that conditioned the drama presented. The history approaches its subject with a full awareness of relevant developments in literary criticism, cultural analysis, and performance theory. At the same time, it is designed to be an accessible, challenging narrative. All volumes include an extensive overview and timeline, followed by chapters on specific aspects of theatre. Volume Three examines the development of the theatre after World War II, through the productions of Broadway and beyond and into regional theatre across the country. Contributors also analyze new directions in theatre design, directing, and acting, as well as key plays and playwrights through the 1990s.According to Gerould, the Formalists did not study drama “as a purely literary form, but as a mixed theatrical mode” (ibid., 152)—which is appealing to our investigation into adoptions of dramatic elements in media art.
Author: Claudia Benthien
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781351608701
Category: Social Science
Page: 322
View: 969
The beginning of the 20th century saw literary scholars from Russia positing a new definition for the nature of literature. Within the framework of Russian Formalism, the term ‘literariness’ was coined. The driving force behind this theoretical inquiry was the desire to identify literature—and art in general—as a way of revitalizing human perception, which had been numbed by the automatization of everyday life. The transformative power of ‘literariness’ is made manifest in many media artworks by renowned artists such as Chantal Akerman, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, William Kentridge, Nalini Malani, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, and Lawrence Weiner. The authors use literariness as a tool to analyze the aesthetics of spoken or written language within experimental film, video performance, moving image installations, and other media-based art forms. This volume uses as its foundation the Russian Formalist school of literary theory, with the goal of extending these theories to include contemporary concepts in film and media studies, such as Neoformalism, intermediality, remediation, and postdrama.The Audience as Actor and Character: The Modern Theatre of Beckett, Brecht, Genet, Ionesco, Pinter, Stoppard, and Williams. ... Twentieth-Century Italian Drama: The First Fifty Years; An Anthology. ... A Formalist Theatre.
Author: Bert Cardullo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780810887046
Category: Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
Page: 285
View: 538
In this collection of essays by avant-garde theatre's most creative practitioners--directors, playwrights, performers, and designers--these writings provide direct access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting and performance of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Kirby, M., 1978, A Formalist Theatre, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Klarer, M., 2001, Ekphrasis: Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare, Niemeyer, Tübingen.
Author: Patrice Pavis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317521143
Category: Performing Arts
Page: 313
View: 838
The Routledge Dictionary of Contemporary Theatre and Performance provides the first authoritative alphabetical guide to the theatre and performance of the last 30 years. Conceived and written by one of the foremost scholars and critics of theatre in the world, it literally takes us from Activism to Zapping, analysing everything along the way from Body Art and the Flashmob to Multimedia and the Postdramatic. What we think of as 'performance' and 'drama' has undergone a transformation in recent decades. Similarly how these terms are defined, used and critiqued has also changed, thanks to interventions from a panoply of theorists from Derrida to Ranciere. Patrice Pavis's Dictionary provides an indispensible roadmap for this complex and fascinating terrain; a volume no theatre bookshelf can afford to be without.