"A performs B for C"

-someone performs something for someone

-what is performed

-the performance

-the audience

*all theatre is performance, but not all performance is theatre

*live

-power of spectator to influence performers and direct their attention (audience can look wherever they want during the play)

*ephemeral-gone and can't get it back

*typically involves storytelling

*conventional-has rules that it follows and ways it works

*communal-brings people together

*colllaborative and complex-literature, dance, art, brings them all together requiring alot of skill

Who: Collaborators

-playwrights write scripts

-directors: translate scripts into production

-dramaturgs: another set of eyes for best translation

-performers/actors

-desginers: lighting, set, costume, sound

-choreographers

-stage managers

-technicians: make walls, set

-critics and scholars

-fight directors: choreographers of violence

-producers: responsible for money

-audiences

-build community (for actors or audience)

-encouraging empathy (care about characters)

-work for political/social change

-developing imagination

-teach

-entertain

How: Reading vs. Watching a Play

-a playscript is NOT a performance

-a script is to a performance as a recipe is to a meal

-type of space, production team

-audience

-proscenium theatre

-thrust

-arena

-flexible

-arch (picture frame stage)

*audience on one side

-formal

-3/4 stage

-can see reaction of others

-more interaction with actors

-Kleberg style

-theatre in the round

-audience on all sides

-Zachary Scott theatre center's arena stage

-anything goes

-Black Box spaces, can refigure space

-allow for experimentation

-money

-social: who you know

-cultural: what you know

Pierre Bourdieu

-habitus: sense of how to deal with situations based on experience

-taste: not individualistic, could be changed on how you were raised

-culture legitimizes social hierarchy

-High Art (PBS, HBO)

-elitist culture, "highbrow"

-"production for producers"

-requires expertise, knowledge

-minimal investment in commercial success, suspiciousof commercial success

-conducive to experimentation

-popular culture

-easy to engage with, conventional, don't need to know anything special

-dependent on commercial success, resistant to new forms

in-between

-external

-internal

-accessibility

-conventions

External

-more of a high art because of numbers, seeing shows in live theater compared to movie theaters

-"handcrafted vs. mass production"

-some performances are valued more than others

-canon: highly valued, great works

-changes over time

Case Study: Shapkespear and Elizabethan Stage

-high or low art?

Elizabethan Era

-Renaissance in England

-increased interest in ancient Greece and
Rome

-scholarship, increased interest in learning

-focus on secular life

-succession of Henry VIII

-Elizabeth bans religious and political plays

-Medieval theatre were all religious in nature

-needed new topics

-theatre becomes professionalized and commercial

-legal status of theatre: dubious at best, actors were vagrants, licensing required

-so they couldn't get in trouble

-made to make money, so audience is needed

-new shows in high demand, competitive

-craft not art, "sides"

-didn't want published edition of plays so it couldn't be stolen

-music important

-Shakespeare, Marlowe (tragedies),

-Ben Johnson (comedies, 1st to publish plays)

-all male, shareholders, hired men, apprentices

-multiple roles

-public theaters: large and partially covered, closer to a thrust stage

-design elements: natural light, "spoken decor", contemporary clothing

-private theaters: noble audiences, in doors

-public theaters: tiered admission, concessions sold, rowdy!

Performance

-adaptions for stage and screen

-widely varied

Canon

-greatest playwright in English language

-NEA's Shakespeare in American communities project

-what do we expect at the theater?

-onstage and offstage audience?

-comes from 19th century

-photography becomes popular

-challenge Biblical history and literal interpretation

-look at other things for answers

-Darwin: origin of the species, 1859, can't separate humans and animals and how humans fit in the world, heredity and environment shape species

-Freud: unconscious mind (ID vs. Superego), self preservation and sex are basic drives, superego helps us behave

-socialization: you have to bet taught things, moral values and way to live in community in order to develop superego

Relativism

-truth isn't universal

-moral values aren't absolute

-social responsiblity: everything is not responsibility of the individual based on socialization

*truth can be observed through 5 senses

-1850s

-Avant Garde

-Goal: theatre as a tool for social progress, trying to inspire social change through theatre

-Premise: art that shows life how it is, not as it should be

-different from Melodrama (hero and villian, good and bad, good always wins, no moral ambiguity)

-realistic speech, no verse

-contemporary stories

-social issues and problems arise from class, poverty, gender roles, STD's

-wanted to show detailed world bc of environment is essential to plot and character

-specific, detailed pieces instaed of generic furniture (right books in bookshelf)
*Box set: 4th wall, works on a Proscenium stage

-lighting: intro of gas light, more controllable

-Henrik Ibsen: tragic, A Doll's House, Hedda Galder, Ghosts

-George Bernard Shaw: pokes fun, Arms and the Man, Pygmalion (my fair lady), Major Barbara, Mrs. Warren's Profession

-Anton Chekov: comedy and drama, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters

-performing the unconscious mind

-subtext: don't always say what they mean, implications

-Stanlislavski: systematic way of acting

-directing Chekov: flopped bc too much subtext

-created the "system"

-"magic if" putting yourself in character's shoes

-interactin with space/environment

-changes in directing

-role of director: need someone to unify production

-realistic movement