Introduction to Theatre

INTRODUCING THEATRE, eighth edition, Joy H. Reilly & M. Scott Phillips

I think it will be good to finally ground my head in the conventional ways of thinking through theatre as an artform. This book is especially introductory, and therefore especially useful to my mind for systemic/organizational purposes!

"No other art form can so completely harness the power of the human mind, arouse such passion, or create such vivid living pictures."

Performances and Theatre especially do this - they create vivid, living pictures, fleeting in each moment. They are pictures nonetheless, images set to life. In this I might approach Ionesco, for it is the images which seem and are seen, the power in such images. Relate to your life of painting, to the act of figures together. A new relevance for painting from life is found for me, in this quote.

"The people who create the marvelous illusions to which Shakespeare refers to are the practitioners of the most collaborative art in the history of human endeavor."

Quite an expression and claim, but one that I nonetheless like. http://www.peelspawn.info/blog, http://www.peelspawn.info/collaboration

THE ILLUSION OF A VIRTUAL REALITY - not a virtual reality proper, rather, an illusion of such

"If we agree to make ourselves receptive to the artist's work, we will find that it does three things: it magnifies and intensifies sensation, while clarifying and then interpreting experience. The world of the artist is a heightened world, where feelings and sensations are magnifies far beyond what they are in ordinary life. Art clarifies because it allows us to focus on selected aspects of our experience in a detached manner. It is interpretive because, through the very act of selection and arrangement, the artist expresses a definite point of view.

Not only is art an act of self-expression, it is also communicative; it speaks both to the individual and to the community, either directly or indirectly. But in the indirect arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature the artists does not come into contact directly with those experiencing the work of art. The direct arts are the performing arts-music, dance, drama, and performance art- and the art work is the performance by the artist for an audience."

SEE Wagners "Total Work" the theory of ultimate art as a theatrical combination of all arts, The Mayan Dreamspell affirmation that "LIFE IS ART" - a future projection of how we can save this world

"The spectacle of life fascinates. Caught in the turmoil of affairs we do not see it clearly, for our eyes are ficed on other things, our business, our wealth, our occupations, our reputation. These tihngs give us a bias and a preoccupation which prevent our seeing the spectacle we make of ourselves. But in moments of leisure we flock to the theatre or read stories of love, passion, intrigue and adventure. These, and not our experience, tell us what life really is, for they reansform us from pariticpants in action to spectators of it.. We hav th happiness of deatchment.... We see life without living it.... Art, not business or work or morals or religion or science or philanthropy, reveals what life is and reveals it to be viewed in freedom." - Frederick J.E. Woodbridge, The Son of Appollo

"By its very nature, dance is more abstract, farther removed from our experience in real life than drama is. This essential difference between dance and drama lies in the manner of the performers and not in the nature of the thing performed."

I do not know that I can agree. While dancing is usually always located in "sanctioned" places and sites, designated for such activity, the metaphor of movement and its potential for translation is not abstract... but simply, metaphorical, I would say. Though conventional modes of theatre, presenting a situation of genre, people, families, DAILY LIFE, does seem to be more direct, these forms and conventions can be just as abstract as any dance occuring on the stage.

PERFORMANCE TIME

the time of a performance

the performance of a time

the performance of time

the timing in performance

these endless considerations

which make so much

from the Glass Menegerie

"There is the social background of the play (music).

The play is memory

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.

In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings"

more to come, as i digest it all