Composing Drama

 

Un artículo de semiótica teatral. En el que se me cita de pasada.

Jahn, Manfred. "Composing Drama." 2021. Academia.*

         https://www.academia.edu/46997795/

         2026

Drama-tically

 

La acción característica según Stendhal

 

La teoría de la acción característica en el drama la expondría con mucho acierto A. C. Bradley con respecto a las tragedias de Shakespeare. Pero como estos grandes aciertos preexisten a su formulación más redonda o característica, otros observadores del drama antes de Bradley hicieron observaciones al respecto. Así Stendhal en su diario (28 de noviembre de 1804):

Las acciones que realiza el protagonista de una comedia no pueden ser consideradas en sí mismas, sino por las relaciones que demuestran existir entre los principios constitutivos de la voluntad del personaje, lo que casi nos asegura que en tal circunstancia él procedería de tal manera, y que si ocupara un lugar importante en la sociedad, por ejemplo el de rey, se decidiría por las cosas más grandes, por la paz o por la guerra, por dictar tal o cual ley, a causa de las mismas pasiones que hacen que se decida a dar una comida, más bien guiado por el consejo de un criado que por el de su mujer.

Las acciones de un protagonista no pueden, pues, ser consideradas en sí mismas, sino porque muestran el cara´cter de éste. Por lo tanto, no hay que desdeñar ninguna, por pequeña que sea (siempre que no caiga en lo rastrero), siempre que pueda pintar, con ingenuidad y franqueza, el carácter.

 

Trolösa: Trasuntos tras los asuntos

 Trolösa: Trasuntos tras los asuntos https://www.academia.edu/73499254/

Introduction to Theatre and Drama Arts

Retropost, 2014:

Robert Bradley, "Introduction to Theatre and Drama Arts: Lecture 1 – Introduction." YouTube (Missouri State University) 8 Feb. 2013.
    http://youtu.be/_ELP95UxEmQ

Theatre 101 aims to answer several questions, the most important of which is, "what is the nature of the theatre experience?" Why do people do theatre? What do they hope to accomplish? What is the relationship between the performers and the audience? How has the relationship between theatre and society developed throughout history from the early theatres of democratic Athens to the contemporary mega-musical? The course looks at drama and theatre arts as art, literature, business, and entertainment, and it examines the creative processes of theatre -- writing, design, directing, and acting -- which move from idea to script to performance. Because theatre, by its very nature, is interactive and interdisciplinary, this course encourages students to develop their own imaginations and to be open-minded in their responses to the theatre experience. It encourages considered, critical evaluation of difficult or challenging material and asks students to develop their capacity for interpretation, evaluation, and cultural understanding.

LECTURE 2: INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL MAULDIN

History of Theatre 1: From Ritual to Theatre

—oOo—

Teatro: Otras áreas

 Teatro: Otras áreas https://bibliojagl.blogspot.com/2023/10/teatro-otras-areas.html

Personajes dramáticos ( A Bibliography)

 Personajes dramáticos (A Bibliography) https://bibliojagl.blogspot.com/2023/09/personajes-dramaticos.html

Estética dramática (A Bibliography)

 Estética del drama (A Bibliography) https://bibliojagl.blogspot.com/2023/09/estetica-del-drama.html

Drama and Theatre

Drama and Theatre (A Bibliography): https://literarytheory.hcommons.org/2023/09/07/drama-and-theatre-2/

A Narratology of Drama

 A Narratology of Drama: https://ebin.pub/a-narratology-of-drama-dramatic-storytelling-in-theory-history-and-culture-from-the-renaissance-to-the-twenty-first-century-9783110724110-9783110721379.html

El drama: Forma y acción, no mensaje

 Retropost, 2013:

Un pasaje de J. L. Styan, The Elements of Drama, contra la idea de un teatro "de ideas" o "realista", y defendiendo el mostrar sobre el decir, y las convenciones, la estilización, la construcción de una forma dramática autosustentada:

By the laws of comic theatre and of any comic art, perhaps the more incisevely and vigorously the writer wishes to probe, the farther into a Ruritania must he transport the spectator first. 

So a first step towards judgment is not to ask how far it is like life, but why it is different from life. But in asking 'why?', we come close to looking for theat tiresome, misleading, ungainly phantom, the play's 'message'. The common assumption that the more the playwright teaches a tidy lesson, the more considerable it is, is a dangerous fallacy. Though we may consciously disavow it, it is an assumption we hold unwittingly. Drama does not tell what it has to say, but shows it. The good mother does not say to her child, 'Go away and play'; she says specifically, 'See if you can find the cotton-reel in my basket'. The playwright owes to his audience to find particular and concret action for the general and abstract idea, so that the playgoer can move across common ground with him. Because the stage expects concrete detail of behaviour for its living actors, no other literary form is more objective, less moralizing. (...)

Without losing one's sense of the complexity of the whole, the discssion must become one about the ordering and emphasis of the play and the relation of its parts, not immediately about its content or message. Injustice has been done to the work of Bernard Shaw, though he invited it himself, by a general refusal to give him credit as an artist before assessing hims as a thinker. This is somewhat true of Molière, is still largely true of Strindberg and Pirandello, for years was true of Shakespeare, and may yet blight the fortunes of M. Anouilh today. Shaw's own attitude to Ibsen, as seen in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, showed a similar error of judgment. Should the spectator become aware of the preacher in the playwright, aware that a view of life is being thrust upon him, the play will destroy itself. 

A poem can make a deep and broad meaning out of a tiny subject, and what is true of poetry is true of drama. The meaning that matters emerges from the way the subject is treated. the family of The Cherry Orchard makes a departure, the family of The Three Sisters does not, but there the seminal ideas end: the rest is growth and fruition. The satisfaction of drama arises from no logical consistency in the events, nor from their magnitude. The power of the play comes of its consistency within itself, and its content achieves magnitude by the quality of its exploration, its with of view and its sense of proportion.

In arriving at a judgment, the second step is therefore one inseparable from our decision about the quality of the texture and the offering of the impressions, together with decisions about the delicacy and precision by which the author and his agents originate and project them. (1960: 262-3)

Drama and Theatre

 

—oOo—

Theaternarratologie

 

Horstmann, Jan. Theaternarratologie. (Narratologia, 64). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2018.* (Scenery, semiotics of drama, performance, space, perspective; Roland Schimmelpfennig, Der Goldene Drache, 2009; Nicolas Stemann, Faust; Jette Steckel, Der Fremde; Bastian Kraft, Orlando).

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110597868/html

         2022

Drama and Theatre

 

2012 - Beginning my course on English drama....

Literature is by and large a discursive phenomenon, a collection of texts, a set of linguistic practices. Literary works are made of words. Now, if literature is defined by its medium, written or printed discourse, drama is multimedia. Of course there is also "oral literature" (—a contradiction?) which is linked to live performance, and may therefore have a theatrical quality. But a book, a written text, is a well-defined medium. Drama may be written or printed—and read, just like any other poem or novel. In that sense we may speak of drama as part of literature, as a literary genre. But drama is also composed to be staged, and there it is multimedia: the words of the literary text interact with the presence and body of the actors, with gestures, acting, with staging conventions. In that sense, drama is literary, but theatre is multimedia. This ambivalence will be found everywhere; we may stress the literary aspect of drama, or its theatrical potential; we may read a play, or we may watch a performance, and we shall be experiencing drama in different ways. Some theories of drama emphasize its literary side, others emphasize spectacle and performance. Some dramatists are more literary, some are more theatrical. And some dramatic companies, too, are more literary and attentive to the text, while others emphasize theatricality, spectacle and acting. So the issue of mediality has to be acknowledged every time we encounter drama and theatre.

Here we shall use both terms interchangeably in many contexts, but when we need to emphasize live performance we will speak of "theatre" and when we emphasize the linguistic or literary aspect we will speak of "drama".

The twentieth century saw a certain reaction against "wordy" theatre or literary drama—although it was an age of powerful and innovative literary drama. But many directors and actors (and dramatists themselves) emphasized acting, spectacle, visual symbolism, creative staging and nonverbal communication; other semiotic dimensions apart from language are discovered and emphasized: lights, gesture, music, objects, space…

In studying a play, therefore, we may focus on the text or on the text in a specific performance—or a kind of performance, for instance, on the typical performance in a given theatrical tradition. That is, we may focus on the drama as literature, or on the theatrical aspect of the play. From a semiotic viewpoint, we may also speak in this case of the theatrical text, only we use here text in an extended sense, meaning not words but other kinds of signs.

Some aspects of the written play point to the theatrical text: these are called the stage directions. They may be missing in some authors or traditions; sometimes they are supplied by editors, not by the playwright. In many modern dramatists, such as Valle Inclán, Beckett or Tennessee Williams, the stage directiosn may be quite elaborate, showing that the author wants to control not only the text, but also the way it is performed; not suprisingly, sometimes such modern dramatists direct their own plays, or express annoyance when a company keeps the text but disregards the stage directions—part of the theatrical text as the dramatist understands it.

The main text in drama consists in the direct presentation of characters' words (and their actions, in the case of theatre). The author is silent, present like an invisible God in the world, but letting his characters speak and act without his intervention. Of course there may be exceptions: in "epic" drama (epic in the sense of narrative) there may be a narrator, a kind of author-figure whose discourse mediates the world of the stage and the world of the audience.  Sometimes a non-dramatic work may be adapted to the stage (e.g. Don Quijote) and then many options are open: the character's words may be preserved, or expanded and supplied where they are missing; the narrator's discourse may be suppressed or kept usually in a more marginal position as an epic or voice-over narrator.

In narrative the narrator's voice acts as a mediator between the authorial creation and the characters' world. For instance, sometimes the narrator is a kind of author, reading the characters' minds, but still he is "in the middle" in the sense that he presents the world of the characters as fact and not fiction—Although there are many possibilities and variations. In drama, such mediating figures may appear, too, between the world of the interacting characters and the world of the audience. Sometimes a chorus or narrator will address the audience; Shakespeare uses this device in some of his plays.

It is only to be expected that the most "literary" dramas will be those which work best as literature. Theatrical spectacles which rely on acting, situation, gesture or music rather than drama will belong to the history of the stage, or to the history of music, but not to literary history. For instance, opera combines music, song, story, text and acting, but operatic librettos are rarely considered significant works of literary art. The same goes for pantomimes or music-hall spectacles. The works which we study in this course are important literary texts which were also theatrically successful., for the most part (exceptions like Milton's Samson Agonistes).  Milton's text is an instance of closet drama, drama written to be read, not performed, although of course nothing prevents its being performed. Seneca's plays in the Roman period were influential instances of closet drama, much studied and imitated by the Elizabethan dramatists for their own theatrical plays.

A performance may complete or supplement the words of the dramatic text into significant action and gesture. Sometimes the acting and staging are so significant and prominent that they not only illustrate or "translate" the dramatic text—they may also interpret it, complete it or add to it, sometimes enter into a complex relationship with it, perhaps adding to the performance a number of meanings which are not to be found in the dramatic text as originally written by the author. A dramatic work may be written by one person, although sometimes we collaborate with others without even knowing it. But a theatrical performance is like a film, it is not the work of one person but of a whole team: author, adaptor, translator, director, manager, actors and the rest of the team behind the scenes—makeup, music, sound, light, stage hands, etc.

El mundo todo es máscaras

 

The Medium of Drama Is Not Words

Qué es una tragedia y cómo identificarla e interpretarla en el arte y la...

A Narratology of Drama

Schwanecke, Christine. (U of Graz). A Narratology of Drama: Dramatic Storytelling in Theory, History, and Culture from the Renaissance to the Twenty-First Century. (Narratologia, 80). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022. (I. Towards a Transgeneric and Contextual Theory of Narrative in Drama, Or, Reframing 'Drama' as a Narrative Genre; II. The History of Narrative and Narration in British Drama - The Cultural Dynamics and Performative Power of Dramatic Storytelling).

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "1. 'Enter Drama!' Putting the Genre (Back) Centre Stage in the Study of Literature and Culture." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022. 1-34.*

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "2. Rising Action: Towards a Narratology of Drama." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022.      35-56.*

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "3. Suggestions for a Peripeteia in Drama and Narrative Theory: A Culturally Sensitive Narratology of Drama and Dramatic Narration." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022. 57-94.*

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "4. Stories in Conflict and Competition: Alternative Histories, Complementary Tales, and Lies in Early Modern Drama." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022.  97-147. (Henry IV, Webster's The White Devil, Pericles; dissimulation) 

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "5. The Containment of Different Narratives and of Narratives of Difference in Drama: The Renewal and Self-Definition of a 'Sleeping' Genre as well as Theatrical Configurations of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century (Drama) Cultures." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022. 148-98.* (Dryden's Marriage à la Mode, Behn's The Rover, Gay's The Beggar's Opera; politics and drama).

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "6. From Stage to Page, from the Publicly Politic to the Metaphysically Private: Late Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Drama as a Genre in Transformation, Dramatising Diegetic Storytelling and Narrativising (Revolutionary) Change in Society and Conflict in Selves." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022. 199-253.* (Richard Cumberland, The West Indian; Joanna Baillie, Orra; Byron, Manfred; Revolt).  

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "7. Expanding the Allowances of Drama by Generic Encounters with Narrative in Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century Plays: Intersecting Drama and Narrative as Means to Fight against Hypocritical Hegemonies as well as to Perform and Forestall Political Change." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022.      254-303.* (Shaw, Mrs Warren's Profession, Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John, How the Vote Was Won, J. M. Barrie, Mary Rose, politics of drama).

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "8. From Stories in Drama to the Drmaa of (Performed) Stories: Late-Twentieth and Early-Twentieth-First-Century Dissolutions of Established Generic Traditions." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022. 304-57.* (Peter Shaffer, Amadeus; debbie tucker green, stoning mary; Lucy Prebble, Enron; Intermediality).

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Schwanecke, Christine. "9. Conclusion: 'The Contextual Dynamics of Dramatic Storytelling' and the 'Performative Power of Narrative in British Plays'." A Narratology of Drama. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2022. 358- 78.* (Function of drama, British drama).

         https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110724110

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110724110/html

         2022

Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama

Mi bibliografía sobre teatro (general)

The Play

Bibliografía sobre drama y teatro