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Trouble with Titles and Directors: Benjamin Britten and William Plomer’s Curlew River and Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls/Pas

Carrie J. Preston

in Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching

Britten and Plomer put the noh play Sumidagawa through multiple stages of adaptation and revision over a period of years to create their queer drag “parable for church performance,” Curlew River. The ... More

Britten and Plomer put the noh play Sumidagawa through multiple stages of adaptation and revision over a period of years to create their queer drag “parable for church performance,” Curlew River. The conventional Christian renunciation in Curlew River has been unpalatable to some queer theorists just as feminists have critiqued Beckett’s authoritative directing practice and painful dramaturgy in late plays like Footfalls/Pas; Preston reads both as noh-influenced late-modernist dramas exploring submissive forms of being.Less

From the Score to the Stage

in Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera

This chapter discusses certain aspects of stage direction and set design. An important part of the audience for Italian opera in the United States and Italy tends to be exceptionally conservative ... More

This chapter discusses certain aspects of stage direction and set design. An important part of the audience for Italian opera in the United States and Italy tends to be exceptionally conservative when it comes to the staging of works they know and love. Neither Verdi nor any other nineteenth-century Italian composer could have imagined the emergence during the twentieth century of interventionist stage directors and so-called radical stagings. Resistance to this approach has been fierce, particularly in the United States and Italy. By the 1820s, opera librettos tended to incorporate a larger number of elaborate stage directions, indicating the increased importance of dramatic action throughout each work. The construction of these librettos was dependent upon ever more complex arrangements of the painted backdrops used for the settings and solid pieces of scenery, some purely decorative and some accommodating actors.Less

Musical Analysis as Stage Direction

David Lewin

in Studies in Music with Text

This chapter proposes two linked ideas about classical music theater. First, it suggests that each analytical observation about the music-cum-text intends (inter alia) a point of dramatic direction. ... More

This chapter proposes two linked ideas about classical music theater. First, it suggests that each analytical observation about the music-cum-text intends (inter alia) a point of dramatic direction. Second, and conversely, it argues that each intuition we have about the behavior of characters on stage naturally seeks its validation (inter alia) through musical-textual analysis. To oversimplify the matter in a brief maxim: no analysis without direction; no directing without analysis. To demonstrate the relation between musical analysis and stage direction, the chapter examines a short passage from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. The passage, comprising a solo by Count Almaviva, and a subsequent solo by Basilio, opens the first act trio “Cosa sento!” Most people will observe that the Count has trouble making a firm cadence on the tonic, that the cadence on “sento” is somehow unconvincing, and that the Count must work hard—too hard—to achieve the eventual cadence at the end of his solo.Less

Widowers’ Houses: “Life Here Is a Perfect Idyll”

Tony Jason Stafford and R. F. Dietrich

in Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries

By examining Shaw’s use of the garden and the library in Widowers’ Houses in meticulous detail, one gains an appreciation of the complexity, subtlety, and mastery which Shaw therein reveals, as well ... More

By examining Shaw’s use of the garden and the library in Widowers’ Houses in meticulous detail, one gains an appreciation of the complexity, subtlety, and mastery which Shaw therein reveals, as well as an insight into the play’s deeper textual implications. Satorius, whose mother was a poor washerwoman, has pulled himself up from extreme poverty by making a fortune in slum dwellings and presently craves nothing more in the world than for him and his daughter to be accepted by upper class society, a desire which is dramatized by means of the garden and library. Widowers’ Houses also exposes the heartlessness and injustices of British society. It is a remarkable example of Shaw’s dramatic practice of integrating gardens and libraries into the revelation of characters (as well as the implications of their names), the delineation of conflict, the symbolic value of the settings, the establishment of atmosphere, and the development of the theme of pretense and hypocrisy.Less

On the Operatic Stage

Donald George and Lucy Mauro

in Master Singers: Advice from the Stage

In this chapter, the artists answer questions pertaining to performance on the operatic stage. Such topics as learning a new role, warming up before a performance, managing modern stage direction, ... More

In this chapter, the artists answer questions pertaining to performance on the operatic stage. Such topics as learning a new role, warming up before a performance, managing modern stage direction, pacing, integrating singing and acting, working with conductors, and projecting are included.Less

The Asterisk; or, the Gnomic Page

Laurie Maguire

in The Rhetoric of the Page

Like the blank and the etcetera, the asterisk is a typographical sign that draws attention to what it professes to conceal. But although the asterisk represents absence it also does the opposite: it ... More

Like the blank and the etcetera, the asterisk is a typographical sign that draws attention to what it professes to conceal. But although the asterisk represents absence it also does the opposite: it is the thing it represents—a star. Part I of this chapter looks at this paradox in representation. It shows the asterisk as a stand-in for consciousness, for sexual terms, for strong emotion and for swearing, as well as for its look-alikes: stars and flowers. However, where early modern readers most often encountered the asterisk was in the margin and so Part II looks at early modern systems of navigating books, the material around the text (notes and indexes and stage directions), in all of which the asterisk has a role to play.Less

Samuel Beckett

Anthony Paraskeva

in The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema

This chapter looks at Beckett’s Nacht und Träume, revealing a complex referential structure by demonstrating how each minute gesture, taking its meaning by association with other hand gestures in ... More

This chapter looks at Beckett’s Nacht und Träume, revealing a complex referential structure by demonstrating how each minute gesture, taking its meaning by association with other hand gestures in Beckett, strives to achieve the symbolic properties of a micro-language. The chapter then reads the aesthetics and politics of Catastrophe as a critique of the modernist tendency to impose legibility on the body, and of naturalism’s mimesis of text and performance, its desire to induce identification in the mind of an audience. The chapter also reads the play as a self-critique of Beckett’s own tendency as a writer-director to formalise gestures within a self-enclosed and immanent structure. By foregrounding the partial opacity and double aspect of the stage directions, their sketch of gestures invisible to the eye, Beckett imputes an openness and indeterminacy to the text, leaving the central figure with choices to make, allowing him to be the author of himself in the play’s climactic moment.Less

Introduction: The Arts of Ostentation

Laurie Maguire

in The Rhetoric of the Page

The Introduction looks at blank space in an era in which the blank did not yet prompt readerly unease, suspicion of error, or the need for reassurance (as in Google books: ‘this page intentionally ... More

The Introduction looks at blank space in an era in which the blank did not yet prompt readerly unease, suspicion of error, or the need for reassurance (as in Google books: ‘this page intentionally left blank’). It discusses the development of negative vocabulary for blanks, at cognitive research on how the brain responds to what is not there, at reading as an act of completion, and at typographical ways of representing stage business. It engages with the work of recent book historians on experimentation in early modern printed books. It reviews critical work on the architecture of the page and the page as a visual unit. It explores a number of early modern literary works that are thematically dependent on gaps of various kinds from things that are unsaid or glossed over to those that call attention to what cannot be articulated.Less

Court theater

Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler

in A History of Russian Literature

This chapter focuses on the creation of court theater under the reign of Tsar Aleksei. It looks at the forms of dramatic entertainment and considers some of the better-known repertory pieces. The ... More

This chapter focuses on the creation of court theater under the reign of Tsar Aleksei. It looks at the forms of dramatic entertainment and considers some of the better-known repertory pieces. The creation of a theatrical vocabulary and stagecraft was a challenge that the Muscovite court met through the participation of a small and influential group of well-educated churchmen, including Polotsky, Rogovsky, and Prokopovich. Jesuit school theater, allegorical plots, and Biblical speeches were different ways of conveying messages sanctioned by the church and the tsar about moral behavior, conduct codes that prose tales more usually subverted. These modest steps toward creating a court theater fitted well into the assimilation of baroque techniques that featured stunning effect in poetry.Less