Christopher B. Balme
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184447
- eISBN:
- 9780191674266
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184447.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
This chapter focuses on theatrical and dramatical space and concludes the survey of strategies of syncretism in post-colonial theatre and drama. It analyses two different strategies for creating new ...
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This chapter focuses on theatrical and dramatical space and concludes the survey of strategies of syncretism in post-colonial theatre and drama. It analyses two different strategies for creating new spatial forms. The one strategy attempts to create different physical performance conditions in keeping with indigenous spatial concepts. The other is a dramaturgical strategy which can be realized on a Western proscenium stage. The strategies cover experiments in new forms of theatre architecture and staging as well as reassessments of dramaturgical approaches to space. This chapter also emphasizes space and place as the core experience determining all other theatrical elements such as direction, dramaturgy, scenography, and audience response. It analyses the relationship between performance space and audience reception and demonstrates to what extent the place of performance can affect the cultural and aesthetic perceptions of spectators.Less
This chapter focuses on theatrical and dramatical space and concludes the survey of strategies of syncretism in post-colonial theatre and drama. It analyses two different strategies for creating new spatial forms. The one strategy attempts to create different physical performance conditions in keeping with indigenous spatial concepts. The other is a dramaturgical strategy which can be realized on a Western proscenium stage. The strategies cover experiments in new forms of theatre architecture and staging as well as reassessments of dramaturgical approaches to space. This chapter also emphasizes space and place as the core experience determining all other theatrical elements such as direction, dramaturgy, scenography, and audience response. It analyses the relationship between performance space and audience reception and demonstrates to what extent the place of performance can affect the cultural and aesthetic perceptions of spectators.
Lauren R. Clay
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450389
- eISBN:
- 9780801468216
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450389.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter examines the role played by municipal governments in designing new civic playhouses in eighteenth-century France. It argues that municipal authorities were central participants in ...
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This chapter examines the role played by municipal governments in designing new civic playhouses in eighteenth-century France. It argues that municipal authorities were central participants in establishing new standards for the design, elegance, and utility of the French playhouse. The actions of municipal authorities supported an escalation in expectations in cities that influenced theater construction, both public and private. This is all the more significant because in the domain of theater architecture the royal government was not the primary trendsetter. This chapter analyzes the decisions of municipal governments to stake their city's reputation—and its funds—on public theaters within the context of the population growth and commercialism that marked eighteenth-century urban life. It also considers how the new generation of public playhouses came to function as multifaceted cultural, social, and even commercial centers, accommodating a wide variety of uses by the urban community. Finally, it discusses the controversy surrounding theater-building projects financed by municipal funds and land.Less
This chapter examines the role played by municipal governments in designing new civic playhouses in eighteenth-century France. It argues that municipal authorities were central participants in establishing new standards for the design, elegance, and utility of the French playhouse. The actions of municipal authorities supported an escalation in expectations in cities that influenced theater construction, both public and private. This is all the more significant because in the domain of theater architecture the royal government was not the primary trendsetter. This chapter analyzes the decisions of municipal governments to stake their city's reputation—and its funds—on public theaters within the context of the population growth and commercialism that marked eighteenth-century urban life. It also considers how the new generation of public playhouses came to function as multifaceted cultural, social, and even commercial centers, accommodating a wide variety of uses by the urban community. Finally, it discusses the controversy surrounding theater-building projects financed by municipal funds and land.
R. Darren Gobert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804786386
- eISBN:
- 9780804788267
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804786386.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This chapter concerns theater architecture after Descartes. In Cartesian theory, the physiology of perception (which Descartes calls “representation”) is connected with the physiology of emotion ...
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This chapter concerns theater architecture after Descartes. In Cartesian theory, the physiology of perception (which Descartes calls “representation”) is connected with the physiology of emotion (which represents feeling by means of animal spirits in the blood vessels). Jean Racine's Phèdre stages this tension between ocular and sanguinary representation, but the play's precise theatrical meanings are determined by the anatomies of the theaters in which it is enacted. As they developed more ocular shapes and corneal proscenium arches, these theaters collectively traced the development of Cartesian theater architecture. Three theater designs are anatomized: Paris's Hôtel de Bourgogne, the original Comédie-Française (designed by François d'Orbay), and London's Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket (designed by John Vanbrugh and home to Phèdre's English première in an adaptation by Edmund Smith).Less
This chapter concerns theater architecture after Descartes. In Cartesian theory, the physiology of perception (which Descartes calls “representation”) is connected with the physiology of emotion (which represents feeling by means of animal spirits in the blood vessels). Jean Racine's Phèdre stages this tension between ocular and sanguinary representation, but the play's precise theatrical meanings are determined by the anatomies of the theaters in which it is enacted. As they developed more ocular shapes and corneal proscenium arches, these theaters collectively traced the development of Cartesian theater architecture. Three theater designs are anatomized: Paris's Hôtel de Bourgogne, the original Comédie-Française (designed by François d'Orbay), and London's Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket (designed by John Vanbrugh and home to Phèdre's English première in an adaptation by Edmund Smith).
R. Darren Gobert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804786386
- eISBN:
- 9780804788267
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804786386.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This book explores theater history's unexamined importance to Cartesian philosophy alongside Descartes's unexamined impact on theatre history. Put another way, it provides a new reading of mind-body ...
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This book explores theater history's unexamined importance to Cartesian philosophy alongside Descartes's unexamined impact on theatre history. Put another way, it provides a new reading of mind-body union informed not only by Descartes's Passions of the Soul and his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia but also by stage theory and practice, while simultaneously itemizing the contributions of Cartesianism to this theory and practice. For example, Descartes's coordinate system reshaped theater architecture's use of space—as demonstrated by four iconic theaters in Paris and London, whose historical productions of Racine's Phèdre are analyzed. Descartes's theory of the passions revolutionized understandings of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectator in general and dramatic catharsis in particular—as demonstrated in Descartes-inflected plays and dramatic theory by Pierre Corneille and John Dryden. And Descartes's philosophy engendered new models of the actor's subjectivity and physiology—as we see not only in acting theory of the period but also in metatheatrical entertainments such as Molière's L'Impromptu de Versailles and the English rehearsal burlesques that it inspired, such as George Villiers's The Rehearsal. In addition to plays both canonical and obscure and the writings of Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia, the book's key texts include religious jeremiads, aesthetic treatises, letters, frontispieces, architectural plans, paintings, ballet libretti and all manner of theatrical ephemera found during research in England, France, and Sweden.Less
This book explores theater history's unexamined importance to Cartesian philosophy alongside Descartes's unexamined impact on theatre history. Put another way, it provides a new reading of mind-body union informed not only by Descartes's Passions of the Soul and his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia but also by stage theory and practice, while simultaneously itemizing the contributions of Cartesianism to this theory and practice. For example, Descartes's coordinate system reshaped theater architecture's use of space—as demonstrated by four iconic theaters in Paris and London, whose historical productions of Racine's Phèdre are analyzed. Descartes's theory of the passions revolutionized understandings of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectator in general and dramatic catharsis in particular—as demonstrated in Descartes-inflected plays and dramatic theory by Pierre Corneille and John Dryden. And Descartes's philosophy engendered new models of the actor's subjectivity and physiology—as we see not only in acting theory of the period but also in metatheatrical entertainments such as Molière's L'Impromptu de Versailles and the English rehearsal burlesques that it inspired, such as George Villiers's The Rehearsal. In addition to plays both canonical and obscure and the writings of Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia, the book's key texts include religious jeremiads, aesthetic treatises, letters, frontispieces, architectural plans, paintings, ballet libretti and all manner of theatrical ephemera found during research in England, France, and Sweden.
Claire M. L. Bourne
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198848790
- eISBN:
- 9780191883149
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198848790.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Chapter 3 shows how typography responded to the increasing formal complexity of vernacular plays. The central case study is the printer-publisher Richard Jones’s octavo of Tamburlaine the Great ...
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Chapter 3 shows how typography responded to the increasing formal complexity of vernacular plays. The central case study is the printer-publisher Richard Jones’s octavo of Tamburlaine the Great (1590). Jones used numbered scene headings to carve the plays into discrete units of action and tease out their episodic dramaturgy for readers. In particular, he removed divisions where characters are described as clearing the stage to “enter to the battle.” The absence of divisions at these moments in a playbook with an unusually full complement of divisions anticipated the treatment of numbered scene divisions in other plays that, like Tamburlaine, were styled as “histories.” The kinesis and noise of battle sequences invited the continuity of audience focus, not rupture. This typographic mediation of the iterative, “rotating door” strategy of staging battle scenes with limited resources exposes “the scene” as a shape-shifting entity of dramatic form.Less
Chapter 3 shows how typography responded to the increasing formal complexity of vernacular plays. The central case study is the printer-publisher Richard Jones’s octavo of Tamburlaine the Great (1590). Jones used numbered scene headings to carve the plays into discrete units of action and tease out their episodic dramaturgy for readers. In particular, he removed divisions where characters are described as clearing the stage to “enter to the battle.” The absence of divisions at these moments in a playbook with an unusually full complement of divisions anticipated the treatment of numbered scene divisions in other plays that, like Tamburlaine, were styled as “histories.” The kinesis and noise of battle sequences invited the continuity of audience focus, not rupture. This typographic mediation of the iterative, “rotating door” strategy of staging battle scenes with limited resources exposes “the scene” as a shape-shifting entity of dramatic form.
