Drama Theater an introduction to its social impact

Drama & Theater an introduction to its social impact Dr. Tonya Howe Marymount University March 2012

Drama & Theater What makes theater different from other forms of art, like novels, poems, movies, or paintings? Theater puts the world into motion—it is the imitation of action (Aristotle) It takes experience and transforms it through performance, making it more powerful than everyday life. Theater enacts what is hidden, dreamt of, even what is forbidden.

Drama & Theater unfolds in real time—we watch its action unfold before us. . . Which means, it is an art of the moment, ephemeral. Once finished, it is lost to time, and its unrepeatability is part of its power. Why is theater unrepeatable?

Drama & Theater Film fixes action into a repeatable text, but theater happens live. Theater is alive—its illusion is always precarious. Theater is an imitation of an action on stage, but it also involves a spectator who participates in that action. An evening's performance is never exactly the same, even if it's performed by the same actors in the same theater with the same set.

Drama & Theater There is no omniscient narrator, no guiding authorial consciousness. Instead, there are competing voices—different actors who represent different psyches, worldviews, experiences, motives, goals. Novels and poems are guided primarily by the words on the page only; film, the images on the screen; theater, by performance, and by experience of the performance.

Drama & Theater Though theater often depends on a play text that we can read, we cannot separate the text from performance. The text is always shadowed by performance and the possibilities of it. A play text is more like a musical score--it only becomes music by being played.

Drama & Theater

Drama & Theater As we read a play, we have to keep in mind its conditions of performance—whether actual or potential. It uses a material objects and lighting to set the stage. It depends on verbal dialogue and gestural, embodied dialogue that point off-stage—to the external world, but also to the interior world (esp. impt for Miller). We have to imagine the play in performance, with actors, in a theater, observed by a live audience.

Drama & Theater is organized social performance. . . . and it is one of our oldest and most enduring forms of expression. It is deeply embedded in its historical, social, cultural, and experiential contexts. It is about make-believe, as much as it is about making the world different. Where did theater come from?

Where does theater come from? We have always told ourselves stories, acted out stories for each other. We are performers by nature. Theater originated in ritual. Do you have any rituals? Daily rituals? Rituals on special occasions? Rituals that makes something special? Morning routines? Giving thanks for food? Praying in specialized, performative ways? Induction into a club or a social group? Voting? Public protest?

Ritual and Community A ritual is something special, or something done in a different way or with a sense of purpose--even if you do it every day. What makes some of your rituals special, versus something ordinary? In the past, ritual was closely connected to hunting, fertility, worship, and other important activities in early communities. It involved the enactment of religious or mythic stories for purposes of commemoration or to effect change in the natural or the spiritual world. Methexis vs. mimesis

Ritual, Performance, Community Scholars believe that theatrical performance is an extension of ritual symbolics into non-ritual contexts. Where theater evolved from ritual, symbolic performance became interesting in its own right. . . and theater emerged as a communal and artistic activity, more of this world than sacred (Greece, 500 BCE, India 140 BCE). Thus closely associated with community—at its best, it can help shape (even reshape) our sense of ourselves, our group identity.

Ritual, Performance, Community

Ritual, Performance, Community Middle English pageant wagon. Scene of Christ before Pilate. From Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants. . . (1825)

Ritual, Performance, Community Early 18 th century British engraving, The Laughing Audience, by William Hogarth

Ritual, Performance, Community Japanese Noh performance, 1948. Note the different seating areas.

Ritual, Performance, Community In a kutiyattam performance (India), the bloody demoness enters through the audience, some members of which bear lit torches.

Ritual, Performance, Community Sheffield Crucible stage, 1971

Ritual, Performance, Community An underground avant-garde performance of Paradise Now, by the Living Theatre (1960 s-1970 s, US). This kind of drama sought to “revolutionize society through the psychological liberation of the public” by establishing intense connections between audience and performer.

How are these Tunisians performing? What are they performing?

How is performance working here?

Ritual, Performance, Community Of all the arts, “drama is perhaps the most immediately involved in the life of its community” (Worthen 1). Performance is closely related—even identical to— doing, acting, asserting the power to do, to act. Therefore, it can be dangerous. Throughout history, theater has often been repressed, especially in totalitarian regimes or during times of political turmoil. It has also been used to shore up those in power— colonial theater, Nazi theater. Politics is very theatrical.

Performance & Communal Identity Good theater, however, often finds ways to speak truth to power and to assert an alternative politics. Many scholars see all performance, whether conscious or unconscious, as part of how we know ourselves and represent ourselves to the world.

Performance & Communal Identity “The fact is that acting is inevitable as soon as we walk out our front doors into society; I am acting now; certainly I am not speaking in the same tone as I would in my living room. … Aristotle thought man was by nature a social animal, and in fact we are ruled more by the arts of performance, by acting in other words, than anybody wants to think about for very long. ” --Arthur Miller, Humanities interview (2001)