Lecture Conventions PDF

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Summary of lecture. Professor Valle...

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Theatrical Conventions Lecture Opening Clip: Spring Awakening by Deaf Theatre West  Take popular contemporary plays and refocuses them and include actors who sign and sing  Interweave spoken word and the signed word  Conventionally deaf actors/disabled performers are separated from abled performers o Rather pretending to be disable  people who are actually disabled are preforming  Ex. Ali Stocker  in a wheelchair and preformed on Broadway Audience conventions changed  Article NY Times o “Conventions Change”: this woman was sitting with her bf on her phone completely disinterested and showed her bf her phone. The actor talked about it at the intermission and took her phone and gave it to the stage manager. Everybody freaked out.  Debate on what to do with people with phones View Clip of Tony Kushner (Who is He?)  Playwright for “Angels in America”  Pulitzer prize winning  Difference between watching a live actor and watching an actor on a film  Don’t know what’s going to happen in theatre  creates discomfort  Power in theatre om creating an illusion  clever tricks to try to make people believe what is happening o Compelling audience experience o Illusion is always only partially successful o Creates critical consciousness What is the Great Power of Theatre's "inability" to create illusion?  “There is a great power in there’s inability to create illusion” – Tony Kushner o Not be disturbed  be completely in the world o There is always a distance between us and the pretend world  cooling distance  This helps us be critical Marketing—what is the objective?  First experience of the work  marketing (graphically)  Posters “sell” the story o Ex. Big Love  One poster shows a image of a woman in a wedding dress with red splatters  Another poster shows many brides (no red splatters) o The posters attract different audiences o Play is about 50 brides who are betrothed to marry their cousins  Father pledges they will get married  Sisters leave and sail away and land on an island and hide until the grooms find them  they plead for their lives  make a plot to kill the grooms  kill grooms on wedding night by stabbing o Greek play  Have to be conscious of demographics Define Theatrical Conventions:  A system of techniques whose meaning is agreed upon by audience and artist alike  technical definition

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History of conventions o Western theatre conventions  Women did not appear on the English stage until 1660

Types of Conventions:  Language o Traditionally it is talked about spoken word o Breaking convention: deaf west  Characters – types o Seen type of characters in many plays o Antagonist/protagonist  How do we know them?  How what they want creates a CONFLICT o Stock character  Station in life (age, gender, occupation)  Ex. The tile guy, the painter  Movement o Styles of movement o Accept the way people move conventionally  Ex. Professor doesn’t do weird dances o Ushered into another world where people are moving in new and unique ways Realism versus Abstract  Realism vs surreal  The more abstract the more difficult to understand (can be more compelling  challenged rather than understanding it quickly) Conventional versus Unconventional  Blend of contemporary modern dance, poetry and theatre  There are conventions of staging, design and costumes o Ex. Romeo Castellucci  Don’t want audience to identify costumes, design or props  Attempting to be different  Conventions regarding the relationship of the audience to the stage  Unconventional: problems arise when audiences are asked to agree to or play by new rules they haven’t learned yet Sleep No More - Unconventional Models  Indoor promenade performance lasting up to 3 hrs.  Get ticket  on your own wearing a mask  can stay for whole performance or not  explore rooms  Re imagines “audience” o In charge of own adventure and journey o Break the conventions of the relationship between the audience and stage  Trailer designed to not be understood Willing suspension of disbelief

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We willingly pretend that everything is real Helps us to pretend  suspend our disbelief Willingness to ignore limitations of medium

Why do Humans Pretend?  Why do humans spend so much energy (and $) in pretending? The Fourth Wall - What is it?  When we watch a traditional play  there is an imaginary wall (peeping toms  looking through the fourth wall)  The impression that the audience is looking through the wall int the world  The proscenium is often framed to accentuate the impression of looking into  looks like a frame of a painting  moving painting o The more it looks like a painting: the more our senses are heightened o Many details to make it seem like a painting Breaking the Fourth Wall—examples o Ex. Wolf of Wall Street: talking to the camera or audience  Direct address: the actor directly addresses the audience  The Aside: (frequently in comedy) different people in a scene are talking and one of them addresses the audience  become the ally of the actor  Soliloquy Soliloquy--Is this breaking the fourth Wall?  Sometimes it breaks the fourth wall, sometimes it doesn’t  The character says what they are thinking to no intended audience o Ex. “To be or not to be”  When the actor starts talking to the audience  the audience is implicated in the action more Examples of conventions  Use of narrator  Individual actors play several roles  Actors changing costumes onstage o See actors change  change character (willingly believe that they are now a new character)  Locations o Where are we going? And how are we going? To break the convention of theatre  Place a performance somewhere else (not a theatre)  Anywhere where someone is preforming, and someone is watching Theatre of One – Breaking the convention of Space  Portable preforming space for 1 actor and 1 audience member  Opened on Broadway (street) in 2010 Presentational Versus Representational – Define  Presentational o No 4th wall o Playing to the audience

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Representational o There is a 4th wall o Playing for the audience o Most theatre in the USA is representational o In traditional sense soliloquys are representational

Greek Chorus  Functions: o To establish time/place o Offer backstory o Share the central argument Musical Theatre  The musical moment o The moment in which someone is called to song o Weirdest moment in theatre  no specific reason why  the text has to support the reason

Advantages of Breaking Conventions  Helps engage a passive audience  Change the structure or style of the usual Conventions in Theatre  Unlike film, audiences in theater choose their own focus of attention o They choose what to look at Conventions vary from Country to Country  Conventions vary from geographic region to region  Ex. In Israel going to the movies, some people read during the movie (subtitles) and socialize And Historically  Theatrical conventions are manipulated Séance  In a shipping container  given headset  lights go out (completely dark)  though headset there is voice that tells you what to do  No actors  it is completely done by engineering  Play with conventions of seeing something but all in your head  do we need to see something to be enthralled by it The Flick – Scenes  Blind casting: casting regardless of anything (age, race, etc)  Act 1 – Scene 8  Act 2 – Scene 2 6 degrees of separation Climax: depending on character Sams climax: scene 2...