eBooks de Artes Escénicas, página 10 de 109

Sweet are the whispers of yon pine that makesLow music oer the spring, and, Goatherd, sweetThy piping; second thou to Pan alone.Is his the horned ram? then thine the goat.Is his the goat? to thee shall fall the kid;And toothsome is the flesh of unmilked kids.

A practical investigation into story-theatre and the art of telling stories through theatre, by the renowned director who founded Shared Experience Theatre Company.In Then What Happens?, Mike Alfreds makes the case for putting story and storytelling back at the heart of theatre. He explores the whole process of adapting for the stage, and investigates the particular techniques - many of them highly sophisticated - that actors require when performing story-theatre.The book includes over two hundred exercises, improvisations and workshops dealing with the practical aspects of story-theatre, such as building an ensemble, creating a physical vocabulary, and transforming written narrative into drama. It draws on examples ranging from traditional legends and folklore, through the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh, to contemporary fiction. Alfreds shows how each story demands its own particular set of dramatic choices, opening up endless possibilities for performance.Then What Happens? - like the authors tremendously successful first book, Different Every Night - will be invaluable to directors and actors, to dramatists working in the field of adaptation, to those devising and working from improvisation, and to any theatregoer who has been moved by the power of an unfolding story to ask: Then what happens?All theatre directors know that good narrative is the secret of good theatre, but few have as distinctive, rigorous and exceptional a method of exploring that secret as does Mike Alfreds. His system of working, and his thoughts on the making of theatre in our time, are as crucial and illuminating as those of Stanislavsky and Peter Brook have been to generations of theatre enthusiasts and practitioners. Michael Coveney

Theft is a book by Jack London, an American novelist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.Theft is a political piece set in Washington, DC. A Congressman, Howard Knox, is ready to reveal the corrupt practices of Anthony Starkweather, a wealthy industrialist. To complicate matters, Starkweathers daughter is helping Knox. The plays underlying anti-capitalist theme is also found in some of Londons other works. The plot revolves around recovering documents that support Knoxs revelations.

In "Theatrical and Circus Life: or, Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust Arena," John J. Jennings offers a comprehensive exploration of the unique worlds of theater and circus in the late 19th century. Through vivid anecdotes and meticulous observations, Jennings captures the exhilarating and oftentimes perilous experiences of performers, revealing the interplay between art and ambition within these vibrant venues. His literary style merges informative expose with an engaging narrative that taps into the drama and spectacle of life behind the curtain, making the work resonate with both scholarly audiences and general readers alike. John J. Jennings, a performer and journalist himself, was intimately aware of the complexities and vibrancies of stage life, which informed his vivid narratives. His firsthand experiences and connections within the theater and circus communities equip him with a distinct perspective, bridging the gap between representation and lived experience. Jennings passion for performance is evident as he meticulously sheds light on the often-hidden realities of artists striving for success. This book is a must-read for those intrigued by the performing arts, providing not only a historical lens into the lives of entertainers but also enduring insights into societal perceptions of performance. Jennings work invites us to reflect on the sacrifices and triumphs of those who enchant and entertain, making it an essential addition to any theater lovers library.

In "Theatrical and Circus Life or, Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust Arena," John J. Jennings deftly explores the intricate world of performance, weaving together personal anecdotes and detailed observations to unveil the hidden dynamics of theater and circus life in the late 19th century. This work elegantly combines an informal yet engaging narrative style with vivid descriptions, allowing readers to peer into a realm often shrouded in glamor and glamours darker undercurrents. Jennings navigates the complexities of the stage and sawdust arenas, providing a rich tapestry of stories that illuminate the tension between performance and authenticity. John J. Jennings, a seasoned performer and theatrical manager himself, draws from his extensive experiences within the dramatic arts to write this revealing narrative. His deep understanding of the struggles and triumphs of entertainers informs his insights, creating a relatable, insiders perspective that resonates with readers. Jennings unique vantage point grants him the authority to comment on the artistry and hardships that characterize show business, bolstered by the socio-cultural context of his time. This essential read is a must for those fascinated by the performing artsAibe it theater aficionados, circus enthusiasts, or scholars of cultural studies. JenningsAo compelling storytelling not only entertains but also enriches the readers understanding of the emotional and ethical complexities faced by those who inhabit these vibrant worlds. Dive into this immersive exploration and gain a profound appreciation for the craft and camaraderie that thrive beneath the spotlight.

She has, to my knowledge, an almost unblemished record in never having failed to spot a great new playPhilip Howard, from his ForewordJoyce McMillan has been writing about theatre in Scotland for more than three decades. As drama critic successively for The Guardian, Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman, she has reviewed thousands of plays. During that time she has borne witness to an extraordinary cultural and political renaissance in Scotland, reflected in the newfound confidence of its playwrights, in the vibrancy of its theatre culture and in its recent outburst of new theatre companies.Compiled by McMillan and the theatre director, Philip Howard, Theatre in Scotland is a panoramic history of modern Scottish theatre, reported from the frontline. It traces the remarkable journey of Scottish theatre towards its new self-confidence: the road to 1990, when Glasgow was European Capital of Culture; followed by the explosive expansion of the 1990s; culminating in the emergence of the National Theatre of Scotland and its drive to bring theatre culture right into the heart of the nation.Gathered here are the leading Scottish playwrights, from John Byrne to Liz Lochhead, from David Greig to David Harrower, as well as the full breadth of English playwrights, from Shakespeare to Pinter. There are reflections on the great Scottish plays, classic Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Men Should Weep and modern Black Watch, The James Plays. There are reports not only from the urban theatre centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow but from all over Scotland; and from the feast that is the Edinburgh Festival, to the nourishing A Play, A Pie and A Pint.A leading thinker and writer about Scotland, McMillan has an incomparable ability to detect the wider cultural resonances in Scottish theatre, and to reveal what it can tell us about Scotland as a whole. Her book serves as a portrait of a nation and a shared cultural life, where visions of what we have been, what we are, and what we might become are played out in sharp focus on its stages.When Scottish theatre works [its] magic over the coming years, I will be there, to try to catch the moment in print, and to tell it as it was. And believe me, on the good nights and the bad ones, the privilege will be mine: to be paid to go looking for joy, and occasionally to find it.Joyce McMillanJoyce has an unrivalled passion and hunger for theatre - to be surprised by it, challenged by it, moved by it. Her prose when describing something which has done just this is inspiring and affecting.Vicky Featherstone

Described by The Times as the national childrens dramatist, David Wood has been writing, adapting, directing and acting in plays for children for more than twenty-five years. His best known work, from his play The Gingerbread Man to his adaptations of Roald Dahls The BFG and The Witches have enjoyed national and international professional success and entered the repertory of amateur companies and school dramatic societies. Now David has written the definitive book on theatre for children. He analyses the skills involved in entertaining audiences of children everywhere and reveals his special techniques for catching and holding a childs attention. This practical, step-by-step comprehensive guide is essential reading for professionals and amateurs alike, and anyone wanting to be involved in theatre for children.

You have discovered a perishable treasure, and it is imperative to share it with other people before it fades... You have only one chance to get it right, while the impression is still fresh...If critics often disagree among themselves over the merits of a given work, this is nothing compared to the wider argument about what the critics role should be - Objective judge? Consumer guide? Provocateur? - and whether or not those practising criticism are living up to their duty to the perishable treasures on which they pronounce. In Theatre Criticism, first published in 1992, Irving Wardle sets out to define the credentials and aims of this vexed profession. Tracing its origins to Dryden and the Grub Street writers of Georgian London, Wardle goes on to examine the prejudices, questions and practices of modern reviewing, drawing on three decades worth of his own experience.

Theatre Craft is an all-encompassing, practical guide for anyone working in the theatre, from the enthusiastic amateur to the committed professional. With entries arranged alphabetically, Theatre Craft offers advice on all areas of directing, from Acting, Adaptation, and Accent to Sound Effects, Superstition, Trap Doors and Wardrobe. Enlightening and entertaining by turns, the celebrated director John Caird shares his profound knowledge of the stage to provide an invaluable companion to anyone creating a play, musical or opera. Whatever the theatre space - the backroom of a bar, a studio theatre, or the biggest stages of the West End or Broadway - this authoritative volume is an essential reference tool for the modern theatre practitioner. Internationally renowned theatre director John Caird has directed and adapted countless productions of plays, operas, and musicals for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Londons National Theatre, in the West End, and on Broadway-from Les Miserables and Nicholas Nickleby to Hamlet and Peter Pan.

This study aims to disclose the inner dynamics of the rich and diverse milieu within the Ottoman-Turkish society that created its unique hybrid forms through the scenic arts against an understanding of modernity in terms of a simple import or imitation of Western cultural forms. In the 19th century Armenians pioneered this process with melodramas, necessitating the presence of female performers on the stage; Armenian women thus went onstage with patriotic motives. Among the two leading figures of the Turkish Republic period are Nazim Hikmet, the most prolific but severely censured Turkish dramatist and Muhsin Ertugrul, who founded the subsidised theatres of Ankara and Istanbul. A later phase of modernisation arrives in the sixties with a social awakening towards the conditions of the rural society: Ankara becomes the seat of "popular" theatre after the founding of Ankara Art Theatre, in 1961. Mehmet Ulusoys work in France in the 19701980s crowns the final synthesis.

If theatre were a religion, explains David Mamet in his opening chapter, many of the observations and suggestions in this book might be heretical. As always, Mamet delivers on his promise: in Theatre, the acclaimed author of Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed the Plow, calls for nothing less than the death of the director and the end of acting theory. For Mamet, actors are either good or they are non-actors, and good actors generally work best without the interference of a director, however well-intentioned. Issue plays, political correctness, method actors, impossible directions, Stanislavksy, and elitists all fall under Mamets critical gaze. To students, teacher, and directors, who crave a blast of fresh air in a world that can be insular and fearful of change, Theatre throws down a gauntlet that challenges everyone to do better, including Mamet himself.From iconic and idiosyncratic director and playwright David Mamet, a mischievous manifesto designed to defrock the high priests and challenge the holy bibles of the theatre world.

"The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward womens health, both physical and mental. Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Foregoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment she is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency", a diagnosis common to women in that period. She hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being reproached for overworking herself. Because its a nursery the rooms windows are barred, to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate. The story depicts the effect of understimulation on the narrators mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way." (font: Wikipedia)

Sequels are not always a bad thing. They dont have to be terrible. We can all think of great sequels. But for every good sequel there are a host of truly terrible sequels. Sequels to films that didnt even need a sequel, sequels that were rushed into production with no script, sequels so preposterously belated no one could even remember the original film. If there is one constant in the world of film it is unnecessary and terrible sequels. So, lets lift the veil over the most misguided and inept sequels ever produced and explore the worst sequels of all time!

Herbert George"H. G."Wells (21 September 1866 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is called a "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.Wellss earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels like Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion, when they were published, that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens,[10] but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. A diabetic, in 1934, Wells co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK

"The Winters Tale" is a play in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 160911 and produced at the Globe Theatre in London.One of Shakespeares final plays, "The Winters Tale" is a romantic comedy with elements of tragedy. The plot was based on a work of prose fiction called "Pandosto" (1588) by Robert Greene. The play opens with Leontes, the king of Sicilia, entertaining his old friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. Leontes jealously mistakes the courtesy between his wife, Hermione, and Polixenes as a sign of Hermiones adultery with him. In a fit of jealousy, he attempts to have Polixenes killed, but Polixenes escapes with Camillo, Leontes faithful counselor, whom Leontes has sent to kill him. The pregnant Hermione is then publicly humiliated and thrown in jail, despite her protests of innocence. When the child, a girl, is born, Leontes rejects the child out of hand and gives her over to Antigonus, the husband of Hermiones attendant Paulina. The child, Perdita, is raised by shepherds for sixteen years and falls in love with the son of Leontes old friend, Polixenes. When Perdita returns home, a statue of Hermione "comes to life", and everyone is reconciled.(Source: britannica.com)

CAMILLOI think this coming summer the King of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which he justly owes him.ARCHIDAMUSWherein our entertainment shall shame us we will be justified in our loves; for indeed,CAMILLOBeseech you,ARCHIDAMUSVerily, I speak it in the freedom of my knowledge: we cannot with such magnificencein so rareI know not what to say.We will give you sleepy drinks, that your senses, unintelligent of our insufficience, may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us.CAMILLOYou pay a great deal too dear for whats given freely.ARCHIDAMUSBelieve me, I speak as my understanding instructs me and as mine honesty puts it to utterance.

The Wind in the Willows is a childrens novel by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley. In 1908, Grahame retired from his position as secretary of the Bank of England. He moved back to Cookham, Berkshire, where he had been brought up and spent his time by the River Thames doing much as the animal characters in his book donamely, as one of the phrases from the book says, "simply messing about in boats"and wrote down the bed-time stories he had been telling his son Alistair. In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, wrote to Grahame to tell him that he had "read it and reread it, and have come to accept the characters as old friends". The novel was in its thirty-first printing when playwright A. A. Milne adapted a part of it for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall in 1929. In 2003, The Wind in the Willows was listed at number 16 on the BBCs survey The Big Read (font: Wikipedia)

Originally titled Vildanden in Norwegian, "The Wild Duck" is an 1884 play by Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen. This work is by many considered Ibsens finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. "The Wild Duck" had its debut in Norway in 1885, and its first production in English opened on Broadway at New York Citys Plymouth Theatre in 1918."The Wild Duck" tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who has a compulsion to tell the truth at all costs and reveals to the Ekdal family certain unasked-for information about each family members past. The knowledge destroys their illusions and their family life...Ibsen is considered to be the father of realism and was a major force in bringing modernism to the theatre. His most famous play, "A Dolls House", was the most performed play worldwide by the start of the twentieth century.

MRS HOLROYD (aloud, to herself): You know theyre not dry even now, though its been as fine as it has. (She spreads the shirt on the back of her rocking-chair, which she turns to the fire.)VOICE (calling from outside): Well, have you got them dry?MRS HOLROYD starts up, turns and flings her hand in the direction of the open door, where appears a man in blue overalls, swarfed and greased. He carries a dinner-basket.MRS HOLROYD: You--you--I dont know what to call you! The idea of shouting at me like that--like the Evil One out of the darkness!

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (24 November 1849 29 October 1924) was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three childrens novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 18851886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1852, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 immigrated to the United States, settling near Knoxville, Tennessee. There Frances began writing to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines from the age of 19. In 1870, her mother died, and in 1872 Frances married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their two sons were born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington, D.C., Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o Lowries), was published to good reviews. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer of childrens fiction, although her romantic adult novels written in the 1890s were also popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.Burnett enjoyed socializing and lived a lavish lifestyle. Beginning in the 1880s, she began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she settled in Nassau County, Long Island, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery.In 1936 a memorial sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh was erected in her honour in Central Parks Conservatory Garden. The statue depicts her two famous Secret Garden characters, Mary and Dickon.