Posts

Showing posts from January, 2018

Augusto Boal

Image
Augusto Boal was a Brazilian dramatist, born on March 16, 1931, in Rio de Janeiro, and died on May 2, 2009 (Leukemia) in Rio de Janeiro. He created the Theatre of the Oppressed, which is a form of interactive theatre that intends to transform lives as viewers become performers, acting out solutions to social issues. He began his career in 1956 with the Arena Theatre in São Paulo, where he was a director until 1971, the time in which he developed his theories. Boal was arrested in 1971 by the military party that ruled Brazil and spent the next 15 years in banishment. During this time he published Teatro del oprimido y otras poéticas políticas (Theatre of the Oppressed) in 1974, set up a centre in Paris for the practice of his theory, and arranged international Theatre of the Oppressed festivals during the first half of the 1980s. In 1992 he published Jeux pour acteurs et non-acteurs (Games for Actors and Non-Actors), which discusses techniques for putting his system into practice...

Differences between Dramatic and Epic theatre

Dramatic Epic theatre Brings event to life Relates the event Communicates experience Communicates insights Audience is projected into an event, connects with audience emotionally   Audience is confronted to an event, informs and teaches the audience Suggestion is used Arguments are used The world as it is, one event follows the other in a straight line   The world as its becoming, events move in curved irregular line

Antonin Artaud

Image
Early life  Antonin Artaud was a Dramatist, Poet, Essayist, Actor and Theatre Director, born on September 4th 1896 in Marseilles. He was widely recognized as one of the most significant figures of the 20th century theatre and the European avant-garde. At the age of 4 he suffered from meningitis, which resulted in him having an edgy, short-tempered personality throughout his teenage years. He also suffered from speech defect and clinical depression.  In 1920 after being discharged from the sanatorium due to sleepwalking, he moved to Paris, to pursue a career as a writer. This was when he realized his passion for experimental theatre.    Background info  He was a playwright for a couple of plays during his lifetime, but he used a considerable amount of influence with his small set of works. He was a great French playwright and was also known for his theoretical writings. He was involved with the Surrealist movement for a short while early in his ca...

Bertolt Brecht

Image
Background  Bertolt Brecht, the playwright was born in 1898 in the town of Augsburg in Germany. After contributing to the First World War as a medical orderly and horrified by the effects of the war, he first when to Munich and then Berlin to pursuit a career in theatre. This part of his life ended in 1933 when Nazis took charge of Germany. He fled and during this period his citizenship was removed by the Nazis, so he was no longer a citizen, of any state. The 1920s was the period in which he had written 3 plays: Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of the Cities and Baal. All of which had been directed by leading individuals in the theatre and drew in, like their author, their fair share of scandal. In the 1920 he also adopted Marlowe's Edward the Second , published a number of short stories, directed his play A Man's a Man and took on his first collaboration with composers Kurt Weill in Mahagonny , then in after a short period the popular The Threepenny Opera , which wa...

Konstantin Stanislavski

Image
He is one of the greatest and most influential practitioners of modern theatre. He took the approach that actors must really inhabit the role that they're playing, so not only should the actor know their lines and have the motivation for those lines, they should know every detail of their characters life offstage and onstage. Through this we have established Stanislavski as a director and practitioner whose performances are naturalistic.  Background His real name was Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev but he used Stanislavski as his stage name is 1884. He was born in 1863 and was a part of one of the most affluent families in Russia, and he died when he was 75 in 1939 His family loved theatre and had the opportunity to  indulge in theatricals as a child Although when he adopted a stage name it was to mask his theatricals from his family, but then in 1887 his father gave him his approval and he became an established figure. As a devoted theatrical practitioner, he made p...

World Theatre Brainstorm

Image