Dramatic Character Research Articles

«Буддийский пассион» Тань Дуня

Tan Dun is one of the musicians who gained a high reputation in China after the Chinese Cultural Revolution. His work embraces the principles of Chinese and Western music, bridging the gap between Western classical music and Asian traditional culture. “Buddha Passion” for chorus and orchestra or chamber ensemble was composed in 2018. This work reproduces the musical heritage concealed in cave paintings painted thousands of years ago, which bears in itself national beliefs and feelings of compassion and hope for the future, expresses the everyday life and reflections of Chinese culture. “Buddha Passion” is a work in which Tan Dun expresses his understanding of Zen and Buddhism. The entire work is divided into six acts. Each one of them contains profound philosophy aimed at guiding people toward good deeds by means of a dialogue between music and culture, history and the human soul. In this work the composer attempts to depict the Dunhuang frescoes into music, allowing the audience to “hear” them. The dramatic character of these paintings is described in the form of an epos. “Buddha Passion” manifests musical heritage and conveys the long-time events and the composer’s reflections on his native culture. Tan Dun believes that for the sake of the future development of Chinese culture and Chinese art it is necessary to study the country’s history and traditions more deeply. In the present day Tan Dun’s music plays a vital role in the global prestige of Chinese culture, demonstrating its values that have developed over centuries and millennia, offering the whole world the comprehension of these cultural riches.

De Grenade à Jérusalem

The present article examines the drama Birds of a Kind by the Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad. It analyses the allegorical character of Wazzan which is based on the historical figure Leo Africanus, a Moroccan diplomat and polymath of Granadan origin who in the early 16th century was kidnapped by Christian pirates and offered to Pope Leon X. Following his conversion from Islam to Catholicism he became the first author to present Africa to the Europeans through his works, published under the patronage of two popes from the Medici family. Leo Africanus was introduced to Mouawad by the American scholar Natalie Zemon Davis. In her study Trickster Travels (2006) she discusses the ambiguity and the evasiveness of this enigmatic historical figure whose character she highlights through the story of the amphibious bird. It is a parable placed as the author’s paratextual notice at the beginning of The Book of Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526 [1550]), Leo Africanus’s most important scholarly work, and in spite of many possible sources, it is definitely his own invention. This article aims to demonstrate how Mouawad distanced his dramatic character from the original figure – the historiographic image of a trickster – by changing the point of the aforementioned parable. The story of the amphibious bird in Birds of a Kind, told by Wazzan to a Jew who right before his death is revealed to have an Arabic origin, is transformed form the parable of a trickster into a legend of someone who manages to overcome prejudice in order to find his identity. For Mouawad, Wazzan personifies the reconciliation between Judaism and Islam, transmitting at the same time an idea of the world dreamed of by the humanism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

О художественном содержании макама

The article is devoted to researching Islamic professional oral music. Maqam is the most high form of this, its conception is spiritual catharsis. Maqam is a chain of ascending parts, each of them elaborating on the main theme of the music. It progresses to a culmination and then descends to the cuitial stage. Maqam’s spiritual contents are the sorrow of love in the form of improvisation first of all, but also songs and dances. Maqam unites dramatic and lyrical characters. Every maqam has its own semantic canon, which is actualized by means of the deepest research of human feelings. Semantic and structure canons connect with the performer’s liberty in emotional detail. Maqam represents a peculiar type of authority (not in absolute form of composer’s art) and is based on classical orient poetry. The highest form of maqam is instrumental (without singing), which expresses the character of its singing-instrumental “parent”. The maqam’s performers must have a special complement of musical abilities and study in music empirient schools. It is necessary to mark particular antithesises, which illustrate a “emotion–ratio” relation in macam’s dramaturgy: passionate contents and strict verified form; originality and canon; euphoria and self-control of a performer; melody and polyphony (instruments imitate singing). Maqam represents a penetrating, “endless” melody with its ability to develop. The elite character of maqam’s genesis and contemporary democracy of the genre are explored, as well as the relations between two forms of maqam: maqam-tune and maqam-genre.

Blanche and Stanley, polar opposites. A pragmastylistic analysis of interactions from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire

The paper is an attempt at demonstrating how the language used by fictional dramatic characters contributes to their characterization, that is, how the readers (audiences) perceive them based on inferences drawn from a variety of textual cues. These cues include explicit selfand other-presentation as well as implicit hints retrieved from conversation structure, aspects of turn-taking or features of the language used by the character. In this paper, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski from Tennessee Williams’ play The Streetcar Named Desire are analyzed and characterized as being polar opposites.

Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage

Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage

Fernando Botero and the theme of violence in Colombian art

The subject of this research is the theme of violence in Colombia in the works of the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, mainly of the XX century. Attention is given to determination of the prerequisites for the emergence of the theme of violence in his painting. For this purpose, analysis is conducted on the indirect presence of this theme in Botero’s works since the very beginning of his career to paintings of mature and later periods. It is demonstrated that the artist approached the reflection of the theme of violence from different perspectives, depicting massacres, tortures, death, and involuntary relocation. The article employs the method based on iconographic analysis of the artist’s works, as well as artistic and stylistic analysis. The scientific novelty lies in examination of the topic relevant to the culture and history of the Latin American country, revealed in the works of Fernando Botero, who distanced himself from comprehension of art as resistance throughout his entire career. The author concludes that the Botero’s paintings may be called a form of depicting the slaughterous history of the country, without adherence of the painter to any political or party ideology. The manner used by Botero in the series “Violence in Colombia” is identical the artist resorts to throughout his career, which leads to distortion and caricaturing of the artistic form, in combination with the tragedy of storylines, which aggravates the dramatic character of the chosen themes. The works of Botero of the late XX century are of invaluable cultural value for Colombia.

Temperament Knowledge as The Process of Creating and Studying Dramatic Characters ,Case study: The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Temperament Knowledge as The Process of Creating and Studying Dramatic Characters ,Case study: The Beauty Queen of Leenane

THE NEUTRALITY or the silence before the action

Abstract The actor’s imagination is formed and translated into images. The actor shows and embodies the dramatic character on stage with his body, voice and gestures. The actor’s body goes through a semiotic transformation during the show, it becomes the main vehicle of expression, the main channel of transmiting information, an extremely important function in theatrical artistic creation. The actor’s voice is in accordance to his body and psyche, and through its expressive qualities it becomes an essential component of theatrical language and stage communication. Our every day body is also a permanent transmitter of coded messages, voluntary or involuntary, of packets of information about the subject’s previous experiences, memories, sensations, perceptions, knowledge, attitudes, conceptions, relationships, social constraints etc. The human voice also becomes a sign for the social relationships, for the personal identity, the mood or the motivation of the speaker. Due to the state of neutrality, the actor will discover how an image, real or fictional, can transform his psychophysics, he will discover the psychophysical existence of each character with its external and internal world. The actor must put aside his self-image, learn to allow the presence of the mask / role take control of him, to breathe, to speak and to live with his own voice, face, body and mind. When the face is covered and there is silence, the actor has to communicate through his body and movements, when the movement is simple and economical, the mask /the role begins to live.

“Consent Is Sexy”: exploring the portrayal of prosocial sexuality messages in youth-oriented series

ABSTRACT Content analyses on sexual messages in youth-oriented series have traditionally focused on the distribution of negative or antisocial sexual messages. As such, the potential of youth-oriented series to promote prosocial sexual messages (PSM) has been neglected. Grounded in the 3AM model, this content analysis fills this gap in the literature by examining the occurrence of PSM in youth-oriented series (e.g. Elite) on Netflix. A total of 126 characters (52% male, 48% female) and 3,151 scenes in 65 episodes were coded. The results indicate that PSM were promoted 4 times per episode (i.e. average length was 36 minutes) and were distributed by more than half of the characters. PSM also significantly co-occurred with antisocial sexual messages (ASM) in scenes, suggesting that sexual messages may operate as a “mixed” socialization agent for adolescents’ sexuality development. Further, characters in comedies and non-heterosexual characters more often distributed PSM than respectively characters in dramas and heterosexual characters. The promotion of PSM did not vary by characters’ gender. Implications of these findings in terms of audience effects and suggestions for future research are further discussed.

Taking a stance: mentalization and the Stanislavskian rehearsal process

ABSTRACT In this article, we suggest that the psychological process of mentalization – that of perceiving and interpreting behaviour as conjoined with intentional mental states – might have a key role to play in Stanislavskian rehearsal practice, both in terms of developing relationships in the rehearsal room and in terms of interpreting dramatic characters. We discuss key concepts such as the dimensions of mentalizing, non-mentalizing modes, the mentalizing stance, and epistemic trust, and highlight the potential relevance of these to the work of the acting ensemble. Our aim is to provide practitioners, and especially those charged with leading rehearsal processes, with an introduction to mentalization, allowing them to identify mentalizing problems as they arise and to be proactive in demonstrating and encouraging effective mentalizing within the rehearsal environment.

Slippery scripts: “SOAP dropping” threats in the gendered prison setting

ABSTRACT Media often serve as audiences’ primary source of information about the carceral system and inmates’ lived experiences. While prison media frequently employ violent tropes, these narratives are scripted within the gendered context of the prison setting. In an online experiment, 104 young adults watched short video clips from male and female prison dramas depicting verbal (sexual and non-sexual) threats and evaluated the severity and actuation of threats. The results demonstrated that participants vary in their evaluation of threats based on the gender of characters in prison dramas and that these evaluations are influenced by participants’ traditional gender role and prison rape myth acceptance. These findings have implications for how cultural apathy legitimizes and dismisses violence perpetuated by and within the prison industrial complex.

Nomadic Identities in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and Anna Karenina

This paper examines through Rosi Braidotti’s theory of nomadism two of Marina Carr’s most outstanding female dramatic characters, Hester Swane and Anna Karenina. This critical theoretical approach argues that these nomadic female identities are structurally opposed to fixity. By averting the normative versions of themselves and by engaging in the dynamics of power relations they free themselves from the constraints of phallogocentrism in their different contexts. Hester Swane and Anna Karenina, despite their very different social backgrounds, share the commonality of being nomadic representations. The dramatic works By the Bog of Cats (2004) and the stage adaptation Anna Karenina (2016) display an array of female characters which conform to social norms. This paper argues that unlike these female characters, Anna and Hester are transgressive women; they are ruthless nomadic female fighters and cannot be considered victims of the social constraints that attempt to define them as sub-beings. The paper further concludes that although their deaths at the end of each play are inescapable, their voluntary suicide eludes them to a freer ontological existence.

Can you hear me? by Simona Semenič and the question of no-longer-dramatic writing

In the article, the author analyses three plays by Simona Semenič that were published in the book can you hear me? (2017). At first sight, the three pieces appear to be written in Semenič’s now-familiar writing style with no punctuation marks or upper-case initials and no apparent division between dialogues and stage directions. Content-wise, however, the three plays differ significantly from the bulk of the playwright’s opus as they represent autobiographical texts which once again establish the character and more or less distinct dramatic action. The article focuses on two questions: Are these still no-longer-dramatic texts? And, what is the status of representation and performativity in them? By analysing the formal and content properties of the three texts, more precisely, through an analysis of the drama character, the relationship between dialogue and monologue and dramatic action, the author shows that indeed these texts establish recognisable dramatic characters and relatively strong dramatic action. In this, they move away from no-longer- dramatic texts as defined by Gerda Poschmann, even though their legacy is still very much present, e.g., in the fragmented writing style.

Letture proibite e parole in codice: Storia dell’Ala Occidentale , un’opera drammaturgica nel romanzo cinese Il Sogno della Camera Rossa

The 18 th -century novel The Dream of the Red Chamber ( Honglou meng ) is one of the most important narrative masterpieces of Chinese literature. Despite the numerous studies on this work − that is an encyclopedic summa of an entire culture − the role of the theatre in the novel has not been sufficiently deepened. This paper explores how the young protagonists of Honglou meng use The Story of the Western Wing , a comedy that is still fundamental to the Chinese artistic heritage today. The two teenagers in the novel secretly admire the drama characters and their courageous way of living passions. These characters have the subversive and maieutic function of providing essential words for a dialogue that allows the adolescents to emotionally overcome the conditioning of an environment characterized by a rigid and oppressive Neo-Confucian education. Some issues about the consideration suffered by sentimental dramaturgy − in an imperial context where the theatre was the centre of debates on which themes and behaviours should be censored as corrupting costumes − emerge in the background of this analysis.

SF 영화와 드라마에 나타난 기술적 타자로서의 인공지능 캐릭터 연구

The practical use of artificial intelligence has been accelerated by the advancement of technology, which also allowed artificial intelligence to emerge in the real world and interact with humans. Media has been producing fictitious characters based on the AI as protagonist or antagonist. Through analyzing the process of forming an identity of AI characters in fictional movies and dramas, it will be possible to infer the answer to the socio-cultural problem of artificial intelligence.<BR> In this study, the process of forming identity of AI characters as ‘Technical Others’ was analyzed based on Frantz Fanon’s colonial theory. First of all, AI characters created by human perceive their physical differences as deficiencies through comparison with human. Second, they desire making mutual relationship with humans and becoming members of human society. In this process, they try to prove their human-like features through mutual-recognition. Finally, as the result of their desire, they experience ego-regression or the state of unconsciousness. This blank is filled with the identity as ‘the others’, and as a result, the AI characters solidify their formed identity as a ‘technical others’ in the hierarchical relationship of humanistic ideology.<BR> AI characters are non-human beings that break the boundaries of the binomial confrontation like subject-other, fiction-reality, furthermore, humanism-posthumanism. So through analyzing former AI characters, it is expected that the identity of AI characters can be defined socioculturally and offer alternative directions of preparing for the era of posthumanism.

А. А. Блок – читатель куртуазной литературы: о происхождении некоторых мотивов и образов в драме «Роза и Крест»

А. А. Блок – читатель куртуазной литературы: о происхождении некоторых мотивов и образов в драме «Роза и Крест»

Linguoaxiosphere of Society and Personality in American Drama Discourse

The article presents the results of the study devoted to the linguistic axiological analysis of the XXI century American drama discourse. Contemporary drama discourse, due to its special linguistic status, is a space for verbal representation of characters’ individual axiological trajectories, the analysis of which contributes to determining the values, which are relevant for society as a whole. The aim of the study is to systematize the dynamic structural and content elements of drama characters’ personal axiological spheres and to define their involvement in the piece of social value paradigm, which has its linguistic reflection in modern American drama. The empirical research is based on the texts of the plays written by American playwrights in 2015-2020. Individual linguistic axiological spheres are examined in terms of flexible hierarchical structures, the dynamism of which is determined by the characters’ life experience. The method of linguistic axiological interpretation based on the combination of axiological analysis and discourse analysis is applied to show that the structure of individual linguistic axiological spheres presented in the contemporary American drama discourse is a simplified version of the social linguistic axiological sphere; it has fewer value dominants and evaluative vectors while preserving the diversity of linguistic means of evaluative representation. Linguistic marking of characters’ individual axiological spheres occurs with the help of evaluative utterances, which include evaluative lexemes. Their frequency is characterized by quantitative and qualitative fluctuations in the speech of different communicants and is predetermined by the evaluative potential of the word semantics. In American drama discourse, the individual axiological sphere has a linguistic representation not only in personal evaluative remarks, but also in the personage’s reaction to other people’s value judgments, as well as in the utterances where the object of evaluation is the character himself/herself. The discrepancy between the content-based evaluative vectors or the difference in the position of personal value dominants within individual linguistic axiological hierarchies can lead to communication failures. As a result of the linguistic axiological interpretation of individual linguistic axiological trajectories, represented in American dramatic discourse of the XXI century, a fragment of the current American social linguistic axiological sphere is identified, and the central value dominants are highlighted.

“Show the Clichés:” the Appearance of Happiness in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur

Abstract Le Bonheur, perhaps Agnès Varda’s most beautiful film, is also her most perplexing. The film’s insistently idyllic surface qualities, overtly beautiful imagery, and psychologically impenetrable, improbably content characters mystify and confuse. Of late, feminist scholars have clarified the situation, noting Varda’s incorporation of advertising and pop cultural visual rhetoric to implicate the social forces framing the picture and those insistently “happy” people: more like advertising ciphers than dramatic characters. Varda herself referenced Impressionist painting as a source of the film’s aesthetics. The purposes of this vivid, chromatic intertextual and intermedial source, in relation to the rhetoric of commercial and popular culture, demand attention. Varda studied art history and connected the milieu of Le Bonheur, the Parisian exurbs, their petit-bourgeois and working-class populace, and bucolic leisure, artisanal and industrial settings, to the modernity of 19th-century Impressionism. Le Bonheur uses an Impressionist picturesque dialectically, in relation to a pop contemporaneity, to observe and critique an ideological genealogy of capitalism and its oppression of women.

TINDAK TUTUR ILOKUSI DALAM PERCAKAPAN TOKOH PADA PERTUNJUKAN DRAMA DILARANG MENYANYI DI KAMAR MANDI OLEH TEATER TIANG

Illocutionary speech act is an act of speech that has the intention of conveying information to its destination so that the speech partner does something. Illocutionary speech acts are found in all aspects of daily social interactions. It is also included in the interactions contained in a drama performance Do Not Sing in the Bathroom which is performed by the Tiang Theater, Jember University. According to Searle, the form of illocutionary speech acts consists of several forms, namely representative, directive, declarative, expressive, and commissive. This study uses a qualitative research design while the type of research used is descriptive which aims toproblems in accordance with reality based on facts. The data in this research is in the form of dialogues that are told by drama characters in the performance. The source of the data in this study is a video performance documentation. Data collection techniques used in this study were documentation techniques and data transcripts. The data analysis technique used in this study consisted of three stages, namely data reduction, data presentation, and data analysis procedures (preparation, implementation, and completion). The results of this study indicate that there are forms of illocutionary speech acts in the dialogue of the characters in the drama Prohibited from Singing in the Bathroom by Teater Tiang Universitas Jember, namely: representative, directive, expressive, declarative, and commissive. the illocutionary speech act functions of the drama characters. namely: competitive, convivial, collaborative / cooperation, and conflict. Support speech partners for the illocutionary speech acts received.

Luigi Pirandello’nun Altı Karakter Yazarını Arıyor Oyununda Aile ve Özdönüşümsellik Tartışması

Luigi Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore) portrays numerous significant and functional characteristics of metatheatre, a concept coined by Lionel Abel. By drawing on such metatheatrical features and the play within a play technique, Pirandello’s play presents six characters that are in search of an author. This study will, therefore, explain the concept of metatheatre and present a critical analysis of the play, Six Characters as a self-reflexive play. In this critical engagement with the text through specific references from the play and relevant secondary sources, important themes in the play such as reality and illusion, life, art, and the representation of the family in the play will be analysed. This analysis will ultimately demonstrate that Pirandello presents six characters that are self-conscious of their position as dramatic characters that manage to act out their roles, which actually reveal the family relationships between the characters.