Dramatic Script Research Articles

The play’s the thing: reflections on the use of playwriting as creative practice within an education studies PhD

Purpose Expanding on Harris and Sinclair (2014, p. 5) claim that “the writing of a play is an act of inquiry”, this paper aims to consider the joyful entanglements, messiness and friction-led use of creative methods within the context of a PhD in education studies. Design/methodology/approach Amplifying the voices of both doctoral student and supervisor, the authors explain how the construction of a dramatic script informed the crafting of an alternative format thesis within which “the play’s the thing” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2). In responding to the influence of creativity in the lives of both the student and the supervisor, the paper uses creative and reflective writing as a method of inquiry to explore how practice and procedure are navigated in relation to non-standard theses submissions. Findings The authors find that academic expectancy continues to influence the structure, form and presentation of the PhD thesis and argue that enduring tensions surrounding the reverence of “tradition” impact the application and nature of creativity. Originality/value The piece aims to examine the multiple challenges faced but, importantly, highlights how the creative partnership between supervisor and student has forged changes in contemporary doctoral education in the awarding institution and the implications for future practice within doctoral education more broadly.

Determining possibilities for applying theoretical principles of situational risk management in the aviation safety system

Aviation safety is one of the main criteria for its sustainable development. The object of this study is safety risk management, which is the main tool of the aviation safety management system. The problem that needs to be further solved is the improvement of aviation risk management methods under war, force majeure, and crisis conditions, as well as under conditions of uncertainty, when there is a minimum of time to make a single correct decision. The theory of situational management can be chosen as the theoretical basis for creating decision-making systems. The development of special languages for describing the situation arising at the control object, as well as in its control system, makes it possible to correctly represent the models of control objects and the evolution of knowledge about them. The work solves the task of building a model of the control object, which takes into account the maximum number of its features suitable for implementation. In order to represent the management object based on the method of expert assessments, the weighting coefficients of the risk characteristics’ probabilities and the values of the weighting coefficients of the degrees of severity were calculated, a matrix of risk assessment indicators was built, and risk assessment criteria were developed. Based on the calculations, general approaches to aviation safety risk management were specified. The paper developed a «dramatic script» of an episode of aviation security risk management, which includes the stages of the episode, the content of necessary actions, the corresponding stages of aviation security risk management and the corresponding aviation security risk management. The content of the management itself consists in preventing the transition from the zone of acceptable risk to the zone of permissible and from the zone of permissible risk to the zone of unacceptable risk, as well as the implementation of measures to stimulate the transition from the zone of unacceptable to the zone of permissible risk and from the zone of permissible to the zone of acceptable risk

Clearing the Clouds: Finding Motivation and Clarity in a Non-Traditional Dissertation Using Arts Based Educational Research (ABER)

By crafting a dramatic script about struggling high school readers that I then shared with real students in my Reading classes, I applied Arts-based education research (ABER) methods. Through the writing, presentation, collection, and reflection on student feedback, as well as during the script rewriting process, I was allowed to engage in a unique and motivating research experience. This approach allowed me to attend to three challenges with my Dissertation in Practice (DiP). First, instead of being part of this big, scary, abstract world called ‘research’, it allowed me to demonstrate inquiry though a means that I was more familiar and confident with—writing and theatre. My confidence working in these areas allowed me to initiate and remain engaged throughout the dissertation work. Second, it allowed me to take on a problem in my practice—the skepticism of many high school students in Reading classes about being in those classes. This helped me better understand my students, and thus inform and guide in the identification of best practices. Third, it positioned me to work with colleagues and administrators in my building and across our school district to rethink how we offer reading support to the heterogeneous cross-section of students who currently are being identified as needing such support. This account summarizes my DiP and, I hope, positions other classroom teachers who double as EdD students to imagine new and effective ways forward as they engage with problems of practice.

Abur-aburan Gathutkaca: the Work of Sabet Motion of the Samberan War in the Classical Shadow Puppet Performing Arts

This article describes the artistic research work on garap sabet of Gathutkaca character in classical shadow puppet by the artists; Jaka Rianto and Andi Wicaksono. The focus of the work is the design of abur-aburan motion and Samberan war of the creative-innovative Gathutkaca character, as well as blending them into a classical shadow puppet (wayang Purwa) performance. The method of creating works was carried out from the stage of determining ideas, studies of previous works, and literature studies. After that, the concept of the work embodied by wayang dramaturgy; sambung-rapet , and greget-sahut was formulated. The process of realizing the work was carried out by searching for the exploratory motion of Gathutkaca's sabet and making a dramatic script. The performance of the work was carried out using the rules of Surakarta-style wayang performances after the exercise stage was considered to be solid. The conclusion obtained in the process of this work is that the search for creative-innovative forms of sabet movement must be carried out with exploratory and repeated. The basic rules of cepengan, tanceban, bedholan and solah elements in working on sabet classical shadow puppet cannot be abandoned in order to achieve the aesthetics of classical shadow puppet performances. Keywords: abur-aburan Gathutkaca, perang samberan, garap sabet, dramaturgi wayang DOI: 10.7176/JCSD/66-06 Publication date: September 30th 2021

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Martin Crimp’s Piece “Advice to Iraqi Women”

Language is a vehicle for social values and ideologies that a man intends or attempts to express. Dramatic texts are one of the discursive practices that embody values and ideologies. What is expressed in dramatic text is deliberate because it is meant to affect other’s values, trends and ideologies in one way or another. Such ideologies and values are not explicit. To bring them out requires putting language under scrutiny to unveil what is implied. The present study attempts to analyze a dramatic script entitled Advice to Iraqi Women by the British playwright Martin Crimp in an attempt to unveil the intended political ideologies underlying the text. The title reflects a political aspect embedded in the word “Iraqi” that brings to the mind the war broken out there at that time. Notwithstanding that the script is written in such an unusual manner that appears to the reader or the spectator to be domestic, familiar and free from any political indications. The model adopted in the analysis of Crimp’s theatrical piece is that of van Dijk’s macro and microstructure analysis within critical discourse analysis. Results have manifested the political ideologies that the writer intends to convey. He attempted to bridge a gap and render the English society to be associated emotionally with the repercussions of the remote war by amalgamating what is familiar with what is unfamiliar.

Actor as Author of the Text he Acts

We aim to demonstrate how the acting technique and skills of an actor may influence the intentions of a text’s author, showing him new paths through the human and emotional factors. We also aim to demonstrate that what is usually considered a “text” may not always be a fixed entity produced by a single isolated individual.
 The analysis of the staging and film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and the development of the character Stanley Kowalski by Marlon Brando, shows how he changed the written version of the play, shifting its core, interfering with the balance between the two main characters and helping to shape the cultural and historical attributes which rendered its particular place in art history. The text produced by the actor may, thus, assume an identical value to that of the dramatic script from which it developed, or even produce a higher impact.

The “Lost” Scenes fromThe Merry Wives of Windsor: Robertson Davies’s Shakespearean Hoax

This article introduces a hitherto unpublished dramatic script by Robertson Davies: a set of scenes interpolated into the Stratford Festival’s 1956 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Although these pseudo-Elizabethan additions were first performed as an elaborate prank on Stratford audience members and theatre critics, this article argues that Davies’s work represents a major unacknowledged contribution to the performance history of Merry Wives. Working in collaboration with director Michael Langham, Davies drew on the hypotheses of early twentieth-century textual editors to reconstruct a more narratively “complete” version of the play. In its integration of scholarship and playwriting, Davies’s script not only anticipated later scholarly reconstructions of plays such as Pericles and Cardenio, but it also remains a significant untapped resource for theatre directors today.

Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom

Reviewed by: Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom Mike Sell GAMING THE STAGE: PLAYABLE MEDIA AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH COMMERCIAL THEATER. By Gina Bloom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018; pp. 304. Theatre historians generally agree that the play's the thing, but what exactly do we mean by "play"—and what do we assume is played? The usual answer is the dramatic script, certainly, or more broadly, the text, whether it be printed, devised, or intertextual. We might think of the playful process of theatre creation, whether the provisional "games for theatre" that enable performers to attune mind and body to the task at hand or the more constitutive forms of play we associate with devised theatre. Those versed in the broader spectrum of performance practices will recall Richard Schechner's abiding interest in the varieties of human play and their integral relationship to performance more generally. But despite our love of play, theatre historians have mostly ignored the kinds of play associated with recreational games: cards, boardgames, tabletop role-playing games, and the like. And they have ignored the skills that players of games bring to the arts. There are signs of change if you know where to look, but unfortunately those are mostly in the present tense and are often framed in digital terms—immersive theatre, augmented reality, new media performance, videogames. In Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, Gina Bloom not only corrects these shortcomings, she also describes an innovative and authentically playful transmedia theatre-historical method. It is a tour de force, the [End Page 256] kind of book that could be written only by someone with comprehensive knowledge of their period, an acute sensitivity to the embodied experience of theatre and gaming, a firm critical-theoretical hand, and practical grounding in the design of playful theatrical experiences. Bloom begins in the present tense, noting the unprecedented growth of games as popular pastime and the evidently unstoppable devolution of theatre into an elite entertainment. In response, she asks a pair of questions that implicates both present and past: "What do theatrical plays and games have in common, for their producers and their spectators? And what can we learn about gaming and about theater by uncovering the links between these media forms?" (1–2). The answers Bloom finds shed light on old stages and new media alike and provide useful lessons to both historians and creators of theatrical entertainments. As she notes, "the earliest commercial theaters of Shakespeare's era, known as 'playhouses,' were built right next to gaming establishments; some of these … even doubled as blood sport venues" (1). This geographical coincidence reflected a broader coincidence of ludic cultures and the need for makers of one of them (the theatre) to appeal to consumers of the other (games and sports). "The commercial theater," Bloom writes, "was fashioned as a gaming apparatus for its consumers, whose spectator-ship was participatory, albeit in ways that might be missed at first glance" (3). Thus it follows that one can learn about both by examining the formal and cultural coincidence of playful practice. To this end, Bloom surveys in the first chapter the material record of "sitting pastimes" in Western Europe (cards, boardgames, and the like) and attitudes toward them expressed by cultural authorities. Reflecting her interest in closing the distance between present and past, she emphasizes a characteristic of gameplay of special importance to twenty-first-century game scholars: that games are first and foremost information systems, and that game play is fundamentally an engagement with such systems. It turns out we share that concern with the early moderns. In the next three chapters, she focuses on three popular pastimes—cards, backgammon, and chess—and the plays in which they feature, demonstrating how they engage "a whole set of epistemological concerns about the flow and control of information—a concern of political and religious authorities at the time" (29). Considered together, they show us how early modern audiences perceived and practiced gameplay, as well as how they perceived and practiced a new kind of play: going to the theatre. This is...

When tragedy embraces the farce: Adaption of Gogol’s The Government Inspector in different cultures

How do drama and theatre contribute to developing a democratic process at the intersection between production, activity and way of working? This article examines how artistic processes can shed light on, investigate and comment about moral dilemmas based on Nicolai Gogol’s dramatic script from 1836, The Government Inspector, a Russian farce about corruption. A Nordplus-project designed in 2013 made it possible for drama students, both in Norway and in Tanzania, to establish platforms enabling the students from each country to freely investigate and interpret their own ideas of corruption through process drama activity by exploring Gogol’s original text. This article also investigates whether and how the students’ cultural identity affected their own perspectives on the matter by pinpointing the aftermath of corrupt activity through dramatic depiction and activity.

Communities of Code-Switching Connoisseurs

Code-switching is a universal phenomenon of community formation. Religious speech switches between different registers and codes, expanding its possibilities. In South Asia, the pleasure of including different codes and languages is, at the same time, a characteristic of poetic messages, of popular culture and linguistic systems. This paper considers the code-switching in Islamic sermons in contemporary Bangladesh (waz mahfils), which are characterized by a stress on oral performance and communal experience. On the basis of a theoretical introduction into the terminology of code-switching and its rhetorical and poetic expansion, different levels of code-switching in the sermons are analyzed. These range from switches between individual words (mostly from Arabic, Urdu and Bengali), to binding together of several sentences by vocal techniques. From the perspective of code-switching in performance, “formal” translation mechanisms in the sermons, most prominently translations from the Qurʾan, can be evaluated anew. As opposed to a point of view that argumentation and persuasion of the sermons are derived from the Qurʾan as a “scripture”, the inclusion of Qurʾanic quotations into the dynamics of multilingual code-switching and its aesthetic effects emphasizes a poetic form of evidence building on word-play and dramatic script.

النص المسرحي القصير في الأدب العربي الحديث : نماذج منتخبة = The Short Dramatic Script in Modern Arab Literature : Selected Models as a Sample

النص المسرحي القصير | الصعلوك | الصرير | جثة على الرصيف | رجل وإمرأة في حوض السمك | الناس والحجارة | Short Play | The Tramp | A Corpse on the Sidewalk | The Creak | People and the Stones | A Man and a Woman in the Fish Aquarium

Reviewing Literature on Gender Using Found Poetry and Dramatic Script

In this article, derived from the literature review chapter of her doctoral dissertation, the author presents a variation on what Prendergast (2006) calls found poetry as literature review. Her writing experiment is intended to reflect the dynamism of her “conversations” with the theoretical literature with which she engaged before and during the dissertation project: an intervention in the gender narratives of postgraduate student teachers. She does not, however, see theory as confined to academic literature and her conversations extend into poetry as well. In her conversations, the author engages with a wide range of texts in performance studies and feminist post-structural theory. She also converses with a variety of other texts.

Writing the Revival: The Intersections of Methodism and Literature in the Long 18th Century

AbstractThe Methodist revival attracted as much negative press as it did converts during the 18th century – in religious polemic, satiric verse, prose fiction, and dramatic script; the Methodists themselves likewise produced a rich body of spiritual autobiography and sacred verse, mostly in the form of the Methodist hymnal. This essay offers a survey of the scholarship that addresses the textual culture surrounding the revival, including critical assessments of the literature produced by the Methodists, its impact on the movement and Methodist religiosity, as well as discussions of the anti‐Methodist literature and how it registered within Methodism and the larger society. The essay also considers studies that connect Methodism and its literature to literary and cultural developments during the period, including developments in drama, the novel, and the Culture of Sensibility.

Illness Narratives

An illness narrative is constructed when a person engages with both internal dialogues with himself and in interactions with the others during their journey; these can be transformed into dramatic script for social and self –beneficence. This paper explores whether process-centered creative drama could be the optimum modality for this dramatization. It also suggests that this process can be captured to assist the ill person, their care-givers, and others in understanding the dynamic process of illness.

“A Stroll in Heavy Boots”: Studying Polish Roma Women’s Experiences of Aging

MAGDALENA KAZUBOWSKI-HOUSTON uses the subjunctive practice of developing a dramatic script as a means of extending ethnographic interviewing into topics that Roma women might otherwise be less willing to speak about with an outside researcher.

The Way according to Luke: Hearing the Whole Story of Luke‐Acts. By Paul Borgman

Pp. 404 , Eerdmans , Grand Rapids MI , 2006 , $23.00 . The historical-critical method seems weary these days, and scholars are looking for other ways of reading the texts of the New Testament, not because they want to retreat from the gains that the older methods have made for us; it is simply that these methods are feeling their age, and do not succeed in showing us how Scripture can come alive. This book is a notable example of what literary critics have to teach exegetes. Borgman's insistence on ‘Hearing the Whole Story’ (in the words of his sub-title) reminds us importantly that i) Luke, like all the NT authors, wrote primarily to be heard (most readers of the NT have always been illiterate, and therefore all the more able to pick up his clues); ii) Luke-Acts comes in two volumes. You will go the length and breadth of any biblical conference nowadays without hearing anyone wanting to argue a separate author for Luke and Acts; but we still tend to read and teach them separately; iii) Luke-Acts is a story, and needs to be read as such. Among many other things, a story invites the reader aboard. In narrative, especially oral narrative, Borgman frequently points out, repetitions are of immense importance. Luke-Acts needs to be read as a dramatic script, with attention given to what he calls the ‘ear-clues’. In this connection, one claim that may raise a few eyebrows is his estimate of no less than 37 ‘we-passages’. Another is Borgman's identification of no less than twelve ‘clustered poems’ in the first two chapters of Luke; but take these clues, and see how they help you to read the work. Borgman confidently unveils chiasms everywhere, which will cause many an exegete to reach for his gun; but he is very persuasive. The central message of Luke-Acts comes down, according to Borgman, to a clash of two ways, Jesus' radical way against the ‘normal’ way, love as opposed to self-interest. Readers who suppose themselves all too wearily familiar with the exegesis of Luke may find themselves reanimated by his talk of the ‘poem on the plain’, which is separated from Jesus' ‘Nazareth poem’ by five healings and two healing-summaries. There is a freshness in Borgman's reading of the text that answers the question raised by all too many acts of historical-critical reading, ‘why should I bother with this?’ Borgman will not allow us to scissor the text into pericopae, although occasionally, it must be said, he drifts into the territory of historical-critical exegesis, and makes claims about what went on ‘in those days’ which he does not really trouble to defend. Borgman is especially effective when he points out ‘echoes’ as indicators of what Luke is about; for example the way in which Simeon's ‘light for the Gentiles’ is echoed in Acts. And to prevent us from getting lost in the jungle, each chapter begins and ends with a useful (and thoroughly nuanced) summary of where we have been and where we are going. Borgman's account of how the speeches in Acts (that old chestnut of an essay-topic) hang together is remarkably persuasive, and his account of Cornelius as a paradigm of the changed allegiance to which the story invites us, is most illuminating, as is his affirmation that God is the central character of the whole two-volume story. Most intriguing of all was Borgman's version of how the three accounts of Paul's ‘repentance’ work together. Borgman shows himself very sensitive to the intertextuality of the three accounts, and demonstrates that their mounting rhetorical effect is to highlight the Jesus who is ‘light to the Gentiles’. Finally Borgman brings the whole thing quite beautifully together by way of a concluding reflection on the jailer at Philippi. Read this book for the breath of fresh air that it brings.

Theatrical service experiences

This article provides a framework for the development of a dramatic script for a service (retail) organisation. It is argued that such a script can lead to an agreed experiential goal that the organisation can use to achieve positive holistic service experiences for customers. It draws on techniques from practical theatre and is being tried, evaluated and refined in conjunction with employees of a UK multiple retail organisation. The process of dramatic script development with employees is demonstrated through the identification of the drama, the creation of the playtext and the exploration of subtext. It can be employed by any organisation where the nature of the business requires that face‐to‐face interactions take place between employees and customers.

Towards a Typology of Literary Translation: Drama Translation Science

Based on the ideas of my two edited books The Languages of Theatre (Problems in the Translation and Transposition of Drama) and Page to Stage (Theatre as Translation), this paper attempts to arrive at a typology of translation which deals with both the translation of drama from one language and culture into another and with the various aspects of transposing the dramatic script on to the stage or, vice versa, the creation of drama through processes of theatre production. The focus is on those aspects of drama translation which are different from other forms of literary translation, e.g. on problems of semiotics (i.e. translating non-verbal signs in drama). The paper concludes with recommendations for future developments in drama translation research, including the production process, Le. the transposition from the written (translated) drama to the performed work of art, and the conceptualisation of the production process.

Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico

Identified only in 1986, the Nahuatl Holy Week play is the earliest known dramatic script in any Native American language. In Holy Wednesday, Louise Burkhart presents side-by-side English translations of the Nahuatl play and its Spanish source. An accompanying commentary analyzes the differences between the two versions to reveal how the native author altered the Spanish text to fit his own aesthetic sensibility and the broader discursive universe of the Nahua church. A richly detailed introduction places both works and their creators within the cultural and political contexts of late sixteenth-century Mexico and Spain.

Performing Experiments in Undergraduate Social Psychology Classes

Students in an undergraduate social psychology class selected two interesting experiments and developed a dramatic script to describe the research. Students located the necessary props and performed the play for the class. Student evaluations indicated that the exercise was informative and enjoyable.