Interest In Drama Research Articles

Teaching Drama in Education in the University of Ghana: My perspectives about Ghanaian indigenous games

ABSTRACT This proposal reveals the significance of Applied Theatre in Ghana, with special interest in Drama in Education (DIE) as a teaching tool for teachers and learners. As a teaching tool, Drama in Education places tremendous emphasis on Process, Performance and Skill oriented activities to achieve its teaching and learning goals. The dramatic experiences derived from the improvisations; creative dramatics, mime, role-play and other Ghanaian indigenous art forms such as games, symbols, proverbs, storytelling, etc. in the learning explorations expedite transformation in learners. In these dramatic developments, creativity helps to improve not only learners but society as a whole. This paper aims at exhibiting some of the games employed in various sessions with students in the University of Ghana.

Utiles Nugae: Restoration Plays in Samuel Pepys's Library

Utiles Nugae:Restoration Plays in Samuel Pepys's Library Juan A. Prieto-Pablos Samuel Pepys's interest in drama is a primary theme in accounts of his life and personality. One of his main biographers, Arthur Bryant, remarks that this interest was recognizable since his youth and further states that the theater was "his chief weakness." Claire Tomalin includes the theater among the several things ("music, . . . celebration, processions, ritual and fine clothes") that "delighted him throughout his life."1 This consensus extends to theater critics: Helen McAffee says that "everything and everybody on the stage appealed to him," Montague Summers calls him an "ardent theatre lover," and Henry B. Wheatley and Peter Holland go so far as to define Pepys's theater interest as an "addiction" and his playgoing as "obsessive," respectively.2 The entries in his Diary, covering his daily activities from 1660 to 1669, do seem to confirm these descriptions. McAfee collected references to Pepys's attendance of no fewer than 150 plays,3 and Deborah C. Payne estimates that he visited a playhouse over three hundred times in the nine years covered by the Diary.4 What is recurrently ignored, however, is that the Diary is almost the exclusive source on his playgoing or playreading activities. The scarcity of references to such activities in other documents has not deterred scholars from assuming that this was a permanent feature in Pepys's life. So, for example, Emmet L. Avery states that "Pepys in 1680, long after he discontinued his diary, still attended the theatres"; and Summers implicitly defines Pepys's relationship with the theater as a long-lasting one in the title of his Playhouse of Pepys (London, 1935), which covers London's theatrical production from 1660 to 1682, beyond the more limited range of the Diary years.5 Only in the last decade has Pepys's traditional image been reconsidered. Payne has found some evidence in the Diary itself to conclude that Pepys's attachment to the theater was conditioned by his pursuit of new social identities, which changed in accordance [End Page 23] with the varying conditions of "historical and personal contingencies."6 She confines her analysis to the years of the Diary, but her approach can be applied to the study of Pepys's relationship with plays after 1669, too. That application is the purpose of this essay. Indeed, there are very few references to visits to playhouses or to playreading in other documents related to Pepys's life, but the extent and shape of his relationship can be attested also by looking at the plays he kept in his library, which still remains very much as he left it before his death. According to Kate Loveman, Pepys intended his library to be a lasting representation of himself—or rather, of his best, most socially acceptable self—for those who visited it.7 My purpose in this essay is to discuss the part played by his collection of plays, particularly those acted or published after 1660, in Pepys's general plan. My initial hypothesis was that he must have kept copies of the plays he was most interested in, either because those were the ones he most liked or—as Payne and Loveman contend—because they were the most fitting for the public image he wished to project throughout his library as a whole. Contrary to what I expected, however, Pepys's play collection lacks the consistency one would have expected from such a theater lover. What the collection suggests instead is that Pepys underwent a significant shift of attitude toward drama soon after the Diary years. In this essay, I seek to ascertain the extent and consistency of that shift by (1) reviewing the influence that the Diary holds in current descriptions of him as a lover of plays; (2) discussing the functions that Pepys assigned to his whole library and those that the volumes containing plays may have had as part of the library; and (3) trying to assess the relevance of these plays as illustrations of his public and private interests. My conclusion is that the plays he kept in his library cannot be taken as evidence of any permanent interest in...

Description of a Theatre Review Writing Task in an Online University Classroom Setting

The Internet provides us with a plethora of material to read and view and is the tool that people use today to communicate and acquire information. YouTube is a globally-used platform for individuals and organizations to share audio and visual material. Due to the COVID-19 situation, many teachers in schools and universities have looked to this website to supplement their teaching as it provides a scope and depth of material that is easily and readily accessible to the public. Theatres having been forced to close because of the pandemic have used this platform to share their work, and many teachers, especially those teaching theatre or performance-related studies have accessed recordings of performances to use in the online classroom as it is, as far as I know, the only way to access the arts for free during the pandemic. As a teacher of English language with an interest in drama and theatre arts, I had been viewing many free performances as I hope to share and foster an appreciation of drama and theatre in my students. With that in mind, I attempted to design a theatre reviewing task for use in the EFL classroom. The report shows my findings and my reflections of the task, and reveals that viewing and writing about the theatre arts can have a positive influence on students.

المسلسلات الأجنبية في الفضائيات الكوردية ودورها قي تنمية الوعي لدى الشباب في إقليم كوردستان (المسلسلات الكورية نموذجاً) (دراسة ميدانية على عينة من طلبة معهد الفنون الجميلة في مدينة السليمانية)

The dubbing process for the Foreign Dramas by the Kurdish language became a serious phenomenon in the Kurdish satellite TV, especially in the past few years. It attracted a wide audience, especially young adolescents. And prepared by some breakthrough hostile to Kurdish culture and value coordinated by others remedy for the structural gaps and lapses have, as a result of climate which is brought into existence globalization and secretions variety dimensional, saturated value and cognitive effects bearing a strong identity of its elements. From here, the problem of this research is the ambiguity of their role in a series of developmental processes Kurdish awareness of young people and the extent of the impact that caused it. This research is important from the theme referred to above, which is still an important focus on the priorities of community knowledge, information and technical and popular and others, as well as it studies the few that deal with this kind of soap operas and effects of development on the awareness of the youth, which contributes to the enrichment of Kurdish Library and alert researchers new interesting its other aspects that have not been studied yet. This research as a description example aims to detect and confirm the type and importance of the information and knowledge provided by these serials for various community affairs and how they are displayed and interpreted, and to identify the motives of exposure receiver to those series and duration of time. This research is somewhat descriptive research, which is through the study of the facts associated with the variables in question and clarifies, targeting recognized indicators laxatives to understand its ties with other phenomena. To achieve the objectives of this research, and to invoke the curriculum survey which demonstrated suitability for this purpose as proven by many scientific researches, I realized many important results, including: The information offered by the Korean series showed by the Kurdish satellite TV in the Kurdistan Region is adequate information and relative value, community events and crises in general. Sufficiency of those series to provide explanations and public surface phenomena and economic crisis and none sank in detail the structural and influential. Creating those negative effects series with the relative majority of respondents to the concepts of democracy and public freedoms, taking into consideration the dissenting views that compete with such a majority in number. The existence of contradictory assertions and relatively neutral, towards a pseudo- interpretation of the Korean Series about the fairness of factional strife in society and immortality. The study, finally, sets some recommendations including: Follow-up young families for their children, especially adolescents and guiding them towards viewing main dramas. Kurdish interest in drama and the study develops and supports to bring it to the level of competition with foreign drama through productivity and up-gradation of art and technology.

Science in the service of melodrama: Remembering the Carolingians in the nineteenth century

Using as a case study the historical representation of Charlemagne’s son Emperor Louis the Pious (r. 814–840) and his enemies, this article demonstrates that the pervasive interest in drama during the nineteenth century often informed the writing of historical narrative, which bent its ‘scientific’ claims to accord with dramatic conventions. Central to drama was the exploration of distinct traits of the human condition – apparently timeless and universal motives, interests, and passions – that made it seem a generic form perfectly suited to the historian’s craft. Such melodramatic, ‘spectacular’ history has left a tenacious legacy, and it is one with which historians continue to struggle in their post-historicist attempts to narrate in an honest way the lives of people from the pre-modern past.

The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama by David Kornhaber

Reviewed by: The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama by David Kornhaber Mary Ann Frese Witt David Kornhaber, The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016. In this well-written and original book, David Kornhaber correctly maintains that Nietzsche's interest in drama and theater has until recently been neglected by scholars. Even most of those who acknowledge an influence of Nietzsche on modern drama tend to see it as philosophical rather than theatrical. Rarely is The Birth of Tragedy read as a text about theater. Kornhaber, highlighting the convergence of philosophy and theater, examines in the first half of the book Nietzsche's profound interest in and debt to drama and theater from The Birth of Tragedy through The Case of Wagner. In the second half, he reads the work of three modern dramatists—Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill—in the light of their reception of Nietzsche's theories of the theater. In his thorough and well-informed interpretation of The Birth of Tragedy, along with other early writings by Nietzsche, Kornhaber convincingly demonstrates the young philologist's passionate interest in both drama and performance. Not only did Nietzsche read the classical German drama and theories of theater by Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, he attended the theater frequently and wrote numerous theater [End Page 371] reviews himself. In The Birth, the actor embodies the Dionysian and the dramatic poet the Apollonian. Drama cannot be separated from performance: both are necessary to the spirit of tragedy. For Kornhaber, "the first tragic philosopher," as Nietzsche called himself, might today be designated a performance theorist. His view of tragedy is also philosophical in that in performance genuine tragedy points toward metaphysical truths that cannot be shown in mere words. Nietzsche's story of the birth of tragedy is also to a large extent concerned with tragedy's demise. Socrates's rationality and Euripides's emphasis on page over stage abandon the Dionysian and thus the crucial metaphysical component of tragedy. In calling for a "music-making Socrates," Nietzsche is also calling for a rebirth of tragedy in Europe in his own time. As is well-known, in 1876 he saw Richard Wagner's opera as hailing this rebirth, only to completely reverse himself a decade later. "I am essentially anti-theatrical," he wrote in The Gay Science in 1887. "I regard the theatre with deep contempt." In The Case of Wagner, Wagner's music-drama appears as a spectacle for the masses. And yet, Kornhaber convincingly argues, Nietzsche's proclaimed anti-theatricality does not signify an abandonment of his essential positions in The Birth. Anti-theatricality, as Martin Puchner has shown, can in fact open the way for a new kind of theater. To a certain extent, Nietzsche considered himself (inspired by Bizet rather than Wagner) as a music-making Socrates, particularly in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Although he disparaged the plays being produced on European stages, he continued to hope for a birth of the modern theater he had envisioned. To what extent did the modern drama by playwrights aware of Nietzsche's writing on theater fulfill his hope for a rebirth of tragedy? The question is probably unanswerable. In his introduction, Kornhaber attempts a very brief survey of modern dramatists under the impact of Nietzsche, mentioning Ibsen, Yeats, Pirandello, and Genet. A broader and more exact survey would have been helpful. There is little to suggest that Pirandello was well-acquainted with Nietzsche's works or wanted to write modern tragedy in a Nietzschean vein. His contemporary Gabriele D'Annunzio, however, read Nietzsche extensively and explicitly attempted to introduce in his own modern tragedies a rebirth of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Genet was indeed a great admirer of Nietzsche, but the most important French man of the theater to mention would be Antonin Artaud, whom Kornhaber discusses in his Epilogue. Whereas there is no explicit justification for the choice to focus on Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill, the chapters on each of them are revealing in that they trace what each dramatist found in reading Nietzsche and how their plays incorporate...

A Study on the Hair Style Imitation Behavior according to the Mass Media in Middle-Aged Women

This study targets middle-aged women living in Busan. They were surveyed about hair style imitation behavior through the mass media. The conclusions were follows: Middle-aged women, as they aged, appeared to show economic stability and home ownership. Consequently they spent more money on themselves. The wave perm was the most popular hair style in that demographic and they visited hair salons more often as they aged. Between ages 35 and 40, they accessed the internet via smart phone and computer more than women over age 40. The study showed a high interest in drama and entertainment programs. In younger ages, there was a high awareness of pop stars. Women who spent more money on themselves at hair salons tended to be more aware of celebrities than those who spent less. Just as women who spent more money on themselves showed a higher tendency to imitate pop stars, younger women were more likely to use mass media to imitate celebrity hair styles. Based on these findings, the study concluded that middle aged women tended to imitate pop stars through the mass media to achieve a young, stylish image. These women also spent more money on themselves. Middle aged women who participate in social media and imitate popular styles may be trying to improve their self-image.

Moshe Lazar (1928-2012)

Moshe Lazar (1928-2012) Robert A. Taylor Moshe Lazar was truly a man of the world, a tireless opponent of anti-Semitism, a ground-breaking scholar in troubadour studies, in medieval drama and in Ladino linguistics, a crusader for the preservation of Sephardic texts and culture, and a translator of poetry and plays from Spanish and French into Hebrew, and of modern Hebrew poetry into French, including that of Chagall who wrote in both Russian and Yiddish. His lively eclectic curiosity led him into an immense variety of intellectual fields, including original studies of Hell and the Devil, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, modern French and Spanish drama. He began his life-long interest in drama by studying pantomime with Marcel Marceau in Paris at the end of the World War II; he counted Elie Wiesel and Eugene Ionesco as well as Marc Chagall among his close friends. Moshe’s colleague William Thalmann, chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California (USC) spoke of his “vibrant presence” and his delight in sharing his knowledge and research with colleagues and students. His colleague Mario Saltarelli called him a “perfect sleuth,” one of whose most intense missions was to collect and preserve as much material as he could about Sephardic Jewish culture; Varun Soni, Dean of Religious Life at USC, said that “his extraordinary life and legacy is an enduring testament to the power of courage, compassion, and wisdom”; his wife Sonia said: “Moshe was one of a kind … intense, passionate, a fighter … I called him my soldier scholar.” He was born on the fourth of July in Bercu, Romania; as an infant, he moved to Antwerp, Belgium with his family, then after nine years to France in his father’s truck to escape the threatened Blitzkrieg; he and his family were captured in south-west France and held for three years in the Holocaust camp of Rivesaltes, awaiting transfer to Auschwitz, but they managed to escape with the help of the French Resistance; Moshe was concealed for two years in a Catholic school where he was able to talk his way out of training as an electrician in favor of developing his education in languages and culture; he was reunited miraculously with his parents, four brothers and sister after the war. After further studies at the [End Page 225] Sorbonne and the University of Salamanca, he emigrated to Israel in 1948 at the age of twenty, where he fought in the War of Independence as a member of the Palmakh, and in two other wars in the Sinai, while studying for a master’s degree in Romance philology and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; returning to France, he completed a PhD at the Sorbonne in 1957 with his provocative study of “courtly love and fin’amors” in which he showed once and for all that the troubadours were not only singing about idealized Platonic love, but clearly about sex, among other things. He was later to produce critical editions of Bernart de Ventadorn and of the fifteenth-century Occitan play Lo Jutgamen general. Over his lifetime, he established a vast personal library of rare and specialized books, and in recent years he donated over fifteen thousand of them to the University of Southern California Library. Moshe was a polyglot who read, spoke or wrote in at least a dozen languages. He has published translations from Yiddish, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Old French and English into Hebrew, and from Occitan, Old French, Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew and Ladino into French and English. His most enduring research interests were in the study and preservation of ancient Sephardic texts from medieval Spain, written in Spanish with Hebrew letters, prior to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and in establishing as his magnum opus the richly documented history of 1800 years of anti-Semitic propaganda in speeches, writings, cartoons and films, a task which had preoccupied him ever since his teenage years of internment in France, and which he intended to publish in a monumental work entitled Satan’s Synagogue: The Dehumanization of Jews. His teaching career was as innovative and broadly-based as his scholarly research; he began in Israel...

"Look on Me": Theater, Gender, and Poetic Identity Formation in Milton's Maske

Scholarly approaches to Milton's interest in drama have missed how theater represents for Milton the ethical challenge of negotiating poetic identity with a reading and viewing public. This article locates Milton's Lady within complementary discursive contexts that efface female agency through either virulent anti-feminism associated with theater or dualistic idealizations that elevate the soul while denigrating the agential body. The Maske 's staging of an emergent woman imperiled by the visual and discursive field is in part a test case for a public poetry. By way of the "Maske of Cupid" in Faerie Queene 3, Milton constructs Sabrina's paradoxical function as "uncontrouled worth" enabling the paralyzed Lady by offering a spectacle of an inviolably chaste body that can enter social circulation and work to reform it while evading its distorting power. Nonetheless, Sabrina's ghostly ephemerality and the evident constraints on the Lady's agency suggest why public drama for Milton henceforth would be indefinitely deferred but never staged.

“Theatre as a Memory Machine”: Magrita Prinslo (1896) and Donkerland (1996)

Theatre, as a simulacrum of the cultural and historical process itself, seeking to depict the full range of human actions within their physical context, has always provided society with the most tangible records of its attempts to understand its own operations. It is the repository of cultural memory, but, like the memory of each individual, it is also subject to continual adjustment and modification as the memory is recalled in new circumstances and contexts. (Carlson 2004: 2) Introduction In Jill Fletcher's well-known book on the history of South African theatre, entitled The Story of South African Theatre: 1780-1930 (1994), she gives a fascinating overview of the establishment of a theatre tradition in South Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries. The influence of certain historical events and the impact of various political regimes at the Cape of Good Hope during this period all left traces on the development of such a tradition. The colonisation of the Cape of Good Hope first by Dutch settlers (1652-1806) and then the more prolonged colonisation of the Cape and South Africa by the British (from 1806 till 1961) led to the development of two mainstream European theatre traditions in South Africa: one that was mainly influenced by the British theatre tradition, and one that was clearly to a greater extent influenced by the European (Dutch, German, French) tradition. Afrikaans drama and theatre developed from the latter tradition. I want to highlight in this article the importance of only two plays in this tradition, namely S.J. du Toit's Magrita Prinslo (1896) and Deon Opperman's Donkerland (1996). Whilst du Toit's play is scarcely known or remembered by contemporary Afrikaans audiences and is relegated to the annals of South African/Afrikaans theatre history, Opperman's play is well known, has received the most prestigious Afrikaans (literary) award (namely the Hertzog Prize) and is today widely studied by students, scholars and researchers. The discussion will be placed within the broader context of a contemporary interest in drama and theatre studies, namely a focus on the relationship between theatre and memory. This interest is evident in a number of recent studies (notably Marvin Carlson's The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine). A comparative reading of these two Afrikaans plays, namely Magrita Prinslo (1896) and Donkerland (1996), will focus on the theme of Afrikaner nationalism as a common theme linking these two historical plays. The main concepts and ideas associated with this theme as highlighted in this discussion are: the (re)interpretation of certain events within Afrikaner history and the relationship with the indigenous people of this land; the Afrikaans language; and the volksmoeder theme. 1 Two Afrikaans Plays: Magrita Prinslo (1896) and Donkerland (1996) 1.2 Magrita Prinslo by S.J. du Toit (1896) The significance of du Toit's play lies mainly in the fact that it is considered by most theatre historians (Bosman, Binge, Fletcher) to be the first published play in Afrikaans (1) in South Africa. Magrita Prinslo is on one level just a simple love story, namely the story of Magrita's loyal and unshaken love for Pieter Botha, even after she is wrongly informed by his love rival, Koos Potgieter, that he has died. The historical context in which this romantic love triangle is set, that is, the Great Trek, can, however, be seen as the main focus of this play. The romantic intrigue plays out against the backdrop of important events associated with the Great Trek, namely the infamous Slagtersnek incident (where the British hanged 6 so-called Boer traitors in 1816 in public); Commandant Hendrik Potgieter's Trek to Natal (1838), and Commandant Piet Retief's murder at the hand of the Zulu King, Dingaan (17 February 1838). These historical events are all regarded as important events within Afrikaner history and became the focus of many historical studies of the period. …

Jews in the Fleury Playbook

COMPARATIVE 9?F???F Volume 38 No. 1 · Spring 2004 Jews in the Fleury Playbook Theresa Tinkle If the Saracens are to be detested ... how much more are the Jews to be execrated and hated who, utterly insensible to Christ and the Christian faith, reject, blaspheme, and ridicule that Virgin Birth and all the sacraments of human redemption? Nor do I say this to incite royal or Christian sword to slay their wickedness.... God wishes them not to be killed, but to be preserved in a life worse than death, like Cain the fratricide , for greater torment and greater ignominy.. . . I . . . exhort that they be punished in a way suitable to their wickedness. —Peter the Venerable1 ... the quality ofhostility against Jews cannot be determined by premises about Jews, for it is a characteristic of the mentality of non-Jews, not of Jews, and it is determined, not bythe objective reality ofJews,but by what the symbol "Jews" has signified to non-Jews. —Gavin I. Langmuir2 The FleuryPlaybook,a manuscript collection often Latin plays,includes a surprisingly broad range ofmedieval dramatic types: four miracles of Saint Nicholas, five episodes from Christ's life, and a conversion ofSaint 2 Comparative Drama Paul. The Playbook covers a broad range ofsubjects, includes both liturgical and nonliturgical plays, suggests diverse performance conventions (both monastic and nonmonastic), and employs several musical styles. The collections heterogeneity arguably points to multiple authors and multiple points of origin (I in fact assume that there were multiple authors,though my argument does not depend on this point).After scrutinizing these aspects of the Playbook's diversity, C. Clifford Flanigan persuasively concludes that the only unifying principle is the redactor's interest in drama for its own sake, regardless of its subject matter or connection to the liturgy. In other words, the Fleury collection demonstrates one redactor's "horizon ofexpectations"about drama as a genre.3 Flanigan's conclusions are persuasive, his theoretical approach compelling . In fact, his argument has broader implications than he explicitly recognizes, for the "horizon of expectations" refers to the entire literary experience of readers, encompassing genres, styles, themes, and historical events.4 This and complementary theoretical models would encourage us to look at historicallyspecific reader expectations other than genre in relation to the Playbook.5 Historical specificity is, of course, a relative goal, particularly with medieval manuscripts.This manuscript was mostlikely copied in northern France in the thirteenth century; we know that it resided in the library ofthe Benedictine abbey ofFleury (Abbaye Saint Benoît de Fleury, at Saint Benoît-sur-Loire) in the thirteenth century.6 Fleurywas the preeminent Benedictine abbey of the Orléanais, esteemed for its learning and literary innovations, its possession ofSaint Benedicts relics, and its royal privileges.7 Scholars usually suppose the collection was composed at the monastery (some countertheories notwithstanding), though a definitive provenance cannot be established on existing evidence.8 Still, the Playbook obviously contributes to the literary and dramatic culture of thirteenth-century northern Europe, and we may assume the Fleury monks read it as we assume they read other works in their library. We cannot assume they witnessed performances of the plays: the Playbook is not connected to any service books or performative context, and there is no evidence of performances at Fleury or elsewhere. Still, the manuscript clearly presents drama as enacted mimesis. The texts sometimes detail performance conventions (costumes,processional routes,gestures, Theresa Tmkle3 and the like); they certainly encode meaning through such conventions. The manuscript thus offers historical evidence ofdrama presented both as a performative text and as a genre appropriate for reading, and the Playbook is best approached with both performances and readers in mind. In what follows, I aim at this ideal,though my theoretical perspective leads me to emphasize the verbal works, and to consider rubrics for performance primarily as they suggest meanings to a learned reader. One of the most obvious features of the Playbook is its repetitive, stereotypical anti-Semitism, and contemporary readers no doubt approached these passages with a "horizon of expectations" formed by the literature and events oftheir time. A thirteenth-century churchman would encounter destructive images of Jews in many discourses:9 exegesis presents Scripture...

Spatio-Temporal Dynamics in Sophocles' Oedipus the King

��� A work as complex as Stravinsky’s Oedipus not only invites but calls for approaches from a variety of angles. If anything, the kaleidoscopic nature of the articles devoted to the piece in this volume reflects this necessity. My perspective, that of a classicist with a special interest in drama, complements the field of vision in an obvious way. But there is no way of denying my roots: Stravinsky is nothing but my point of departure, and I am ultimately interested in the Sophoclean play. Let me make two related personal remarks at this point. One is that I hasten to confess narrowsightedness. I am, currently at any rate, mainly interested in theatrical aspects of ancient drama, and this considerably shapes my field of vision within academia and outside of it. No lecture, no concert, no committeemeeting, no dentist appointment passes without my thinking about the theatrical aspects of these (social) dramas in performance. I am confident that nowadays few will doubt the importance of a theatrical approach, not least because it opens up a whole universe of further issues as soon as theatricality is taken beyond technical aspects towards its broader aesthetic, sociological, psychological, and ideological contexts. But even so, no one is safe from tunnel-vision. There was never a question, in hindsight, that my look at Stravinsky, let alone Sophocles, would be a theatrical one. The second personal remark is of greater importance. Being part of a Stravinsky symposium once again brought home to me the selling-point of both interdisplinary and reception-oriented approaches: the fact that they make you look both ways. I now definitely know more about Stravinsky than before. But approaching Sophocles through Stravinsky taught me even more. My journey to Sophocles via Stravinsky will focus on two interconnected features of the opera-oratorio, one big and one small. The small one is the prima facie insignificant fact that at the end of Cocteau’s libretto Oedipus leaves Thebes as an exile and beggar, whereas Sophocles opted for a different closure. There Oedipus asks for exile, but upon Creon’s arrival the issue becomes subject to heavy contention and ends up being resolved in a manner that is more than surprising: for the time being Oedipus is to remain in the palace, while Creon sends for another oracle from Apollo in Delphi. The big feature, and the one I would like to start with, is Stravinsky’s well-known strategy of turning his opera-oratorio into something static and monumental. This, I shall argue, picks up on something intrinsic

Given to theatrics: how to agree with your critic on the qualities of qualitative research

Editor's note:An article by Kathleen Gershman, “Surviving Through Time: A Life History of a High‐School Drama Production,” was published in volume 1, number 3 of QSE.The article was responded to in the next issue by John Bengston, an educational psychologist with an interest in drama and qualitative research. In his article, “What makes a study qualitative?,” Bengston draws a connection between the rigors demanded by theater productions and the demands of qualitative research. In the following article Gershman responds.

An Active Imagination: Coleridge and the Politics of Dramatic Reform

In his of Bertram, which appeared first in Courier (September 1816) and then in Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge draws what proves to be a crucial analogy between political and theatrical management. Hailing Samuel Whitbread's proposal to reform theater by limiting size of governing body of Drury Lane, Coleridge applies this wisdom to contemporary political affairs and suggests that in both cases the right of suffrage may be too widely diffused.' Although explicit analogy was dropped when Critique was inserted in Biographia, it nonetheless informs Coleridge's views of drama and contemporary stage. For Coleridge in his dramatic discussions consistently navigates between what he calls body politic and body theatric. To assert a crucial connection between politics and drama in Coleridge immediately invites two objections. The first sees Coleridge's residence in a Kantean hazeworld as precluding any significant engagements with political affairs of his times. Although still common, such an objection has been substantially countered by recent critical work and editorial focus of Princeton edition of his collected works.2 A second objection takes Coleridge's position as a romantic poet to imply both a lack of talent and a lack of interest in drama and contemporary stage. This implication has been challenged much less frequently than first, since it arises out of an entrenched view of romantic drama overall.3 Because we are in habit of viewing plays produced by romantic poets as artistic failures, we neglect to take seriously seriousness with which these poets wrote and theorized about drama. Worse, we overlook degree to which their conception of drama works against compartmentalizing of aesthetic and political concerns. In particular, Coleridge not only began his career as a playwright and earned more from his plays than from any other literary endeavor, he also wrote his plays and drama criticism expressly to reform stage and contemporary playgoers' states of mind.

Nightmare country

David Kihazo is in his early 30s. He became an undergraduate student of English literature at Makerere University in 1971, the year in which Idi Amin seized power. His closest mentor was David Rubadiri, poet and academic, who as a Malawian found his position increasingly untenable and finally had to go into exile from Uganda'. David Kihazo has been a secondary school teacher and a Makerere Fellow in Creative Writing, when he was able to develop his talent for and interest in drama. He is at present Editor (correspondence courses) in the University's Centre for Continuing Education. The problem for him and for many other members of staff at Makerere is that, in their perception, the expectation of improvement in their own condition and the condition of the country after the defeat of the Amin regime has not been realised. The solidarity of Makerere staff has collapsed now that the pressures remembered in this article have gone and other types of pressure (ethnic and religious) have appeared, leading to fission and new demoralisation in the university community. Despondency among younger staff such as Kihazo has been increased by economic hardship. An assistant lecturer's salary for a month will buy one bunch of matoke (plantain), the staple foodstuff; this will last for about a week. Nothing is left over for any other needs and under-nourishment leads to further lowering of spirits. Makerere staff spend much time hunting for money to live on (a professor will use his old car as a taxi, a woman lecturer spends spare time at the market) and many take refuge in alcohol as the quickest way out of their predicament. There is also cynicism among young intellectuals at the sight of former exiles now mysteriously wealthy. Kihazo himself feels he is in a dead-end, rather mechanical job. The typical ‘qualification inflation’ of the Third World means that his talents and background are not enough to secure him an academic post (for that, he needs a Master's degree and the university has no money for staff development for persons who are not already in an academic post). He is still valiantly creative; both in spoken and written words, but he and his friends constantly explore the question: ‘What went wrong?’ The trauma suffered under Amin is still vividly with them and they necessarily continue to explore it and the intellectual listlessness and apathy which seem to have followed. The author has had a collection of his poems published in Uganda and some have been anthologised internationally.

Drama, Dance and Music ed. by James Redmond

374 Comparative Drama a friend’s work”—p. 263), but from at least some of the evidence I got a sense of different appeals associated with different playhouses (par­ ticularly through the repeated allusions to the Red Bull), whether those distinctions are to be attributed to a greater plebeian presence or to the presence of a different element of the privileged minority. A bit more concern with the potential variations in taste among the privileged or a somewhat higher attendance by plebeians at a few of the theaters might have forestalled any such objections. But such small qualifications should not detract from the solid achieve­ ment of this book which should be read by anyone with an interest in drama in the age of Shakespeare. Cook avoids what she terms “a kind of upward mobility of misperception,” a transformation of “an audience once seen as louts or sturdy artisans into an audience of fine gentlemen” (p. 10), but rather offers a reasoned, well documented case (accompanied by useful maps, tables, and bibliography) that, if attended, could do what few works of criticism succeed in doing—change the way we perceive drama and playgoing at the Globe. ALAN C. DESSEN University of North Carolina Drama, Dance and Music (Themes in Drama, 3), ed. James Redmond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. xviii + 254. $36.00. Except for its short lapse into realism at the end of the last century, the history of the stage shows that music has always been an integral part of the art and expression of drama, not only as an adjunct extending the emotional statement of the action for pathos or comedy, but also at great moments as a force by which dramatic speech has risen from poetry to song. The pervasive presence of music both instrumental and vocal in Shakespeare, or more astonishingly in the realistic Chekhov, comes as a surprising revelation. So, too, with dance: if the stage had not itself prompted the choreography of masque or ballet as independent art forms, then the stylizing of movement and gesture in drama has always thrust it towards the edge of terpsichorean expression. It did not need Wagner and his concept of the total art work to remind us that drama was (happily) never “pure” in form, but a composite of many arts; that a shaping rhythm is at the heart of any performing art that must move in time; and that the words of a play invite us to seek out the music and dance of the text that can bring them to life. Only a periodical publication on the scale of Cambridge University Press’s annual Themes in Drama under the editorship of James Redmond could perhaps have entertained the notion of a whole book on the sub­ ject of drama, dance, and music. This excellent series, appearing just at the time when drama is being seen as a worthy subject for study and research in a few enterprising places (although, ironically, not in Cam­ bridge itself), could yet be the forum for international scholarship in all those cross-disciplinary areas which drama joyfully embraces, and the choice of topics for the first three volumes (“Drama and Society” and Reviews 375 “Drama and Mimesis” were numbers 1 and 2) suggests that this will be its strength. Volumes 4 and 5 are announced as “Drama and Symbolism” and “Drama and Religion,” topics which again point to the essential interrelationship of otherwise disparate themes from which drama as a form takes its life. As for “Drama, Dance and Music,” the very fact that drama juxtaposes and superimposes the visual and aural senses in innumerable ways would seem to make this new volume a prime item for the drama student’s shelf. However, I confess to a niggling disappointment, since this volume falls short of being the exciting seminal collection it might have been. Not just that one-third of the book is given to unrelated matter (two otherwise praiseworthy features of the series are the unrestricted long review article and a “forum” for discussion, so that in volume 3 this formula permits a near-monograph survey of the plays of John Ford of 36 pages and an...

Role Play: Acting or Otherwise?

Don Feasey is a tutor in Education and Drama with a special interest in drama as a mode of psychological interaction, and psychotherapy. He leads psycho-dynamic groups with social workers as well as having responsibility for training teachers and youth workers.

Drama and the high school curriculum

When teachers and school administrators began to talk and think of participation in dramatics as co-curricular rather than extra-curricular activity, education was advanced a timid, but solid step. Educators at last realize that play production cannot be done unless learning takes place. The learning, here, is immediate and intense, and is a vital result of the production, especially in the high school. Whether the play is to be a class play, an all school production, or a club presentation, whatever its relation to the total school program, an accurate evaluation of the benefits, values, and opportunities for learning experiences involved in the production of a play will result in placing the concept of the school play within, not outside, the curriculum. Furthermore, if students are to be used, if school facilities are to be utilized, and if teachers are to be directors, there is little argument that this is a matter of education, not merely entertainment. Where do play production and the accepted content of schools meet? The obvious and most important place for the use of drama is in the English class. There are plays which support the content of any class, but it is in English class that one must deal with the raw materials of language out of which plays are made. The English teacher is involved with style, form, philosophy, projection of character, and language-all the elements of play production. Consider how school children react to television and motion pictures. Since the advent of television, no child of school age is without interest in drama. They enact their favorite stories at every opportunity. The older fans emulate their favorite stories, and everyone can plot the story line, predicting the exact moment when the villian will fall, anticipating lines eagerly, showing keen sensitivities to this form of drama. It is the duty of the school to capitalize on this interest.

Yeats and the Theater: A Selected Bibliography

YEATS'S INTEREST IN DRAMA spanned the whole of his productive career and manifested itself in varied forms, such as practical participation in the creation of the Abbey Theatre and the founding of the national theater movement in Ireland, production of extensive prose work on dramatic theory and criticism, collaboration with other playwrights, composing the English versions of two Greek plays, dramatic exploration of the world of Irish folklore and of the traditional Japanese Noh theater, and, most important, creation of a considerable body of original and experimental drama in verse and prose.

Perspectives on Modern Verse Drama

INTEREST IN DRAMA has been perennial among poets in every century, although since the eighteenth century there has been an increasing separation between the interests of the stage and the interests of a living poetic art. The results of this separation have been particularly evident in the verse theater, while the theater for prose has maintained an element of sensitivity to current life and art which has long been lost to the poetic drama. It is not until the twentieth century that a group of verse playwrights have attempted to revitalize verse drama for the English-speaking stage by bringing to it the same standards of artistic coherence insisted upon in other fields of creative endeavor. In modem art this artistic coherence has expressed itself in a search for a living form; for a meaningful relationship between content, structure, and language. The conception of verse drama as a formal experience was what had been lost as a result of the increasingly rigid separation on the stage of the domain of poetry and the world of real and vital concerns.