Scenic Artists Research Articles

O drama dos artistas na pandemia brasileira

Abstract This paper aims to present the dramas experienced by Brazilian artists during the COVID-19 pandemic. This investigation is nested in one of the axes of broader research on the social impacts of the pandemic in Brazil. Initially, we argue that a pandemic is a critical event with multiple scales, which affects populations unevenly, as is the case of art world professionals, an unorthodox field in terms of specialties and remuneration, which was already suffering from the impacts of reduced investments in public policies in the cultural sector since the mid-2010s. Given the measures to face the pandemic, among which are restrictions on gatherings, artistic events were prohibited, and professionals could not act conventionally, generating economic problems and psychological distress. This paper explores the dramatic report of some of these professionals, highlighting the strategies adopted to cope with the crisis due to the impossibility of performing, the scarcity of public policies for the sector, and the national political and economic elite disdain for the arts and culture. In-depth interviews were conducted with scenic artists, musicians, and DJs from August to December 2020.

The drama of artists in the Brazilian pandemic.

This paper aims to present the dramas experienced by Brazilian artists during the COVID-19 pandemic. This investigation is nested in one of the axes of broader research on the social impacts of the pandemic in Brazil. Initially, we argue that a pandemic is a critical event with multiple scales, which affects populations unevenly, as is the case of art world professionals, an unorthodox field in terms of specialties and remuneration, which was already suffering from the impacts of reduced investments in public policies in the cultural sector since the mid-2010s. Given the measures to face the pandemic, among which are restrictions on gatherings, artistic events were prohibited, and professionals could not act conventionally, generating economic problems and psychological distress. This paper explores the dramatic report of some of these professionals, highlighting the strategies adopted to cope with the crisis due to the impossibility of performing, the scarcity of public policies for the sector, and the national political and economic elite disdain for the arts and culture. In-depth interviews were conducted with scenic artists, musicians, and DJs from August to December 2020.

Investigações sobre treinamento e composição

O presente artigo apresenta uma revisão teórico-conceitual sobre o treinamento de atrizes e atores nas artes cênicas para o desenvolvimento técnico e artístico com vistas à potencialização e à ampliação das ações do corpo vocal. A Redução Fenomenológica (époché) é abordada como conceito chave de reflexão para a liberação dos automatismos do corpo vocal na prática teatral inspirada em Antonin Artaud. A questão é investigar as possibilidades de improvisação, de criação em devir-consciente, em suspensão, na busca por um Corpo Vocal sem Órgãos.

Defending the Standard Contract: Unmeasured Work, Class, and Design Professionalism in United Scenic Artists Local 829

How much is a theatrical design idea worth? Alternatively, how much should a professional theatre designer be paid? For many working today, standard minimum contract scales and “industry standards” help guide fee negotiations. In the United States, United Scenic Artists (USA) Local 829 was among the first bodies to align theatrical design with organized labor activism, and as such, its standard minimum contract for design is an object lesson in the value of artistic labor. These scales were developed nearly a century ago, and were the product of hard negotiation and legal action taken by US-American designers in the interwar period. Lee Simonson and Jo Mielziner are best remembered for their revolutionary use of space, scenery, and lighting, yet their professional advocacy within USA Local 829 provided the basis for today's standard design fees. Further, their defense of fair payment during the Depression and war years preserved scenic design as a form of labor analogous to other backstage crafts and trades.

O LARP COMO FERRAMENTA DE TRABALHO DO ATOR/PERFORMER

Esse artigo propõe uma pesquisa sobre larp (sigla de Live Action Role Playing Game), uma expressividade artística contemporânea com forte presença nos países escandinavos e trazida ao Brasil nos últimos anos, e sua relação com a performatividade de artistas cênicos de outras áreas, com especial atenção o teatro. Abordando o conceito de performatividade, traçamos uma relação entre o larp e a atuação/performance, e analisamos como algumas concepções do encenador Constantin Stanislavski podem estar relacionadas ao larp. Por fim, procuramos entender como a prática de diferentes jogos - produtos da arte do larp - podem auxiliar o ator/performer no exercício de seu trabalho.

Transatlantic transmissions in opera: the forgotten work of Czech-American Designer Richard Rychtarik

ABSTRACTThis paper restores to the historical record the work of the Czech-American theater designer Richard Rychtarik (1894–1982). Born in what would later become Czechoslovakia, and trained as an architect in Prague, Rychtarik moved to the United States in 1925 where he worked successfully with many opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera. Analyzing three selected productions that mark important transitions in Rychtarik's career and offer rich insight into his work: Die Walküre (The Cleveland Orchestra, 1934), Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (The Cleveland Orchestra, 1934), and Alceste (MET, 1941) I argue that, adapting the work of European scenic artists such as Adolphe Appia, Max Reinhardt and Vlastislav Hofman, Rychtarik embraced modernist thinking about staging and applied it in his work for opera. As a scenographer, he combined architectonic forms, distinctive colors, and conceptual work with light to transform the stage into a multifunctional dramatic space. With his scenographic designs and realizations he helped to disseminate and push through the vision of opera-theatre with a strong visual component, as practiced by Joseph Urban during his years on North-American stages, and so contributed to carving out a space for the designer as both the artist and the artisan, and one of the important agents in the process of opera-making.

Precursors for performance: a model for an unrealised production

ABSTRACTThis article discusses an unrealised production of Verdi’s opera Simon Boccanegra, directed by John Dexter and designed by Jocelyn Herbert, and scheduled for the 1984/85 season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The objects generated by the creative process, now held in the Jocelyn Herbert Archive at the National Theatre, London, are considered as ‘precursors for performance’, objects from which new objects can be produced. The set model for the production is a rich source of information about the collaboration between Dexter and Herbert, while notebooks, personal recollections and correspondence indicate how models were used in the conversation between Herbert and scenic artists. Rather than focusing on the teleological function of the archive in showing how an artist arrived at a final design, this approach provides a way of thinking about the generative potential of archival materials.

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

A Preparação Corporal para a Cena como Evocação de Potências para o Processo de Criação

O presente artigo tem o intuito de analisar o espaço da preparação corporal para a cena como local de evocação de potências para o processo de criação. Apontamos e aprofundamos pensamentos sobre a preparação do corpo na dança e no teatro a partir do atravessamento de experiências de duas dançarinas-atrizes-pesquisadoras-docentes com formação nestas áreas que desenvolvem juntas uma pesquisa voltada para a preparação corporal dos artistas da cena. Iremos falar de nossas próprias experiências, dialogando com autores que vislumbraram a cena como espaço sagrado do humano, como espaço da instabilidade, da descoberta, da intuição. Propomos uma reflexão sobre as etapas do processo de criação, sugestão de conteúdos que possam ancorar os trabalhos em sala de ensaio e a partilha de experiências vividas desde o início do projeto de preparação corporal.

Blue Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater

Blue Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater

From the score to the stage: an illustrated history of Continental opera production and staging

Without scenery, costumes, and stage action, an opera would be little more than a concert. But in the audience, we know little (and think less) about the enormous efforts of those involved in bringing an opera to life - by the stagehands who shift scenery, the scenic artists who create beautiful backdrops, the electricians who focus the spotlights, and the stage manager who calls them and the singers to their places during the performance. The first comprehensive history of the behind-the-scenes world of opera production and staging, From the Score to the Stage follows the evolution of visual style and set design in continental Europe from its birth in the seventeenth century up to today. In clear, witty prose, Evan Baker covers all the major players and pieces involved in getting an opera onto the stage, from the stage director who creates the artistic concept for the production and guides the singers' interpretation of their roles to the blocking of singers and placement of scenery. He concentrates on the people - composers, librettists, designers, and technicians - as well as the theaters and events that generated developments in opera production. Additional topics include the many difficulties in performing an opera, the functions of impresarios, and the business of music publishing. Delving into the absorbing and often neglected history of stage directing, theater architecture and technology, and scenic and lighting design, Baker nimbly links these technical aspects of opera to actual performances and performers, and the social context in which they appeared. Out of these details arise illuminating discussions of individual productions that cast new light on the operas of Wagner, Verdi, and others. Packed with nearly two hundred color illustrations, From the Score to the Stage is a revealing, always entertaining look at what happens before the curtain goes up on opening night at the opera house.

Audiences and Programs: Rare Illustrated Programs from the Théâtre Libre, the Théâtre d'Art, and the Théâtre L'oeuvre

Theatre historians have given surprisingly little attention to theatre playbills and programs as documents of material culture. The modern theatre “magazine” program especially, which began to develop in the 1860s, offers more than primary documents for dates, performers, and scenic artists, visual evidence of a performance, or the dramaturg's notes. For the cultural historian, these are open books, symbolically. Programs of the late twentieth century, packed as they are with advertisements, news of the theatre, photo montages, and litanies of benefactors and “friends,” document that larger performance of which the staged event is but a part, the performance of the imagined community to which, and from which the theatrical event ostensibly speaks.

Beerbohm Tree's Production of ‘The Tempest’, 1904

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is remembered today as a great character actor, as a personality, and as a wit: but as a producer he is seldom considered an important or even a positive influence on the course of Shakespearean interpretation in the twentieth century. Focusing on Tree's 1904 production of The Tempest, Brian Pearce argues that Tree was in fact an original and inventive director. Contrasting the faint praise or contempt of theatre historians with the adoption of many of Tree's ideas in later literary criticism of The Tempest, Pearce also suggests that the acceptance of the right of contemporary experimental directors to act in effect as ‘scenic artists’ sits oddly with attitudes to Tree's work, in which he fulfilled precisely such a role. Brian Pearce completed his PhD at the University of London in 1992, and since returning to South Africa has worked as a theatre director. He is a member of the board of directors of the Durban Theatre Workshop Company, and also teaches drama at Technikon Natal.

Scene Painters and their Work in America before 1800

An inquiry into eighteenth-century American scene painting must draw upon sources other than painter's renderings, since few are known to survive. The most promising source other than printed descriptions, barren at best, are the non-theatrical landscape and topographical (view) paintings of America's early scenic artists. No employment of these materials is possible, however, until the parameters of the relationship between easel and scene painting have been established.

Contemporaty Stage Design U.S.A.

Contemporary Stage Design U.S.A. is a catalogue of the current touring exhibition of the International Theatre Institute of the United States. The exhibition and the catalogue come as a result of two shocks: the first in 1967 in Prague when the Quadrennial of world-wide scene design opened without any participation from the United States; the second. four years later, at the second Prague Quadrennial which also opened without any designers from the United States. When the American designers who had attended the Quadrennial returned to New York. they went to the ITI (US and demanded that something be done about the lack of U.S. participation. The challenge was accepted on the condition that the American scenic artists take the lead in planning, judging. and launching the project. Although first aimed only at participation in the Third Prague in 1975. their efforts expanded into a longer tour. It opened at the Library and Museum of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. travelled on to the Kennedy Center. moves on to Prague for November ’75. then to the National Theatre in London and returns to the U.S. for a two year tour.

The Art of Acting: Part III. The Actor as Phenomenon

We have now reached the difficult point and must turn to the unpleasant truths. I regret it, but there is no other way if we want to exhaust our subject. I shall do it as painlessly as possible—without anesthesia. In the preceding chapter we followed the development of several important points in the theory of acting and reviewed the theorists’ artistic demands upon the actor. Finally, we arrive at the actor himself as a type, as a person. The length and purpose of this book do not permit us to occupy ourselves with all the great names, the celebrities, the unforgettable enchanters from the past and the present, so notable and so different. There is only room to mention isolated, selected examples out of which one—as elsewhere in the book—must represent many. It is reassuring to know that certain fundamental traits are alike and common to the majority of the great, leading scenic artists.

Gold Rush Movies

We think so well of our own times that some of us act as if Hollywood newsreels, travelogues, and documentaries were modern inventions. But a century ago our great-grandparents had travel pictures and edu cational reels that brought the distant world to them as readily as our neighborhood movies do to us. Scenic artists made long journeys to sketch with pencil and water color and oil the cities and the rivers, the strange, the quaint, the romantic corners and customs of the world. They spent weeks placing on hundreds of yards of canvas vast repre sentations of subjects that would instruct as well as please. And night after night audiences sat for two or three hours watching such pictures unroll before their eyes, while a commentator pointed out scenes of par ticular interest and a pianist from time to time played appropriate airs. The Funeral of Napoleon in Paris, the Burning of Moscow, the Ante diluvian World, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Niagara Falls and Mammoth Cave, Taylor's Campaigns in Mexico, a Whaling Voyage, a Balloon Flight from London to Mayence, a Grand Panorama of Broad way, the Hudson River, the City of New York, the Mississippi River (five pictures were done of Old Man River in the 1840's, the shortest of which was four hundred and twenty-five yards long) ? these were typical subjects the moving panorama presented to audiences. The excitement of the gold rush gave a new stimulus to newsreels. One picture of a voyage around Cape Horn was being exhibited in New York in mid-September of the first gold rush year. The spring of 1850 saw at Gothic Hall in Brooklyn a panorama of the Gold Mines of Cali fornia produced by Emmert (or Eimert) and Penfield. James Wilkins' Moving Mirror of the Overland Trail, painted in Peoria by a St. Louis artist, began its tour in September 1850. Beale and Craven's Voyage to California and Return was showing at Stoppani Hall, New York, in November 1850. At St. Louis in January 1851, Charles Rogers was busy painting another panorama of the Land Route to California. February 1853 saw the opening of Ball's Model of San Francisco at 312 Broad 29

Types of Actors' Trade Unions

Previous articleNext article FreeTypes of Actors' Trade UnionsPaul F. GemmillPaul F. Gemmill Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Political Economy Volume 35, Number 2Apr., 1927 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/253842 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:David Bisaha Defending the Standard Contract: Unmeasured Work, Class, and Design Professionalism in United Scenic Artists Local 829, Theatre Survey 61, no.22 (Mar 2020): 231–251.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557420000071Deborah Dean The relevance of ideas in a union’s organization of contingent workers: ‘Here come the fairy people!’, Work, Employment and Society 26, no.66 (Dec 2012): 918–934.https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017012458025Kristin McGee The Feminization of Mass Culture and the Novelty of All‐Girl Bands: The Case of the Ingenues, Popular Music and Society 31, no.55 (Dec 2008): 629–662.https://doi.org/10.1080/03007760802188454