Scenic Representation Research Articles

La cruelle fatalité de l’existence, ou la représentation du mal dans La Possession d’Henry Bataille

SummaryHenry Bataille’s name is often classified among authors who are fond of the poetics of “boulevard theater”, which seems to perpetuate the canonical form of drama. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, this theater underwent an undeniable crisis that undermined the very foundations of Aristotelian aesthetics, particularly those of action. The questioning of tradition is manifested primarily through a new approach to conflict, the origin of any dramatic intrigue, which evolves from a dispute between antagonists into a resolute intrapersonal confrontation unfolding within the troubled souls of characters grappling with acute suffering. While delving into evil and its scenic representation, Henry Bataille approaches this issue in an unusual manner for a French playwright of the late nineteenth century. In the play La Possession, we witness, on one hand, the expression of cruelty fueled by animosity between characters, and on the other hand, we observe metapsychological violence descending upon the poor, defenseless creatures facing the irrevocability of fate. If the first conflict (interpersonal) physically pits adversaries against each other—with physical violence being replaced by a battle unfolding on moral and psychological levels, the second one (intrapersonal) takes place within the heart and psyche of the hero, who, paralyzed by existential anguish, is torn between his fantasies and his relationship with reality.

The Inner Scene of Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo virtutum

Is the the Ordo virtutum by Hildegard of Bingen a theatrical text? This article addresses the problem of its scenic representation and discusses if a real theatrical purpose could be found in the intentio operis. The composition reveals a certain immovability and a descriptive, non-performative kind of action in its dialogue. With respect to Scivias and the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, we assume that the Ordo virtutum is an ascetic-mystical chant, perhaps included in the lost liturgy of the Rupertsberg monastery.

Vicente, autoficção de Jorge Andrade

Este artigo traz uma reflexão acerca da autoficção no teatro, a qual se mostra um procedimento bastante peculiar e distinto daquele verificado na narrativa. A partir da personagem Vicente, presente em três peças do dramaturgo brasileiro Jorge Andrade, percebe-se que ela, apesar de ser descrita como autobiográfica pela crítica e pelo próprio autor, carrega status de personagem autoficcional. Isto porque as características intrínsecas ao gênero dramático, especialmente a representação e a presença do ator, fazem com que os domínios da realidade e da ficção sejam encarados de maneira singular pelo leitor ou espectador.

The Memory of Theatre. Theatricalization of Memory

Abstract Theatre as living art, the central purpose of which is life, existence, that is, that can perceive matter as a set of images, a meeting point of the spirit with matter, enters the realm of memory, when it requires precise indications necessary for the scenic representation. Memory is a living organism, it is the warm fire of preparing theatre. We perceive Hamlet acting on stage because we remember that perception. Hamlet – the one that we will see in a few years, in a completely different time, in another geography, will be perceived, criticized, understood, by evoking the memories that have survived or have been adapted, transformed, reinterpreted. The memory facilitates the meeting between the actor and the character, the memory facilitates the meeting between the director and the text, between the director and the concept, the memory brings the playwright face to face with his work. In the The Misunderstanding, Albert Camus imagines psychological dimensions where memory plays the role of central mechanism. We are face to face with the absurd man, who through the awareness of death and crime meets his truth, but at the same time we discover a dissociation of the characters that, despite their rigidity and coldness, maintain the appearance of a structural and functional fluidity. The dialogue has the resonance of a frequency that vibrates from the river of collective memory. The individual memory has split and is to be absorbed by another memory, one of the theatre, a universal memory, a memory of a theatre that was born from memory.

L’esthétique Théâtrale De L’objet Récupéré : De La Matérialité Quotidienne À La Représentation Scénique

This paper focuses on highlighting the particular contribution of the recovered object in the change of artistic techniques and the aesthetic modalities of theatrical representation. It is an opportunity to emphasize this alliance between everyday materiality and the space of the scenic representation in the form of the recovery of the forgotten and an attribution of a second life which is relative to objects marked by obsolescence. Objects loaded from reality, familiar use, and social sharing acquired rhetorical functioning captivated by their use in unusual space. Our approach consists of stopping on this particularity of the recovered object from a comparative study of its different uses by the directors and the playwrights. This is done in order to highlight the artistic potentialities which it generates and the various aesthetic reports that it triggers in the theatrical field. This type of representation highlights the fight against the obsolescence in favor of a new spectacular load so as to mobilize the spectators' imagination. For this purpose, it seems to us that the recovered object is able to find the base of its aesthetic representation. It is about a reflection object which makes the usual the origin of a rhetorical expressivity in order to place it at the very center of the theatrical creation.

El espacio y tiempo teatrales: propuesta de acercamiento semiótico

Sobre la base operativa teórica de la tripartición de la semiótica por Ch. Morris, y con apoyo en las dicotomías: texto teatral / representación, y diégesis / mímesis, se propone un acercamiento teórico al espacio y al tiempo teatrales, y su aplicación a sendas obras de A. Gala y A. Buero Vallejo.
 Metodológicamente se considera que existen espacios y tiempos: A) textuales: diegéticos (de la historia) / miméticos (del discurso), B) espectaculares: escénicos (de la representación) / teatrales (sala / tiempo del espectador), y C) extrateatrales (reales o posibles), y se fija el lugar básico de análisis de sus elementos: sintáctica: determinación de diegéticos y miméticos y su relación; semántica: precisión del significado de ambos y de su relación con los extrateatrales; pragmática: relación de textuales con espectaculares.
 Así se sigue la sucesiva selección reductiva que, sobre espacios y tiempos, ejercen: el autor, primero, al incorporar los extrateatrales como diegéticos y, después, al dar forma dramática a éstos como miméticos; la del director, al configurar los espectaculares escénicos, a partir de los textuales y teniendo en cuenta los teatrales; y el espectador, ejerciendo su labor sancionadora y reductora sobre todos los espacios y tiempos recibidos.

THE SPECIFICITY OF "CIRCUS GYMNASTICS ON THE CANVASES" IN TEACHING AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS OF THE KYIV CITY ACADEMY VARIETY AND CIRCUS ARTS

The article analyzes the peculiarities and specificity of the educational and scenic method in the genre of circus gymnastics on canvases. It specifies its characteristics, structural parts, techniques and principles for performing certain exercises, combinations, trick parts, scenic representation, as well as safety techniques. Keywords : с ircus art, gymnastics, circus genres, educational process, teaching methods.

Principios teatrales para docentes

This study intends to give teachers tools so that they can use them as part of the activities included in a lesson plan. An analysis of the elements that make up the art of the scenic representation is also included. 1. Body expression: It’s the capacity to express emotions using body movements only. 2. Vocal training: It’s the ability of projecting the voice without hurting the vocal cords. 3. Diction: It’s the correct pronunciation of words. 4. Acting: It’s the ability of creating a character from expressive resources in a natural way taking into account the students’ natural reaction. Improvisation technique: In this article, the author offers six steps that can be useful when using the theater as a didactic resource. Throughout history, the theater has been used to transmit knowledge, values, beliefs and all kinds of aspects inherent to the individual and his/ her environment. Thus, teachers must take advantage of what the theater offers.

L'esperienza dello psicodramma freudiano nell'orientamento all'adozione

- The authors reflect on their own group experience with couples that intend to adopt one or more children. This experience developed under the direction of Regione Emilia- Romagna. Each AUSL must organize pre-courses on adoption orientation. Certainly, the authors' specific personal training is what led them to make use of freudian psychodrama, and in the long term this has proved to be profitable in various ways: 1) it points it out how adoption orientation not only involves the couple, but also sets each individual face to face with his/her own problems. 2) The practice of freudian psychodrama, particularly through the use of scenic representation and observation after the session, allows the individual's subjectivity to emerge, thus breaking free from the "glue effect" that inevitably appears in any work done in group therapy. 3) Finally, what emerges is what is known on adoption - which the participants so yearn for - which is not cut off from each individual's knowledge (the individual, however, is unaware of this), as it embodies both the choice - that is the desire - and the symptom, or the emblem of the emptiness/suffering that each person laments.Key words: adoption, group, subject, bond, psychodrama, demand vuoto/sofferenza di cui ognuno si lamenta.Parole chiave: adozione, gruppo, soggetto, legame, psicodramma, domanda.

Aproximaciones a Los Tecuanes, danza-drama de origen náhuatl del Estado de Guerrero

La danza de Tecuanes, de Tigres o de Tlacololeros es una de las expresiones escénicas con mayores elementos mesoamericanos que conocemos y que se mantiene viva. Posee peculiaridades sorprendentes, como su sentido teatral, el humor y el sentido festivo con el que se desarrolla la trama, bastante sencilla, por cierto: es la representación de los esfuerzos de unos cazadores por conseguir atrapar a un tigre. Así también cabe mencionar los elementos mágico-religiosos vinculados con ritos de fertilidad ancestrales que se manifiestan en la danza de Tecuanes. ¿Está vinculada esta danza con la tradición de evangelización, como las otras danzas-drama y representaciones de Guerrero que Maclovio Ariza analiza? Existe además un texto que Fernando Horcasitas debía haber utilizado en el capítulo de su libro El teatro náhuatl II «Farsas de los pueblos» y que quedó inconcluso. En este trabajo trataremos de describir y reconocer sus elementos más importantes, para permitir más adelante estudios más amplios y clarificadores de esta expresión escénica vinculada en algunos casos con las fiestas de carnaval.

Proosallinen näyttämö

Prosaic Stage – On the theatre of Walter Benjamin Article asks the role and signification of theatre in the thought of Walter Benjamin by comparing his essays on Brecht´s epical theatre from the 1930´s with his doctoral thesis of 1919 on the literary theory in the Romanticism of Iena. The approach makes possible to present a more general question concerning the reasons why theatre is reinvented during the past century precisely as a scenic art and as an art of director. In his thesis, Benjamin defends an idea of a different kind of Romanticism which, against the prevailing bourgeois ideas, is politically revolutionary and “sober” by its expression. By assuming novel as the paradigm of work of art, the romantic literary theory accomplishes itself in the idea of “poetry as prose”. Benjamin´s own “Brechtian turn”, as well as the epical theatre he analyses, can be explained as a consequent continuation and critical explication of the former “prosaic turn”. In the “gesture” (Geste), which according to Brecht constitutes the basic element of scenic representation, can be recognized the same “estranging” and “retarding” dynamics and structure as in the “connexions” (Zusammenhang) of the romantic prose. Correspondingly, the “scenic turn” in modern theatre motivates itself by a more general historical change which, still today, continues to dislocate the modes of representation and social existence.

Theatrical Terror: Attentats and Symbolist Spectacle

The 1890s in Paris were a period of intense terrorism. There were more than a dozen bombings in city between 1892 and 1894, attributed to a score of perpetrators, either identified as or assumed to be anarchists. The period of violent activity, known as propaganda by deed, both stoked hysteria about every shady malingerer on city streets and sparked popular support for--even idealizations of--the dynamiters in revolt against a corrupt political and social order. Ravachol (Francois Koenigstein), for instance, first bomb-thrower to meet fate of guillotine, was immortalized in as a martyr, in song and dance as a popular hero: Dansons la Ravachole! Among literary and artistic avant-garde, there was enthusiastic support for anarchism's critique of pere, patron et patrie, not only in spite of anarchism's tactics of terror but because of them. Symbolists and decadents were equated with in period press, not merely because of an analogous rebelliousness, but because symbolist and decadent litterateurs were making destruction of old mold both an artistic and a political principle (Montorgueil 1). In such a climate, Symbolist theater house Theatre de l'OEuvre put on productions of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of People in 1893 and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896. Staged during and after apogee of anarchist terror, press characterized both productions as attentats ([bomb] attacks), their authors as anarchists of art who were exercising a veritable terror over public (Fouquier 87). Ibsen's An Enemy of People opened initial season in 1893, and Theatre de l'OEuvre presented it as a sort of anarchist manifesto: poet Laurent Tailhade introduced with a thirty-minute discussion declaring virtues of revolt, which as a result brought theater under police surveillance. As Richard Sonn notes with regard to Jarry's Ubu: the play resembled an anarchist attentat in its violent assault upon sensibilities of audience, upsetting their expectations of theatrical decorum and dramatically involving them in performance (Sonn 77). Some have argued that such characterizations are due more to political climate than to content of works (e.g., Weir 207-210), but I would suggest otherwise. Both Jarry and Ibsen attest to markedly anarchist sympathies, and their plays--while stylistically wildly different--make scathing critiques of corrupt authority and illegitimacy of state power. In addition, part of what Ibsen's play dramatizes is marginalization of intellectual and inefficacy of speech; hero, who wants his words to have power of dynamite, is utterly ignored and ultimately silenced. Jarry's Ubu has given up on speech altogether, bearing a destructive relationship to language, and relies on a theater of action and of violent gesture in a mode of confrontation with public. The trajectory between two plays and their productions at Theatre de l'OEuvre reveals a shift in Symbolist theater from an emphasis on word to a focus on gesture, which I will argue is tied to Symbolist fascination for anarchist theories of action. The attentat became Symbolist spectacle par excellence, an act whose polysemic eclat made it model for a kind of theatrical terror. I IBSEN AND SYMBOLIST THEATER The 1890s saw foundation of earliest examples of avant-garde theater houses in Paris: naturalist Theatre Libre (1887), followed by symbolist Theatre d'Art (1890-1892), which gave way to Theatre de l'OEuvre (1893), most prominent site of symbolist theatrical productions. (1) Symbolist theories of theatrical representation sought to eliminate many aspects of traditional staging in order to let language evoke decor and scene rather than materially executing them, achieving a scenic representation of Idea through voice, stylized gesture, and radically nonnaturalistic set design. …

Boundary extension as the effects of scene context on picture-memory

Boundary extension is a picture-memory phenomenon that viewers remember seeing wider-angle view than was actually depicted in a photography. To explain boundary extension, Intraub, Bender and Mangels (1992) proposed the scene context hypothesis that boundary extension is due to viewer's expectancy of scene continuity outside the camera's field of view. The present study tested this hypothesis. Experiment 1 replicated the phenomenon of boundary extension. In Experiment 2, a retention interval did not have much effects on this distortion. Experiment 3 revealed that the occurrence of boundary extension was affected by activation of scenic representation that would have existed outside the picture frame. These results supported the scene context hypothesis.

Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of the Origin (review)

Christopher Fynsk's Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of the Origin joins Jean-François Lyotard's Discours, figure as one of the few texts to pose the question of language within the scope of scenic representation. Not only is Infant Figures a valuable con tribution to the determination of the very concept of the "scenic" and its implications for the relationship between critical discourse and clinical discourse, but it is also perhaps the only text to date to stage this relationship within a powerful interreading of Lyotard's treatment of the figural event (the moment at which language and image meet) and his research on infancy. In this Infant Figures does not so much depart from the analyses put forth in Lyotard's Lectures d'enfance as complement them. At the same time it successfully provokes further reflection upon the formulations Giorgio Agamben presents in Infancy and History concerning experience and language, namely, the possibility of an experience prior to that of the subject, which is to say, prior to language. In short, "a 'wordless' experience in the literal sense of the term, a human infancy [in-fancy]."

Early Medieval Narrative: The Political Ideas of Gregory of Tours

EARLY MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE: THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF GREGORY OF TOURS Gregory of Tours is best known to the English speaking world as the author of the History of the Franks, the great narrative history of sixth century Gaul. Yet Gregory's reputation as a serious historian languished while the view of those w h o considered him merely a good story teller held sway. It is only in the latter half of the twentieth century that various approaches to the study of text have installed Gregory as an exemplar of early medieval narrative rather than an inferior exponent of classical historiography.2 The rehabilitation of hagiography brought a new respectability to Gregory while insights from semiology have informed the historian's understanding of text.3 Although Auerbach established Gregory as the master of the new form above Gregory of Tours, Historiarum Libri X, Monumenta Germaniae historica: Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum I, i, ed. by B. Krusch and W . Levison, (Hannover, 1951). Readily available translations are The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, trans, by O. M. Dalton, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927); The History of the Franks, trans by L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974): Gregoire de Tours, Histoire des Francs traduite de Latin, trans, by R. Latouche, 2 vols (Paris: Le Belles Lettres, 1963-1965). In this paper, the Ten Books of the Histories, Gregory's name for his work, is abbreviated to Histories. 2 Jean Jacques Ampere, Histoire litteraire de la France avant le douzieme siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1839; John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings (London: Methuen, 1962): Giselle de Nie, Views from a Many-windowed Tower: Studies of Imagination in the work of Gregory of Tours (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987); Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550-800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon, 0?rinceton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Adriaan H.B. Breukelaar, Historiography and Episcopal Authority in Sixth-Century Gaul (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1994); Martin Heinzelmann, Gregor von Tours (538-594):"zehn Bucher Geschichte" Historiographie und Gesellschaftskonzept im 6. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994). 3 Paul Fouracre, 'Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography', Past and Present, 127 (1990), 3-38; Marc Uytfanghe, 'L'hagiographie et son public a l'6poque merovingienne', Texte und Untersuchungen, 129, Studia Patristica 16 (1985), 54-62: Raymond Van Dam, 'Hagiography and History: the Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus', Classical Antiquity, 1 (1982), 271-308; J. L Derouet, 'Les Possibility d'interpretation semiologique des textes hagiographiques', Revue d'histoire de I'eglise de France, 62 (1976), 153-162; Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: the Development of Christian Discourse (Berkely: University of California Press, 1991). P A R E R G O N ns 14.2 (January 1997) 130 AvrilKeely Caesarius of Aries and Gregory the Great, he retreated from an assessment of Gregory as an historian.4 While in recent times, serious efforts have been made to understand the aims and methods of Gregory the historian, Gregory's episodic style, the absence of any grand over-arching themes, and the dearth of mannered prefaces make it difficult for us to uncover Gregory the thinker. This paper will argue that w e have been unable to identify the political ideas of Gregory because w e have not known what to look for. W e have overlooked the potential of early medieval narrative, which, though not amenable to abstraction, nevertheless provides an adequate vehicle for the transmission of political ideas. T w o questions will be explored: was Gregory of Tours interested in political ideas and, if so, how is this interest manifested in the Histories? A key tool in the analysis is the concept of scenic representation derived from the work of Pizarro, a specialist in English literature.5 It is one of his achievements to teach us that, by analysing an author's scenic representation, w e can more easily probe the mind and historical ideas of that author. Applied to the Histories of Gregory of Tours, this means that analysis of scenic representation will help us to understand Gregory's ideas even in the absence of their abstract formulation. Hence w e are brought to consider the fundamental...

The second woman in the theater of Villedieu

Best known for her prose fiction, Marie-Catherine Desjardins de Villedieu was also a successful playwright. Her three tragi-comedies (Manlius, Nitelis, and Le Favori), while significantly dissimilar in many respects, share an unusual feature. All three plays foreground the figure of the second woman, second because her role is clearly less central to the play's action than that of another woman character. In each case, the relationships between this second woman and the other characters of the play defy the traditional categories of the seventeenth-century stage. Furthermore, the second woman is not an object of desire. The differences between the first and second women are reflected and reinforced by a curious tendency in the structure of all three plays to split. Both on the level of plot and that of scenic representation, the three tragi-comedies resist unity. An examination of each of the plays reveals the links between the presence of the second woman and this structural split. The second woman, as a departure from the norms of the classical stage, becomes a significant locus for Villedieu's inscription of a personal, and distinctly female, authorial voice.

Archetypes and attributes: Rock paintings in Zimbabwe

Abstract This paper seeks to establish the primacy of the image in the study of the prehistoric paintings of Zimbabwe and to show how detailed comparative iconographie analyses of a range of images may elucidate something of the significance of the art. It seeks to demonstrate that art was concerned with basic ideological concepts of the society, that the human imagery was concerned with the construction of a limited range of archetypes. Thus that the art has little or no relevance to such things as scenic representation, narrative, historical record or myth. The human imagery was qualified by the addition of a limited range of attributes or emblems attached to figures. These provide a pervasive additional dimension to almost all the imagery, a constant sub‐text that almost certainly refers to San metaphysics.

The Epic "Scene," Scenic Representation and Visual Ambiguity in Gottfried's "Tristan"

The Epic "Scene," Scenic Representation and Visual Ambiguity in Gottfried's "Tristan"