Stage Metaphor Research Articles

Presages of contemporary theatre studies theories in Vladimír Jindra's structuralist theory of scenography

The study provides detailed analysis of the work of Czechoslovak theoretician of scenography, Vladimír Jindra (1920–1979). It focuses on Jindra's at the time innovative taxonomy of scenography which substantially supported the shift in today's worldwide understanding of the notion of scenography as a complex theatrical discipline. The aim of the study is to connect Jindra's work with contemporary theoretical approaches to theatre, especially rooted in multimodal and cognitive analysis of scenography. Special attention is given to the elements of Jindra's work that predated Multimodal Metaphor Theory. The study shows that his conception of scenography is connected to the structuralists' understanding of the socalled 'stage metaphor'. This exploration should therefore show the reader not only the progressiveness of Jindra's thinking about scenography, but also outline a view on possible future research in the field of multimodal and cognitive approaches to theatrical scenography.

EXISTENTIAL PROBLEMS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL CONFLICT (READING OF THE PLAY WAITING FOR GODOT)

The article deals with the study of the poetics of S. Beckett's play “Waiting for Godot”. This original and extremely capacious play is minimalistic in form. The secret of the capacity is that, through four characters, Beckett showed the human race in miniature, modeling the main types of human social and private relationships: the type of equality (i.e., self-neighbor relationship) isrepresented by friends Vladimir and Estragon, and the type of inequality/dependence is represented by Pozzo and Lucky. The type of relationship does not change in the second act either, with a change in circumstances, but the author's allegory is enriched with new content: not only is the immutability of social inequalityshown, but also the interdependence of the subjects of these relations. It can be read as an allegory: power is blind and slavery is dumb, and this is one of many examples of how Beckett makes an episode or dialogue an expressive “stage metaphor”, and builds the whole play as a chain of metaphorical scenes, where each link is in its place. The main conflict lies in how the two pairs of characters behave in the “act of waiting”: the author showed the differences in human nature as the antithesis of passivity – active action, contemplative and active type of life practice. And the extent to which the meaning of the search is achievable for the first or second looks equally doubtful. Absurd only to a superficial view, Beckett's form and style are loaded with philosophical meaning. Its simplicity bordering on the primitive exposes the essence of existential tragedy in human existence with unprecedented force.

ОПЕРНЫЙ РЕЖИССЕР АХИМ ФРАЙЕР: ФРАГМЕНТЫ О МЕТОДЕ

This article discusses the creative method of the German painter, set designer and operatic director Achim Freyer. The paper deals with structural and hermeneutic analysis of several scenographic and directorial techniques in his opera productions “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte” by Mozart, “Parsifal” and the tetralogy “Der Ring des Nibelungen” by Wagner, “Freischütz” by Weber, “Ariodant” by Handel. It explores the questions of corporeality and representation of gender, the embodiment of the unconscious, the use of hyperboles and fragmentation, the citation of cultural signs and aesthetic codes of different genesis. Freyer’s creative method refers to Brecht’s theoretical views on theatre. In these productions the principle of gestus and idea of the dialectical spiral as a basis of drama are realized. The main approach of the article is the investigation of the stage metaphors in Freyer’s productions as the way to accentuate the concepts of the libretto.

Climate Dialectics in Psychotherapy: Holding Open the Space Between Abyss and Advance.

The complexity, uncertainty and charged nature of climate change make it a unique stressor that is irreconcilable at an individual level. This experience of impossibility leads to splitting of reactions into polarities, or dialectics, which must be contained to reduce climate distress and held open for generative use towards climate adaptation. We present a dynamic model for addressing climate change material within psychotherapy, wherein these climate dialectics are identified, explored, and held open. Clinical vignettes* illustrate therapeutic work with the particular climate dialectics of Climate Reality-Social Reality, Individual Agency-Collective Agency, Hope-Hopelessness, Certainty-Uncertainty, and Nature as Comfort-Nature as Threat. Situations of climate anxiety, solastalgia, disavowal, and the climate dismissive patient are addressed, as is the therapeutic use of the wordlessness that accompanies our relationship with the natural world. We explore and emphasize how a focus on the containment and transformation of climate anxiety, rather than on its reduction, assists in aligning with new realities and in the reduction of distress. Use of a developmental stage metaphor, attention to climate-specific counter-transference enactments, and emphasis on authentic action are central to this process.

Theatrical and pedagogical foundations laid down by V. M. Chystiakova in the development of the imaginative world of the Ukrainian actor

Theatrical and pedagogical foundations laid down by V. M. Chystiakova in the development of the imaginative world of the Ukrainian actor

СЦЕНОГРАФІЧНІ ПЕРЕТВОРЕННЯ РОМАНУ Ф. ДОСТОЄВСЬКОГО «ІДІОТ»

Мета дослідження. Розкриття алгоритму народження сценічного образу, висвітлення режисерського методу створення театральних метафор за допомогою сценографічних засобів виразності. Методологічною основою дослідження є перетворення літературного тексту роману Ф. Достоєвського «Ідіот» у метафоричне видовище за допомогою сценографічних засобів виразності методами драматургічного аналізу літературного твору та режисерського синтезу мистецтв актора, композитора та сценографа на прикладі постановки вистави за вищезазначеним романом на сцені академічного театру ім. М. Садовського. Наукова новизна роботи полягає в розкритті авторської методики створення театральних метафор шляхом синтезу різних мистецтв на грунті власного режисерського та сценографічного досвіду. Висновки. Головним результатом дослідження є розкриття природи сценічних метафор, алгоритму їх народження та методики їх побудови. Формування метафоричного мислення нового покоління театральних режисерів дозволить вивести театральне мистецтво з «царства побутового реалізму» на широкий шлях образно-філософського осягнення дійсності, на рівень Театру Потрясіння.

Stage metaphors in Verdi's Otello: Miloš Wasserbauer's State Theatre production (Brno 1967) in the context of Otello's staging tradition

Studie se zabýva tzv. jevistnimi metaforami v brněnske inscenaci Verdiho Otella z roku 1967, kterou režiroval Milos Wasserbauer. Teoretický přistup teto studie je inspirovan teorii konceptualni metafory.

‘Fause Frenche Enough’

The English language lesson scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V has attracted more critical attention for its sexual innuendoes than for its political significance even though King Henry was historically instrumental in the demise of French in medieval England. Closely modeled on early modern primers, the language lesson is a stage metaphor of the king’s language policy, and settles old ideological scores by canceling the effects of the Norman Conquest. Traces of insular French in Kate’s morphosyntactic idiosyncrasies serve the political agenda of a play chronicling the process that took the French tongue from authority to disempowerment. Keywords: Shakespeare; Henry V; language primers; French; Anglo-French

Elements of Ibsen`s Drama: Reversion, Anagnorisis and Catastrophe

This paper will be focused mainly in the elements of symbolic drama of Henrik Ibsen, Brand and Peer Gynt, and When We Dead Awaken . Most scholars consider them as unrealized work of his. A close review of these plays requires the necessity of its connection with Aristotelian principles of tragedy as well as in many other dramas of Ibsen. The element of reversion and recognition finds place in the most magnificent works of great dramatist, and no doubt, it is present in Ibsen’s drama. However, the most important part is when reversion encounters recognition, which is the unique feature of this drama, which interweaves in it the complication of the relation between the subject and the characters. In the combination of stage metaphor with the textual metaphor, one can notice the animal lust, the pure and sublime love, the sacrificing life, the betrayed art, which try to survive although too late for that. This is because artistic visions are unifying and conflicting voices in the last stage metaphor of the plays. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n4p303

Facing the Stranger in the Mirror: Staged complicities in recent South African performances

You are the face I see in the Mirror A dark shadow. (Mark Fleishman, Medea 1994) Should we remember things as a way of learning, or forget them as a way of healing? (Romesh Gunesekera, in conversation in Aamer Hussein, The Independent, UK 13 April 2002) By its very nature art–and theatre in particular–poses hard questions, reflects the difficult challenges being grappled with by individuals within historical moments, poses alternatives and celebrates life, optimism and human endeavour even within trying circumstances. (Mike Van Graan, ‘The Art of Democracy,’ Cape Times 2009, p. 9) The staging of complicity has developed into one of the most prevalent trends in recent South Africa theatre. The audience may become aware of their own complicity in injustice, or complicity may feature as a subject to be explored in the play. I will argue that one can identify three broadly defined performance modalities which shape current engagements with complicity. These modalities are identified by the adjectives, ‘thick’ (as in densely layered, complex, deep), ‘reflective’ (as in reflecting upon as well as revealing), and ‘hard’ (in the sense of direct, uncompromising, difficult to penetrate). Rather than signifying distinct categories, these terms are attributed to a cluster of performance dynamics. The term ‘thick theatre’ is adapted from the key concept of ‘thick description’ employed by cultural anthropologist Glifford Geertz to emphasize the interpretative function of ‘reading’ cultural events. The aim here is to compare how the staging of complicity is shaped by the types of aesthetic engagement employed. While ‘hard theatre’ implicates audiences in complicity, in ‘reflective theatre’ complicity is explored in terms of the staged experience that is witnessed by the audience. The most challenging exploration of complicity is achieved by the type of ‘thick theatre' produced by, for instance, Magnet Theatre and practitioners like Jay Pather, Brett Bailey, Lara Foot-Newton, and Marthinus Basson. Such practitioners have developed a strong reputation for producing textured work using physical images, and generating multiple meanings through innovative stage metaphors which challenge common assumptions. These productions are often collaborative, involving research into local communities, and they question hegemonic knowledge, its production and dissemination. In the process these works often draw on history in order to play with contemporary realities in ways that challenge conventional notions of complicity.

Beijing Olympics and Beijing opera: A multimodal metaphor in a CCTV Olympics commercial

Abstract This paper is a cognitive semantic analysis of a CCTV educational commercial, which is one of a series designed and produced in preparation for, and in celebration of, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Called the “Beijing Opera Episode”, this TV commercial converges on the theme: “To mount the stage of the world, and to put on a show of China”. That is, China sees her hosting of the 2008 Olympics by Beijing as a great opportunity for her to step onto the international stage to perform a show of China. This theme, which alludes to China's globalization and retention of cultural identity, is conceptualized and expressed in terms of a central metaphor of theatrical performance: hosting the beijing olympics is performing beijing opera on an international stage. This study first analyzes in detail how this central metaphor is manifested multimodally through visual and aural as well as verbal discourse, thus examining it as a multimodal metaphor. The study then applies a decompositional approach, based on the distinction between primary and complex metaphors, to analyzing the central metaphor as a metaphorical compound with its internal structures and components, which is nevertheless built on a more general cognitive foundation. The study also offers a linguistic perspective on a cultural model underlying the central metaphor, which is arguably a Chinese cultural model for understanding various aspects and events of life in general. At the core of this cultural model is the widespread life is a stage metaphor, which however has a specific manifestation within the Chinese cultural context.

Recent Trends in Conrad Studies

Recent Trends in Conrad Studies Alexia Hannis (bio) Katherine Isobel Baxter and Richard J. Hand, eds. Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 165 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6490-1 Michael John DiSanto. Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. 253 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7735-3510-7 Katherine Isobel Baxter. Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 163 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7456-6902-9 It would seem that over the past two decades or so the call for new approaches to English literature has become increasingly pronounced, with the emergence in 1995 of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (as an alternative to the mla), and works such as After Theory by Terry Eagleton (2003) and Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (2005). In this context, when it comes to Conrad studies we are left with questions about what lies beyond, [End Page 189] say, the well-traversed terrain of dialogism, the specialized language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, or the now-familiar tensions between critiques of and complicity with imperialism in Conrad’s fiction. Three recent contributions to Conrad studies explicitly aim to open new lines of thought for Conrad readers, with mixed results. Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts, edited by two recently established academics, brings together work by well-known and emergent Conradians. As its title suggests, the volume is preoccupied with examining the relatively unexplored realm of performance in Conrad’s writings. Only in the last decade has a pronounced interest in this area emerged, signaled in particular by Richard Hand’s important book, The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions (Palgrave, 2005). The current collection —because it is so wide-ranging, drawing from elements of performance from the theatre and theatricality to cinematography—is particularly valuable as it provides some groundwork for scholars who are interested in pursuing what the editors describe in their introduction as “one of the most interesting and nascent areas of Conrad studies” (10). The volume opens with Linda Dryden’s “Performing Malaya,” an essay that explores anew the theme of imperialism in Conrad’s Malay fiction, by reframing the discussion with Clifford Geertz and James Clifford’s notions of culture and identity as performance. Drawing from A Personal Record, where Conrad uses theatrical imagery while reminiscing about his creative process in writing Almayer’s Folly and revisiting Conrad’s emphasis on fiction as a “visual performance” in the preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ Dryden argues that Conrad’s concept “art as performance” is inseparable from the ethico-political underpinnings of his literary project. That is, if “the theatrical experience” allows for “all the cast [to be] equally present before us” (14), Conrad’s theatrical imagination is consistent with his aim “to challenge the romance and adventure genre and its simplistic, reductive assumption about Eastern peoples” (12). Impressively wide-ranging, the essay offers readings of Almayer’s Folly, “Karain,” Lord Jim, and The Rescue, following a trajectory in Conrad’s oeuvre as he explored enactments of “cultural programming” at the start of his career which developed into an exploration of the arrogance and catastrophic results of European self-fashioning on the imperialist stage. We encounter in Dryden’s essay the somewhat worn-out claims about the “multivocality” of Conrad’s fiction, and her reading of Lord Jim is not, at base, particularly new. That said, the conceptual framework Dryden brings to Conrad’s Malay fiction enables readers to consider anew Conrad’s attempt to negotiate between cultural difference and “common human experiences and passions” (27). [End Page 190] Dryden’s essay is followed by Susan Barras’s “‘Sly Civility?’: Mrs Almayer’s and Mrs Willems’s Performances of Colonial Resistance in Outcast of the Islands and Almayer’s Folly,” an essay that employs theoretical work by Erving Goffman and James C. Scott to shed light on how Mrs Almayer, Joanna Willems, and Aissa manage with varying degrees of success to exercise de facto power through performance. The backstage/front stage metaphor from Goffman’s theory and Scott’s application of this notion...

Scientific perspectivism: behind the stage door

Adopting the stage metaphor suggested in Brown’s review, and treating Scientific perspectivism as a play in five acts, I respond to his review as a playwright might respond to a generally favorable review. Taking the reader behind the stage door, I discuss the playwright’s intentions for each act, paying special attention to the expected audience for the play as a whole. The result, therefore, supplements the review from the standpoint of the playwright. It also provides answers to some of the reviewer’s questions.

Be Copy Now: Dialectics and Feedback of Life and Theater in Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.1

This paper offers an analysis of one of King Henry's speeches to his troops in Shakespeare's Henry V. The analysis focuses on the sexual imagery and symbolic association of war and aggresion, and on the reflexive, metadramatic dimension of this passage and of Shakespeare's theory of self and drama — thus drawing some further implications of the world as a stage metaphor, in the light of a theory of performativity, as developed by J. L. Austin and J. Hillis Miller.

Spectacle, Theatre, and Sympathy in Caleb Williams

Spectacle, Theatre, and Sympathy in Caleb Williams Monika Fludernik There is no pleasure more congenial to the human heart, than the approbation and affection of our fellows. I call heaven to witness that I could mount the scaffold, surrounded with an innumerable multitude to applaud my fortitude, and to feel as it were on their own neck the blow that ended me, and count it a festival. But I cannot bear to be surrounded with tokens of abhorrence and scorn. William Godwin, St Leon, chap. 27 In the opening words ofhis narrative, Caleb Williams says that "for several years" his life has been "a theatre of calamity."1 This essay traces the manifestations of the theatrical metaphor in Caleb Williams (1794) and links the staging of Caleb's (and Falkland's) "tragedy" with the spectacle of sympathy that underpins theatrical representation in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas ofthe Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). William Godwin reinterprets the theatrical scenario within an extended conception of sympathy that also helps to explain the psychology of major characters as facets of the workings of mutual attraction, that is, sympathy. Sympathy is figured positively in terms of affection, love, reverence, and admiration and 1 William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 3. References are to this edition, which is based on the first edition of 1794, but integrates later changes in the second and third editions. Comparison will be made with Things As They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1992), which follows the text of the first edition. This essay is dedicated to Professor Willi Erzgräber on his seventy-fifth birthday. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 1, October 2001 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION negatively in terms of infection or contamination. The subject eliciting sympathy may do so either truthfully or deceptively, giving rise to a long discussion about the artfulness and rhetoricity of sympathetic appeal. Sympathy is an ineluctable need for the individual, but sympathetic involvement, besides elevating humanity to a status of semi-divine fellowship, also carries with it the dangers of infection and corruption, of illegitimate attraction and fatal obsession. This essay is a companion piece to my "William Godwin's Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime,"2 on Godwin's deployment of the Burkean sublime, which bases its analysis on a network of key terms and phrases. In particular, terms associated with sublimity , benevolence, and the divine are contrasted with a set of concepts relating to the infernal, the tyrannical, and the calamitous as undersides of the sublime. From this network of phrases (observable throughout Caleb Williams), a revised understanding of Godwin's views on the sublime becomes possible. I extend the approach in this essay, which discusses a set of related terms, including the stage metaphor, sympathetic affect, theatrical artifice and emotional excess , infection, passion and madness. These terms are linked to those already discussed in connection with the sublime, since Burke's illustrations of a sublime spectacle include the comparison of tragedy in the theatre with the spectacle of an execution, which—according to Burke—foregrounds the powers of "the real sympathy."3 The theatrical scenario of tragedy is thus linked to the sublime4 and is constituted in Burke's concept of the sublime (and in Smith's formulations) by the workings of sympathy. The ambivalences and ambiguities introduced byjoining the sublime with sympathy in the theatrical spectacle can be documented in an inductive analysis of the key terms associated with sympathy, based on an explication du texte. From the network of allusions within the text, I will establish what sympathy means in Caleb Williams, demonstrating that Godwin significantly restructured Smith's schema. Godwin criticism rarely takes the language of the text very seriously. For this reason, it is on the interpretive level of my analysis that I most frequently refer to previous work on Caleb Williams and elaborate on this criticism. 2 Forthcoming in KLH 68:4 (2001). 3 Edmund Burke, A Philosphir.nl Enquiry into the Origin o)'Our ideas of the Sublime and...

Speech act metaphor in theatre

Theoretically, the existence of speech act metaphor would appear to be impossible, in that it would necessitate combining the principle of speech activity which, as a specific kind of action, is a referential entity, and the principle of metaphor, which is a standard form of predication and description of referential entities, including actions. The term ‘speech act metaphor’, however, denotes not a verbal metaphor in the propositional content (p) of a speech act, either assertive or other but, rather, a speech act in which the performative component, either verbally indicated or otherwise, is metaphorical in itself. Speech act theory has contemplated the possible explanation of verbal metaphor as a specific kind of speech act, combining literal and non-literal elements, but not the possibility of a performative metaphor. In the theatre, however, and in the so called Theatre of the Absurd in particular, there are many cases that can only be understood if it is assumed that such a combination of principles has materialized. I intend to illustrate this peculiar type of stage metaphor by speech acts in Ionesco's Exit the King.

Statecraft as Stagecraft: Disneyland and the Rosenberg Executions in The Public Burning

Robert Coover's encyclopedic critique of McCarthyism in The Public Burning uses stage metaphors to explore the political process building up to the June 1953 executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Each character plays a role that has been carefully scripted by directors Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. President Eisenhower repeatedly utters: “My only concern is in the area of statecraft. […] The effect of the action” (230 and elsewhere, emphasis Coover's). Two major artistic decisions foreground Coover's statecraft as stagecraft: first, his choice to present the executions as an open public spectacle in Times Square and second, his use of Disney to emphasize by exaggeration the staged nature of the trials and executions.

Stage Metaphor: With or Without. On Rina Yerushalmi's Production of Ionesco's The Chairs

In the last century it has become commonplace that faithfulness to the playwright, and the play, is not necessarily a commendable quality. The play is currently viewed as raw material for a production, a pre-text for a more complex and final text, which reflects the universe of the director rather than that of the playwright. The performance is a work of art in which dialogue is only one component among others, although usually of crucial importance. Similarly, the playwright is viewed as merely the designer of the verbal aspects of the final text, among other designers. The director, in contrast, is viewed as the actual sender of the message and accountable to audience and critics for the results of his decisions: whether he or she has impoverished or enriched the play, whether or not he or she succeeded in conveying some new insight. Without elaborating on a justification of this view, there is no doubt that the production of Ionesco's The Chairs, directed by Rina Yerushalmi at the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1990, is a clear instance of such an approach.Perhaps the most striking decision of Yerushalmi was to get rid of any deviation from consistent characterization, although prescribed by the playwright in the stage directions of the play. Following Martin Esslin, with regard to plays within the style of the so-called ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, such deviations are among the features which are held responsible for the sense of absurdity and/or grotesque that such texts produce in the audience.

Stage Metaphor

Two major theoretical requirements should be fulfilled before embarking on an attempt to suggest an adequate description of stage metaphor. First, an appropriate description of verbal metaphor is mandatory. Such a prerequisite does not imply that stage metaphor is a derivative of verbal metaphor; it assumes, rather, a common deep structure underlying both verbal and stage metaphors and recognizes the fact that theories of verbal metaphor are much more advanced. There is no way to avoid striving for a unified theory of metaphor, which assumes the existence of a common deep structure, and explains the generation of both particular types of metaphor. Second, an appropriate description of theatrical language, which is a particular case of iconic communication, is also mandatory since, according to the same premise, differences in the structure of metaphor in varying languages should be accounted for on the grounds of the specific features of the respective languages.

The Mirror as Stage Prop in Modern Drama

The use of the mirror as an important stage prop is by no means peculiar to modern drama. A perhaps almost archetypal instance occurs near the end of Act IV of Richard II, when Shakespeare's narcissistic protagonist (essentially an actor who only plays at being a king) calls for a looking glass and then dashes it to the ground in disappointment when it fails to reflect his internal agony. But it is not until the Modernist movement that playwrights regularly employ the mirror as the dominant symbolic element of their stage setting. By examining in chronological order four dramas and three musicals which extensively use the mirror, we can chart the emergence and growing preponderance of a metatheatre not only in the sense in which Lionel Abel applies the term to those works that capitalize on the life as dream/ world as stage metaphors and on the audience's awareness of the play as play,l but also in the sense that the audience is consciously forced into a recognition of themselves as audience.