Time in Theatre
Publisher
Macmillan Education UK
Reference7 articles.
1. It is sufficient to look at Patrice Pavis’s Dictionary of Theatrical Terms to see how difficult it is to grasp the essence of the phenomenon under discussion. For an intriguing discussion of the ways we perceive time, see Vyvyan Evans, The Structure of Time: Language, Meaning and Temporal Cognition (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004). 2. Jerzy Limon, The Chemistry of the Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 3. The actor is a human being for whom theatre is a profession or hobby, whereas the figure is a creation of the former. In other words, the actor is both the co-creator and the material substance of a sign of a figure which is immaterial and basically a mental construct. We have to remember, however, that the figure much more than an actor is capable of creating on their own: the fictional figure is a synthesis of the various relationships between fictional and material and verbal substances of the performance, and it does not exist in the material sense, for it is being created in the mind of the spectator by other factors, such as other figures’ utterances, behaviour, costume, make-up, light, music and so on. It has to be said that the new wave of so-called ‘postdramatic’ theatre often attempts to break the boundary dividing the actor and the figure; consequently, the temporal and spatial split or hiatus is annulled. That may, of course, be a temporary feature of a production, but in its dominating variety it undermines the basic qualities of theatre as art, which inevitably becomes another type of art, such as performance or happening. Cf. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006). 4. For an intriguing discussion of theatricality, see Eli Rozik, ‘Is the Notion of “Theatricality” Void?’, Gestos, 15.30 (2000), 11–30 5. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).
|
|