Stage Props

Making Shakespeare offers a lively introduction to the major
issues of stage and printing history, whilst also raising
questions about what a ‘Shakespeare play’ actually is. It reveals how London, the theatre, the actors and the way in which the plays were written and printed all affect the ‘Shakespeare’ that we now read. Concentrating on the instability and fluidity of Shakespeare’s texts, the book discusses what happened to a manuscript between its first composition, its performance on stage and its printing, and identifies traces of the production system in the plays that we read. It argues that the versions of Shakespeare that have come down to us have inevitably been formed by the contexts from which they emerged, being shaped by, for example, the way actors received and responded to their lines, the props and music used in the theatre, or the continual revision of plays by the playhouses and printers. Allowing a fuller understanding of the texts we read and perform, Making Shakespeare is the perfect introduction to issues of stage and page. A  clear, accessible read, this book allows even those with no expert knowledge to begin to contextualise Shakespeare’s plays for themselves, in ways both old and new.

This essay argues that the king’s body politic in Richard II depends not only by the king’s physical body but also on the many human bodies and material possessions that comprise the kingdom. Richard II presents the legal fictions of sovereignty and state and the illocutionary force of speech acts as ultimately resting on material bodies and objects. These bodies and objects tend to fall to the ground and fail to meet their owners’ intended purposes. While in the fiction of the play bodies and objects are mostly ineffectual, from a dramaturgical perspective it is precisely because bodies and objects do not align with their owners’ intentions that they appear to draw level with them as agents of dramatic action. People thus become like props in the play, and props become like people. Power is shown to be diffused away from the figure of the king towards the bodies and objects around him and the king himself is revealed to be a kind of prop.

Precisely because of its radical instability as a theatrical signifier, playwrights have seized on the prop as a tool for destabilizing the conventional symbolism previously embodied by the now ambiguous object. Although they cannot legislate the prop's impact, playwrights can seek to orchestrate the prop's movement through concrete stage space and linear stage time. They can also shape the audience's reception of the prop through dialogue and stage directions. . . . This is especially the case during periods of semiotic crisis, when the meaning of the object the prop represents is (quite literally) up for grabs.—Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props

"Contents:

От задника к квази-вещи и настоящему мясу: плоскость и трехмерность в кино 1900-1920

Бюсты-Цари Бауэра

Оживление вещи в 1910-е годы:
Черепки кувшина и жест спинки кресла

«Душа декорации» и диковинки Бауeра в трактовке Кулешова

Вещи в глубинном постранстве

Освобожденная вещь в монтаже

«Убрать неработающие вещи!»

Столетие вещи в кино: От «малеванных» к дигитальным задникам


"Н. Друбек-Майер (Берлин) в докладе «Вещь в немом кино» остановилась на двух подходах к вещи в кинематографе — в символизме и авангарде. Хорошо изучен­ная монтажная вещь авангарда представлена в фильме обычно как крупный план предмета, чередующийся с другими кадрами (чаще всего разных планов). Второй подход — это помещение вещи внутри мизансцены. Такого рода перспектива ха­рактерна для модерна. В символистском кино вещи являются частью эстетиче­ского мира в кадре и обладают таинственной связью с потусторонним (в этом аспекте интересны стеклянные вещи, дублирующие призматический «киноглаз» камеры и обнажающие медиальную специфику вещного мира в фильме). В каче­стве примера технологии репрезентации вещи в немом кино был приведен глу­бинный фокус в фильмах Е. Бауэра, одного из первых режиссеров, задолго до Орсона Уэллса использовавшего этот прием. Вещь здесь находится на переднем плане, что напоминает остраняющие приемы живописного маньеризма, и как бы посредничает между актерами и публикой." Илья Кукуй NLO, НОВОЕ ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЕ ОБОЗРЕНИЕ № 108 (2011) http://www.nlobooks.ru/rus/magazines/nlo/196/2297/2339/
Méliès, “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (1902), “The Starving Artist, or Realism in Art” (1907), А. Уральский / Н. Ларин: „Треxсотлетие царствования дома Романовыx“ (1913), Пудовкин, Максим Горький, Ханжонков, Бауэр, Bauer, "Сумерки женской души", «Грезы», “После смерти”, Кулешов, Kuleshov, „Проект инженера Прайта“ (R 1918), Лотман, Цивьян, объем, Pastrone "Cabiria", Gregg Toland, "Citizen Kane", Coleridge, Clarence Brown, “A Woman of Affairs” (1929), Борис Барнет, Федор Оцеп, «Мисс Менд» (1926), Родченко, Вещи: Американский / Русский графин, сосиски, перчатка, сумочки,«...die Dinge tragen meistens, wie schamhafte Frauen, einen Schleier vor dem Gesicht». (Balász)"

"Film as Life after Death (Evgenij Bauėr's "Posle smerti"/"After Death", 1915)

Tags:

- a symbolist treatment of a realist text:
E. Bauėr's film and I. Turgenev's story "Klara Milič. (Posle smerti)” (1883)
- dreams and hallucination in Bauėr's film
- Bauėr and Russian symbolism
- symbolist "thanatology"transferred onto the screen
- gender in Bauėr's films: the overlooked male victims
- film is perceived as a new life "after death""

Nicht jeder Gegenstand, der auf einer Bühne zum Einsatz kommt, ist ein Requisit. Andrew Sofer fasst in seiner vielbeachteten Studie ‚The Stage Life of Props‘ von 2003 unter diesem Begriff nur eigenständige, materielle und unbelebte Objekte, die von einer Schauspielerin oder einem Schauspieler im Laufe einer Vorstellung sichtbar manipuliert werden. In dieser engeren Definition des Requisitenbegriffs kommt dem Moment der Bewegung eine zentrale Bedeutung zu: An sich nicht mit Bewegungspotential ausgestattet, werden Objekte zu Requisiten, sobald sie in absichts- und bedeutungsvolle, repräsentative Handlungen eingebunden werden. Damit gerät nicht nur die konkrete Beschaffenheit der Requisiten in den Blick, sondern auch und vor allem ihre Handhabung durch menschliche Akteure, die wiederum durch die mit den Objekten verbundenen Konnotationen ebenso wie durch ihre spezifische Konstruktion (funktionsfähig oder von eingeschränktem Funktionswert) mitbestimmt wird.

Die Tagung widmet sich den Requisiten, die auf den vielfältigen ‚Bühnen‘ der bildenden Kunst vom Mittelalter bis in die Gegenwart verwendet wurden. Nicht erst im Theater, sondern bereits in der christlichen Liturgie, bei militärischen Triumphzügen und im höfischen Zeremoniell, um nur einige Beispiele zu nennen, wurden Objekte auf unterschiedlichste Weise in Szene gesetzt und semantisch aufgeladen. Spätestens seit Leon Battista Albertis Umschreibung des Bildes als Fenster oder Ausblick auf eine ‚historia‘, d. h. auf eine Handlung mit mehreren Figuren in unterschiedlichen Haltungen und Bewegungen, durch die der Bildraum einer Bühne anglichen wird, zeigt sich aber auch eine Parallelität zwischen bildlichen Darstellungen und Abläufen im Theater. Daher scheint eine Weitung des Blicks vom realen zum fiktiven Raum angebracht, in dem signifikante Objekte ebenfalls zu herausgehobenen Requisiten werden können.

Im Fokus theaterwissenschaftlicher Studien standen bisher vorgefundene Objekte wie Ringe, Totenschädel und Fächer oder eigens für eine Theaterinszenierung angefertigte Artefakte wie Masken, Gläser aus Zucker oder Messer mit versenkbaren Klingen. Neben solchen Objekten, die teils bereits Gegenstand kunsthistorischer Studien sind, können während der Tagung auch ‚Requisiten‘ aus den genannten Kontexten, aus privaten Sammlungen oder Künstlerateliers sowie aus vergleichbaren Zusammenhängen diskutiert werden. Über die Inszenierung solcher Objekte im realen wie im fiktiven Raum hinaus sollen auch die Orte ihrer Aufbewahrung und Präsentation Berücksichtigung finden (Rüst-, Wunder- und Requisitenkammern). Ebenfalls thematisiert werden können die methodischen Zugänge zur Erforschung von Requisiten in ihrer Relevanz für die Kunstgeschichte bzw. eine kunsthistorische Objektwissenschaft, etwa die Affordanztheorie und die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, die beide von der spezifischen Beschaffenheit der Objekte ausgehen, oder auch gendertheoretische und transkulturelle Ansätze, aus denen neue Impulse für die Erforschung der vielschichtigen Interaktion von Mensch und Objekt hervorgegangen sind.

Taking as a starting point Isabella Nova’s discussion of the scene of Aga-memnon’s death painted in the well-known krater Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 63. 1246, the article discusses the nature of the deadly peplos which entangles the king, and the relationship between the vase and Aeschylus’ treatment of the same subject. The two artists, independently, seem to have conceived the cloth in a similar way; it is also possible that the painter tried to represent Agamemnon as still wet after the bath: this remains, however, a controversial point.

In Theater Mitu’s Abu Dhabi production of Death of a Salesman, most of the parts were played by physical objects. With their meticulous attention to the material relationships onstage, Mitu reveals how Salesman – and modern drama, more generally – moves and is made to move unevenly in the global repertory. Spurred by this production, the article puts into conversation the recent critical discourses on global theatre and performing objects. Global studies of theatre, as they accumulate their examples, tend to distance themselves critically from individual performances as performances. The study of performing objects, in a sense, checks these more sweeping critical tendencies by reminding us of the obstinate materiality, contingency, and strangeness of live theatre. In its defamiliarization of a familiar tragedy, Mitu’s Salesman negotiates this methodological difference and illuminates the physical ways that performance moves on stage and off, and both in and out of our critical gaze.

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Lee Knight’s musical performances takes “storytime” to the next level. The children can jump into the book and act out the story and use props, figurines, and their own emotions and expression, to assist them in making the story come to life.

Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.

Portraits in Early Modern English Drama studies the complex web of interconnections that grows out of the presentation of portraits as props in early modern English drama, from the Elizabethan age up to the closing of the theatres. This book examines how the dramatic text and the subjectivities of the dramatis personae are shaped and changed through the process of observation and interpretation of pictures in the dramatic actions and dialogues.
Unlike any previous study, it confronts when a portrait is clearly meant not to be a miniature. This also has bearings on the effect of the picture on the audience and in terms of genre expectation. Two important questions are interrogated in the book: What were the price and value of these portraits? and What were the strategies deployed by the playing companies to show women’s portraits in a theatre without actresses?
This book will be of interest to different areas of research dealing with the history of drama and literature, material and visual culture studies, art history, gender studies, and performance studies.

An essay is presented on ecological psychology and its main concept of affordances that was developed by American perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson. It aims to show how affordances can be used to relativize the unwarranted specificity or generality of concepts such as prop or object and the very dichotomy of objects and subjects. It discusses how theater objects afford theatrical action and how this approach affords probing them in the context of this approach.

Source Doc: https://alternate-logic.blogspot.com/2022/07/for-your-conscious-intent-you-do-get.html



For your conscious intent, You DO 'get what you deserve'!

See link for this image:  'Why We Fail and How'

Not that your intent is validated as good or bad, or that the results will, being favorable or unfavorable, are ethical and spiritually moral. It means in the context of your motivating preconceptions, you've gotten what you deserve!

When You're going by your own rules-just pulling them out of your intuitive, ass' notions of obsessions and imperatives-there will be mechanical adjustment other than being more accommodating or conformist to what you decided from which to deviate. There are some hard realities you'll encounter that will necessitate a new perspective or incidental fine-tuning. That which particularly seems like FAILURE or success may have more to do with the perspective and expectations of intent.

In "failure", though one door seems to be slammed shut in your face, if you take a moment to step back, turn around, and see the broader scope about you, that failure just might have been the liberating forced leverage you needed for your 'Self' to open your eyes to other means and factors that your preconceptions had not counted on.

Being an intuitive Iconoclastic thinker from the herd-of-thought is a meandering, convoluted, marathon path, than a sprint or short run from point A-to-point B. It's a thought deconstruction and reconstruction of your minds soft-ware and embedded hardware of habits. This will take the time and discipline which you randomly ignored and discounted, prior to this off-the-beaten-path journey.

It's about your juxtaposition with an idea, for which relationships with people come to be seen as passing ephemerals and transactional incidentals. People are just the symbolic props of place and time than the long-sought soul-mate of longevity. The mechanics of your thinking are your bestie, your partner, your companion-literally and figuratively.

Make friends with your mind's mechanics and its minimalist, obligatory and imperative needs in the most expedient, amoralistic ways, when necessary, to nurture and develop the path your mind's mechanics present to your conscientious discernment.

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