The director's main task is to find meaning in the text and convey that meaning to the audience. The art of the director is to radically re-interpret the classic text in order to make it relevant for a contemporary audience. Adjudicate between these two different positions with reference to the work of two major theatre directors.
The director has become a very important part of a theatre performance. This has not always been the case. In the early years of theatre the director was seen chiefly as a manager, they were there to organise a performance and overlook the development of the play. The director's job was to focus on `the management' of a production to keep it moving forward. But this was soon to change, on May 1, 1874 the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen displayed a different direction style, which would go a long way to changing the role of the director forever. The Duke, on this date did not become the significant figure a director now is. His ideas helped to develop the role of the director who would soon become the fundamental factor to the success of a performance. The Duke's initiative allowed him to be more involved in the piece. Cole and Chinoy expressed the impact of the Duke on a performance in their book Directors on Directing.
"He was the artistic creator of each production. He designed the sets and costumes, but he went further and designed every movement and every position on stage."
The development of the director was a gradual process but each new director in the nineteenth and twentieth century contributed to the emergence of the director as the artistic creator of each show.
Is the role of the director to convey meaning from the text and to convey that meaning to an audience? Or is the art of the di...
... middle of paper ...
...ays. The director can choose what meaning he wants to convey to the audience, what meaning the set will have for the piece, what feelings the characters put across to the audience. An example of this is in Stanislavsky's version of The Cherry Orchard when he represented the character of Lopakhin to be the most psychologically complex, which Chekhov questions. This is significant because the author originally created the meaning in the text and Stanislavsky's direction techniques can alter the meaning of the whole piece. But if a director attempts to show the values the script holds he has less choice on how it is going to be performed and the director's choices shrink and there is a greater margin for error if the script is interpreted incorrectly. As a result, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard could really only be understood and performed perfectly by Chekhov himself.
In the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else’s vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock.
When Mary Zimmerman adapts a play from an ancient text her directing process and the way she engages with text are woven together, both dependent on the other. She writes these adaptations from nondramatic text, writing each evening while working through the pre-production rehearsals and improvisations during the day with the cast. The rehearsal process influences the text, and the text enriches the rehearsal process, so that one cannot exist without the other. Every rehearsal is structured the same but each production is unique because as Zimmerman states in “The Archaeology of Performance”, she is always “open to the possibilities”. The piece is open to everything happening in the world and to the people involved, so the possibilities are honest and endless.
Playwrights and directors during this time would have needed a vehicle to accurately represent their intentions. Because of this, they would need to
To realize the vision of the play, the script, set-up, costumes, stagecraft, sound design, and acting have to communicate a unified message with which the audience will relate. The script will be tailored to ensure that the audience can understand the play as it proceeds. This is in terms of the language and terms used. Though the language will not be modern, it will be English that can be understood by the audience. This will be English of antique England as it will give the play a feeling of ancient times. The scriptwriter will carry out research on the level of understanding the local people will have of ancient English so as to ascertain that the script matches this level. Although many plays of that era were sung and accompanied by dance, this play will be acted out with spoken word rather than songs. This is because speaking will ensure the audience hears the conversations as they go on and that they understand. This is ...
These plays are presented as slightly distorted mirrors of reality, so by having audiences invest themselves so deeply in the understanding of the literature, they are likely to gain a greater understanding of themselves and the worlds they live in. By pushing the imaginative burden onto the audience, Shakespeare is able to make commentary on human nature and human history without being held responsible for its implications. Because the audience is encouraged to fully embrace their role in the production, any commentary and critique is aimed towards themselves and their inability to effectively understand, resulting in an increased appreciation for Shakespeare himself, and the complexity of literature as an art
There are many important aspects of theatre history. Important playwrights, actors, theatres, and events that impacted theatre in major ways. In this paper I am going to discuss the life of an important actor who would be better known for his last name and the actions of his brother. By looking into his life I have learned how interesting of an actor he was and what significance he had on theatre history. This actor is Edwin Booth.
The criticism relies on two assumptions. One, that rhetoric creates reality, and two, that convergence occurs. With regards to rhetoric creating reality we are to assume that the symbolic forms that are created from the rhetoric are not imitations but organs of reality. This is because it is through their agency that anything becomes real. We assume to that convergence occurs because symbols not only create reality for individuals but that individual’s meanings can combine to create a shared reality for participants. The shared reality then provides a basis for the community of participants to discuss their common experiences and to achieve a mutual understanding. The consequence of this is that the individuals develop the same attitudes and emotions to the personae of the drama. Within this criticism the audience is seen as the most critical part because the sharing of the message is seen as being so significant.
This essay shows the subtle differences that can occur between directors, even when they are basing the movie off of almost the exact same script. Almost no two movies are exactly alike, no matter how hard the directors and actors might try. Minor personality differences and scene changes greatly affect the atmosphere and meaning of the same movie. One example of this is the movie Romeo and Juliet. This movie tells the gripping story of two young lovers who are forbade to see each other because of a viscous feud between the two families. I'll be looking at the older 50's version of Romeo and Juliet and comparing it to the newer version of Romeo and Juliet.
By definition, a film director is one who is in charge of a film’s creative and dramatic aspects and envisions the script while guiding the crew and actors in the fulfillment of that vision. There are few directors in Hollywood that truly and passionately fulfill their artistic vision; one of these directors is Quentin Tarantino.
When a play is presented on film, the director takes the script, and with poetic license, interprets it. A film not only contains the actual words of the author (in this case Shakespeare), but it includes action, acting, and cinematographic techniques; the three are used to better portray the author’s story. Using these elements, the director’s interpretation of the plot is reinforced. The film provides symbolic images and a visual interpretation, hence Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth” is better understood by the viewers.
Despite the provision of stage directions, however, a play is not simple to adapt to a cinematic form. Plays rely heavily on dialogue to communicate emotion to the reader whereas film allows for close visual representation. Filmmakers can explore creativity in adaptation in many ways unavailable and impractical in the theater. In order to maximize the emotional impact of a dramatic work, the filmmaking team can make use of several simple yet effective tools, such as the composition of frames and the variations of the camera shot. In the 1961 film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking play A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Daniel Petrie, the filmmakers use these techniques in creative ways to communica...
Martin Esslin, an established drama director, scholar, and critic, approaches his analysis of drama by drawing on his practical experience as a director of plays. Esslin implicitly assumes that drama is the most elite of the artistic genres when he directly declares the purpose of his book, which is to answer the question "why should those concerned with art resort to drama rather than any other form of communication?" Esslin then immediately poses another question that he seems to take as a prerequisite for the first question: "What is the underlying, basic nature of dramatic form and what is it that drama can express better than any other form of communication?"
” … an auteur is able to maintain a consistency of style and theme by working against the constraints of the Hollywood mode of production.” – Warren Buckland (2008)
Being a director in a production such as Romeo and Juliet is no easy task, and I enter into this paper with that in mind. My goals are to be creative, and do things differently from the many versions of the play we have viewed in class. Each of those directors took the original text, written by William Shakespeare, and turned it into a unique version of their own; unique in the sense that they changed the tragedy by taking out lines, conversation or even entire scenes to better suit that particular director’s needs.
“Theatre makes us think about power and the way our society works and it does this with a clear purpose, to make a change.”