Apparition Of An Actor On The Stage example essay topic

Grotowski The name that was given to Jerzy Grotwsky's working orientation in theatre means precisely that his direction minimizes to the maximum the scenography; the actors act in an almost naked space. Scenography was refused because it was considered as an activity with commercial goals, obeying to the social and economical ideologies of the bourgeois theatre. The "poor theatre" even reduces the human body and its identity and personality. It refuses the realistic representation of the character, moreover its human corporal connotation. Behind Grotowski's 'poverty', which rises in the 60's, there is an ideological position: react against the technology that wants art to be possible only through the hi-tech. Grotowski searches to go back to a sort of theatre that evokes an archaic world, where man lives the plenitude of his social and existential condition.

He wants to restore the symbolic and ritualistic practices in a sort of returning back to a native space recalling to an interpersonal relation between the actor and the spectator. This experimental vision of theatre activity is seen in Grotowski work since his first staging of Ionesco's 'the Chairs' in 1957 at the tear Scary in Cracovy. In 1965 he creates the Institute of research on acting methods in Poland. Always far from the large audience, he works only in small towns for an audience composed of 20-30 spectators. This attitude corresponds to a true aesthetic purism: his "poor theatre" tends towards an essentiality of the theatrical act. His staging of Julius Slowcki's kord ian in 1962 takes place in a psychiatric clinic where the small audience takes part of the play, considered as other internals from the clinic, some of them seated on the hospital beds.

The same year he presents Wyspianski's Acropolis which originally takes place inside Cracovy's cathedral, an important place to the Polish national identity. But Grotowski had decided to situate his representation in the Auschwitz camps. Grotowski wanted to devel Wyspianski's gloomy and pessimistic text through a same scenic space that transmits those very specific emotions. Grotowski questions about the elements constituting theatre and concludes that everything is only additional except from the relation between the actor and his audience. Thus, the 'poor theatre' gets rid of everything that is superfluous in the traditional theater. It refuses the century's innovations such as film and pictures projections or the use of new lightening techniques, in order to get closer to the theatre act's essentiality and its specificity as an artistic form.

Svoboda: The direct heir of what is called the ' technologie stage" in the first half of the twentieth century is the Czech scenography Josef Svoboda. It is in 1958, at the czechoslovaque stand at the Universal exposition in Bruxelles, that his stenographic conception is revealed to the international stages. His presented there the Laterna Magica, conceived by Alfred Rado k, whose theatrical aspect is centered upon time and space, movement and light. Svoboda invents a theatre where are acting, at the same time, living actors- whose acting is composed of pantomime, dancing, singing, dramatic and tragic tones- and film projections in black and white or in color, as well as comic strips and transparencies, projected on moving objects. The mise en scene of several effects together creates poetic moments such as the apparition of an actor on the stage though he was on the screen a moment before, or characters's plotting on stage.

The combination of all those techniques builds the very modern and revolutionary aspect of Svoboda's theatre. He resolutely goes towards an aesthetic research serving the theatre in so as such. As he leaves the Laterna Magica, he starts using the image projections as a mental and metaphorical key on stage. For example in 1963, the setting of Shakespeare's ' Midsummer Night Dream' was composed of large surfaces in a giant leaf form upon which were projected images of smaller leaves. It gave a movement impression which corresponds to the play's atmosphere. In Hamlet, two years later, he visualizes the idea of the two opposed civilizations by a contrast of vertical and horizontal lines.

He sets in the middle of the stage an immense mirror, inclined to 50 degrees, upon which the characters are reflected. To formulate the idea of an inevitable trap, he builds a strange machine with aggressive volumes that sink into each other during the presentation. Besides the setting's movements and the projections, the lightening also structures the space. In the seagull in 1966, to suggest the presence of a lake, he conceives luminous partitions tat the actor can cross, although the stage is stretched by black velvets. Some branches suspended on the lamps cut the space with their shadow. For Don Giovanni, the same year, he creates a stage made of a checkerboard.

At the backstage, are placed all the scenic elements, such as game prawns, and they advance to rhythm the dramatic action. At the end of the play they go back to their place: there is only the commander statue left on stage. In this staging that had a very strong visual effect, mirrors send back the spectators proper image on the stage. Using light as a true magician, Svoboda abolishes the stage's limits. Svoboda's scenography introduces the technological knowledge dimension to build his fascinating creations. Besides his invention of a certain lightening technique that carries his name, he elaborates new surfaces destined for the projections by creating mobile slides, and installs electronic images on the set or in between the actors.

He is the one to use the best way the mechanical image and diversifies it, introducing on the stage, new techniques of representation, new machines with their proper significance, that remain at the service of the play itself, of the theatre and the poetry.