Theater is everywhere in our life. Wedding, holiday parade, president election, car race can all be categorized as theatrical events, because of the role playing involved and the presence of an audience. Among all theatrical activities, one is not invented until a decade ago, yet closely related to the ancient theater --- flash mob. Flash mob can be defined as a sudden art performance by a group of suddenly resembled people in front of the public. It, like a theater work, consists of actors, an audience, a production process prior to the performance (selection and coordination of performer, music, stage, costumes, choreography). Although seemingly identical, flash mob lacks profundity and deepness in all aforementioned aspects, and can only …show more content…
Without an audience, the flash mob would merely be a group of people practice dancing, dull and boring. Despite the fact that both theater and flash mob needs an audience, the audience itself is quite different in each scenario. The first difference is that the target audience of the flash mob need not necessarily to be everyone who is watching the show. In a proposal flash mob, the target could exclusively be only one person. In a one that aims at advertising a product, the target would be a selected group of people, maybe students in a school, or commuters at a subway station. In theater, however, the target is supposed to be as widely as possible. Another difference is that the flash mob’s audience does not have choices over what to watch and hence there is a high possibility for them to leave the performance before it ends. In addition to this unstable audience, flash mob also need to take in the noise from the environment, provided that most of their performances are given on the street or at other public places. These disturbances will more or less distract the performance. In contrast, the audience in theater needs to follow the rules and will not talk during the performance. As a result, the focused …show more content…
A director’s role is well described by Wilson and Goldfarb, “While the director is preparing the script and choosing the performers, he or she is also working closely with the scene, the costume, lighting, and sound designers to develop the visual and aural aspects of the production” (125). The counter part of the director in a flash mob is the organizer. In a simple example, the role of organizer can be understood clearly. In 2011, UCLA newsroom reported a successful flash mob proposal happened in the Bruin Plaza at UCLA. Nam Tran, the “director” who was about to propose to his girl friend Vu, chose the scene (Bruin Plaza), the actors (Flash Mob America staff), the costume (casual clothes as disguises), music or sound (his girl friend’s favorite song) all by him self, a work as expansive a director’s (Hewitt, Flash mob helps Bruin pop the question). While the flash mob has the role of director, it is missing an integral component to be considered a true theater --- the script. Without the script, an artistic event will always be one dimension thinner than theater which contains three parts literature, visual and heard
Harrison’s production is an empathetic insight into the sustained impact of the “Stolen Generation” on its victims. Harrison’s stage directions allow performers to powerfully use sets and props to represent the experience of each character. This was demonstrated while viewing different scenes of “Stolen” workshopped in class. The actors started off each holding a suitcase conveying the absence of home, stability and security.
During this time they had been focusing
More the audience invest, the more emotionally involved and able to think about the issue associated with this crime. Giving such contrasting vision also helps the audience to reflect where they stand in their point of view in a
This key term was used to articulate what exactly had been done in Orlando. The audience knows that this was a shooting, but classifying it as an act of terrorism tells the audience the scale of how atrocious this event was. The shooter and an act of terrorism are cause and effect clusters that go together well to explain to the audience what happened. Then, the audience is the last key term. The rhetor makes the audience itself a key term to easily identify and relate with the audience using pathos and logos that was discussed earlier.
Flash Mobs convey their messages by lasting a set amount of time and utilizing communication methods that people will remember, such as singing or dancing in a public place. In the article, “News Flash: Why Flash Mobs are Good for your Health”, Anna Miller argues that flash mobs have both mental
Upstage is back, downstage is front, right is left, left is right, out is up, break a leg but don't really, wings have nothing to do with birds, the catwalk doesn’t involve cats, and when the stage manager says move it means move. The theatre vocabulary is very confusing for the outside world, but for me it is my second language. More specifically, I have developed a passion for the technical elements of theatre over the years. The joy of being the “people in black” that can make amazing sets and produce incredible plays which goes unnoticed.. Although this discourse is much small yet complex it has helped me find out who I am but also in my academic skills through learning how to work in teams, solve problems independently but also how to be
Circuses are more than just an extravagant evening rendezvous. The exhilaration gained from entire families’ valiant works a hair’s breadth away from injury, with not a net or harness to cradle their shortcomings, is hardly matched. One could not imagine a greater feat of merriment if left to their own devices and for good reason. That is to say the waves of eyes darting towards the centerpiece incite no lesser feeling of chagrin. The tides of townspeople, dressed to the nines with only a scaffold to support their boisterous japery bind the crowd, their purposes ultimately served in total.
The cast of the play are unaware of the audience, however, the audience is able to listen to dialogue that occurs throughout the theater, whether it is in the headsets between technicians, on stage between the actors playing their characters in the play and between the director and actors who make adjustments when necessary. The third fourth wall was at its edge of breaking, where the audience is almost unable to tell whether what they are experiencing is real or not. As an observer of the rehearsal of this play, this wall was broken when I understood that what I was watching was a rehersal of a play, of a rehearsal of a play. It was difficult to describe or understand when the cast of 10 out of 12 were actually in or out of character. The complexity of this play lies in the use of metatheatre, which has been exploited to its fullest extent
The Greeks were the first to introduce the concept of theater. As a matter of fact, one performer, Thespis, created the idea of a chorus, which was a group of people that expressed opinions, gave advice, and had the author’s point of view. The chorus would be the equivalent to the “score” in modern theater. The International Thespian Society, an organization formed to honor student’s success in the theater, was named after Thespis. In Greek theater, the place that the actors performed was called the “paraskene,” while in modern theater it is called the stage.
As matter of fact, the actors at some points are out in the audience, which makes for a kind of unique experience; things like lighting cues, set pieces just kind of spice it up. I think people will recognize the touch TJ theatre puts on
Peter Elbow claims in “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience”, audience is important but sometimes should be placed on the backburner during the writing process. He says that thinking about the audience while writing can sometimes affect our style of how we write. I agree with Elbow that this is true. I believe that thinking about the audience during the writing process can influence how the finished product will look. I also think that we as the writer have a choice as to who are audience can be.
In the article, Sarah Einstein, an undergrad professor, speaks about her experience teaching students to read like writers instead of reading for mere pleasure. She elaborates by pointing out that due to the length of flash fiction, students can read and reread the story numerous times to decipher the meaning behind certain literary choices. Growing as a writer is also about growing as a reader. Understanding why certain things work and why others do not strengthens the readers own prose. This ties into VTM in the sense that flash fiction, both writing and reading, can help us grow creatively to write larger works of fiction.
One aspect of film theory, the auteur theory, has been debated and critiqued by many film theorists since it was first introduced. The auteur theory is the idea that the director is the main creative force behind a motion picture; that similarly to the author of a novel, a director constructs a film through camera movements (akin to an authors pen). In this theory, the fundamentals of the film, which include blocking, lighting, camera movement and placement, are more important than the plot itself. The director, in a sense, makes the film great because of his/hers creative control over every aspect of the filmmaking process. The theory, however, has raised many concerns; it puts ‘great directors’ into this group of ‘auteurs’ and once you make
“The Empty Space”, a book written by the director Peter Brook outlines his four theories of theatre each that evokes a different meaning, Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate. In his opinion, Deadly Theatre is the most common type of theatre, which fails to modernize, instruct or even entertain. This style concentrates on the act of imitation by mimicking successes from the past and relying on old schemes instead of exploring the deeper meaning from the text (Brook, Peter). However, Shylock, a character from the Merchant of Venice a play written by Shakespeare, has had various interpretations from actors through out time, causing tendentious reactions from its audience. This thought fueled my inquisitiveness to investigate the importance on how
“Imagination no longer has a function”, says Emile Zola in his essay, ‘Naturalism in the Theatre’. Many of the ideas which Zola has discussed in this essay have been taken up by modern theatre, both in theory and practice. Modern theatre, for instance, is aware of the fact that analysis and not synthesis should be the basis for theatrical production. It is with this theory at the back of his mind that Bertolt Brecht has discussed theatre’s role as an educator only if the elements associated with spectacle are removed from theatre.