The other entertaining moments I liked was when some of the characters would intentionally break the fourth wall. There was a character at one point who broke the fourth wall by literally running through a “wall” that was meant to be there, and the other characters addressed this. Another time, a character would mention actual places in St. Louis and it made it even funnier because the audience knew exactly what they were talking about, and we could easily relate. Since this is a travelling play, we knew those lines were specifically for our city, and that connection to the audience made the play more enjoyable. Another very entertaining moment that broke the fourth wall was when a character who always used a walker throughout the play, walked…
The Conversation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, follows Harry Caul, an expert in the field of surveillance, as he becomes obsessed with trying to decipher a distorted audio of a conversation between two people that he thinks are in danger. He is already wracked with guilt after his work on a previous project led to a person's death, and this guilt fuels an obsession to prevent it from happening again. This obsession contributes to a disconnect from reality and Harry's tendency to distance himself from the people in his life. This scene shows Harry's disconnection from others and his obsession with the people in the recorded conversation in a few different ways. It was represented most clearly through the composition of the shots and use of sound throughout the scene.…
CRR #7 Observations: In the reading Our Town by Thornton Wilder I felt the feeling of being included in the audience because he gives us the layout at the beginning. Another detail that contributes to this feeling of being included is by having the stage manager speak directly to us. When he starts describing the town and how small it is it reminds me of Porterville and how nothing really happens there or here. I find it sad when the stage manager tells us about all the things Joe is going to accomplish but ends up dying in the war.…
Culture has often been a reflection and commentary of history through entertainment outlets such as moves, plays, or music. Common examples include Imitation Game and Hamilton: An American Musical. The Jewish culture has famously been depicted in two theatrical performances, describing life in the twentieth century. The musical.…
I was able to see a different approach on how to grab the audience’s attention from the other director’s performance. The scene at the same time was very comical, but also held you on the edge of your seat with its high tension and wonderful transformation of a relationship between two characters on stage. This really grabbed my attention and taught me that a transformation of a relationship on stage really enriches the performance. Overall, the knowledge I gained from this activity in class really helped me establish a foundation and base for the mechanics of…
The trailer for Bad Words, the 2013 Jason Bateman movie about a guy who exploits a loophole in national spelling bee rules that allows him to compete against a bunch of fifth graders, goes in hard on its one-joke idea: that swearing is funny. “Auto-fellatio” Bateman uses as the prerequisite lesson to teach a nine-year-old how to say “fuck”. As in Ted, Deadpool and a thousand Bad Santa, -type movies before them, the joke only works if there’s tension between the film’s liberal premise – that bad language does not, in fact, do any harm – and it’s the new age status quo. There has never been a better time to be foul mouthed in public.…
Anne Frank SFQs The pain Mr. Frank feels within himself when he returns to the attic rooms reveal a central theme in “The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play.” In paragraph 6 it states, “his eye is caught by something lying on the floor. It is a woman’s white glove. He holds it in his hand and suddenly all of his self-control is gone.…
Hrotsvitha wrote liturgical plays that were never performed on stage and became the first medieval woman to write about female spirituality. The main themes Hrotsvit emphasized her writing on was the virginity of woman. In her plays, “Hrotsvit constructs a world in which women’s chastity and asceticism become sources of power and direct links to God and Christ in which male lust is the fault of men, which is seen as un-Christlike” (Wetmore 18). Gallicanus is a satire that focuses on male lust and the conversion to Christianity. In the Benedictine monastery at Bad Gandersheim in Saxony, the noble women in the convent may have read Gallicanus and her other works aloud.…
Reader’s theater ties in different strategies to help students practice their oral reading. It helps students improve their reading fluency and comprehension when reading a book. The students are also able to create a performance based on the reading that helps them tell the story by acting. I will use Reader’s Theater to motivate students who need more practice in oral fluency. This strategy can also benefit the students’ who have an artistic approach to…
It is always eye opening to watch and read things that are through the perspective of a person who stutters. Having grown up with a classmate who stuttered with a really great school SLP gave me a different perspective. In school we learned that our just needed a little more time to say what he wanted to say and if he was having a really hard time he would sing it, there was a lot of singing going on in our classroom. The school SLP pushed in to our classroom all the time to teach us to be patient when playing with our friend. This gave me a different perspective on people who stutter because to me a stutterer was just a normal part of my day as a child.…
This is not unlike Greek theatre where actors used exaggerated gestures and dialogue to express the feelings of their characters. This production was held in an area where the audience surrounded the performers which meant that at any given time during the performance their back was to at least two sections of the audience. Emotions of the characters relied mostly on voice and movement from one part of the stage to another. Elizabethan theatre also used the movement of actors across the stage to express the emotions of characters and allow the actors to be seen by all the difference portions of the…
Cross dressing has been a tradition in theater for a very long time now and is still used very frequently today. An enormous amount of theaters in our culture now use cross dressing to enhance and exert dramatic and comic effects, whereas in older theater they did not have a choice because in some countries women were not allowed to join acting companies. The fact that times have changed, and women are allowed to participate in theater yet we still frequent this strategy raises an interesting question. Is this strategy an evolution striving towards greater acceptance and understanding of all, or just, in some way, a deeply ingrained human impulse?…
In the chapter covering blocking, Cohen and Harrop introduce several ways of blocking with different intentions. They stress on ways of blocking with an overriding focus on presenting intrinsic interpretation of a script. The chapter also includes a number of different images to demonstrate which blocking facilitates which visual effect correspondingly, thus very helpful for visualization. Another chapter “Working with Actors” explains different acting systems including Stanislavski’s system, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Copeau’s poetic physicality, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, and Brecht’s epic theatre. In this section, Cohen and Harrop take an extra step by offering a general guideline of how directors should react and interact with actors corresponding to each system.…
The films in today’s society leave nothing to the imagination. The viewers are given a visual of each character and can see their facial expressions throughout the movie. The down fall when watching a film is that the audience cannot hear the character’s thoughts. When they cannot read their thoughts on the page in front of them, it is hard to figure out their reasoning and personality. When a character in a movie runs into a burning building, the audience is left wondering why?…
INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION In today’s modern era, interpersonal communication plays a very major role in our lives. Interpersonal communication is the core essence of a relationship. It defines an individual role in a relationship. It teaches us how to communicate with different people and be able to adjust to their culture and circumstances.…