Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century, Student Edition

Writing as a Woman in the Twentieth Century

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A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary.

More relevant are the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human madness portrayed in a good farce.

A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.

Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful play has style and little else. By style , therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play, its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion , and the way in which these qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also: By means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.

Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly broken. By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play.

In theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. The author must reckon with this circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen , George Bernard Shaw , and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason the ideas as part of their response to the play.

Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to ensure the affective function of their plays. The language of drama can range between great extremes: In the ritualistic drama of ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse , and it may be assumed that their actors rendered this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically.

The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance , the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine , the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller , and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.

Indeed, plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.

Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response.

Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Kimbrough

Certainly, the aural, kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically into the mood of the play.

The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but, rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the conditions in which it will be performed: How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to be dramatized: A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story episodically from its beginning to the end.

There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally suggested in his Poetics: In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.

In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world to the next, and from reality to dream.

Certainly it has little to do with merely physical activity by the players. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. For drama is a reactive art, moving constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious time is of immeasurable value. In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England , a Javanese puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller , all forms of dramatic literature have some points in common.

Differences between plays arise from differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important, if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately distinguishable from that of the West. It was at its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable and conservative , perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors and their individual achievements.

Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept. The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre as in the 20th-century experimental drama of William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in French, and of Brecht in German.

In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of exceptional finesse , subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: The display and studied gestures of the actors, their refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role.

In this drama, place could be shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists, the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema, and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive. Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre , in which stylization of character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes.

In Bunraku , the classical puppet theatre of Japan , the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century master Chikamatsu Monzaemon , who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character and situation.

It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti.

This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes.

None of the moral probing of Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg , nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is imaginable in the classical drama of the East. Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring and winter festivals of Dionysus.

Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. The chorus not only provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and emotion of the audience throughout the play: Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist in the form and style he could use in these plays: Nevertheless, these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling.

It is a mark of the piety of those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes c. The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus c. Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and content of plays of later times.

Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church , and, again, the texts reflect the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy , the climax of the Christian calendar , explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery cycles.

Common elements of drama

From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? The liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi was instituted in , the great lay cycles of biblical plays the mystery plays and miracle cycles developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence controlling their form and style was their manner of performance.

The vast quantity of material that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry , they mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details, familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life.

Their drama consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms, religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its simple audiences. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business lazzi to meet the occasion of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play.

As these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. In the 16th century , England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety.

In both nations, there were public as well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London , dramatists wrote in an extraordinary range of dramatic genres , from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy , from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies , all before the advent of Shakespeare.

Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles. With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in character.

A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible dramatic poetry.

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These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and vision. Quite independently in Spain , dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes of dramatic influence.

On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. The Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine , tragedies of honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly controlled plot. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the throne of England in , a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course.

Wits such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed a comedy of manners , replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.

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German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite different type of play: Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre.

One of the first known actors is believed to have been an ancient Greek called Thespis of Icaria.

Dramatic literature

Writing two centuries after the event, Aristotle in his Poetics c. Before Thespis, the chorus narrated for example, "Dionysus did this, Dionysus said that". When Thespis stepped out from the chorus, he spoke as if he was the character for example, "I am Dionysus, I did this". To distinguish between these different modes of storytelling—enactment and narration—Aristotle uses the terms " mimesis " via enactment and " diegesis " via narration.

From Thespis' name derives the word "thespian". A professional actor is someone who is paid to act. Professional actors sometimes undertake unpaid work for a variety of reasons, including educational purposes or for charity events. Amateur actors are those who do not receive payment for performances.

Not all people working as actors in film , television , or theatre are professionally trained. Bob Hoskins , for example, had no formal training before becoming an actor. Conservatories and drama schools typically offer two- to four-year training on all aspects of acting. Universities mostly offer three- to four-year programs, in which a student is often able to choose to focus on acting, whilst continuing to learn about other aspects of theatre. Schools vary in their approach, but in North America the most popular method taught derives from the 'system' of Konstantin Stanislavski , which was developed and popularised in America as method acting by Lee Strasberg , Stella Adler , Sanford Meisner , and others.

Other approaches may include a more physically based orientation, such as that promoted by theatre practitioners as diverse as Anne Bogart , Jacques Lecoq , Jerzy Grotowski , or Vsevolod Meyerhold. Classes may also include psychotechnique , mask work, physical theatre , improvisation , and acting for camera. Regardless of a school's approach, students should expect intensive training in textual interpretation, voice, and movement.

Applications to drama programmes and conservatories usually involve extensive auditions. Anybody over the age of 18 can usually apply. Training may also start at a very young age. Acting classes and professional schools targeted at unders are widespread. These classes introduce young actors to different aspects of acting and theatre, including scene study. Increased training and exposure to public speaking allows humans to maintain calmer and more relaxed physiologically. As actors increase performances, heart rate and other evidence of stress can decrease.

These effects can vary from hormonal to cognitive health that can impact quality of life and performance [5].

Some classical forms of acting involve a substantial element of improvised performance. Most notable is its use by the troupes of the commedia dell'arte , a form of masked comedy that originated in Italy.

History of theatre

Improvisation as an approach to acting formed an important part of the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski 's 'system' of actor training, which he developed from the s onwards. Late in , the playwright Maxim Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri , where they discussed training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar" of acting. In the United Kingdom, the use of improvisation was pioneered by Joan Littlewood from the s onwards and, later, by Keith Johnstone and Clive Barker. Like the British practitioners, Spolin felt that playing games was a useful means of training actors and helped to improve an actor's performance.

With improvisation, she argued, people may find expressive freedom, since they do not know how an improvised situation will turn out. Improvisation demands an open mind in order to maintain spontaneity, rather than pre-planning a response. A character is created by the actor, often without reference to a dramatic text, and a drama is developed out of the spontenous interactions with other actors. Speaking or acting in front of an audience is a stressful situation, which causes an increased heart rate [9] Baldwin, [10] Lacey, In a study on American university students, actors of various experience levels all showed similarly elevated heart rates throughout their performances; this agrees with previous studies on professional and amateur actors' heart rates [11] Konijin, While all actors experienced stress, causing elevated heart rate, the more experienced actors displayed less heart rate variability than the less experienced actors in the same play.

The more experienced actors experienced less stress while performing, and therefore had a smaller degree of variability than the less experienced, more stressed actors. The more experienced an actor is, the more stable their heart rate will be while performing, but will still experience elevated heart rates. The semiotics of acting involves a study of the ways in which aspects of a performance come to operate for its audience as signs.

This process largely involves the production of meaning, whereby elements of an actor's performance acquire significance, both within the broader context of the dramatic action and in the relations each establishes with the real world.

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In his The Theatre and its Double , Artaud compared this interaction to the way in which a snake charmer communicates with a snake, a process which he identified as " mimesis "—the same term that Aristotle in his Poetics c. These "vibrations" passing from the actor to the audience may not necessarily precipiate into significant elements as such that is, consciously perceived "meanings" , but rather may operate by means of the circulation of " affects ".

The approach to acting adopted by other theatre practitioners involve varying degrees of concern with the semiotics of acting. Konstantin Stanislavski , for example, addresses the ways in which an actor, building on what he calls the "experiencing" of a role, should also shape and adjust a performance in order to support the overall significance of the drama—a process that he calls establishing the "perspective of the role".

Eugenio Barba argues that actors ought not to concern themselves with the significance of their performance behaviour; this aspect is the responsibility, he claims, of the director , who weaves the signifying elements of an actor's performance into the director's dramaturgical "montage". The theatre semiotician Patrice Pavis , alluding to the contrast between Stanislavski's 'system' and Brecht's demonstrating performer—and, beyond that, to Denis Diderot 's foundational essay on the art of acting, Paradox of the Actor c.

Acting was long seen in terms of the actor's sincerity or hypocrisy—should he believe in what he is saying and be moved by it, or should he distance himself and convey his role in a detached manner? The answer varies according to how one sees the effect to be produced in the audience and the social function of theatre. Elements of a semiotics of acting include the actor's gestures, facial expressions, intonation and other vocal qualities, rhythm, and the ways in which these aspects of an individual performance relate to the drama and the theatrical event or film, television programme, or radio broadcast, each of which involves different semiotic systems considered as a whole.

Any acting is based on a codified system even if the audience does not see it as such of behaviour and actions that are considered to be believable and realistic or artificial and theatrical. To advocate the natural, the spontaneous, and the instinctive is only to attempt to produce natural effects, governed by an ideological code that determines, at a particular historical time, and for a given audience, what is natural and believable and what is declamatory and theatrical. The conventions that govern acting in general are related to structured forms of play , which involve, in each specific experience, " rules of the game.

For it is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to engage in mimesis indeed, this distinguishes them from other animals: This connection with play also informed the words used in English as was the analogous case in many other European languages for drama: Actors and actresses need to make a resume [17] when they go to auditions, similarly to when people of other occupations go into an interview.

The acting resume is very different from the normal resume, it has a lot less information on it with lists, instead of paragraphs and it should have the head shot [18] on the back. Auditioning is the act of performing either a monologue [19] or sides [20] the casting director either mails or emails to the actors right before your audition. Auditioning entails showing the skills the actors have to instantly turn into a completely different person within a two-minute frame period.

For theater auditions it can be longer than two minutes or they can perform more than one monologue, each casting director can have different requirements for actors. For auditions, actors will have to go dressed similarly to the character they are auditioning for to make it easier for the casting director to visualize them as the character. For television or film they will have to undergo more than one audition, if the casting director chooses to put them forward into the process. Oftentimes actors are called into another audition last minute and will send them the sides either the morning of or the night before.

Auditioning can be part of the stressful side to acting, especially if one is not trained to audition.

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