Download or read book The World of Harlequin written by Allardyce Nicoll and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-03-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The commedia dell'arte was an improvised drama performed by masked players. How did the actors react to these demands and limitations? What force kept this form of theatre alive for more than two centuries and made Harlequin such a potent image? In this study of the commedia dell'arte, originally published in 1987, Professor Nicoll's concern is not to provide an historical survey of its origins or to trace the ascent and descent of Harlequin or any or any other character or 'mask', but rather to explore critically the answers to these and related questions. His arguments are based on the evidence of the play scenarios and contemporary documents as far as possible, and are illuminated by many illustrations that are either little-known or had not previously been reproduced.

Download or read book Performance and Literature in the Commedia Dell Arte written by Robert Henke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-12-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the commedia dell'arte: the Italian professional theatre in Shakespeare's time. The actors of this theatre usually did not perform from scripted drama but instead improvised their performances from a shared plot and thorough knowledge of individual character roles. Robert Henke closely analyzes hitherto unexamined commedia dell'arte texts in order to demonstrate how the spoken word and written literature were fruitfully combined in performance. Henke examines a number of primary sources including performance accounts, actors' contracts, and letters, among other documents.

Download or read book The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth Century Commedia dell Arte Stage written by Rosalind Kerr and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage examines the emergence of the professional actress from the 1560s onwards in Italy. Tracing the historical progress of actresses from their earliest appearances as sideshow attractions to revered divas, Rosalind Kerr explores the ways in which actresses commodified their sexual and cultural appeal. Newly translated archival material, iconographic evidence, literary texts, and theatrical scripts provide a rich repertoire through which Kerr demonstrates how actresses skillfully improvised roles such as the maidservant, the prima donna, and the transvestite heroine. Following the careers of early stars such as Flaminia of Rome, Vincenza Armani, Vittoria Piissimi, and Isabella Andreini, Kerr shows how their fame arose from the combination of dazzling technical mastery and eloquent powers of persuasion. Seamlessly integrating the Italian and English scholarly literature on the subject, The Rise of the Diva is an insightful analysis of one of the modern world’s first celebrity cultures.

Download or read book Picturing Performance written by Thomas F. Heck and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has long been a need to introduce performing-arts enthusiasts and students to the fascinating field of iconography, both as manifested in art history and in its more pragmatic or applied forms. Yet relatively little systematic effort has been made to collect and interpret centuries of such visual evidence in the light of the best available art-historical information, combined with corroborating textual documentation and insights from the histories of performance disciplines. Aspiring iconographers of the performing arts need to be aware that there are often several levels of interpretation which great works of visual art will sustain. This book explores these levels of interpretation: a surface or literal reading, a deeper reading of the work which seeks to enter the mind of the artist and asks how and why he put a given work together, and the deepest reading of the work relating it to the artistic traditions and culture in which the artist lived. In expounding on these levels of iconographic interpretations four discourses by scholars active in the study of visual records are given in relation to traditions, techniques, and trends: performance in general (Katritzky), music (Heck), theatre (Erenstein), and dance (Smith). Effort is made to keep abreast of modern technology influencing iconographic representations as on the Internet and virtual reality.Thomas F. Heck is Professor of Musicology and Head of the Music and Dance Library at the Ohio State University.

Download or read book The Art of Commedia written by M. A. Katritzky and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2006 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian comedians attracted audiences to performances at every level, from the magnificent Italian, German and French court festival appearances of Orlando di Lasso or Isabella Andreini, to the humble street trestle lazzi of anonymous quacks. The characters they inspired continue to exercise a profound cultural influence, and an understanding of the commedia dell'arte and its visual record is fundamental for scholars of post-1550 European drama, literature, art and music. The 340 plates presented here are considered in the light of the rise and spread of commedia stock types, and especially Harlequin, Zanni and the actresses. Intensively researched in public and private collections in Oxford, Munich, Florence, Venice, Paris and elsewhere, they complement the familiar images of Jacques Callot and the Stockholm Recueil Fossard within a framework of hundreds of significant pictures still virtually unknown in this context. These range from anonymous popular prints to pictures by artists such as Ambrogio Brambilla, Sebastian Vrancx, Jan Bruegel, Louis de Caulery, Marten de Vos, and members of the Valckenborch and Francken clans. This volume, essential for commedia dell'arte specialists, represents an invaluable reference resource for scholars, students, theatre practitioners and artists concerned with commedia-related aspects of visual, dramatic and festival culture, in and beyond Italy.

Download or read book Commedia Dell Arte written by Oliver Crick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A companion to John Rudlin's best-selling Commedia dell'Arte: A Handbook for Actors, this book covers both the history and professional practice of commedia dell'arte companies from 1568 to the present day. Indispensable for both the beginner and the professional, it contains historical and contemporary company case histories, details on company organisation, and tips on practical stagecraft. Essential for students and practitioners, this book enables the reader to understand how successful commedia dell'arte companies function, and how we can learn from past and current practice to create a lively and dynamic form of theatre. Includes tips on: * writing a scenario * mask-making * building a stage * designing a backdrop * costume * music. _

Download or read book A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology written by Eugenio Barba and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2011-03-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book Commedia dell Arte and the Mediterranean written by Erith Jaffe-Berg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on published collections and also manuscripts from Mantuan archives, Commedia dell' arte and the Mediterranean locates commedia dell' arte as a performance form reflective of its cultural crucible in the Mediterranean. The study provides a broad perspective on commedia dell’ arte as an expression of the various cultural, gender and language communities in Italy during the early-modern period, and explores the ways in which the art form offers a platform for reflection on power and cultural exchange. While highlighting the prevalence of Mediterranean crossings in the scenarios of commedia dell' arte, this book examines the way in which actors embodied characters from across the wider Mediterranean region. The presence of Mediterranean minority groups such as Arabs, Armenians, Jews and Turks within commedia dell' arte is marked on stage and 'backstage' where they were collaborators in the creative process. In addition, gendered performances by the first female actors participated in 'staging' the Mediterranean by using the female body as a canvas for cartographical imaginings. By focusing attention on the various communities involved in the making of theatre, a central preoccupation of the book is to question the dynamics of 'exchange' as it materialized within a spectrum inclusive of both cultural collaboration but also of taxation and coercion.

Download or read book Old Age Masculinity and Early Modern Drama written by Anthony Ellis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first book-length study to trace the evolution of the comic old man in Italian and English Renaissance comedy shows how English dramatists adopted and reimagined an Italian model to reflect native concerns about and attitudes toward growing old. Anthony Ellis provides an in-depth study of the comic old man in the erudite comedy of sixteenth-century Florence; the character's parallel development in early modern Venice, including the commedia dell'arte; and, along with a consideration of Anglo-Italian intertextuality, the character's subsequent flourishing on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In outlining the character's development, Ellis identifies and describes the physical and behavioral characteristics of the comic old man and situates these traits within early modern society by considering prevailing medical theories, sexual myths, and intergenerational conflict over political and economic circumstances. The plays examined include Italian dramas by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Niccolò Machiavelli, Donato Giannotti, Lorenzino de' Medici, Andrea Calmo, and Flaminio Scala, and English works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker, along with Middleton, Rowley, and Heywood's The Old Law. Besides providing insight into stage representations of aging, this book illuminates how early modern people conceived of and responded to the experience of growing old and its social, economic, and physical challenges.

Download or read book The Italian Comedy written by Pierre Louis Duchartre and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-11-16 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrated history of the beginnings, growth and influence of the commedia dell’ arte. Describes improvisations, staging, marks, scenarios, acting troupes, and origins.

Download or read book Women on the Stage in Early Modern France written by Virginia Scott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on actresses in France during the early modern period, Virginia Scott examines how the stereotype of the actress has been constructed. The study then moves beyond that stereotype to detail the reality of the personal and artistic lives of women on the French stage, from the almost unknown Marie Ferré - who signed a contract for 12 livres a year in 1545 to perform the 'antiquailles de Rome or other histories, moralities, farces, and acrobatics' in the provinces - to the queens of the eighteenth-century Paris stage, whose 'adventures' have overshadowed their artistic triumphs. The book also investigates the ways in which actresses made invaluable contributions to the development of the French theatre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and looks at the 'afterlives' of such women as Armande Béjart, Marquise Du Parc, Charlotte Desmares, Adrienne Lecouvreur, and Hippolyte Clairon in biographies, plays, and films.

Download or read book The French Stage in the XVIIth Century written by Thomas Edward Lawrenson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1957 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Stages of Evil written by Robert Lima and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2005-12-23 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The evil that men do” has been chronicled for thousands of years on the European stage, and perhaps nowhere else is human fear of our own evil more detailed than in its personifications in theater. Early writers used theater to communicate human experiences and to display reverence for the gods governing daily life. Playwrights from Euripides onward sought inspiration from this interplay between the worldly and the occult, using human belief in the divine to govern characters’ actions within a dramatic arena. The constant adherence to the supernatural, despite changing religious ideologies over the centuries, testifies to a deep and continuing belief in the ability of a higher power to interfere in human life. Stages of Evil is the first book to examine the representation and relationship of evil and the occult from the prehistoric origins of drama through to the present day. Drawing on examples of magic, astronomy, demonology, possession, exorcism, fairies, vampires, witchcraft, hauntings, and voodoo, author Robert Lima explores how theater shaped American and European perceptions of the occult and how the dramatic works studied here reflect society back upon itself at different points in history. From representations of Dionysian rites in ancient Greece, to the Mouth of Hell in the Middle Ages, to the mystical cabalistic life of the Hasidic Jews, to the witchcraft and magic of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, Lima traces the recurrence of supernatural motifs in pivotal plays and performance works of the Western tradition. Considering numerous myths and cultural artifacts, such as the “wild man,” he describes the evolution and continual representation of supernatural archetypes on the modern stage. He also discusses the sociohistorical implications of Christian and pagan representations of evil and the theatrical creativity that occultism has engendered. Delving into his own theatrical, literary, folkloric, and travel experiences to enhance his observations, Lima assays the complex world of occultism and examines diverse works of Western theater and drama. A unique and comprehensive bibliography of European and American plays concludes the study and facilitates further research into the realm of the social and literary impact of the occult.

Download or read book Costume in Performance written by Donatella Barbieri and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-29 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of Best Performance Design and Scenography Publication Award, Prague Quadrennial 2019 This beautifully illustrated book conveys the centrality of costume to live performance. Finding associations between contemporary practices and historical manifestations, costume is explored in six thematic chapters, examining the transformative ritual of costuming; choruses as reflective of society; the grotesque, transgressive costume; the female sublime as emancipation; costume as sculptural art in motion; and the here-and-now as history. Viewing the material costume as a crucial aspect in the preparation, presentation and reception of live performance, the book brings together costumed performances through history. These range from ancient Greece to modern experimental productions, from medieval theatre to modernist dance, from the 'fashion plays' to contemporary Shakespeare, marking developments in both culture and performance. Revealing the relationship between dress, the body and human existence, and acknowledging a global as well as an Anglo and Eurocentric perspective, this book shows costume's ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary borders. Through it, we come to question the extent to which the material costume actually co-authors the performance itself, speaking of embodied histories, states of being and never-before imagined futures, which come to life in the temporary space of the performance. With a contribution by Melissa Trimingham, University of Kent, UK

Download or read book Renaissance Drama 36 37 written by Albert Russell Ascoli and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-19 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Drama, an annual interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance. This special issue of Renaissance Drama on "Italy in the Drama of Europe" primarily builds on the groundwork laid by Louise George Clubb, who showed that Italian drama was made in such a way as to facilitate its absorption and transformation into other traditions, even when it was not explicitly cited or referenced. "Italy in the Drama of Europe" takes up the reverberations of early modern Italian drama in the theaters of Spain, England, and France and in writings in Italian, English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Latin, and German. Its scope is an example of the continuing force of and interest in one of the most rewarding, wide-ranging, and productive early modern aesthetic modes, and a tribute to the scholarship of Louise George Clubb, who, among others, recalled our attention to it.

Download or read book The Venetian Origins of the Commedia dell Arte written by Peter Jordan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant and original new study of a key dramatic form Author is both an historian and practitioner of the craft There are few up-to-date case studies of Commedia available in English

Download or read book Theatre of the Book 1480 1880 written by Julie Stone Peters and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the impact of printing on the European theatre in the period 1480-1880 and shows that the printing press played a major part in the birth of modern theatre.