Театр /english/
Theater Production, the various means by which any of the forms of theater are presented to a live audience. The term theater is often applied only to dramatic and musical plays, but it properly includes opera, dance, circus and carnivals, mime, vaudeville, puppet shows, pageants, and other forms—all of which have certain elements in common. They are essentially visual; are experienced directly (although film, videotapes, or recorded sound may be incorporated into a performance); and are governed by sets of rules—such as scripts, scenarios, scores, or choreography—that determine the language and actions of the performers; language, action or atmosphere may be contrived, in order to elicit emotional responses from the audience.
Representational theater, on the other hand, is illusionistic. Most Western theater since the Renaissance has been essentially representational: Plays have had plausible plots, characters have seemed true to life, scenery has tended toward, or been suggestive of, the realistic.
Most performances do not, of course, fall neatly into one or the other category but may contain elements of each. The plays of the American dramatist Tennessee Williams, for example, are rooted in psychological realism but often employ dream sequences, symbolic characters and objects, and poetic language.
Most countries have a designated national theater company supported by the state. In Great Britain and Germany, for example, most cities or regions have subsidized companies as well. In Communist countries virtually all theater is state-supported; often this allows more elaborate design, technology, and experimentation than in Western European and U.S. theater. Until recently, considerable government support was available for the arts in the U.S., especially for regional theaters—permanent professional companies located in major cities that often present performers in rotating repertory, such as the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. The amount of government support to the American theater, however, has always been far less than that given to its European counterpart, and it is increasingly dependent on the unpredictable generosity of philanthropic foundations. This situation, largely caused by the very size and diversity of the U.S. and of its audience, also reflects current government cutbacks. Other important reasons are the lack of a single dominant cultural center such as London or Paris and the lack of a strong theatrical heritage.
Commercial theater appeals to a large audience and is produced with the intention of making a profit. The basis of commercial theater is entertainment; social relevance and artistic and literary merit are secondary considerations. In the U.S. and Canada, commercial theater is centered in New York City's Broadway theater district; almost every major city in the world has an equivalent—London's West End, for example. Before opening in New York, many shows hold tryouts in other cities—preview performances to work out difficulties or to test audience response. If a show is successful in New York, road companies will tour other cities. These companies may range from the original cast playing extended runs in large cities to “bus and truck” tours (so called because of their method of traveling and transporting cast and scenery) with little-known actors playing one-night stands in small cities. Road companies were once common, but today only hit shows tend to tour. Commercial theater also includes dinner theater and summer stock.
In 1980 a typical Broadway drama or comedy cost approximately $500,000 to produce, a musical about $1 million. Such high initial costs, plus the weekly operating costs (theater rent, salaries, royalties, publicity, insurance, equipment maintenance, and the like) may cause a show to take several years to pay off its debts and begin to make a profit. Sometimes only the lucrative sale of movie rights puts a production in the black. Because of such economics, Broadway producers seldom take risks with unknown playwrights or unusual plays. Although the economics were not so harsh before World War II, commercial theater has always been inherently conservative and inhospitable to experimentation.
Noncommercial theater tends to operate on limited budgets, to make lack of resources a virtue, and to be unconcerned with profit. It tends to believe strongly in specific ideals and often disavows the so-called slickness associated with commercial theater. Noncommercial theater tries to survive on box-office income and donations, but in recent years it has become increasingly dependent on federal and private subsidy. Those companies that cannot obtain adequate funding are usually faced with bankruptcy after a short time or else are forced to compromise their ideals to survive. In fact, those that do survive almost become as commercial as the theater they once rebelled against. This has been a repeating pattern in 20th-century theater history.
Theater can also be discussed in terms of the type of space in which it is produced. Stages and auditoriums have had distinctive forms in every era and in different cultures. New theaters today tend to be flexible and eclectic in design, incorporating elements of several styles; they are known as multiple-use or multiple-form theaters.
A performance, however, need not occur in an architectural structure designed as a theater, or even in a building. The English director Peter Brook talks of creating theater in an “empty space.” Many earlier forms of theater were performed in the streets, open spaces, market squares, churches, or rooms or buildings not intended for use as theaters. Much contemporary experimental theater rejects the formal constraints of available theaters and seeks more unusual spaces. In all these “found” theaters, the sense of stage and auditorium is created by the actions of the performers and the natural features of the space.
Throughout history, however, most theaters have employed one of three types of stage: end, thrust, and arena. An end stage is a raised platform facing the assembled audience. Frequently, it is placed at one end of a rectangular space. The simplest version of the end stage is the booth or trestle stage, a raised stage with a curtained backdrop and perhaps an awning. This was the stage of the Greek and Roman mimes, the mountebanks and wandering entertainers of the Middle Ages, commedia dell'arte, and popular entertainers into the 20th century. It probably formed the basis of Greek tragic theater and Elizabethan theater as well.
The administrative group includes the producer, box-office and publicity personnel, and front-of-house staff (house manager, ushers, and others responsible for the audience). The artistic staff consists of the director, designers, performers, and, if applicable, playwright, composer, librettist, choreographer, and musical director. Technical personnel include the stage manager, technical director, and various construction and running crews, all working backstage.
For a new commercial production, the producer contracts with a playwright for a script; raises funds from private investors called “angels” (who may invest after seeing a fragment of the play at a special staging known as a backer's audition); hires the artistic and technical staffs; rents a theater and all the necessary equipment for the stage; and oversees publicity, ticket sales, and all the financial aspects of the production. Box-office operations are handled by a general manager. In theater companies that do repertoire, a season of several plays, the producer may be responsible for selecting the repertoire, although this is often the task of the artistic director. The producer also arranges tours, subsidiary productions, and the sale of subsidiary rights, including film, television, and amateur production rights. Most theaters also have a theater or house manager, responsible for theater maintenance and audience control.
The concept of the modern director can be traced to the 18th-century English actor-manager David Garrick, although George II, duke of the German principality of Saxe-Meiningen, is generally referred to as the first director; touring Europe with his theater company in the 1870s and '80s, he exercised absolute control over all aspects of production. In the 20th century there has been a recurring tendency for directors to use a script simply as a starting point for their own theatrical visions, resulting in unorthodox and frequently spectacular productions often called “theatricalist.” Such productions often achieve clarification or emphasis of themes or images in the text, or a new relevance for classic scripts, sometimes—admittedly—at the expense of the integrity of the original. Some notable directors of this type were Vsevolod Meyerhold, Max Reinhardt, Jean Louis Barrault, and, more recently, Peter Brook, Peter Stein, and Tom O'Horgan.
The director usually selects the cast through auditions in which performers read sections of the script to be produced, present prepared scenes or speeches, or, when appropriate, sing and dance. The director of a musical production is aided in the auditioning process by the musical director and the choreographer. Although auditioning is acknowledged to be a flawed method, it does allow the director to judge the talents and qualities of potential performers. Actors may also be hired on the basis of reputation, recommendation of agents, or simply for physical appropriateness.
Acting implies impersonation, and most plays require the creation of complex characters with distinct physical and psychological attributes. In the broadest sense, however, a performer is someone who does something for an audience; thus, performing may range from executing simple tasks to displaying skill without impersonation, to believably re-creating historical or fictional characters, to exercising the virtuosic techniques of dancers and singers.
The director and cast of modern productions generally rehearse from two to six weeks, although certain European subsidized theaters have the luxury of several months' rehearsal time, and certain types of Asian theater require several years of formal training (the bunraku puppet theater of Japan and the kathakali dance theater of India are notable examples). During rehearsals, blocking (the movement of the performers) is set, lines are learned, interpretations are determined, and performances are polished. If a new play is being rehearsed, the playwright is usually present to change lines and to rearrange, add, or delete scenes as necessary. In the case of musicals, songs and dances may be added or dropped; the choreographer rehearses the dancers, and the musical director rehearses the singers.
Most professional actors in the U.S. belong to Actors' Equity Association, a labor union. Canada and Great Britain also have equity associations, and equivalent unions exist in other countries. Virtually all commercial theaters, most regional and dinner theaters, and many summer-stock theaters in the U.S. are union houses; therefore, they may hire only Equity actors except under special conditions. The union determines salaries, length of rehearsals, number of performances per week (normally eight), working conditions, and benefits. Although acting is often thought to be a lucrative profession, it is so for only a very few—the stars. Base salaries for actors and dancers are lower than in most other trade professions. Moreover, theater does not provide steady employment or job security. Of the more than 20,000 Equity members, some 85 percent are unemployed at any one time.
In Europe, one person, frequently called a scenographer, designs sets, costumes, and lights; in the U.S. these functions are usually handled by three separate professionals. Set design is the arrangement of theatrical space; the set, or setting, is the visual environment in which a play is performed. Its purpose is to suggest time and place and to create the proper mood or atmosphere. Settings can generally be classified as realistic, abstract, suggestive, or functional.
From the Renaissance to the mid-19th century, realistic settings generally consisted of a painted backdrop and wings—flats placed parallel to the front of the stage to help mask the offstage space, and often painted to enhance the scenic illusion. Some furniture or freestanding set pieces were sometimes placed on the stage, but generally it was an empty space for the actors. The settings were “stock,” consisting of an interior set, an exterior set, and variants that sufficed for all performances. Most interior scenes since the early 19th century have utilized a box set—a room from which the fourth wall (the one nearest the audience) has supposedly been removed, leaving a room with three walls, a ceiling, and three-dimensional furniture and decor. Such an arrangement posits the spectator as voyeur. In actuality, the setting is once again illusionistic; the arrangement of furniture and the positions and movements of actors are designed for audience convenience.
Even in the most realistically detailed setting, the designer still controls much of the setting's effect through choice of colors, arrangement of props and set pieces (is the room sparsely furnished or cluttered, spacious or claustrophobic?), and placement of entrances. All this has a profound, albeit subtle, effect on the audience.
Until the Renaissance, almost all performance was outdoors and therefore lit by the sun, but with indoor performance came the need for lighting instruments. Lighting was first achieved with candles and oil lamps and, in the 19th century, with gas lamps. Although colored filters, reflectors, and mechanical dimming devices were used for effects, lighting served primarily to illuminate the stage. By current standards the stage was fairly dim, which allowed greater illusionism in scenic painting. Gas lighting facilitated greater control, but only the advent of electric lighting in the late 19th century permitted the brightness and control presently available. It also allowed the dimming of the house-lights, plunging the auditorium into darkness for the first time.
Lighting design, however, is not simply aiming the lighting instruments at the stage or bathing the stage in a general wash of light. Audiences usually expect actors to be easily visible at all times and to appear to be three-dimensional. This involves the proper angling of instruments, provision of back and side lighting as well as frontal, and a proper balance of colors. Two basic types of stage-lighting instruments are employed: floodlights, which illuminate a broad area, and spotlights, which focus light more intensely on a smaller area. Instruments consist of a light source and a series of lenses and shutters in some sort of housing. These generally have a power of 500 to 5000 watts. The instruments are hung from battens and stanchions in front of, over, and at the sides of the stage. In realistic settings, lights may be focused to simulate the direction of the ostensible source, but even in these instances, performers would appear two-dimensional without back and side lighting.
Because so-called white light is normally too harsh for most theater purposes, colored filters called gels are used to soften the light and create a more pleasing effect. White light can be simulated by mixing red, blue, and green light. Most designers attempt to balance “warm” and “cool” colors to create proper shadows and textures. Except for special effects, lighting design generally strives to be unobtrusive; just as in set design, however, the skillful use of color, intensity, and distribution can have a subliminal effect on the spectators' perceptions.
The lighting designer is often responsible for projections. These include still or moving images that substitute for or enhance painted and constructed scenery, create special effects such as stars or moonlight, or provide written legends for the identification of scenes. Images can be projected from the audience side of the stage onto opaque surfaces, or from the rear of the stage onto specially designed rear-projection screens. Similar projections are often used on scrims, semitransparent curtains stretched across the stage. Film and still projection, sometimes referred to as mixed media, was first used extensively by the German director Erwin Piscator in the 1920s and became very popular in the 1960s.
The lights are controlled by a skilled technician called the electrician, who operates a control or dimmer board, so called because a series of “dimmers” controls the intensity of each instrument or group of instruments. The most recent development in lighting technology is the memory board, a computerized control system that stores the information of each light cue or change of lights. The electrician need no longer operate each dimmer individually; by pushing one button, all the lights will change automatically to the preprogrammed intensity and at the desired speed.
A costume is whatever is worn on the performer's body. Costume designers are concerned primarily with clothing and accessories, but are also often responsible for wigs, masks, and makeup. Costumes convey information about the character and aid in setting the tone or mood of the production. Because most acting involves impersonation, most costuming is actual or re-created historical or contemporary dress; as with scenery, however, costumes may also be suggestive or abstract. Until the 19th century, little attention was paid to period or regional accuracy; variations on contemporary dress sufficed. Since then, however, costume designers have paid great attention to authentic period style.
As with the other forms of design, subtle effects can be achieved through choice of color, fabric, cut, texture, and weight or material. Because costume can indicate such things as social class and personality traits, and can even simulate such physical attributes as obesity or a deformity, an actor's work can be significantly eased by its skillful design. Costume can also function as character signature, notably for such comic characters as Harlequin or the other characters of the commedia dell'arte, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, or circus clowns.
In much Oriental theater, as in classical Greek theater, costume elements are formalized. Based originally on everyday dress, the costumes became standardized and were appropriated for the stage. Colors, designs, and ornamentation all convey meaningful information.
A special element of costume is the mask. Although rarely used in contemporary Western theater, masks were essential in Greek and Roman drama and the commedia dell'arte and are used in most African and Oriental theater. The masks of tragedy and of comedy, as used in ancient Greek drama, are in fact the universal symbols of the theater. Masks obviate the use of the face for expression and communication and thus render the performer more puppetlike; expression depends solely on voice and gesture. Because the mask's expression is unchanging, the character's fate or final expression is known from the beginning, thereby removing one aspect of suspense. The mask shifts focus from the actor to the character and can thus clarify aspects of theme and plot and give a character a greater universality. Like costumes, the colors and features of the mask, especially in the Orient, indicate symbolically significant aspects of the character. In large theaters masks can also aid in visibility.
Props are the objects handled by actors or used in dressing the stage—all objects placed or carried on the set that are not costumes or scenery. Whereas real furniture and hand props can be used in many productions, props for period shows, nonrealistic productions, and theatrical shows such as circuses must be built. Like sets, props can be illusionistic—they may be created from papier-mвchй or plastic for lightness, exaggerated in size, irregularly shaped, or designed to appear level on a raked stage; they may also be capable of being rolled, collapsed, or folded. The person in charge of props is called the props master or mistress.
Technicians also create special aural and visual effects simulating explosions, fire, lightning, and apparitions and giving the illusion of moving objects or of flying.
The running crew is determined by the needs of the production. It may consist of the following: scene crews, or grips, who shift the scenery; prop crews; wardrobe crews, who assist the performers with their costumes and maintain the costumes between performances; sound technicians; electricians; and flymen, who operate all flying scenery. In commercial theater, all technicians belong to the stagehands union. On Broadway, all productions are required to hire a minimum crew, which may in fact exceed the demands of the production. The house carpenter, for example, may be the person who raises the curtain.
When the scenery is built, it is “loaded in” and set up. Lights are hung, focused, and gelled—given colored filters. Technical rehearsals are then held, during which light, sound, and scene, and scene-shift cues are set and rehearsed—first with the crews alone, then with actors. Finally, in dress rehearsals, the show is rehearsed with all elements except the presence of an audience. When a show closes, the set is “struck” and “loaded out.”
Дата добавления: 31.01.2001
