The origin of the word is bitter. Why do they shout bitterly at a wedding?
The art of theater has its own specific language. Only knowledge of this language provides the viewer with the opportunity to communicate artistically with the author and actors. An incomprehensible language is always strange (Pushkin, in his manuscripts to “Eugene Onegin,” spoke of “strange, new languages,” and ancient Russian scribes likened those speaking in incomprehensible languages to mutes: “There is also a pechera, that tongue is mute and sits with self-righteousness at midnight.” 269* ). When Leo Tolstoy, reviewing the entire edifice of contemporary civilization, rejected the language of opera as “unnatural,” the opera immediately turned into nonsense, and he wrote with reason: “That they don’t speak like that in recitative and even a quartet, standing at a certain distance, waving their arms, doesn’t express feelings that they don’t walk like this with foil halberds, in shoes, in pairs anywhere except in the theater, that they never get so angry, they don’t get so touched, they don’t laugh like that, they don’t cry like that... there can’t be any 407 doubts" 270* . The assumption that a theatrical performance has its own conventional language only if it is strange and incomprehensible to us, and exists “so simply”, without any linguistic specificity, if it seems natural and understandable to us, is naive. After all, the kabuki or no theater seems natural and understandable to the Japanese audience, but Shakespeare’s theater, which was a model of naturalness for centuries of European culture, seemed artificial to Tolstoy. The language of theater is made up of national and cultural traditions, and it is natural that a person immersed in the same cultural tradition feels its specificity to a lesser extent.
One of the foundations of theatrical language is the specificity of the artistic space of the stage. It is she who sets the type and measure of theatrical convention. Fighting for a realistic theater, a theater of life's truth, Pushkin expressed a deep thought that naive identification scenes and life or simply canceling the specifics of the first will not only not solve the problem, but is practically impossible. In drafts of the preface to Boris Godunov, he wrote: “Both the classics and the romantics based their rules on credibility, and yet it is precisely this that is excluded by the very nature of the dramatic work. Not to mention time and so on, what the hell can be the credibility of 1) in a hall divided into two halves, one of which accommodates two thousand people, as if invisible to those on the stage; 2) language. For example, in La Harpe, Philoctetes, after listening to Pyrrhus’s tirade, says in the purest French: “Alas! I hear the sweet sounds of Hellenic speech” and so on. Remember the ancients: their tragic masks, their double roles - isn’t all this a conditional improbability? 3) time, place, etc. and so on.
408 The true geniuses of tragedy never cared about verisimilitude." It is significant that Pushkin separates the “conditional implausibility” of the language of the stage from the question of genuine stage truth, which he sees in the life reality of character development and the veracity of speech characteristics: “The verisimilitude of positions and the truthfulness of dialogue is the true rule of tragedy.” He considered Shakespeare to be an example of such truthfulness (whom Tolstoy reproached for his abuse of “unnatural events and even more unnatural speeches that do not follow from the positions of persons”): “Read Shakespeare, he is never afraid to compromise his hero (by violating the conventional rules of stage “decency.” - Yu. L.), he forces him to speak with complete ease, as in life, for he is confident that at the right moment and under the right circumstances he will find for him a language corresponding to his character. It is worthy of note that it was precisely the nature of the stage space (“hall”) that Pushkin laid as the basis for the “conditional improbability” of the language of the stage.
The theatrical space is divided into two parts: the stage and the auditorium, between which relationships develop that form some of the main oppositions of theatrical semiotics. Firstly, this is a contrast existence - non-existence. The existence and reality of these two parts of the theater are realized, as it were, in two different dimensions. From the viewer's point of view, from the moment the curtain rises and the play begins, the auditorium ceases to exist. Everything on this side of the ramp disappears. Its true reality becomes invisible and gives way to the completely illusory reality of the stage action. In modern European theater this is emphasized by plunging the auditorium into darkness at the moment the stage lights are turned on and vice versa. If we imagine a person so far removed from theatrical conventions that at the moment of dramatic action he not only with equal attention, but also with the help of equal type of vision observes at the same time the stage, the movements of the prompter in the booth, the lighting people in the box, the spectators in the hall, seeing in this some kind of unity, then it will be possible with good reason 409 to say that the art of being a spectator is unknown to him. The boundary of the “invisible” is clearly felt by the viewer, although it is not always as simple as in the theater we are accustomed to. Thus, in the Japanese bunraku puppet theater, the puppeteers are located right there on the stage and are physically visible to the viewer. However, they are dressed in black clothing, which is a “sign of invisibility,” and the public “seems to” not see them. Excluded from the artistic space of the scene, they fall out of the field theatrical vision. It is interesting that, from the standpoint of Japanese bunraku theorists, the introduction of a puppeteer to the stage is assessed as improvement: “Once upon a time, a doll was driven by one person, hidden under the stage and controlling it with his hands so that the audience saw only the doll. Later, the design of the puppet was improved step by step, and in the end the puppet is controlled on stage by three people (the puppeteers are dressed in black from head to toe and are therefore called “black people”).” 271* .
From the point of view of the stage, the auditorium also does not exist: according to Pushkin’s precise and subtle remark, the audience “ as if(italics mine. - Yu. L.)invisible to those on the stage.” However, Pushkin’s “as if” is not accidental: invisibility here has a different, much more playful character. It is enough to imagine the following series:
to make sure that only in the first case the separation of the space of the viewer from the space of the text hides the dialogical nature of their relationship. Only theater requires a given addressee, present at the same time, and perceives signals coming from him (silence, signs 410 approval or condemnation), varying the text accordingly. It is precisely this dialogic nature of the stage text that is associated with such a feature as variability. The concept of a “canonical text” is as alien to the performance as it is to folklore. It is replaced by the concept of some invariant, implemented in a number of options.
Other significant opposition: significant - insignificant. The stage space is distinguished by high symbolic saturation - everything that ends up on stage tends to be saturated with additional meanings in relation to the immediate objective function of the thing. A movement is a gesture, a thing is a detail that carries meaning. It was this feature of the stage that Goethe had in mind when he answered Eckermann’s question: “What should a work be like in order to be stagecraft?” “It must be symbolic,” Goethe replied. - This means that each action must be full of its own meaning and at the same time prepare for another, even more significant one. Moliere's Tartuffe is a great example in this regard." 272* . In order to understand Goethe’s thought, one must keep in mind that he uses the word “symbol” in the sense in which we would say “sign,” noting that an act, gesture and word on stage acquire in relation to their analogues in everyday life life, additional meanings are saturated with complex meanings, allowing us to say that they become expressions for a bunch of various meaningful moments.
In order for Goethe’s deep thought to become clearer, let us quote the following phrase from this entry following the words we have quoted: “Remember the first scene - what an exposition there is in it! Everything is full of meaning from the very beginning and excites anticipation of even more important events that are to follow.” The “fullness of meaning” that Goethe speaks of is associated with the fundamental laws of the stage and constitutes a significant difference between actions and words on stage from actions 411 and words in life. A person who makes speeches or performs actions in life has in mind the hearing and perception of his interlocutor. The scene reproduces the same behavior, but the nature of the addressee here is double: the speech is addressed to another character on stage, but in fact it is addressed not only to him, but also to the audience. The participant in the action may not know what the content of the previous scene was, but the audience knows it. The viewer, like the participant in the action, does not know the future course of events, but, unlike him, he knows all the previous ones. The viewer's knowledge is always higher than the character's. What the participant in the action may not pay attention to is a sign loaded with meaning for the viewer. For Othello, Desdemona's handkerchief is evidence of her betrayal; for the parterre, it is a symbol of Iago's deceit. In Goethe's example in the first act of Molière's comedy, the mother of the protagonist, Madame Pernelle, just as blinded by the deceiver Tartuffe as her son, enters into an argument with the whole house, defending the bigot. Orgone is not on stage at this time. Then Orgon appears, and the scene just seen by the audience is, as it were, played out a second time, but with his participation, and not Madame Pernelle’s. Only in the third act does Tartuffe himself appear on stage. By this point, the audience has already received a complete picture of him, and his every gesture and word becomes for them symptoms of lies and hypocrisy. The scene of Elmira being seduced by Tartuffe is also repeated twice. Orgon does not see the first of them (the audience sees her), and refuses to believe the verbal revelations of his family. He watches the second from under the table: Tartuffe is trying to seduce Elmira, thinking that no one sees them, and meanwhile he is under double surveillance: his hidden husband lies in wait for him inside the stage space, and the auditorium is located outside the ramp. Finally, this whole complex construction receives an architectural conclusion when Orgon retells to his mother what he saw with his own eyes, and she, again acting as his double, refuses to believe the words and even the eyes of Orgon and, in the spirit of farcical humor, reproaches her son for not waited for more tangible evidence of adultery. An action constructed in this way, on the one hand, acts as 412 a chain of different episodes (syntagmatic construction), and the other as a multiple variation of some nuclear action (paradigmatic construction). This gives rise to the “fullness of meaning” that Goethe spoke about. The meaning of this nuclear action is the collision of the hypocrisy of the hypocrite, who with clever twists presents black as white, gullible stupidity and common sense, exposing deceptions. The episodes are based on the semantic mechanism of lies carefully revealed by Molière: Tartuffe tears words away from their true meaning, arbitrarily changes and inverts their meaning. Moliere makes him not a trivial liar and rogue, but a clever and dangerous demagogue. Moliere exposes the mechanism of his demagoguery in a comical way: in the play, before the eyes of the viewer, verbal signs that are conditionally related to their content and, therefore, allow not only information, but also misinformation, and reality change places; the formula “I don’t believe the words, because I see with my eyes” is replaced for Orgon by the paradoxical “I don’t believe the eyes, because I hear the words.” The position of the viewer is even more piquant: what is reality for Orgon is a spectacle for the viewer. Two messages unfold before him: what he sees, on the one hand, and what Tartuffe says about this, on the other. At the same time, he hears the intricate words of Tartuffe and the rude but true words of the bearers of common sense (primarily the maid Dorina). The collision of these various semiotic elements creates not only a sharp comic effect, but also that richness of meaning that delighted Goethe.
The symbolic condensation of stage speech in relation to everyday speech does not depend on whether the author, due to his belonging to one or another literary movement, focuses on the “language of the gods” or on an accurate reproduction of a real conversation. This is the law of the scene. Chekhov's “ta-ra-ra-bumbia” or the remark about the heat in Africa are caused by the desire to bring stage speech closer to real life, but it is quite obvious that their semantic richness infinitely exceeds what similar statements would have in a real situation.
413 Signs come in different types, depending on which the degree of their convention varies. Signs like “word” completely conventionally connect a certain meaning with a certain expression (the same meaning has different expressions in different languages); pictorial (“iconic”) signs connect content with an expression that is similar in a certain respect: the content “tree” is connected with a drawn image of a tree. A sign above a bakery written in any language is a conventional sign, understandable only to those who speak that language; the wooden “bakery pretzel” that is “slightly golden” above the entrance to the shop is an iconic sign, understandable to anyone who has eaten a pretzel. Here the measure of convention is much less, but a certain semiotic skill is still necessary: the visitor sees a similar form, but different colors, material and, most importantly, function. The wooden pretzel is not for food, but for notification. Finally, the observer should be able to use semantic figures (in this case, metonymy): the pretzel should not be “read” as a message about what is sold here only pretzels, but as evidence of the opportunity to buy any bakery product. However, from the point of view of the measure of conditionality, there is a third case. Let’s imagine not a sign, but a store window (to make things clearer, let’s put on it the inscription: “Products from the window are not for sale”). Before us are genuine things themselves, but they appear not in their direct objective function, but as signs of themselves. That is why the showcase so easily combines photographic and artistic images of the items being sold, verbal texts, numbers and indices and genuine real things - all of them act as a sign.
Stage action as a unity of actors acting and performing actions, verbal texts spoken by them, scenery and props, sound and lighting design is a text of considerable complexity, using signs of different types and varying degrees of convention. However, the fact that the stage world is iconic in nature gives it an extremely important 414 the line. A sign is inherently contradictory: it is always real and always illusory. It is real because the nature of the sign is material; in order to become a sign, that is, to turn into a social fact, the meaning must be realized in some material substance: value - take shape in the form of banknotes; thought - to appear as a combination of phonemes or letters, to be expressed in paint or marble; dignity - to put on “signs of dignity”: orders or uniforms, etc. The illusory nature of the sign is that it is always Seems, that is, it means something other than his appearance. It should be added to this that in the field of art the polysemy of the content plan increases sharply. The contradiction between reality and illusory forms the field of semiotic meanings in which every literary text lives. One of the features of the stage text is the variety of languages it uses.
The basis of stage action is the actor, the person playing, enclosed in the space of the stage. The iconic nature of stage action was revealed extremely deeply by Aristotle, believing that “tragedy is the imitation of an action” - not the actual action itself, but its reproduction by means of theater: “The imitation of an action is a legend (the term “story” was introduced by translators to convey the root concept of tragedy in Aristotle : “storytelling through actions and events”; in traditional terminology, the concept of “plot” is closest to it. - Yu. L.). In fact, I call a combination of events a legend.” “The beginning and, as it were, the soul of tragedy is precisely the legend” 273* . However, it is precisely this basic element of stage action that receives double semiotic coverage during the performance. A chain of events unfolds on stage, characters perform actions, scenes follow each other. Inside itself, this world lives a genuine, not a symbolic life: each actor “believes” in the complete reality of both himself on stage, and his partner and actions in 415 in general 274* . The viewer is at the mercy of aesthetic rather than real experiences: seeing that one actor on stage falls dead, and other actors, realizing the plot of the play, carry out actions that are natural in this situation - rushing to the rescue, calling doctors, taking revenge on the killers - the viewer leads himself differently: whatever his experiences, he remains motionless in the chair. For the people on stage, an event takes place; for the people in the hall, the event is a sign of itself. Like a product on display, reality becomes a message about reality. But an actor on stage conducts dialogues in two different planes: expressed communication connects him with other participants in the action, and unexpressed silent dialogue connects him with the audience. In both cases, he acts not as a passive object of observation, but as an active participant in communication. Consequently, his existence on stage is fundamentally ambiguous: it can be read with equal justification both as immediate reality and as reality transformed into a sign of itself. The constant oscillation between these extremes gives the performance vitality, and transforms the viewer from a passive recipient of a message into a participant in the collective act of consciousness that takes place in the theater. The same can be said about the verbal side of the performance, which is both real speech, focused on extra-theatrical, non-artistic conversation, and the reproduction of this speech by means of theatrical convention (speech depicts speech). No matter how the artist strived in an era when the language of a literary text was fundamentally opposed to everyday life, to separate these spheres of speech activity, the influence of the second on the first turned out to be fatally inevitable. This is confirmed by the study of rhymes and vocabulary of the dramaturgy of the era of classicism. Simultaneously 416 there was a reverse effect of theater on everyday speech. And on the contrary, no matter how hard a realist artist tries to transfer the unchangeable element of extra-artistic oral speech onto the stage, this is always not a “tissue transplant,” but a translation of it into the language of the stage. An interesting recording by A. Goldenweiser of the words of L. N. Tolstoy: “Once, in the dining room below, there were lively conversations among young people. L.N., who, it turns out, was lying and resting in the next room, then went out into the dining room and told me: “I lay there and listened to your conversations. They interested me from two sides: it was simply interesting to listen to the arguments of young people, and then from the point of view of drama. I listened and said to myself: this is how you should write for the stage. And then one speaks, and others listen. This never happens. It is necessary for everyone to speak (at the same time. - Yu. L.)”» 275* . It is all the more interesting that with such a creative orientation in Tolstoy’s plays, the main text is built in the tradition of the stage, and Tolstoy met Chekhov’s attempts to transfer the illogicality and fragmentation of oral speech to the stage negatively, contrasting Shakespeare, who was blasphemed by him, Tolstoy, as a positive example. A parallel here may be the relationship between oral and written speech in literary prose. The writer does not transfer oral speech into his text (although he often strives to create the illusion of such a transfer and may himself succumb to such an illusion), but translates it into the language of written speech. Even the ultra-avant-garde experiments of modern French prose writers, who refuse punctuation marks and deliberately destroy the correctness of the syntax of a phrase, are not an automatic copy of oral speech: oral speech put on paper, that is, devoid of intonation, facial expressions, gesture, torn from what is obligatory for two interlocutors, but absent for readers of a special “general memory”, firstly, it would become completely incomprehensible, and secondly, it would not be “accurate” at all - it would not be living oral speech, but its murdered and skinned corpse, farther from the model than the talented and conscious transformation of it under the artist’s pen. 417 Ceasing to be a copy and becoming a sign, stage speech is saturated with additional complex meanings drawn from the cultural memory of the stage and the audience.
The prerequisite for a stage spectacle is the belief of the viewer that certain laws of reality in the space of the stage can become the object of playful study, that is, subject to deformation or abolition. Thus, time on stage can flow faster (and in some rare cases, for example in Maeterlinck, slower) than in reality. The very equation of stage and real time in some aesthetic systems (for example, in the theater of classicism) is of a secondary nature. The subordination of time to the laws of the stage makes it an object of study. On stage, as in any closed space of ritual, the semantic coordinates of space are emphasized. Categories such as “top - bottom”, “right - left”, “open - closed”, etc., acquire increased significance on stage, even in the most everyday decisions. Thus, Goethe wrote in “Rules for Actors”: “Actors, for the sake of a falsely understood naturalness, should never act as if there were no spectators in the theater. They shouldn't play profile 276* , just as one should not turn one’s back to the public... The most revered persons always stand on the right side.” It is interesting that, emphasizing the modeling meaning of the concept “right - left,” Goethe has in mind the point of view of the viewer. In the internal space of the stage, in his opinion, there are different laws: “If I have to give my hand, and the situation does not require that it must be my right hand, then with equal success I can give my left hand, because on the stage there is neither right nor left "
The semiotic nature of scenery and props will become clearer to us if we compare it with similar moments of such an art, seemingly close, but actually opposed to theater, as cinema. Despite the fact that both in the theater hall and in the cinema before 418 we the viewer (the one who looks) that this viewer is in the same fixed position throughout the entire spectacle, their attitude to that aesthetic category, which in the structural theory of art is called “point of view”, is deeply different. The theater spectator retains a natural point of view of the spectacle, determined by the optical relationship of his eye to the stage. Throughout the performance this position remains unchanged. Between the eye of the movie viewer and the screen image, on the contrary, there is an intermediary - the camera lens directed by the operator. The viewer seems to convey his point of view to him. And the device is mobile - it can approach the object closely, drive away to a long distance, look from above and below, look at the hero from the outside and look at the world through his eyes. As a result, shot and perspective become active elements of film expression, realizing a moving point of view. The difference between theater and cinema can be compared to the difference between drama and novel. Drama also retains a “natural” point of view, while between the reader and the event in the novel there is an author-narrator who has the opportunity to place the reader in any spatial, psychological and other positions in relation to the event. As a result, the functions of scenery and things (props) in cinema and theater are different. A thing in the theater never plays an independent role, it is only an attribute of the actor’s play, while in cinema it can be a symbol, a metaphor, and a full-fledged character. This, in particular, is determined by the ability to take a close-up of it, hold attention on it, increasing the number of frames allocated to show it, etc. 277*
In cinema the detail plays out, in the theater it is played out. The viewer's attitude towards the artistic space is also different. In cinema, the illusory space of the image seems to draw the viewer inside itself; in the theater, the viewer is invariably outside the artistic space (in this 419 In relation, paradoxically, cinema is closer to folklore and farcical spectacular performances than modern urban non-experimental theater). Hence the marking function that is much more emphasized in theatrical decoration, most clearly expressed in the pillars with inscriptions in Shakespeare’s Globe. The scenery often takes on the role of a title in a movie or the author's remarks before the text of a drama. Pushkin gave the scenes in Boris Godunov titles like: “Maiden Field. Novodevichy Convent”, “Plain near Novgorod-Seversky (1604, December 21)” or “Tavern on the Lithuanian border”. These titles, to the same extent as the titles of chapters in the novel (for example, in “The Captain's Daughter”), are included in the poetic construction of the text. However, on stage they are replaced by an isofunctional sign adequate - a decoration that determines the place and time of action. Another function of theatrical scenery is no less important: together with the ramp, it marks the boundaries of the theatrical space. The feeling of the border, the closedness of the artistic space in the theater is much more pronounced than in the cinema. This leads to a significant increase in modeling function. If cinema, in its “natural” function, tends to be perceived as a document, an episode from reality, and special artistic efforts are required in order to give it the appearance of a model of life as such, then it is no less “natural” for theater to be perceived precisely as the embodiment of reality in an extremely generalized form and special artistic efforts are required in order to give it the appearance of documentary “scenes from life”.
An interesting example of the collision of theatrical and film space as the space of “modeling” and “real” is Visconti’s film “Sensation”. The film takes place in the 1840s, during the anti-Austrian uprising in northern Italy. The first shots take us to the theater for a performance of Verdi's Il Trovatore. The frame is constructed in such a way that the theater stage appears as a closed, fenced-off space, a space of conventional costume and theatrical gesture (characteristic is the figure of a prompter with a book, 420 located outside this space). The world of film action (it is significant that the characters here are also in historical costumes and act surrounded by objects and in an interior that is sharply different from modern life) appears as real, chaotic and confusing. The theatrical performance acts as an ideal model, ordering and serving as a kind of code to this world.
The scenery in the theater defiantly retains its connection with painting, while in the cinema this connection is extremely masked. Goethe's well-known rule is “a scene must be considered as a picture without figures, in which the latter are replaced by actors.” Let us again refer to Visconti’s “Sense,” a frame depicting Franz against the backdrop of a fresco reproducing a theater scene (the film image recreates a mural recreating a theater) depicting the conspirators. A striking contrast of artistic languages 278* only emphasizes that the convention of the scenery acts as the key to the hero’s confused and, for him, most unclear mental state.
"...Black velvet flowed from the ceiling. Heavy, languid folds seemed to envelop a single ray of light. The curtains framed the altar of art with the tenderness of a mother hugging her child. A smooth floor, painted black, and a black curtain on the back wall. Everything is so black and so bright! Here a rainbow ran through the fold, but the right curtain smiled. Everything is so wonderful and so magical here! Suddenly, right in the middle, out of nowhere, a girl appeared. She just stood and looked straight ahead. And everything froze in anticipation. Suddenly she she laughed loudly and loudly. And the ray of light, the curtains, the floor, the ceiling and even the air laughed with her. Everything is so wonderful and so magical here!..."
- From my story “The One Who Laughed on Stage”
Today I would like to talk about the stage, stage space and how to use it. How to distribute the scenery and characters? How can you hide something that the audience doesn't need to see? How to use a minimum of scenery and props, getting maximum results?
Let's first understand what a stage as a space is. Of course, I’m not a professional stage director, but I know something. They taught me something in America (I was a member of a theater club there and played in plays and musicals), I listened to something from experienced people, and I came to some of it myself. So, the stage space can be roughly divided into squares (or rectangles)), onto which our dance points can be superimposed very easily and conveniently. It would look something like this:
Yes Yes exactly! I didn’t mix up left and right =) On stage, left and right are determined by the position of the actor/dancer/singer, and not by the position of the viewer. That is, if in the script you see “goes to the left wing,” then you should go to the left from you.
How to distribute the scenery and characters?
Of course, creating the mise-en-scène is the director’s job. But the characters themselves must understand why and why they are at a given point in the stage space. For reference: mise-en-scène(French mise en scène - placement on stage) - the location of the actors on the stage at one time or another during the performance (filming). The most important thing to do correctly is not to turn your back on the audience. However, this only applies to involuntary rotation. It is clear that in dancing there are movements when you need to turn your back to the audience. Well, or in theatrical productions there can also be such moments. But, for example, if you are having a dialogue, on stage you cannot turn completely towards your partner, and not even half-sideways, because even if the central part of the hall sees your face, then the outer spectators are unlikely to. And along with this, the sound is also lost.
In addition, the scene should almost never be empty, except, of course, for those cases when it is necessary to emphasize that the hero is lonely, for example..... but this is already a flight of fancy. But even in such cases, the “emptiness” of the scene is carefully thought out. This is where sound and light come to the rescue, but more on that a little later. So how do you fill the space? Firstly, the heroes should not be too close to each other. If the stage is large, and there are two people on it and, for example, one chair, it is enough to put people at a decent distance from each other, place the chair on the edge of the stage, say, at the 8th point - and voila, the space is filled! On the other hand, this distance between the characters and the scenery must be appropriate. Also, pieces of furniture or any other voluminous decorations should not be placed in a line unless the script requires it. For example, if the action takes place in an ancient temple, the columns should be lined up in 2 lines, this is logical and understandable. But placing a sofa, a window, an armchair, a closet and a chair clearly next to each other is hardly a good idea. It will be much more attractive to place something further, something closer, something straight, and something at an angle. And if you need to “narrow” the space, to depict, for example, a small room, then you can move everything and everyone closer to the edge of the stage, that is, as if “removing” 4, 5, and 6 points.
How to use a minimum of scenery and props, getting maximum results?
How is cinema different from theater? In the movies, some things are much more realistic. For example, in a movie it might actually snow or rain. In the theater - no, only sound, light and acting. In general, on stage, many things remain imaginary. Imaginary objects help get rid of scenery and props. So, the backstage supposedly hides the real door from which the heroes appear, the auditorium symbolizes a window, and so on - examples can be given endlessly. Especially often and widely imagined objects and even phenomena are used in dance performances. Why? Because it’s time to change and rearrange the scenery or take out a whole bunch of props. If the character clearly understands what kind of object he has in his hands, then any person is quite capable of making the viewer believe.
How to keep the viewer's attention?
In fact, this is a whole science! This comes with experience; you almost never manage to win the attention of the viewer just like that. If it’s a dance, it’s easier, but if it’s a theatrical production, it’s more difficult.
So, the very first thing is the look. There is such a good way to look at no one and everyone at once: to do this, you need to choose a point on the far wall of the auditorium; the point should be directly in front of you and slightly above the far row. This will create the illusion that you are looking at everyone at the same time. Sometimes, in order to concentrate attention, the actors choose a “victim” for themselves and look at the poor fellow throughout their performance. Sometimes you can do it this way. But everything should be in moderation))
The second point is facial expression. I don’t take theatrical art here - everything is clear there, the facial expression must be completely definite. When you dance, pay attention to your facial expressions. 90% of dancing involves smiling. Dancing with a stone-funeral, extremely tense face is not a very good idea. So you can fart from tension =))))) There are dances in which you need to show hatred or tenderness or anger - any emotion. But again, all these points are discussed during the production. If you were not given any “special” instructions regarding facial expressions, smile))) By the way, just like when learning a monologue you need to tell it with the right volume from the very beginning, you also need to get used to dancing with a smile. Because when you go on stage, you already lose 30% of what you had at the dress rehearsal (if not more), and your smile too. Therefore, smiling should be a matter of course.
The third point is the effect of surprise. This is also not always appropriate, but it is still important. Don't let the viewer know what will happen next, don't let him predict, surprise your viewer - and he will watch without taking his eyes off. In short, don't be predictable.
How to hide flaws and show advantages?
Even the most brilliant actors sometimes need "clothes". And when I say “clothes,” I don’t mean a shirt and pants. Stage clothing is not only a costume, but also those little things behind which emotions are hidden. That is, if the hero is angry, if he is waiting, if he is nervous, he should not run around the stage like an idiot, grabbing his hair and screaming heart-rendingly to the whole audience. But you can do it like this: a person drinks water from a plastic glass; drinks to himself, looks down somewhere or, on the contrary, up..... drinks, drinks, drinks, and then - rrrrraz! - He sharply crushes the glass in his hand and throws it to the side, looking at his watch. It’s clear that he’s angry and waiting for something? Such director's secrets hide shortcomings. Showing advantages is much easier, I think there is no particular point in writing that they don’t need to be hidden, and then it’s a matter of technique. Contrast also plays an important role. If you don't want to show someone's technical shortcomings, don't pair a less skilled person with a more experienced and skilled one. Although, here, of course, there is a double-edged sword: lower one, raise the other....
I'm far from a professional. I repeat: everything that is written in this article I learned from experienced people, I read somewhere, I came to something myself. You can and even should argue with my thoughts and conclusions =) But I wrote here what seems correct and usable to me. But, when using, remember the Ukrainian proverb: too much is unhealthy!... =)
Good luck with your productions!
The stage space of delusions was accompanied by a willingness to minimize decorative design - in the middle of the century this became almost an optional requirement, in any case, a sign of good taste. The most radical (as always and in everything) was the position of the Sun. Meyerhold: he replaced the scenery with “construction” and the costumes with “overall clothes”. As N. Volkov writes, “...Meyerhold said that the theater must dissociate itself from the painter and musician; only the author, director and actor can merge. The fourth basis of the theater is the viewer... If you depict these relationships graphically, you will get the so-called “direct theater”, where the author-director-actor form one chain, towards which the viewer’s attention is directed” (31).
Such an attitude towards the decorative design of a performance, albeit not in such extreme forms, has not been eliminated to this day. Its supporters explain their refusal of a clear stage design by the desire for “theatricality.” Many people objected to this. masters of directing; in particular, A.D. Popov noted that $ ...the return of the actor to the background of the canvas wings and his liberation from any acting details does not yet mark the victory of romanticism and theatricality on stage” (32). That is, from the discovery that the auxiliary arts are not the main ones on the stage, it does not at all follow that they are not needed at all. And attempts to rid the theater of scenery are echoes of the previous hypertrophied respect for stage design, only “upside down”: they reflect the idea of independence and independence of scenography.
In our time, this question has become completely clear: art
stage design plays a secondary role in relation to
passion for the art of acting. This situation is by no means
"denies, but, on the contrary, assumes a certain influence, which
4 can and should influence the design of the performance on the stage
| action. The measure and direction of this influence is determined by
|: the rage of action, which is where the primary, op-
the decisive role of the latter. The relationship between plastic
".the composition of the performance and its decorative design are very
; visible: the point of their closest contact is the mise-en-
review. After all, mise-en-scène is nothing more than a plastic form
“action taken at any stage of its development in time and in
u. stage space. And if we accept the definition of directing as
art of plastic composition, then you can’t come up with anything
better than the popular formula of O.Ya. Remez, who said: “Mise-en-scene
The Director's Language" and to prove this definition we write
who lost an entire book.
Possibilities for the actor to move in the stage space
| depend on how this space is organized scenically
|! count. The width, length and height of the machines are naturally determined
I know the duration and scale of movements, the breadth and depth of the world
t of the stage and the speed of their replacement. Stage tablet tilt angle
| We make our own demands on acting skills. Besides that-
First, the actor must take into account the perspective of the pictorial image.
1 design and texture of prop parts, so that the loss of the necessary
distance does not destroy the illusion, does not expose it to the audience
lem true proportions and true material of constructions and
hand-drawn scenery. For the director, dimensions and shape of the machines
and sites are the “proposed circumstances” for creating a plan-
stic composition. Thus it becomes obvious
direct connection between the architectural and constructive side of the de-
decorative design and plastic composition of the performance.
Influence on the plastic composition of pictorial and color
decisions about scenery and costumes are manifested more subtly. Gamma
colors chosen by the artist affects the atmosphere of the action
viya; moreover, it is one of the means of creating the necessary atmosphere
spheres. The atmosphere, in turn, cannot but influence the selection
plastic means. Even the color ratio itself
costumes, scenery, stage clothing can have an effect on the viewer
a certain emotional impact that must be taken
take into account when arranging figures in mise-en-scène.
The connection between the plastic composition of the spec-
tackle with the furnishings of the stage area - furniture, props -
that and all other objects that actors use in
process of stage action. Their weight, their dimensions, material,
from which they are made, their authenticity or conventionality - everything
this dictates the nature of handling these items. Wherein
requirements can be directly opposite: sometimes you need
overcome some qualities of the object, hide them, and sometimes,
against, to expose these qualities, to emphasize them.
Even more obvious is the dependence of the physical behavior of a person
pressure from suits, the cut of which can constrain, limit-
to create or, conversely, to free up the acting skills.
Thus, the multifaceted relationship between decorative
design and plastic composition of the performance are not subject to
lives in doubt. HELL. Popov wrote: “The mise-en-scene of the body, presum-
Gaya plastic composition of the figure of an individual actor, strictly
is completely interdependent on the neighboring one associated with it
figures. And if there is none, there is only one actor on stage, then in this
case, this one figure must “respond” to nearby
volumes, be it a window, door, column, tree or staircase. In ru-
kah of a director who thinks plastically, the figure of an individual actor
tera is inevitably linked compositionally and rhythmically with the oc-
environmental environment, with architectural structures and
space" (33).
Scenography can be invaluable to the director and actors.
a great help in constructing the form of the performance, but it may also hinder
formation of a complete work depending on
to what extent the artist’s plan is in tune with the director’s plan. A
since in the relationship between stage action and decor -
tive design assigns a subordinate role to the second, then
It is obvious that in the creative collaboration of the director and artist
the latter must direct the work of his imagination
to realize the overall concept of the performance. And yet the situation
an artist in the theater cannot be called powerless. Formation
style and genre of the performance does not follow the path of suppression, depersonalization
understanding the creative individualities of its creators, but along the way
their summation. This is a rather complicated process even when
when it comes to bringing the works of two artists into harmony,
operating with the same means of expression. In this
In no case, a harmonious combination of two different
types of arts, two different types of creative thinking, two
different means of expression; therefore, here the question is mutual
conformity, which should result in the creation
giving the stylistic and genre integrity of the work, especially
complex and cannot be exhausted by a simple statement of pre-
property rights of one and subordination of the other. Direct,
elementary subordination of the stage design of the performance to utilitarian
needs of stage action may not give the desired
result. According to the definition of A.D. Popov “...design of spec-
taklya is an artistic image of a place
actions and at the same time a platform, pre-
providing rich opportunities for
carrying out stage performances on it
in and I" (34). Therefore, it would be more correct to say that subordination
the design of the action must arise as a result
composition of creative handwriting, as a result of the joint work of
independent creative individuals. Hence,
we can only talk about the soil that is most favorable
clear for this cooperation, about those common positions that
give a unified direction to the development of creative thought of each of them
creators of the play. Building your plan on this common ground,
the scenographer can use many features of expressive
of his art, without violating the genre and style
unity of the entire production.
1. denouement of the action in the sketch
The denouement of the action is the final part of the plot, following the climax. At the denouement of the action, it usually becomes clear how the relationship between the warring parties has changed and what consequences the conflict had.
Often, in order to destroy the stereotype of readers’ expectations (“wedding” or “funeral”), writers completely omit the denouement of the action. For example, the absence of a resolution in the plot of the eighth chapter of Eugene Onegin makes the ending of the novel “open”. Pushkin, as it were, invites readers to reflect on how Onegin’s fate could have developed, without prejudging the possible development of events. In addition, the character of the main character also remains “unfinished”, capable of further development.
Sometimes the resolution of the action is the subsequent story of one or more characters. It is a narrative device used to communicate how the characters' lives have turned out after the main action has ended. A brief “subsequent history” of the heroes of A.S. Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter” can be found in the afterword written by the “publisher”. This technique was quite often used by Russian novelists of the second half of the 19th century, in particular I.A. Goncharov in the novel “Oblomov” and I.S. Turgenev in the novel “Fathers and Sons.”
2. The place of musical noise in the sketch.
The sound score is a guiding document that tells the sound engineer those moments during the program when to turn on and when to turn off the soundtrack. It is necessary to understand the general musical accompaniment of the project and represents a “draft” of the main musical theme, sound logo, etc.
The director begins to practically implement his idea of musical and noise design during the rehearsal period of working on the program. At the final stage of the rehearsal work, when all the musical and noise numbers have been determined, that is, cues for turning on and off, sound plans and sound levels for each sound fragment have been established, the sound engineer compiles the final version of the sound score for the event.
The score is a document following which the sound accompaniment of the project is carried out. It is checked with the director's copy of the script, agreed with the head of the musical part and approved by the director. After this, all changes and corrections to the score are made only with the permission of the director.
True mastery, the ability to master the expressive means of stage art, depends, along with other factors, on the level of musical culture. After all, music is one of the most important elements of a theatrical performance of almost any genre.
No book can replace music itself. She can only guide
attention, to help understand the features of the musical form, to introduce the composer’s intentions. But without listening to music, all knowledge acquired from a book will remain dead and scholastic. The more regularly and attentively a person listens to music, the more he begins to hear in it. But listening and hearing are not the same thing. It happens that a piece of music at first seems complex, inaccessible to perception. You shouldn't rush to conclusions. Repeated listening will surely reveal its figurative content and become a source of aesthetic pleasure.
But in order to experience music emotionally, you need to perceive the sound fabric itself. If a person reacts emotionally to music, but at the same time can distinguish, differentiate, “hear” very little, then only a small part of its expressive content will reach him.
Based on the way music is used in action, it is divided into two main categories.
Plot music in a play, depending on the conditions of its use, can have a wide variety of functions. In some cases, it provides only an emotional or semantic characteristic of a separate scene, without directly invading the dramaturgy. In other cases, story music can rise to become a major dramatic factor.
Story music can:
· Characterize the characters;
· Indicate the place and time of action;
· Create the atmosphere and mood of the stage action;
· Talk about an action that is invisible to the viewer.
The listed functions, naturally, do not exhaust the variety of techniques for using plot music in dramatic performances.
It is much more difficult to introduce conventional music into a performance than plot music. Its convention may conflict with the reality of life shown on stage. Therefore, conventional music always requires convincing internal justification. At the same time, the expressive possibilities of such music are very wide; a variety of orchestral, as well as vocal and choral means can be used for it.
Conditional music can:
· Emotionally enhance dialogue and monologue,
· Characterize the characters
· Emphasize the constructive and compositional structure of the performance,
· Exacerbate the conflict.
