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Styles in Theatrical Staging

All theatrical performances are in some measure unrealistic: While the Bard may argue that the world is but a stage, in fact it is rather larger, with no clear distinction between audience and actors, between proscenium and flies, between onstage and off. When we enter the theater as audience members we are making an implicit promise that we are suspending disbelief. Or at least to some extent. We are willing to overlook some deviations from reality in the name of the dramatic or simply because some things cannot easily be enacted within the confines of a theater. But we expect our expectations of how reality should be reproduced to be met in other ways.

This mixture of the suspension of disbelief in the face of the clear artifice that is so much of theater and the requirement that in some arenas we may expect realism results in productions that are a mixture of the fantastical and the realistic - a mixture that is continually shifting. For styles in theatrical staging change from one season to the next as surely as do dress styles or hairdos. Theater in the 1960s went experimental with other art forms, and cast off much of its traditions of realism. While it could not become entirely abstract as could painting (for there were the pesky human bodies of the actors), theater became as abstract as possible, with sets made minimal or dispensed with altogether, period costumes done away with, lighting made seemingly natural. This abandonment of any pretense at realism in theater was itself relatively quickly abandoned, for it did not sit well with the essentially narrative quality of theater, and the plays that one sees stage today - at least anything that is at all "big budget" - are more likely to be dominated by realistic than by non-realistic elements. Or at least, they appear to be more realistic than not, although some of the realism is the product of legerdemain. This paper looks at the dominance of realistic elements in the touri...

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Styles in Theatrical Staging. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:24, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688321.html