What is Physical Theatre?
Physical Theatre is a type of theatre used to tell a story, putting emphasis on physical movement rather than dialogue. Merging drama and dance to shape different forms of performance, physical theatre shows that words aren’t always necessary to convey ideas in theatre.
Popular techniques include contemporary dance, mime and gestures to explore complex cultural and social issues. But most other movement-driven theatre could also be classed as physical theatre, such as puppetry, clowning and theatrical acrobatics.
Essentially, physical theatre is anything that puts the body in the spotlight of the story narration process, but dialogue is sometimes added for effect, usually in the form of short, repeated phrases.
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It explores our needs of food, security and intimacy and how they can get confused. The piece makes the audience consider the question “What are we hungry for?” using exciting and challenging movement, text and live song.
Trestle Theatre Company
Trestle Theatre Company was founded on 11th July 1981 by Sally Cook, Alan Riley and Toby Wilsher. Specialising in mask and physical theatre, Trestle create performances, workshops and their own masks, which they send out nationally and internationally.
The founders of the company are three graduates from the BA Performance Arts course of Middlesex Polytechnic. With the support of their course leader, John Wright, they planned to tour the country with a pop-up trestle stage. This eventually proved impractical, but after being joined by Joff Chafer the company continued to tour nationally and internationally, developing a distinctive storytelling style: combining mask, physical theatre and puppetry.
Trestle Theatre Company has performed many productions over the years, including
“Moon Fool - I’ll Met by Moonlight” which was based on “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” by William Shakespeare. Their most recent works include “The Snow Queen”, “The Man with the Luggage” and “The Birthday of
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“147 Questions About Love”, “Black Stuff” and “Caitlin” are amongst their most recent works.
“147 Questions about Love” uses theatre space imaginatively to connect with the audience and create a memorable, thought-provoking production based on a novel made entirely of questions.With intimate dialogue between a man, a woman and an audience, the show asks some strange queries: “Are your emotions pure?”, “Are your nerves adjustable?”, “How do you stand in relation to the potato?”, “Do you find all these questions fascinating, impertinent, or just plain impossible?”. It explores our interest in each other, our attempts to express and the unreliability of communication.
Volcano Theatre’s “Alice In Wonderland” consists of 5 women, 84 bales of hay and “all the madness the book deserves”. It portrays a story about the behaviour of one generation as seen through the eyes of another, showing the everyday monstrousness of the world. It conveys and upside-down world with a child’s sense of wonder, where ordinary things are made bizarre. The production is inspired the themes “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and
It is imperative to understand the significance of the profound effects these elements have on the audience’s response to the play. Without effective and accurate embodiments of the central themes, seeing a play becomes an aimless experience and the meaning of the message is lost. Forgiveness and redemption stand as the central themes of the message in The Spitfire Grill. Actors communicate character development through both nonverbal and verbal cues; their costumes serve as a visual representation of this development by reflecting the personal transformation of each character. In the case of The Spitfire Grill, set design is cut back to allow for the audience’s primary focus to be on the actors and their story. Different from set design, the use of sound and lights in The Spitfire Grill, establishes the mood for the play. In other words, every theatrical element in a play has a purpose; when befittingly manipulated, these elements become the director’s strongest means of expressing central themes, and therefore a means of achieving set objectives. Here again, The Spitfire Grill is no exception. With the support of these theatrical elements, the play’s themes of forgiveness and redemption shine as bright as the moon on
Modern professional theatre is characterized by the widespread challenge to established rules surrounding theatrical representation. This resulted in the development of many new forms of theatre. Such included modernism, expressionism, impressionism, political theatre and other forms of experimental theatre. It is also characterized by the continuing development of already established theatrical forms like naturalism and realism. As years went by, the reputation of modern theatre has been improving, after being belittled through the nineteenth century. However, the growth of other media, more specifically movies, resulted in a smaller role culturally.
Pause for a second and think about a play or musical that you have seen. Consider the plot, whether you liked it or not and if the experience was positive or negative. Think about the characters, the costumes, and the emotions that were emitted. The discourse community of theatre is unique in the way that it is so complex and there are many different parts that ultimately come together to create a dynamic whole. The term discourse community is rather broad, but John Swales in his article “The Concept of Discourse Community” gives six characteristics that define it. Swales lists them saying,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a story about a little girl who comes into contact with unpredictable, illogical, basically mad world of Wonderland by following the White Rabbit into a huge rabbit – hole. Everything she experiences there challenges her perception and questions common sense. This extraordinary world is inhabited with peculiar, mystical and anthropomorphic creatures that constantly assault Alice which makes her to question her fundamental beliefs and suffer an identity crisis. Nevertheless, as she woke up from “such a curious dream” she could not help but think “as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been ”.
The duration and cost of the production have been compared to other media which provide entertainment, such as television and film. A theatre performance is more expensive to attend than cinema. The play only lasted for 85 minutes, a film can go on for two hours or even more. This can have a big influence on why people would choose one medium over the other. Accessibility has also to be taken into account when investigating the relevance of theatre in the 21st century. Television is a medium which can be accessed from home, and usually doesn’t cost a lot of money, whereas theatre costs money and is harder to access. Although the production was Australian, the actors talked with an American accent. Bearing in mind that the play was written in America, which could make it harder for an Australian audience to familiarise with the dilemmas going on, on stage, while the themes discussed seem to be more relevant there than in Australia. Overall this play doesn’t contribute to the relevance of Australian theatre in the 21st century, due to the many other sources people can access for entertainment, and because the play seems to be more relevant for an American audience rather than an
It is difficult to imagine a play which is completely successful in portraying drama as Bertolt Brecht envisioned it to be. For many years before and since Brecht proposed his theory of “Epic Theatre”, writers, directors and actors have been focused on the vitality of entertaining the audience, and creating characters with which the spectator can empathize. ‘Epic Theatre’ believes that the actor-spectator relationship should be one of distinct separation, and that the spectator should learn from the actor rather than relate to him. Two contemporary plays that have been written in the last thirty years which examine and work with Brechtian ideals are ‘Fanshen’ by David Hare, and ‘The Laramie Project’ by Moises Kaufman. The question to be examined is whether either of these two plays are entirely successful in achieving what was later called, ‘The Alienation Effect”.
As an academic theater person and as a writer, Dolan demonstrates how to bring sentimentality into academic writing. She is full of passion and brings her own theatrical experience and memories to draw up her personal ‘‘archive of spectatorship’’ (10). It can be risky to weave the subjective and instinctive narrative with the typically objective and critical discourse of academic inquiry, but Dolan questions, ‘‘how can we use sentimentality as something positive instead of abandoning it?’’ (23). She challenges theater scholars to embrace passionate engagement with the faith, hope, and charity that she finds productive of social justice and human solidarity. Therefore, after explaining the main concepts, Dolan describes some specific cases that support the "utopian performatives," including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner 's production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. These cases demonstrate how live performance and its utopic sentiment can inspire and motivate people to change the sociality, because performance provides a forum for being human together towards “feelings of possibility, hope, and political agency (p.59),” and commonality in particular
The name of the Bread and Puppet Theatre hails from the custom of sharing freshly baked bread with the theatre visitors to symbolise that art should be an everyday ritual for everyone just like eating bread.` We give you a piece of bread with the puppet show because our bread and theatre belong together. For a long time the theatre arts have been separated from the stomach. Theatre was entertainment.` (Peter Schumann, Bread & Puppet official website). The foremost goal of this theatre is to raise feelings of sensitivity in the viewer and to outline what the terms 'good' and 'evil' mean, especially in political spheres. This reflects the use of the audience as being used to create this form of emotion within the performanceset up, this is done through the raising the elements of sensitivity within their audience. Theatre also places a huge emphasis on the education and popularisation of art. Artists expressing their pacifistic views, strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam, and the enormous dolls created by Schumann have since become a permanent feature in many pacifistic demonstrations. Theatre critiques racial discrimination, deaf royal of natural habitats, compulsory military service and globalism. The theatre spectacles take the role of mentors who teach is lessons of morality - they are full of symbolism, archetypes and they refer to the bible, mythology and folklore.` ìWe believe in puppet theatre as a wholesome and powerful language that can touch men and women and children alike, and we hope that our plays are true and are saying what has to be said, and that they add to your enjoyment and enlightenment ` (Robert Schumann, Bread & Puppet Theatre official website). They focus on en...
There is much at stake when delineating the histories of theatre through dramaturges and their dramaturgical practices. There is the perpetual presence of fallacies: a historical rather than historiographical approach, a search for legacies and linearity, and a Darwinian evolutionist lens that paradoxically renders static ‘Theatre’, which is a dynamic in-process event-structure. The mode here is to avoid these pitfalls and through a deconstructive approach tread the dialectic of theory-praxis in Peter Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty. The approach is not a complicated one, albeit transitory and shifting in focus. The shifting nature emerges from the conjuring of Artaud rather than Artaud by the subject (Brooks’ dramaturgy) and my analysis.
Applied Theatre work includes Theatre-in-Education, Community and Team-building, Conflict Resolution, and Political theatre, to name just a few of its uses. However, Christopher Balme states that “Grotowski define acting as a communicative process with spectators and not just as a production problem of the actor” (Balme, 2008: 25). Applied Theatre practices may adopt the following “theatrical transactions that involve participants in different participative relationships” such as Theatre for a community, Theatre with a community and Theatre by a community Prentki & Preston (2009: 10). Whereas, applied theatre one of its most major powers is that it gives voice to the voiceless and it is a theatre for, by, and with the people. However, Applied Theatre practitioners are devising educational and entertaining performances bringing personal stories to life and build
...n, Elaine. & Savona, George. Theatre as a Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance (London: Routledge 1999)
The type of theatre can be changed, by changing the three properties, for example, the space in which the actors perform.There is street theatre, in which the actors generally mark out an area of the street and perform a piece of drama whilst the audience gather round or watch a short part as they walk past. On the other hand there is rehearsed theatre; this is usually performed by highly skilled actors that perform for a living. The space that is used for this would have a large stage, seated audience, and special lighting to help the performance come to life.
Alice’s quest in Wonderland is not well though-out, in fact her encounters are disordered. Having her encounters be unpredictable places Lewis Carroll fairy-tale under Gothic horror. Without a doubt, Alice’s experiences can be illustrated as a nightmare. More importantly, the usage of satire and symbolism by Lewis Carroll gives Alice in Wonderland a meaningful note. All the different characters used in Wonderland essentially come together to form a secret lesson, this secret lesson being teaching children the turmoil of having to grow up. Lewis Carroll utilizes the rabbit hole, growing and shrinking, identifying oneself to characters, and Alice herself as symbols. Like in the “real world,” the only known laws in Wonderland are of chaos.
The survival of theatre lies in the very nature of humankind: its inner voyeuristic drive. The desire to watch other people dealing with their conflicts and fates challenges as well as reinforces values and the morality of society. The theatre provides an exciting opportunity to watch stories and situations as if they were real life, showing us the truth of our nature.
Theatre is a more language driven medium, while movies and television are driven by what you see. Theatre relies solely on excellent script, and acting. Theatre has a live element, a more heightened sense of realism. Some argue that we are losing the very essence of theatre, its live-ness, because of recorded media seeping into plays and performances (Trueman). With technology things can more easily go wrong. Lyn Gardner says that if the show relies too heavily on technology, it can cause performances to be canceled completely due to technical glitches that instead of adding to performances, the technology has become the show. The spectacle has began to make actors obsolete, leaving the audience to feel alienated and passive to the performance rather than part of it as they should feel