This paper illustrates the use of two language-teaching and learning methods (process drama and theatre) in a class of Italian. Process drama is based on improvisation, over-identification, and dramatisation from a short set of coordinates that students can read just a few minutes before the activity that will be later performed in class (see…

"Theatre Applications" was an international conference convened by the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, in April 2010. Framed by the subheading "Performance with a purpose", the call for papers invited contributors to consider how theatre making in different settings can "make a difference" to those who…

One of the rhetorical dimensions on which theatre exists is the rhetoric of production. This implies that the production, through examples, takes and urges an attitude toward the text. This argument provides a foundation for both the nature and the implications of interpreters theatre productions that advocate social issues. Theatrical…

The artistic quality of creativity is not unique to artists but is carried out more skillfully by those who are artists than by those who are not. The artist participates with the rest of humanity in the essential part of creativity, communication, and develops a consonance--a resonance--between the work of art and the audience. The ritual of…

Influenced by film and television exposure, the student designer tends to be camera oriented and two-dimensional in creating theatrical sets. This paper outlines six visual projects designed to help students develop a selective visual sense for dealing with the three-dimensional aspects of the stage. The projects include the following activities:…

This report summarizes part of an investigation of audience response to theatrical settings; it proposes a direction for further research which would examine attitudinal relationships among theatre experts and laypersons, scenic designers, and directors; and it describes additional design-oriented quantitative studies. For the major investigation,…

Personal interviews were conducted with drive-in theatre patrons in an attempt to paint an empirical portrait of a contemporary drive-in movie theatre audience. A total of 607 patrons of one Rochester, New York, drive-in were interviewed by trained college undergraduates using a prepared 33-item questionnaire consisting of open- and close-ended…

The best art experience has often been characterized as a kind of balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the expected and the unexpected, the easy and the hard. Good directors and actors have the artistry to be able to play on the orientation reactions of the audience. They know how to structure a production or performance so that it…

Acting Style refers to the individual characteristics of appearance, voice, movement, and temperament that distinguish one actor from another. Based on the theory that the black actor tends to approach a role presentation on a visceral level of communication, in contrast to the white actor's intellectual approach, this study identified those…

Just as all perceptions are of figures differentiated from a larger background, a play takes place against the background of the audience's knowledge and feelings. While audience members generally bring to a performance a large body of background information--they evaluate the storyline, for example, using a lifetime of personal experience--at…

A gestalt approach to theatrical design seems to provide some ready and stable explanations for a number of issues in the scenic arts. Gestalt serves as the theoretical base for a number of experiments in psychology whose findings appear to delineate the principles of art to be used in scene design. The fundamental notion of gestalt theory…

This paper traces the historical development of melodrama in the theatre and discusses its influence on twentieth century drama. Melodrama is a responsible literary mode based on romance and allegory, and its deliberate exaggeration of external actions represents figuratively the interior or psychological dimensions of imagination. Good melodrama…

To help reduce sexism in children's theatre productions, directors should make a conscious effort to eliminate negative patterns from scripts. They should give attention to the roles of the characters, since female characters are often relegated to the roles of waiting for a male, a supportive parent or sister, or a passive admirer of a male.…

Most performer-writers accept the writing process simply as a means to an end: the shared performance event with a live audience. While writer-performers regard a script as more important than the performance, a solo performance is, however, a showcase of the artist's talent, and creating one's own text offers the performer artistic control. Some…

Because it focuses on questions of communication, the experimental theatre of the 1970s, particularly that created by Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman, can be analyzed according to two distinct theories regarding the communication process. The first theory defines communication as a process in which the communicator selects and transmits messages…