Grotowski

1. What does Grotowski denounce?

a.
2. What is the "via negativa"?
3. What are two assumptions that Grotowski makes in his creative approach to
acting?
4. What is the difference between physical actions that are alive and physical
actions that have slipped into mechanical repetition? Compare Stanislavskis approach
to physical actions and Grotowskis.
5. Thomas Richards quotes a Russian critic who said that "Grotowski is
Stanislavski" (At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions) Stanislavski was concerned
with the natural behavior of everyday life, which by means of structured circumstances
and preparation can be turned into art on stage. How does Grotowski build upon, yet go
beyond, the work begun by Stanislavski exploiting the potential of organic impulses?
6. Can "stage fright" be valuable for the actor?
7. The notion of the "score of a role," articulated by Stanislavski involves creation of
a second text with objectives corresponding to the written text. This subtext becomes the
driving force of action. What distinguishes Grotowskis notion of the "score" of a role?
8. Grotowski said that an actor should "be a good thief." What does this mean?
9. What is meant by the "holy actor"?
10. Descibe the acting style in Akropolis.
11. How does Grotowski train his actors?
12. How does the actor existentially challenge the audience?
13. During actor training for Akropolis, Grotowski put special emphasis on the use of

the face as a mask. What techniques were used to create a facial mask in rehearsal?
What was the result in the actual performance we viewed on video tape? How does it
differ in purpose and effect from the neutral mask used in commedia dellarte and
LeCoq?
14. The late actor Ryszard Cieslak is mentioned prominently in Thomas Richards
book and in articles excerpted in the Reader describing his performance inAkropolis and
The Constant Prince. Richards was inspired by Cieslak at Yale and refers to Cieslak in
making a point about the actors identification with the character in another chapter.
From the material you have studied and using the evidence you have about Cieslaks
embodiment of Grotowskis style, consider the similarities and differences between
Grotowski and Stanislavski in terms of method of physical action, organicity and
impulse.

Art and Illusion

1. Explain the notion of "shock and adjustment" of the observer.
2. What does Gombrich mean by the term "mental set"?
3. How does art criticism give us a way to talk about performance?

4. Describe the interplay between expectation and observation in

particularizing visual experience.
5. What is the principle of "guided projection"?
6. Discuss the complex process of making and matching, suggestion and
projection as a principle that plays a part in all art.
7. How does the context of action create conditions of illusion?
8. What is the "etc." principle?
9. Gombrich states that interpretation involves a tentative projection and a
key to the problem of image reading is ambiguity - "is it a rabbit or a duck?" He
claims that we can oscillate between readings, but we cannot hold conflicting
interpretations. Do you agree or disagree? Support your position with examples
or evidence.
10. The mimetic approach to dramatic literature or performance considers the
relationship between real life and a play. While this covers a wide range of
dramatic theory from Aristotle's "imitation of an action" to Zola's 19th century
naturalistic rubric that theatre should be the "study and depiction of life,"
Gombrich's thinking leads in another direction using communication theory to
examine how art (or theatre) creates meaning. List and define some of the
concepts that are involved in the transmission and decoding of a work of art
according to Gombrich. Examine some of the similarities in the interplay
between the work of art and the observer in painting and in theatre. What are
some of the factors involved? How does this help us to understand the aesthetic
process?

Film Criticism
1. What does Eisenstein say about the differences between the Eastern and
Western ways of teaching drawing?
2. What is montage?
3. How can the notion of the ideogram inform our understanding of
montage?
4. How does "linkage" and "collision" work in montage?
5. According to Kracauer, what are the two categories of film properties?
6. How does Kracauer connect film and photography?
7. What does Kracauer consider to be the most indispensable technical
property?
8. What are the differences between Lumiere and Melies?
9. What are some of the problems associated with plays made into films?
10. How can film theory inform the theatrical process?
11. Gombrich and Eisenstein are both concerned with our schematization of
ideas and how we formulate meaning through our experience. What do they give
us that indicates specific ways to talk about theatre? What are some of the
connections you can make? (Example: I might use Gombrich's notion of "shock

and adjustment" of the observer or Eisenstein's "montage/ideographic method" to

frame an answer. You may wish to use other ideas gathered from the readings)

Film Criticism II
1. Sontag and Bazin compare film and theatre. Sontag claims that because
of the camera, film is a medium as well as an art. She points out some of the
differences in how art is mediated on stage and on film, mentioning key ideas
about characters and the screenplay. One of the questions she asks is whether
cinema is the successor, the rival or the revivifier of the theatre?" How would you
answer this question?
2. Sontag also describes how Meyerhold intended to cinematify the theatre.
Do you agree or disagree with her assessment? What evidence would you use
to support your contention?
3. Bazin goes much deeper in his claim that cinema challenges the concept
of presence. He asks whether the image "can have an existence distinct from the
object," and claims that "Tarzan is only possible on the screen." How does Bazin
structure his argument?
4. How does Bazin view the notion of dramatic space?
5. Bazin goes into great detail describing the limits and constraints of
architecural (stage) space, but how does he perceive screen space?
6. Can you connect Bazin with Kracauer's basic principle of the "redemption
of physical reality" as a basic property of film?
7. The realism of cinema might help to explain why filmed plays fail. Please
expand upon this explanation. Are there other reasons?
8. Another concept has to do with the film "frame." It seems that both
Eisenstein and Bazin consider the cinematic frame to be of paramount
importance (next to montage), yet for one it is means to select, for the other it is a
method of masking. What do these complex notions mean? How are they
important for the theatre artist?

Semiotics
1. How do we use a semiotic approach in the theatre?
2. What are the benefits of analyzing signs and sign systems (in terms of the
spectator, critics and performers)
3. If a play or dramatic work of cinema or television or theatre produces
certain effects, insights or emotions in an member of the audience, what has
actually taken place? How was it brought about?
4. What are the three levels of meaning in the scene from "Ivan the Terrible"
as distinguished by Barthes?
5. How does Barthes differentiate between obvious and obtuse meaning?
6. Give examples of the sign function modes icon, index, symbol in the
theatre.

7. Define Peirce's notion of sign, interpretant, object.

8. What is the relationship between a signified and signifier?
9. How does the collective unconscious of the audience function within the
semiotics of a play?
10. What is the relevance of Gombrich's idea of "guided projection" to
semiosis?
11. Explain what Elam means when he says that a table on the stage aquires
a set of quotation marks.
12. It might be easier to understand how objects assume the role of signifiers
on stage, but how is an actor a signifier?
13. Connotation happens when an object becomes a sign of a sign. Give
examples of this occurence in Noh theatre.
14. What is meant by claiming that a performance is a network of meanings?
15. How does the actor in Brecht's Epic theatre become a sign vehicle?

Phenomenology
1. What is "binocular vision" in terms of seeing significantly and
phenomenally?
2. Discuss three types of stage images that do not entirely surrender their
objective nature to the sign/image function.
3. Describe some of the similarities and differences between phenomenology
and semiotics as tools for studying theatre.
4. Contrast the way these two approaches explain how we infer meaning
through scenography. (Consider the language used and how we particularize
objects.)
5. What is the rubble principle?
6. What was the breakthrough in expressionism? How did it grow out of
naturalism, according to States?
7. Discuss differences between art paradigms and scientific paradigms.
8. "The setting does not grow out of the play as a fictional world, but out of
an idea of which the play is simply exemplary." Please elaborate.
9. How does phenomenology help us to understand the dynamics of
actor/character in the creation of a role and revealing the actor's presence?
10. How does phenomenology explain the process of the spectator's "reading"
of a play as opposed to reading a novel?

Phenomenology II
1. Give some examples of rhetorical scenery.
2. Define and give examples of the following: 1.) metonymy; 2.) synecdoche;
3.) metonymic gestus; 4.) metaphor.
3. What is the text in the phenomenological viewpoint?
4. How does States compare Thornton Wilder and Brecht?

5. What is the "self-expressive" mode of acting as compared with the

collaborative and representational?
6. Describe how Bert States shows how phenomenology helps to understand
the dynamics of the curtain call. Think in terms of pretense, paradox and
decompression. How is it that some shows omit the curtain call entirely? Could
there be a phenomenological reason for this?

Phenomenology III
1. What is the process we go through as readers?
2. What does Iser mean by the "virtual dimension of the text"?
3. How do anticipation and retrospection lead to the formation of experience?
4. "The phenomenological theory or art lays full stress on the idea that, in
considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text
but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text,"
according to Wolfgang Iser. How can you apply this theory to theatre? How does
Iser explain the process of the spectator's "reading" of the play as opposed to
reading a novel?

Mulvey and Moi Readings

1. What is the objective of feminist critical theory?
2. What are the differences between feminism, femaleness and femininity,
according to Toril Moi?
3. How does psychoanalytic theory help to demonstrate the way patriarchal
society has structured film form, according to Mulvey?
4. How does the controlling male gaze objectify the female image?
5. If woman is represented only as object in male discourse, in what sense is
woman a subject?
6. Laura Mulvey claims that the constitutive male "gaze" creates a structure
that places woman as the object and man as the subject. The spectator joins with
the male character in this "fetishistic scopophilia" of classic narrative Hollywood
films, feeling pleasure in the perception of sexual difference. Mulvey believes that
other techniques, such as lighting and focus, contribute to the formation of the
gaze in the Hollywood cinema. McLuskie says that theatre exerts much less
complete control, although she marks a path for us in her analysis of Measure for
Measure and King Lear. Using a scene from any play written between 1860 and
1960, write your own critical analysis of how woman is defined and sexualized
and identify the strategies you would use in acting, directing or designing to
change the direction and power of the gaze.

Freedman Reading

1. How does Freedman argue that sexuality is constructed in completely

male terms?
2. What is the principle role of culture, according to this article?
3. Who is Jacques Lacan? Why is his discourse important?
4. What is involved in the psychoanalytic differentiation of gender?
5. Is feminist theatre possible or is it a contradiction in terms?
6. What is meant by the Symbolic in a Lacanian sense?
7. How is it that feminist criticism has to rely upon phallocentric
psychoanalytic theory and vocabulary?
8. How does language function in terms of engendering?
9. How is woman perceived in the phallocentric narrative?
10. What are the two senses of "the gaze" in this article?
11. How can we intervene in the cultural reproduction of sexual difference
without being entangled in it?

Rose Reading
1. T. S. Eliot developed a concept called an "objective correlative" in his
critical analysis of Hamlet. What is this pre-condition and how does it involve the
character of Gertrude?
2. Compare the views of Eliot and Rose regarding the sexuality of Gertrude
in Hamlet and Isabella in Measure for Measure. Do you agree with Eliot that the
woman provokes a crisis?
3. How does Rose succeed in lifting the onus off the woman in these plays?
4. Ernest Jones sees Hamlet as a little Oedipus who cannot bring himself to
kill Claudius. Why?
5. Freud includes Hamlet in a group of plays which he feels rely for their
effect on the neurotic in the spectator. What do you think he means by this?
6. Performance is the place where cultural forces converge, forming and
transforming social, sexual and political meanings. Masculine and feminine
portrayals in plays are useful to examine issues of sexual difference, identity,
cultural conventions and the shifting dynamics of interpersonal relations.
Shakespeare's theatrical tradition is "androcentric," that is written and acted by
males in playhouses owned by males with neither economic nor performance
opportunities for women. Boy actors played wome n's parts. Women and children
in Elizabethan England shared a similar disenfranchisement. Please refer to the
following scene (from Comedy of Errors viewed in class) and write an essay that
considers the social aspects of gender, the phenomenological consequences of
imposing femininity on the male body and Shakespeare's reinforcement or
potential subversion of prevailing cultural practices. How would you foreground
the issues in performance?
Luciana: A man is master of his liberty: Time is their master, and when they see time
They'll go or come: if so, be patient, sister.

Adriana: Why should their liberty than ours be more?

Luciana: Because their business still lies out o'door.
Adriana: Look, when I serve him so, he takes it ill. Luciana: O, know he is the bridle of
your will.
Adriana: There's none but asses will be bridled so.
Luciana: Why, headstrong liberty is lash'd with woe. There's nothing situate under
heaven's eye But hath his bound, in earth, in sea, in sky: The beasts, the fishes and the
winged fowls Are their males' subjects and at their controls: Men, more divine, the
masters of all these, Lords of the wide world and wild watery seas, Indued with
intellectual sense and souls, Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls, Are masters to
their females, and their lords: Then let your will attend on their accords.

McLuskie Reading
1. In what sense is gender an "act"?
2. Can phenomenology assist a feminist reconstruction of the sedimented
character of sex, gender and sexuality?
3. What are two types of feminist criticism?
4. How does an "essentialist" approach to Shakespeare influence the way
we analyze the plays? Give an example, using any scene from Shakespeare.
5. McLuskie states that the process of interpretive criticism is to construct a
social meaning for the play out of its narrative and dramatic realizations. Please
explain.
6. Jacques Derrida reminds us that binary oppositions are a violent hierarchy
where one of the two terms forcefully governs the other. A crucial stage in their
deconstruction involves an overturning or an inversion. How does binary
opposition help to explain the idea of an essentialist feminist approach to
theatre? How does it influence the way we analyze a play? Give an example.
7. In feminist performance art we find outspoken language and nuditytactics
used to express a political purpose. How does this fit with Derrida notion of
deconstruction?

Comedy/Performance Art
1. Ron Jenkins calls the clown an "emblem of human imperfection" and
comedy a "chronicle of the struggle to survive." In class we discussed multiple
aspects of the clown function, including the notion of "standing out", "success in
failure" and the social function of clowning. Today's clown shares virtuosity and
sheer skill with predecessor circus clowns. What are the differences?
2. What are some of the obstacles that the clowns face?
3. In discussing the function of the clown in a class report, Arrianna mentioned that the clowns
look and inventory of tricks may have changed, but her role for her audiences still retains the same
importance. What is this importance?

4. Peter Brook laments the loss of "magic" in the theatre. He says that the
theatre "is hardly wanted and its workers hardly trusted." He believes that
something must be done to capture the audience's attention and renew its belief.
In order to accomplish this, theatre artists must show that there is nothing hidden,
no tricks, nothing up our sleeves. How do contemporary comic performers fulfill
Brook's goal?
5. What is meant by the term New Theatre?
6. Describe three distinct costumes that Bill Irwin wears in Regard of Flight.
7. What device is used to bridge the chasm between the audience and stage in
Regard of Flight?
8. In the clown bagatelle Willys Trunk, which body part does he injure?
9. In the clown bagatelle The Waiter, what food does he serve?
10. Bill Irwin acknowledges that his performance includes offstage forces and
environmental staging similar to what is found in Beckett. Yet, in his argument with The
Critic, he mentions at least two other elements that make his theatre different than
Becketts. Please list them. How does he acknowledge the similarity in his work, at least
after the influence of The Critic?