Hi All,

This weeks’ post is going to be a short one i’m afraid as I was not present for this lesson, but I will explain what I got from the readings.

So the dramatic text as a current issue. Surely any text could be seen as dramatic? Yes and no really its the way you approach and interpret the text itself.

Reading Dan Rebellato’s paper he asks the question “When We Talk of Horses Or, what do we see when we see a play?”. I thought about what I do when I go to see a play. I see it from the prospective of an audience member as well as a technical point of view so looking at the use of lighting and sound affects. I think now I do not see a show as a form of entertainment, I feel its different if you are not trained in the arts you would only see it as a form of entertainment.

He goes on to explain in a paragraph about  VISUALISING VS . IMAGINING

 

“…I recognise something like this happening when I read a novel; often I find that while reading I have formed an indistinct visualisation of the scene in the back of my mind. If I pay closer attention to that, I often realise I have taken a remembered image and subtracted or smudged out some aspects of it. The novel has entered an abandoned, broken-down cottage; I remember a cottage we stayed in on holiday when I was young, and I subtract from it signs of life and habitation”. (2009).

Is the best way to understand a dramatic text is to both visualise the setting like you would when reading a novel.

I was told in the seminar, they work shopped Simon Stephen’s Pornography. After reading the play and notes written by Jacqueline Bolton you get a better understanding what a Dramatic text is. As she mentions;

“When studying a dramatic play-text, it is often useful to break it down into elementary components: plot, structure, character, dialogue and themes. This seems a logical approach: by analysing these formal elements in isolation we are better equipped to understand how they interact and combine as drama. There are plays, however, that demonstrate such an assured synthesis of form and content that they resist this neat compartmentalisation of formal elements: Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2007) provides one of our best contemporary examples”. (Botlon, 2012, p. 14).

This meets all the requirements to create an entertaining and an truly impacting play.

That’s all for today, I promise my next post will be better.

Till then

Bye x

Work Cited:

Bolton, Jacqueline. (2012) Notes on Pornography by Simon Stephens. Bloomsbury. pp. 14.

Rebellato, Dan. (2009) When We Talk of Horses Or, what do we see when we see a play? Performance Research paper 14. Taylor & Francis Ltd. pp. 17-28