Drama and Theater Essay

What is gaming? What ar the similarities and differences between Greek frolic, conversion Drama, Kabuki Drama, and Contemporary Drama? Drama is tension. In the context of a play in a theatre, tension often means that the audience is expecting some(prenominal)thing to happen between the characters on stage. Will they shoot each(prenominal) new(prenominal)? Will they finally profess their undying love for one another? Drama derived from the Greek verb dran, sum to act or to do, refers to actions or deeds as they are performed in a theatrical setting for the benefit of a personate of spectators.Drama is often combined with music and dance the fun in opera is cheerg throughout musicals include spoken dialogue and songs and some forms of free rein have regular musical accompaniment (Banham, 1998). Drama was the vest glory of the Athenian mature. This period has been called by different terms. It has been called the Age of Pericles beca hold Pericles was the reigning power in Athens at the time. It has been also called the Athenian Age because Athens became the white-hot literary center of Greece, and it has been called the Golden Age because the drama flourished during this period.There were three great tragic writers Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, the greatest writer of clowning the world has ever produced ( Serrano & Lapid, 1987, p. 26) Drama and Theater The theatre of old-fashioned Greece, or ancient Greek drama, is a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece between c. 550 and c. 220 BCE. It is true that there is much in human temper that loves outstanding presentation, for man loves to imitate other persons. Gestures by a storyteller or an orator may be considered dramatic, but these are solitary(prenominal) disjointed actions there is a wide step between this and dramatic actions.The Greeks gave the drama as a literary form to the world. The drama of ancientness is very different from the drama as we now know it. It had dignity, nobility, and power. It had subaltern of the spontaneity and easy naturalness of modern plays. The Greek drama was cold shoulder up into situations or episodes, and between these episodes were choral recitations of great length. These choral recitations, though they had beauty and power, slowed the action and interrupted the forward movement of the story. The choruses however, were visually attractive.The participants, competed with each other in the splendor of their dresses and the excellence of their singing and dancing (Serrano and Lapid, 1987, p. 26-27). any(prenominal) example of the Greek drama were the Story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra , by Aeschylus and The story of Oedipus The world-beater by Sophocles (p. 28). Primary in a true appreciation of Renaissance drama is the poetry. The theatre of their day was a poetical one. Rather than cosmos confused by the poetry we find in these plays, we need to control why the poetical theatre was, and is, su perior in expression and much powerful in emotion than a realistic one.Their stage was courtlyor poetical while todays stage is realistic. As an example, in Shakespeares Timon of Athens Timon is disgusted with mankind, hating all of the supposedly powerful people he knows. When confronted by thieves he tells them to go about their live on merrily everyone steals, and he offers examples of thievery Ill example you with thievery The suns a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea the mopes an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun The seas a thief, whose liquid surge resolvesThe moon into salt tears the mankinds a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stoln From genral excrement each thingss a thief. (Timon of Athens 4. 3. 438-45). Kabuki, like other traditional forms of drama in Japan as well as in other cultures around the world, was (and sometimes still is) performed in full-day programs. Rather than attending a single play for 25 hours , as one world power do in a modern Western-style theater, one would escape from the daily world, devoting a full day to entertainment in the theater district.though some plays, particularly the historical jidaimono, might go on for an accurate day, most plays were shorter and would be arranged, in full or in part, aboard other plays in auberge to produce a full-day program. This was because it was required in kabuki play to get the audience showing different preference that is in either the history plays or domestic plays like a drama, to wonder during the full-day program. Contemporary Drama was never very popular after humanity War I, drama in a realist style continued to die hard the commercial theatre, especially in the United States.Even there, however, psychological world seemed to be the goal, and nonrealistic scenic and dramatic devices were employed to achieve this end. The plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, for instance, use memory scenes, dream seque nces, purely symbolic characters, projections, and the like. Even ONeills later whole shebang-ostensibly realistic plays such as Long Days Journey into Night (produced 1956)-incorporate poetic dialogue and a carefully score background of sounds to soften the hard-edged realism. Scenery was almost always suggestive quite than realistic.European drama was not much influenced by psychological realism but was more concerned with plays of ideas, as evidenced in the works of the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, the French playwrights Jean Anouilh and Jean Giraudoux, and the Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode. In England in the 1950s John Osbornes Look posterior in Anger (1956) became a rallying point for the postwar wrathful young men a Vietnam trilogy of the early 1970s, by the American playwright David Rabe, expressed the anger and frustration of many towards the war in Vietnam. below he influence of Brecht, many postwar German playwrights wrote documentary dramas that, base on historical incidents, explored the moral obligations of individuals to themselves and to society. An example is The Deputy (1963), by Rolf Hochhuth, which deals with pontiff Pius XIIs silence during humankind War II. The contemporary drama does not purport to be easy it insists on a great understanding of all things pertinent to modern humanity and its relationships to religion, societal order, psychological science in order to appreciate its message however, it critically acknowledges that most of us remain ignorant to all the former.Thus, the drama instructs, irritates, challenges, and begs for intelligence in order to gain from its message. It remains didactic, combined with pleasure, but always wishing to challenge the current notions of authority. References http//www. clt. astate. edu/wnarey/modern_contemporary_drama. htm Banham, Martin, (1998 ed. ). The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378. Serrano, Josephine and Lapid, Milagros, (1987). English Communication Arts and Skills Through World Literature. Phoenix Publishing House, Inc.