Finished a book, sort of
Sep. 20th, 2008 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethIt is 2230, and I have finished reading Part 1 of Rehm's Greek Tragic Theatre.
Part 2 is about particular texts, many of them not the set ones, so I'm going to have to read a bit more to find it useful. Or, move on to another book.
I liked this one. It was about these plays as Theatre, as performances. Masks and acoustics and what exactly the chorus did, natural lighting and seats that went up hills. The way the conditions and relationship between audience and performance was and was not like what we might be used to. And importantly how it relates to the day to day performances of Athens, where standing up and having a great big argument was the basis of both law and politics.
Er, okay, I oversimplify. But sort of like that.
Clothes were usually what the locals would consider 'modern dress', and they could read subtleties like which clothes were for weddings or funerals or day to day wear or rich people or poor people. Masks were conventionalised but conveyed a particular type. I think. Masks interest me, I'd like to know more. But basically the audience the plays were first for would have been able to read them a lot more naturally than I could. Even the language, whilst rhythmical and in distinctive forms, was closer to natural speech than the most used forms before plays.
Actors spoke rhetoric and the chorus sang lyric. Except when they did the other thing. The chorus also danced. The actors pretty much didn't. The use of songs wasn't much like in musical theatre or opera. It says that opera hardly uses speaking, and never for important stuff. Musical theatre puts important emotional moments and plot changes in the songs. But Greek chorus would sing as sort of a commentary. Maybe. I need to read more about that. But they were using the lyric bits in a distinct way, not to be easily compared with modern familiar forms. The speaking parts as well had quite a lot of the court room drama about them, even without a formal court. They'd have a big formal argument, the agon, in the middle of the story. That's the bit where Jason and Medea were arguing and Jason doesn't convince anyone. There's other bits too. It's part of the usual form.
It's all interesting.
It also all using words that I vaguely learned in the poetry unit last... er, no, year before last now. I guess I better dig up my words from then.
I like the feeling at the start of the semester when there's new shiny vistas of knowledge to explore.
I not so much like the feeling that they're a snowfield with random crevasses spread through them.
I read more, I have map.
Also reading is fun.
But not more tonight, cause it's late and I'm blinky tired.
Part 2 is about particular texts, many of them not the set ones, so I'm going to have to read a bit more to find it useful. Or, move on to another book.
I liked this one. It was about these plays as Theatre, as performances. Masks and acoustics and what exactly the chorus did, natural lighting and seats that went up hills. The way the conditions and relationship between audience and performance was and was not like what we might be used to. And importantly how it relates to the day to day performances of Athens, where standing up and having a great big argument was the basis of both law and politics.
Er, okay, I oversimplify. But sort of like that.
Clothes were usually what the locals would consider 'modern dress', and they could read subtleties like which clothes were for weddings or funerals or day to day wear or rich people or poor people. Masks were conventionalised but conveyed a particular type. I think. Masks interest me, I'd like to know more. But basically the audience the plays were first for would have been able to read them a lot more naturally than I could. Even the language, whilst rhythmical and in distinctive forms, was closer to natural speech than the most used forms before plays.
Actors spoke rhetoric and the chorus sang lyric. Except when they did the other thing. The chorus also danced. The actors pretty much didn't. The use of songs wasn't much like in musical theatre or opera. It says that opera hardly uses speaking, and never for important stuff. Musical theatre puts important emotional moments and plot changes in the songs. But Greek chorus would sing as sort of a commentary. Maybe. I need to read more about that. But they were using the lyric bits in a distinct way, not to be easily compared with modern familiar forms. The speaking parts as well had quite a lot of the court room drama about them, even without a formal court. They'd have a big formal argument, the agon, in the middle of the story. That's the bit where Jason and Medea were arguing and Jason doesn't convince anyone. There's other bits too. It's part of the usual form.
It's all interesting.
It also all using words that I vaguely learned in the poetry unit last... er, no, year before last now. I guess I better dig up my words from then.
I like the feeling at the start of the semester when there's new shiny vistas of knowledge to explore.
I not so much like the feeling that they're a snowfield with random crevasses spread through them.
I read more, I have map.
Also reading is fun.
But not more tonight, cause it's late and I'm blinky tired.