io9.com: For centuries, humans have placed way too much importance on people playing fictional characters on stage. And when you’ve done that for as long as we have, things are bound to get weird occasionally. Here are five of the strangest stories from the history of theater.
13 comments:
My only problem with this article was that I felt like these facts were all coming from one area of theater, it didn’t really expand into any interesting productions from contemporary theaters. This article would have been a lot more satisfactory if some attention was paid to diversity of subject matter, it also would have garnered the attention of a larger audience of readers. I thought the fact about the magician was interested because he went back for his lion. Also the idea of all your friends and family thinking that some strangers corpse was your own, that is an idea that is very disturbing to me but could also totally happen in the world of theatre. I liked this article because it was a good reminder of how theatre has grown, we’ve expanded in so many different areas. Theatre is now safer, more diverse, and so so much more interesting than it use to be.
I don’t think really proves theater is “weirder than you think”. To work in this industry is to know that it is full of tricks and superstitions. This list just helps to prove: 1) Fires destroy things, 2) Greeks were a little obsessed with numbers, and at the time very into creating perimeters on things 3) some one got bored with Shakespeare and had a sick since of humor. 4) Egyptians liked their plays like they like their tombs, to last for a long time. Also, as far as the history of Egypt goes 2,000 isn’t that long 5) Ancient Romans had a tendency to be animals who slaughtered people for amusement. I rest my case at the Colosseum. They are interesting factoids and I did enjoy reading them, but they do not prove anything about the weirdness of theater. I’m sure I could think of weirder things we have done in the name of theater.
I would say that this list was more like “5 Weird Historical Facts about Theater”, but nevertheless it was very interesting to read. It’s crazy to read about what theater used to be, to look at how it is today, and then to think about how different it may be thousands of years from now. The story about the fire (though more about a magician show than it is about a theatrical production), was simultaneously panic- inducing and crazy from start to finish (also, god bless stage managers!) I found the facts about ancient Greek and Roman theater particularly thought- provoking in that I consider Greek and Roman theater to be where it all started, and how it led up to now. The idea of only allowing for three actors in one show, or of killing people onstage, is completely insane to us now, but it highlights how much theater has been able to evolve, and how important it is to question how and why we make artistic choices in accordance with the world around us. Like Rachael said, I’m sure there are “weirder” things that have happened in theater (and I’m sure no one in the school of drama would be surprised by these things either).
These facts were interesting, but not mind-blowing. The vast majority were simply quirky historical facts about theater. The one good fact that came out of this article is that I now know that it is perfectly fine to say "Macbeth" in the theater (however, I won't. Tradition shall stand).
The bit about Greek and Roman theater, however, was quite interesting. Greek theater is thought provoking, emotional, and deliciously twisted. Greek theater is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. When a tragedy goes wrong, it really goes wrong. But I don't just watch and read these plays for the (mostly offstage) blood, gore, and mommy fetishes. Despite the limit (as Rachel said, the Greeks liked their rules) Greek tragedies still manage to speak about important issues and themes. "Antigone" isn't just about two inbred brothers who kill each other over a crown and a sister who is engaged to her cousin(?). The entire play is actually speaking about finding the balance between what the law says is right (represented by Creon) and what out morals say is right (Antigone herself is the symbol here). I'm sorry for the rant, but theater history and literary analysis are fascinating subjects that, although they are not mind-blowing or "weird", should still be talked about.
Interesting factoids, with no real analysis to them whatsoever. There are a lot of articles and videos out today that string together loosely related facts and snippets of information and slap on an eye grabbing title that also doesn’t really have much to do with the facts. Now, don’t get me wrong, these articles have their place in the world, but as for this article, I would have liked to see an article expand on any one of those topics more than I would have liked to read all five in a rushed and incomplete way. A lot of those facts definitely showed a weird aspect of theatre (debatably) and a lot of them were actually integral to the history of theatre and why live performance has struck a chord throughout nearly every culture of humanity. Instead of presenting them as ‘The Five Weirdest Facts’, they could have been presented in a way that highlighted their importance to theatre. A show that plays for 2,000 years is a milestone in live performance, it’s incredibly significant to theatre and live performance, speaking to how important theatre was to a culture so ancient that we put ancient in the name of the culture. IN short, I thought this article made light of some important facts.
These Five historical facts pretty much just emphasize the phrase that he show must go on. It's interesting to realize the nature of historic theatre and performances and the severity of their nature. The fact that romans actually killed people on-stage is mind-boggling. Try doing that today, your theatre company would get sooo sued. Now the magician story just goes to show that even in the worst of situations, the production team will put the audience's concern first. Obviously I would be a bad stage manager because instead of playing "god save the queen", I would literally yell for everyone to leave and leave myself..... oops. The egyptian show playing for 2000 years is so cool, longest running broadway show material if you ask me. That's definitely something to be proud of indeed. Now although the facts were fun and interesting, I dont feel them to be reasons that make theatre weirder than I realize. They're just facts of some screwed up things in theatre history. Still a good read though.
I found this article to be really amusing because, we all know that theater is weird, but how much more strange could it get than our normal? The most eye opening to me was the first fact about the magician the Great Lafayette who died in a fire accident on stage, of course magicians use deception when performing tricks, but the body double was something I would not have considered. Especially the fact that not many people even on the crew knew about it, as if they did when the fire department was searching they would have accounted for another person lost. The article all refers to historical theatrical events, such as the Romans using a criminal to play a characters death scene and actually murdering them on stage. However, as strange as the roots of theater are, I was hoping the article would compare some things todays practices. Based on what the author discussed I feel they would think that today's theater is not that weird because we have safety protocols that do not kill actors. But anyone involved in theater today can attest to the fact that theater is still very weird.
I wouldn't say that these facts prove that theater is weird, but instead that they show how theater has changed and progressed over thousands of years. Besides the Buzzfeed article type title, this article was actually a really interesting look at theater history. By reading this you really get a sense of the purpose of theater has transitioned. If you look at the ancient examples of the Greeks and Egyptians, theater was used a spiritual and ritualistic way of praising the gods through performance. Although this isn't exactly how we experience theater today, it is an important part of theater history. These facts also show how much safer theater has gotten. A fire that killed 10 people in a theater, as shown in the first example, would most likely never happen today. Even if it did for some reason, things would be done to ensure that standards became more rigorous to make sure it never happened again. It's very important to look to the past occasionally to enhance your knowledge of theater, and I don't think that that's weird at all.
The strange thing about this article is that it focuses only on the weirdness, and not about any examples of weirdness that may be socially implicated in our modern day. This is just a fun celebration of a few examples of odd occurrences of live performance in history. The most interesting to me was the Egyptian play for 2000 years, as it draws potentially beautiful parallels between theatre and religion, and how the beauty of storytelling can be used for education, manipulation, and the constructing of society as one giant conglomerate. It may be fascinating to do an examination of all of the historical ways that theatre has been used, and cross-reference them against each other, attempting to determine the human psychological understanding of the power of storytelling.
I wouldn't characterize these facts the same way the author did claiming them to be "facts that prove theater to be weirder than you realize," perhaps a title like "interesting facts of theater history" would be more to the point. Anyone who works in theater knows that the practice is "weird" in a certain sense, but I don't think these facts affirm that predetermined knowledge that practitioners of the art already have. Perhaps this article is addressing non-theater goers who don't already understand the "weirdness" of theater, but then it begs the question why does this author want to point out the strangeness of the theater world/with what intentions? I know I'm clearly over analyzing this relatively simple article, but I think it's interesting how so much of online writing nowadays are collections of quirky little facts like this, and it is often hard to distinguish the author's credibility intention or purpose because the structure of the communication is changing . While it's great to gain some insight into theater history and to be able to affirm once and for all the curse of the Scottish play isn't real, perhaps this article provides better insight on how communication in our world is shifting.
This article seems like something you would write to grab the attention of non-theater people. Every occupation has gone through a phase of weird practices before it became the thing that it is today. Some of those vestigial things stay with the occupation all the way up until modern times because "that's the way it's always been done" or "it's a tried and true method", like in the case of the 2,000-year-old Egyptian play. As for the Greek three-actor rule, it's how we got the idea of one actor playing multiple parts. What's cool to me is that the theatre community has taken these attributes about their history and learned from and improved upon them. We now have fire safety codes, we don't kill people onstage (the cleanup, among other things, would be atrocious), and we have developed clever ways to portray the death of someone in a play. And theater, like any other occupation, still has vestigial things that we still hold dear- we tell universal and timeless stories that continue to touch the minds and hearts of audiences, we're careful about our Scottish Play, and we still leave the theater every night with a ghost light on.
I think this headline is misleading. Theater is weird. Everybody knows it. In the entertainment industry, we do things that nobody else does and that nobody else would attempt to do. Of course it is going to be weird – maybe weirder that people on the outside think it is. For someone who was worked in theater, I think you can always expect the weird. The weirdness may exceed your expectations, but you can always be prepared for it. Illusions, tricks, and gimmicks are a part of what we do. Creativity knows no bounds and it is our job to come up with it and make it happen. Our weirdness has to keep the audience coming back. If we can’t come up with new and weirder things, we will lose our audience, and thus not have jobs for what else would we do? I say bring on the weird!
This article did not really prove that theatre was that weird. There are many more things that could have been said that would make theatre look a lot weirder. Those were just normal stories of people in the past. The story about the Great Laffayette was not very weird; it was more of a tragic story that people died in the theatre because something went wrong. The story about the Romans is kind of weird and messed up. It is weird to think that theatre was used as a form of punishment because people mostly do it for enjoyment. It definitely makes the show more dramatic if someone actually dies on stage. I would not want to see that though. I would rather see a realistic looking death that uses interesting methods to make it realistic without endangering the actor in anyway. It is interesting to hear that the Scottish play curse was just because a critic was bored.
Post a Comment