Performing Arts - The Arts - Life 101 lecture

Theater: dramatic performances as a branch of art.
Due to the hectic nature of daily life, we don't have nearly enough time for anything. It is because of this that I am going to only give one example.

Tennessee Williams
A prominent American Playwright who's works focused on the heavier side of interpersonal relationships. Mostly his characters were based on his family members.
Here we have the opening to his play The Glass Menagerie

TOM: Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
To begin with, I turn bark time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
In Spain there was revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion.
In Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labour, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis. . . .
This is the social background of the play.

[MUSIC]

The play is memory.
Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.
In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.
I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it. The other characters are my mother Amanda, my sister Laura and a gentleman caller who appears in the final scenes.
He is the most realistic character in the play, being an emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from. But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for. There is a fifth character in the play who doesn't appear except in this larger-than-life-size photograph over the mantel.
This is our father who left us a long time ago. He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town. . . .The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words -
'Hello - Good-bye!' and no address.
I think the rest of the play will explain itself ...

to see the rest of the play clix da linkage http://pagesperso-orange.fr/absolutenglish-972/notes/uscivi/glassmenagerie/scene_by_scene.htm

Theater is the most obvious expression of human existence. Direct expression of mindsets are conveyed in the use of conversation. Action is not as prevalent as is the way these characters respond to one another. These stories show a slice of life from one very specific point of view. Theater is more documentative of the interpersonal relationship that specific "people" have with their reality. Check it out, Theater is highly moving, poignant, and often overrides our ideas of how the world works.
There is tons of great theater out there, ranging from simple home brewed skits to theatrical performances.
If you got some time, check out some old Shakespeare, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, or Arthur Miller. I personally recommend any ancient greek plays, Especially Antigone or Prometheus Bound.

Dance: a successive group of rhythmical steps or bodily motions, or both, usually executed to music. I know there are probably plenty of really good videos of dance on the interweb, but I've decided to go a bit more entertainment and a little less obvious.

Dance is solely physical representation. Mood, action, and conversation are all expressed by body movement. More popular dances are those done in groups or pairs. Anything can be a dance, from a march, to a simple bootie shake, to throwing your hands in the air, to spinning, to whatever kind of movement you can think of. I once made a dance out of referee signals. J.R. thought that shirt I made looked like a Referee's Jersey. So there we were at a Keane Concert and me using my bod to call people out for being offsides. Anyone can dance. Also, dancing is fun. Representation of emotional or mental states can be obvious or easily confused since most people have trouble reading body movement as a language. That aside, It is exciting, quite literally moving, and a great way to relieve stress. Not to mention visually enrapturing.

Homework:
1. read a play.
2. dance