Having studied theater forms of the past for the last few months, puts contemporary theater into perspective. One way of looking at the histories of theater, as we have spoken about in class, is that they had a kind of “building block” effect on the types of theater that came after them. Whether these types were formed from or in opposition to their predecessors. In regards to Immersive theater, though the form is relatively new, I feel as if there are many past forms that had begun the work of paving the way for different kinds of audience experiences (examples include Boal’s Forum Theater and the “sepct-actor experience”, and the rise of performance art). However, this doesn’t mean the form is not original, because it does create an experience that one has never historically had before in a theatrical setting.

This scavenger hunt was hands down my favorite assignment I’ve ever had to do for any class, and that includes being more fun than having to prepare scenes in an acting class. Tuesday morning was absolutely disgusting weather wise, and while I was hoping that we weren’t going to have to go out and do the hunt, I’m still incredibly glad that we were given this opportunity to just roam the city and look at theater related objects and buildings. Theater history in NYC, as we have been learning, is very expansive, and while I feel like I have a decent amount of knowledge about it, it was very exciting to see that there were so many clues on the list that I had no idea what they were. Who would have known that there were so many different arrest sites in theater history (even in recent history), as well as there being a bunch of theater spaces that were founded by people from other professions. One of the things that I was very happily surprised about was that we were still able to find people in costume, even in the awful rain. While looking at the clues on the train to Times Square, I was pretty upset that we probably weren’t going to be able to check off what on any other day would have been the easiest one to get. However, once we got to 42nd second street, though they were  not in costume, we saw some people handing out flyers for shows, and that reminded me that the women who hand out flyers for the show Chicago are always dressed up. So after asking around, we found out that when it rains, a lot of the people who do come out hang out under the awning of the Hard Rock Cafe, and thats where we found our person in costume. It was also really interesting to see from our finds and our classmate’s that there were a few different theater themed or related restaurants around the city. Our strategy for this hunt, having a rather large team of 5 people, was to have some people take uptown (Times Square mostly) and some take downtown, and the downtown portion of our team would text their pictures to me to post, and that added so much to the experience. Even though I was not physically a part of the downton team, getting to see and write the captions to the guy’s pictures from the Astor Place Riot Site, th Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame, Edwin Booth and Mark Twain’s theater club, and Richard Foreman’s Ontological Theater was as exciting as running around and taking pictures in Times Square. It was also really exciting to watch the feed on the hashtag we had to use, and seeing what everyone else was posting in real time, as well as getting some recogniziton for what we were doing (ex: the Vineyard Theater likig our tweet where we talked about the Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame). There are so many great pieces of history in the city, especially regarding theater, that are almost hidden and it was really great to see how things just started appearing all over the place once we really started looking. Over all, this was a really informative and fun experience that took some places I already knew about, and some I had no idea of the history behind and brought them into a new light for me.

In the Intorduction to Part IV of our textbook it mentions that in the time of mass media and globalization, there was also a trend of nation leaders execerting power over media outlets. While I’m sure that notion implies serious censorship, I’m very curious how this played out and whether or not it restricted what theatres produced as well. We know from the book that theatres and performance artists were putting up resistance to this, but it almost seems as if there was no reaction to this from those controlling other media, which to me is very strange.

After reading A Doll’s House and learning some more background of many of the prominent playwrights in the modernists period of theatre, I’m really beginning to wonder why these authors choose theatre and plays as their medium of expressing their ideas in the first place. For many of these plays, you can easily re-create them as a short novel, and many of these playwrights were writing in different forms to begin with, so why choose theatre? Especially for something that isnt part of popular entertainment and most likley wont get seen by the masses to begin with?

The ideals of “high modernism” in theatre really confuses me, especially those of Beckett. While I understand the motives of moving away from realism and having to compete with the new medium of film/movies, what I dont understand is why they would try to make plays more of a “reading” experince for the audience? If you look at the background of the playwrights in the high modernists era (ex: Yeats, Pirandello, Elliot, and Beckett), it seems as if they were using their knowedgle of writing novels or poems and just converting that into plays. However, in my opinion its almost as if they were eliminating the empahsis of the performance itself, which is what some people believe is what makes a play a finish product, opposed to just dialouge written on a page.

With our conversation of “high art” and “low art” in mind while reading this, I began to wonder whether avant-garde would be considered part of the high art category , because it seemed more based in higher culture, and also how compared to vadueville and other popular entertainment within these categories.

One question I had during this reading, from an actor’s standpoint, was whether or not the rise of romanticism and individualism, and the time of growing populairty of representational acting were happening at the same time? Considering that all of these views on life and theatre take a more inward approach, it would make sense that they came about together. If so, a second question would be, did an actor’s training and preparation increase at this point in time ?

This reading mentions how print culture affected the acting techniques of the time, including how the publication  of The Art of Speaking by James Burgh and John Walker gave actors and spectators gesture references to go by when they were presenting or reading other’s body language. What I wonder is, whether actors truly stuck to each gesture or expression they were taught goes with a certain emotion, or if they developed their own expressions that projected the same emotion. Also, if they did only stick to what was given to them, when did this begin to evolve into actors creating their own styles?

Unfournately, I have never been to any part of Lincoln Center prior to going to the NPYL for the Performing Arts this past week, and while Im sure there are more “glamorous” portions of the area, the library was a very cool place to be. What really surprised me the most was how much access the new york area’s public has to all these documents, books, video files, and films. You would think that they would have a more  restricted process for allowing people inside, in order to make sure that these items stay perserved. Yes, technically you are only suppose to be there for reserach purposes, but this would be the only place that I would lie about having to do a paper in order to get in.

It is so interesting to me to see how far back the connection between music and theatre goes. I may be wrong, but I can’t  think of any point in time where  theater ever really existed without music. We see this  with the ancient forms of theatre, with examples such as the greek chorus and the music in the Kathakali. In the first video, you can clearly see how the music cues each detailed movement; be it a hand gesture, change in facial expression, or slight movement over all and Im sure for anyone who understand the language, that the lyrics provide even more depth to the story. The concentration and connection that you see between the actors and musicians (compared to today’s seperation of them by “the pit”) makes the music almost like a second character on stage.