Interesting things students have done in the past on their Theatre History presentations & scenes:

All Periods

· played period music under parts of presentation

· introduced themselves and the characters they will be playing

· presented equal parts of presentation

· explained why they were serving the food they chose

· briefly told us the plot of the play and what has happened just before the scene begins

· presented defining elements on big, easy to read poster cards with definitions

· showed us significant clip from Changing Stages video and clarified the clip - telling us why the clip is important

· recap history of period in terms of theatre events while other members pantomime the action of the events - making the history interesting and engaging

Spanish Theatre

· discussed acting style - related it to today's soap operas

· showed video clip of a television soap opera in Spanish and discussed the passionate acting style

· Welcomed the class in Spanish then had a volunteer read the English translation of the same speech

· food: cheese quesadillas, chips, salsa

NOTES

· During the 16th and 17th cnturies the Spanish theatre flourished with religion as it's primary source.

· A religious festival three times annualy called the Corpus Christie festval.

· Performed plays called autos sacrementales.

· Had some of the aspects they featured human as well as some aspects of cycle plays.

· They featured human as while as supernatural characters.

· Plays that were presented were performed by a single company and later by two companies.

· On carros, or wagons, which held everything neede for performance.

· By 1500 secular dramas began to emerge.

· A man who is often refered to as the founder of spanish drama is Juan del Ecina. His first works were religious, but later he also wrote secular plays. The most noted of these is The Ecologue of Placida and Victoriano.

· Professional theatre in spain began around 1550 led by Lope de Rueda, who was an actor and an author. He was first noticed in religious plays, but later he wrote plays for popular audiences. Rueda normally played fools or simpletons, but his characters were the most fully developed of the time. He was the most sucessful performer of his time.

· Theatre popularity was on the rise in the 1570s. Madrid and seville were the theatrical centers, though other cities had acting troupes. The playwrights/dramatists which also were popular at the time were Juan de la Cueva and Miguel se Cervantes. Cervantes wrote of everyday life, as well as of classical subjects. Cevantes is best known for his novel Don Quixote. He wrote about thirty plays during his career.

· In Spain, Comedia was the word used to describe any full-length play, whether it was serious or comic. Most comedias were divided into three acts and began with a loa, or prologue.

· Vega is believed to have written 800 comedies, 450 of which survived. His plays have clearly defined actions which keep the audience interested, and most of his plays deal with the theme of ove and honor. Vega's plays almost always had happy endings.

· Pedro Calderon de la Barca is another well-known Spanish playwright known for plays such as The Phantom Lady, The Physicians, His Own Honor, and Life is a Dream. Calderon wrote 200 plays, but only 100 have survived to the present day. Public theatres in Spain were known as corrales. The first corrales was built Madrid and was called Corall de la Cruz. A few public theatres were also built in these citites. Performances began at 2:00p.m. in the fall and 4:00p.m. in spring and were required to end at least one hour before nightfall.

· Both secular and religious drama flourished at the same time. Calderon was successful at both.

· Women occasionally prformed- but were eventually banned by Catholic church.

· Lope De Vega- prolific playwright of spanish period.

· Spanish Armada is the top of political power.

· Actors were looked down upon. female actors were considered whores or sluts. DO'S:

· Go over all the vocabulary

· Have a vocab list for audience.

· synopsis of Life is a Dream.

· Know your lines.

· Use the style of your period.

· Use lots of expression and emotion in scene.

Fuente Ovejuna

Lope de Vegas

DRAMA OF SENSE and SENSLUALITY

Frey Felix Lope de Vega Carpio and William Shakespeare were the two most radical and popular writers of their two countries during roughly the same years. Neither, as far as we know, knew of the other's work. While there is uncanny common ground between the Spanish Golden Age and the English Renaissance, the two cultures and their greatest writers reflect profoundly distinct sensibilities, perhaps none more so than Lope de Vega and Shakespeare. The spirit of both these writers contrasts as strongly as Mozart's lyricism and the passion of Beethoven.

Lope offers none of Shakespeare's breadth and depth, intricacy of plot and intimacy of character; even the smokescreen of translation doesn't explain this absence. Lope's drama is of a fundamentally different essence-raw, direct, and communal. As is typical of Spanish drama of the period, his characters are mouthpieces which confront us directly with philosophical issues. Rather than fully fleshed-out, profoundly realized characters, they embody states of being which illustrate the action, in some ways resembling the stock characters of the commedia dell'arte 'the young lovers, the clown, the evil master. Lope's approach to drama in this sense is closer to that of the ancient Greek dramatists or the twentieth century's Brecht.

As in opera, Lope's tones and meters often seem to take precedence over the words themselves. They swoop and blend like instruments in an orchestra, movements in a symphony, or strophes and antistrophes of Greek drama. Fuente Ovejuna shifts abruptly from long monologues to snatches of conversation to sonnet to song. Impassioned rhetoric transmutes to comic banter and then to lyrical meditation.

The extraordinary monolithic speeches which punctuate and arrest the play's action have little affinity with Shakespeare's introspective, subtly layered soliloquies, seamlessly woven into the fabric of his plays. The Commander, like a Greek chorus, sets forth the reasons why the Master should fight on behalf of the Portuguese king. Flores, like a Greek messenger, reports on the battle and later on the revolution. Finally, like a mythical Fury, Laurencia comes back to haunt the living with blood-guilt, and like Medusa, her hair tells the story of her suffering and paralyzes her listeners with terror. These speeches are not rooted in exposition or character revelation. Like finely detailed paintings or exquisitely chiseled sculptures, they express infinite detail in one essential state.

In Fuente Ovejuna, a village's oppressed population experiences desecration and exultation, and finally a fusion of both. Perhaps more than any other Spanish artist, Lope's contemporary, El Greco, captures this fusion of torment and ecstasy. For instance, in his death speech Flores achieves a heroic stature wildly at odds with his brutal actions. In this sense it recalls El Greco's agonized visions of attenuated, twisted bodies and eye-stretching away from the earth and his lurid, otherworldly colors the shimmering magentas, vivid blues, and purplish-greys of lifeless flesh.

The contrast is striking with the rosy tints, rounded shapes, and sensual gaze of Titian and Tintoretto's Italian Renaissance madonnas and courtesans. Perhaps this expression of the eyes most distinguishes the Renaissance English and Italian sensibilities from the Spanish. Golden Age Spanish art and literature characteristically glory in the corporeal world, but not for its own sake, as with their English and Italian contemporaries. The most sensuous, earthly terms instead are devoted to the depiction of spiritual transcendence. Rather than looking to create an earthly paradise, this world is perceived as a path to heaven.

Similarly, the Golden Age Spanish theatre does not strive for naturalism or the illusion of realism. Shakespeare generally explores complexities of good and evil by focusing on powerful individuals. In Fuente Ovejuna, Lope explores the same issues by depicting the collective powerlessness of ordinary people. This play explores a broad political landscape rather than the individual soul.

Those many who claim the play as support for a particular political program, whether of democracy or socialism, overlook the fact that although the people assume power for themselves, they do so only to hand it back to the monarchy. The absolute power of the king and queen is reaffirmed. The basis for faith and the sense of cosmic order remains unassailable and absolute.

Fuente Ovejuna recalls Aristophanes' Lysistrata, in which the women of the city end war by withholding themselves sexually from the men until they stop fighting. But in Fuente Ovejuna pacifism is not the chosen road. Although the women provide the moral impetus by inciting and leading the revolution, it is only initially a triumph of female wisdom. Here the women characters (who in the Spanish Renaissance theatre, unlike the English, were actually played by females) see no alternative but to adopt male militarism to achieve revenge, insisting that they no longer be called women, but soldiers.

The entire village appropriates the Commander's sadistic brutality as its fury leads it to gluttonously dismember his body. The peasant characters have the simple dignity of Velazquez's country scenes; their oppressors have the grotesqueness of Goya's Capricbos monsters. But by the play's end, dignity cedes to monstrosity, and monstrosity surrenders with a certain dignity.

Lope, true to the culture which gave birth to cubism, depicts the many perspectives of oppression in a play that resembles a dramatic fusion of Picasso's Rape of the Sabine Women and Guernica. Like those terrifying paintings, Fuente Ovejuna depicts an exploded world filled with distorted breasts, hands, and eyes. The play is perhaps ultimately closest to Euripides' The Bacchae, in which the women of Athens, in wild abandon, tear apart a young king caught watching their rites. Fuente Ovejuna places this scenario in a political context of oppression startlingly familiar to our contemporary world. It shares The Baccbae's inverted eroticism, its frenzied intoxication with violence, and its final reckoning the morning after.

Liza Henderson

De Barbieri Dramaturgical Fellow