David Porter » Archive
Political Performance Art Can Be a Right Song and Dance
Performing Arts (dance, drama, music) and politics make natural travellers on the same road. Whether they change minds, win hearts, may be another matter. Political arts are about raising awareness of issues, ideas and responses to society. Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica showing the tragedy of bombing civilians during the Spanish Civil War has become an iconic anti-war artpiece. Visual and performance art is often in the form of protest against a government, a system, an act of war, on stage, in song or on film. People hear Edwin Starr’s Motown song, ‘War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing…. only friend is the undertaker’, and know it’s a political, antiwar pop song. Other classics include Universal Soldier, by Buffy Sainte-Marie (1964), Eve of Destruction … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles at Suite 101
Political Theatre is a Major Performance Artform
If politics is the art of the possible and the theatre is about communication, political theatre is one of the strongest weapons a stage activist can have. Political performance traces back to the ancient Greeks. Stage lampooning those in authority was banned in the Greek republic after The Birds and Lysistrata; since when playwrights have used stages to convey messages, demand political action or change government policy and public opinion. Antigone is political: quoted by Aristotle on the loyalties of a citizen, adapted in 1944 by Anouilh setting it in the French resistance against the Nazis, while Brecht in 1948 made it more radically anti-Hitler. Bertolt Brecht, at the Forefront of Political Theatre Political performance is the expression of strongly-held beliefs, protesting at society or promoting a particular belief system. As politics … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles at Suite 101
Movie Remakes Are the Golden Goose of the Entertainment Industry
One idea for a single film is a waste. Updating it can be a box-office winner, especially using the latest top stars. In a few years they can do it again. No slouches at reusing old ideas and films about films, showbusiness in general and Hollywood in particular, has created a genre: remaking old movies for a second outing, often with spectacular success. The Prisoner Made for television, The Prisoner was a 1960s cult series starring and partly written by Patrick McGoohan, at that time Britain’s highest paid TV-actor. The prisoner is perhaps a spy, who after resigning is kidnapped and taken to The Village, a mysterious place (actually Portmeiron, an eccentric Welsh Italianate place), where he wakes to find everyone’s names replaced … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles at Suite 101
Physical Theatre: Ritual is Key Ingredient in Performance-Making
Life’s rhythms revolve round rituals: daily tasks, birthdays, weddings and funerals. In creating meaning on stage, performers harness the power of rites. Almost everything people do regularly has a ritualistic feel. Getting dressed every morning, preparing/sharing food, anniversaries, courtships, conducting business and great occasions of state – are rituals, patterns of regular human behaviour. Often, social convention rites/rituals dictate further ritual: for example, shaking hands on greeting, waving goodbye. Devisers of performance must reflect that in their creating. Then they have to experiment with it. In psychiatry an action performed obsessively can be interpreted as evidence of compulsive disorder. It is often revealed in manic dance. A ritualistic dance or going through the regular motions of a life with all its … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles at Suite 101
Performance Arts Can Be Either High Art or Just Having a Laugh
This art-form is an event by an individual or group, who create something approximating to art, but as a living performance, as pure fun or with a message. Not sculpture, painting, nor pure theatre performance, it’s a mixture, of no fixed time, in an unusual or unexpected place. It might play to a random audience, like shoppers, or people in a park, and the relationship between performers and audience is crucial to make the event. Mime artists on little boxes in summer resorts or festival fringes heavily made-up like robots or characters from movies or sci-fi fantasies, constitute performance art. Falk Richwien from Germany beheaded two rabbits at a gallery in 2006, claiming he wanted people to break from a supermarket culture … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles at Suite 101
Do Opinion Polls Reflect or Drive Voters’ Intentions?
Are people’s viewpoint snapshots more reliable predictors of election outcome than horoscopes or reading tea leaves? Should they be allowed in elections? In the run-up to elections and in between, the public is bombarded with surveys and polls revealing views of random samples of voters, snapshot opinions of think-tanks, focus groups and ordinary men and women in their guises as social types, income earners, marrieds, homeowners, benefit recipients, taxpayers, consumers. This is a regular marketing tool, but in elections, the real question is: do poll findings drive public opinion or accurately reflect it? If on a given day, say, 79% of single mothers answer the voting intention question by saying it’ll be Party A, does that influence other single mothers to believe … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles at Suite 101
Ideas, Plans, Themes for Drama Teaching
After many years of drama teaching to British high school students (Key Stages 3-5), I have started to put together some of the ideas, themes, warm-ups, games, productions that I have worked through with students. Some are articles published at Suite 101. Some will be unique articles published here. Eventually, some teenage performance/production ideas will be available to download from here. These are the Suite 101 articles on drama teaching, so far: Using Masks as a Creative Teenage Drama Tool First published on Suite 101, 24 September 2011 The mask as a device to support teaching of theatre history, culture diversity and improvisation techniques in Key Stage 4 (ages 14-16), is second to none. The mask is a versatile object. For protection (industry; fencing), for prevention (infection), for disguise or grotesque effect (to … Read entire article »
Filed under: Drama Teaching
Writing Online, Writing On Paper
As well as publishing articles online, I have published work in magazines and papers, have written a complete English correspondence course for Bankers, plays, sketches and drama teaching materials. I can express what you need to say, and help business staff to do likewise. Writing Online My articles at Suite 101 began in April 2010, and as the articles reach a year old, I am republishing them on this site, in the Articles at Suite 101 category. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Writing
Once Seen as Sinister, Left-Handedness is Now All Right
US President Obama, is the world’s most prominent current sinistral writer. Centuries ago, left-hand writing was frowned upon and discouraged. Sinister, (evil or menacing), comes from the Latin word sinestra, meaning left. It was therefore a short step for people to believe left-handedness was devilish.Today, there are many derogatory terms to describe left-handedness, from southpaw (often in sport) to goofy in the US and cack-handed in Britain. To describe someone as ‘out-in-left-field’ (from the world of baseball) is to mean they come out with something unrelated to what is happening around them; a bit crazy. The implication of clumsiness can be hurtful, although people who use their left hand as the stronger one do live in a world filled with right-handed machines, gadgets … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles at Suite 101