The Play Of Light And Shadow Chiaroscuro

“This performance draws upon both ‘traditional and contemporary arts and cultural practice. The integration of… contemporary performance art and modern theatrics to form of cultural hybridity.”

Sarah Ruhl’s play, Eurydice, is a devastating story battling love, grief, life, and death. Although it is set during the 1950’s, the play manages to encompass the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. The three most evident themes of this play are recurring death, fleeting happiness, and the power of love. The main conflict in this play is ultimately about the painful choice that comes with death; this is often caused by the King of the Underworld. One of the most impressive parts of this play is the ability to change the way the play is perceived through design.

Mansfield’s description throughout the narrative is intriguing and captivating, pulling the reader into the drill hall and making them sway to the “oft, melting, ravishing tune” as though they themselves could have been Leila. Moreover, her use of description allows her to create the character of the “fat man” and utilise him to portray the idea that “happiness [doesn’t] last for ever.” Because she describes him as the fat man, who is old and wearing a coat that “looked dusty with French chalk”, she creates an evident contrast between the beautiful characters she initially described. Through this imagery, Mansfield subtly portrays Leila’s fears of losing the beauty of this first ball and emphasises that in fact, beauty doesn’t last. However, Mansfield plunges the reader back in to the dance, such that the almost

Mrs. Farrell’s book is quite technical when it comes to the lengthy descriptions of the dances she rehearses and performs; from a dancer’s view these varied conclusions of the types of movements she was dancing is quite astonishing. In fact, it adds a whole new level to the imagination that can come alive in a person’s thoughts when they read an expressive book. Although the technical explanations will excited, astound, and reveal how much passion and deep meaning ballet had in Suzanne Farrell’s life, but a reader, who may not be involved in the arts will be unfamiliar with the ballet and musical terms in

“the sonnet-ballad” by Gwendolyn Brooks is a Shakespearean sonnet that uses imagery to paint a picture of death/war stealing a lover’s happiness by portraying that the man is seduced away. This passage portrays that the lover cannot be happy for her significant other has been taken away by death/war. War has a negative effect on women, and the relationships with their lovers. When death takes away a woman’s lover, they must overcome sorrow and anguish of their loss.

As a piece of choreography, “La Petite Mort” expresses the motifs of sexuality and death through the contrasts between levels of energy, confidence, and elevation. Translating directly from French to “little death”, the phrase “petite mort” also serves as a French idiom representing sexual climax. The comparison of the supposed pleasure of a sexual act, and act associated with creation, with death evokes strong emotions for both dancers and audience members alike. The piece runs for approximately seventeen minutes and consists of twelve dancers, six males and six females, and a wide array of symbolic props, including swords (foils), dresses that stand without support, and more. The tension and lack thereof between dancers and between a dancer and his or her prop can be felt palpably by the audience. Between sections of the piece, the male dancers carry an enormous cloth which glides through the air gracefully like a scarf, and the lights dim, creating a sense of mystery which is consistent with the feelings of the audience in trying to figure out how to deal with these two conflicting ideas.

My overall response to the dance concert is spectacular because each dance piece was moving, remarkable, and motivational. Each dance had an astounding affect on me and allowed to me repelled into the performance. These impressions came from me analyzing the dance pieces, “A Brief Study of Recent History and “One Heart, Two Worlds”, for the Spring 2016 Studio 115 Dance Concert Series at USM’s Dance and Theatre Building on May 4th. The first performance, “A Brief Study of Recent History” was choreographed by Elizabeth Lentz-Hill and introduced by the dancers Jennifer Alafat, Megan Bradberry, Shaquille Hayes, etc. While the second piece, “One Heart, Two Worlds”, was choreographed by Dejonelle Gleeton and the performers were Brittain Allgood,

The novella, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, is a piece that pushed the envelope of its time due to an oppositional stance on the forced imperialism of primitive and/or impoverished countries. The protagonist of this story is the self-proclaimed explorer, Marlow, who decides to leave the heart of light and purity (Europe) and take a job as a steamboat captain in the dark jungles of the Congo Free State in Africa. Upon his arrival, Marlow begins to see the impact of Belgium’s intrusion on the Congo by means of implementing slavery, commandeering ivory (a valuable resource), and presenting a negative attitude toward the primitive population. Marlow eventually becomes obsessed with an ivory

“Calixta would be there… That little Spanish vixen.” No matter what the age, there are certain types of women who seem to capture the attention of every man in the room. In the story At the ‘Cadian Ball by Kate Chopin, the protagonist Calixta is precisely that kind of a girl. She is an atypical female of her time. The ideal woman of the late 1800’s was demure, prim and restrained. She was the paragon of prudery, modesty personified. Then there was Calixta. Calixta was everything that the idealized ‘Madonna’ of her time was not. She was boldly flirtatious, impulsive, sensuous and altogether outrageous. For all these anomalous characteristics, she is admired in

A black submerged fountain floor was sprinkled with dancers at the Waterfront Park in San Diego. The dark color scheme was contrasted by the ten dancers wearing black shirts and amethyst colored galaxy print pants. With the absence of music, Stephan Koplowitz’s dancers of the piece “Play(as)”, gradually progressed across the first segment of the reflecting pool. After

Sarah Ruhl is well known for her existential writing style, with many of her plays consisting of uncommon, and often unrealistic, circumstances that wander into the realms of vivid imagery, myth, and realized metaphors. Her characters are faced with the battle of finding themselves in an unstable and abstract world, struggling to discover their place as the foundations of their lives are shifted under their feet. This paper pursues to address the question: How does one find realistic and beneficial meaning for today’s world behind the messages written into Ruhl’s whimsical approach to life through her plot structure? To answer this I will examine the dramatic structure within the plays Melancholy Play, Eurydice, and Passion Play. I chose

Strong emotions of women in love are presented in these three pieces of texts using many different linguistic techniques to express the heightened and almost erratic emotions; enabling the audience and reader to sympathise and capture the fluctuations of human feelings. ‘The Laboratory’ explores the narrator's vehement feelings of jealousy, unreciprocated love and revenge in a dramatic monologue based around heartbreak, betrayal and the repercussions of revenge. However, Shakespeare's persona conveys a range of emotions throughout the play ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Love, lust, loyalty and hatred are portrayed by Juliet in different situations and circumstances throughout the play. ‘Havisham’ is written as the monologue of a woman who was jilted at the altar, and was so devastated by the loss that she couldn’t progress in life.

The Use of Light in Pablo Neruda’s The Light Wraps You (II), In My Sky at Twilight (XVI) and Thinking, Tangling Shadows (XVII):

The genre of comedy, throughout the history of dramatic art has always served to not only entertain audiences, but to make them aware of their own individual flaws, or flaws that exist in society. (Weitz, E.) Comedy has no precise definition, and its boundaries are broad. One function of comedy however has remained the same - to hold up a mirror to the society of the time but through pleasure, inviting audiences to reflect and also providing amusement. Set in the late nineteenth century, the play An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895) epitomises comedy, as both a literary and dramatic genre. Wilde was masterful in his ability to combine aspects of evolved comedic traditions and dramatic conventions to critique Victorian society. Drawing on characteristics of Greek and Roman tragicomedy, the choices in the play’s plot involves elements of tragedy as well as scenes that serve as comic relief and give the audience a sense of finality through a happy resolution. (Bureman, L) Focussing on the upper class stratum, Wilde employs a comedy of manners Molière style, of the Restoration Period in the seventeenth century in the play by combining forms of comedy with aspects of realist drama. The portrayal of archetypal figures such as Lady Chiltern and Lord Goring satirize rigid moral value of the time and expose their hypocrisies, through dialogue involving irony, wit and humour. Elements of farce and disguises characterized by ‘commedia dell’arte’, a form of comedy first developed in

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a deep, twisted play by Martin McDonagh, is a symbolic work of art. The symbols within this play, powerful as they may be, do not jump out at the reader. They are instead embedded into the simplest objects and the relationship of the main characters. Martin McDonagh portrays his symbols with such an ironic eloquence; the dark, powerful symbols are inextricably linked in such a beautiful way, that once the reader makes the connections, the entire aura of the play changes. From symbols as simple as hot oil and a rocking chair to the mother-daughter relationship of Mag and Maureen, the reader learns more and more about Ireland during its time of troubles.