Assignment:

Chapter 4 of Experiencing Theatre concerns performers, directors, and dramaturgs. As with previous chapters, there is a lot of information the book gives you, and your assignment will be again to distill it down to its most essential points. In pursuit of that, please answer the following questions. Your answers for these questions should be about 100 words each. You will not have to respond to anyone else's answers this week for this assignment, but will for the show response, per usual.

As with previous assignments, remember that your job here is to essentialize and synthesize--to take big ideas, or big swaths of ideas, and condense them down to their most essential talking points. Just like previous chapters offered you lots of ancillary and auxiliary information, so will this week's. For example, this week's chapter goes into an in-depth discussion about Anne Bogart's Viewpoints technique. You can reference Viewpoints as evidence in an answer, but if you try and fully summarize all of Bogart's theories on acting, you'll quickly eat up all of your 100 words for that question.

Read the questions before reading the chapter so you know what to look for in the text. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email--I'll be happy to help.

1. The chapter spends a lot of time breaking down the difference between inside-out and outside-in acting techniques. What's the difference? Briefly define each approach, and then explain what makes them different.
2. What is "directorial vision?" You've watched a few plays so far this semester: pick one and explain what you feel the director's vision might have been. (HINT: p. 82 references "idea" in connection with "directorial vision." Where else have you heard ideaas a component of theatre?)
3. Production dramaturgy is a notoriously hard to define profession, since every production at every theatre has different dramaturgical needs. A key component of dramaturgy, however, is research. A dramaturg is often the research component of a production process, making sure complicated ideas and historical items all make sense to the production team and the audience alike. Pick any show you've watched this semester as part of this course and imagine you've been asked to serve as dramaturg. For the show you've picked, what would be the first thing you'd research, and why?