World as a stage notes/ Shanna McCoy

Shanna McCoy

Cobras: Leaps and Bounds

“The World on stage”

 

All that is on stage os a sign

When you are on stage or watching a performance on stage everything on it is a sign and a symbol for the world within the play and everything from the outside world is put aside so as to make way for the objects on the stage that represent something new.

There are various significations of the sign

            As long as there is a pretence of the word

            Comes down to perspective

            Impact the perception of the object to make things unfamiliar and have you look at them in a different way for a longer period of time—So that you are not thinking about the object you are thinking about what it represents… So that it leaves a longer standing impression upon you like a work of art.

 

If we approach theater semiotically we must surely agree with the Prague linguists that “all that is on the stage is a sign,” and that anything deliberately put there for artistic purposes becomes a sign when it enters illusionary space and time. That is, it becomes an event in a self-contained illusion outside the world of social praxis but conceptually referring to that world in some way, if only in the fact that the illusion is about hypothecial human beings.

 

Images are signs with a high degree of “iconic identity” the signs working together to create a deeper meaning despite theatres tendency to be what it seems to be.

 

The essence of the play

 

Art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life

-to make object unfamiliar

-to make forms difficult

-the object is not important

-seeing things anew that used to just be a part of the everyday life

-“we grow away”

art provides an “unfamiliar” route

-meaning conceal the objects

 

Art imparts “the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,”

 

A sensory experience that cannot be accounted for by semiotic systems

The fact that the play (Macbeth) does far more than is necessary in order to mean whatever it may mean

 

MUST HAVE MUSIC

LIGHT

 

An imagined actual experience that floats wherever the text leads

 

Plays are dreams or interpretations of directors and designers-the audience has to see through that dream and get a meaning from that…we should all create our own plays!

 

Real engagement is an enhancement of being

 

The actor enables us to recognize the human from the inside