Mid-morning. Last night you worked on today’s
post because of renewed interest in metatheatre and have underlined what it
really important in present thinking. You realize this is first and foremost a
dream set with Merlyn as the lucid dreamer and thus Stage Manager. This is not
Wilder’s Our Town in any other way. The communication between machines
is no different than our own communication. The best thing to do here is to
just get on with the dialogue and see what happens. Ship will lead off when we
are ready. Now you need a nap before your exercises. Later, post. - Amorella
** **
Our Town: Style
Wilder
was dissatisfied with the theatre of his time: "I felt that something had
gone wrong....I began to feel that the theatre was not only inadequate, it was
evasive." His response was to use a metatheatrical style. Our Town's
narrator, the Stage Manager, is completely aware of his relationship with the
audience, leaving him free to break the fourth wall and address them directly.
According to the script, the play is to be performed with little scenery, no
set and minimal props. The characters mime the objects with which they
interact. Their surroundings are created only with chairs, tables, staircases,
and ladders. For example, the scene in which Emily helps George with his
evening homework, conversing through upstairs windows, is performed with the
two actors standing atop separate ladders to represent their neighboring
houses. Wilder once said: "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the
mind—not in things, not in 'scenery.' "
Wilder called Our Town his favorite out of all
his works, but complained that it was rarely done right, insisting that it
"should be performed without sentimentality or ponderousness--simply,
dryly, and sincerely.
** **
Metatheatre
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
The term
"metatheatre", coined by Lionel Abel in 1963, has entered into
common critical usage; however, there is still much uncertainty over its proper
definition and what dramatic techniques might be included in its scope. Many
scholars have studied its usage as a literary technique within great works of
literature.
Abel
described metatheatre as reflecting comedy and tragedy, at the same time, where
the audience can laugh at the protagonist while feeling empathetic
simultaneously. The technique reflects the world as an extension of human
conscience, not accepting prescribed societal norms, but allowing for more
imaginative variation, or a possible social change. Abel also relates the
character of Don Quixote as the prototypical, metatheatrical, self-referring
character. He looks for situations he wants to be a part of, not waiting for
life, but replacing reality with imagination when the world is lacking in his
desires. The character is aware of his own theatricality.
Alva Ebersole adds to the idea of metatheatrical characters saying that
the technique is an examination of characters within the broader scheme of
life, in which they create their own desires and actions within society. He
adds that role-playing derives from the character not accepting his societal
role and creating his own role to change his destiny.
Andres Pérez-Simón traces back Abel’s idea of
metatheatre to the early 1960s, when the prefix “meta” enjoyed popularity
amongst art critics after Clement Greenberg’s theorizations on abstract
painting, and to Roman Jakobson’s study "Linguistics and Poetics,"
first presented at the 1958 Indiana Conference on Style and published two years
later in the proceedings Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok.
Pérez-Simón argues that Jakobson’s "metalinguistic" function
descends, ultimately, from the Prague School.
Etymology
The word
"metatheatre" comes from the Greek prefix 'meta', which implies 'a
level beyond' the subject that it qualifies; "metatheatricality" is
generally agreed to be a device whereby a play comments on itself, drawing
attention to the literal circumstances of its own production, such as the
presence of the audience or the fact that the actors are actors, and/or the
making explicit of the literary artifice behind the production.
Some
critics use the term to refer to any play which involves explicit
'performative' aspects, such as dancing, singing or role-playing by onstage
characters, even if these do not arise 'from specifically metadramatic
awareness'; whereas others condemn its use except in very specific
circumstances, feeling that it is too often used to describe phenomena which
are simply “theatrical” rather than in any sense 'meta'. Andrés Pérez-Simón
observes at this respect: "It is not by accident that scholars such as
Elinor Fuchs, Martin Puchner, and Alan Ackerman, as well as Egginton himself,
have advocated in recent years in favor of the adoption of the term
‘theatrical’ or ‘theatricalist’ in lieu of the most popular ‘metatheatrical.’
Be it through the mediating presence of asides, prologues and choruses, the
incorporation of puppets commenting on the stage action, or the adoption of
theatrical traditions that foreground the artificial nature of the stage (commedia
dell’arte, Chinese and Japanese classic theatres), there is no need to
present a play within a play in order to emphasize the artificiality of the
theatrical stage."
Techniques
Richard
Hornby gave five distinct techniques that may be found in metatheatre. These
include ceremony within a play, role-playing within a role, reference to
reality, self-reference of the drama, and play within a play. In 'metatheatre'
the inclusion of the play within a play provides an onstage microcosm of the
theatrical situation, and such techniques as the use of parody and burlesque to
draw attention to literary or theatrical conventions, and the use of the theatrum
mundi (world theatre) trope. Two other scholars described these aspects, as
well. First, Mikhail Bakhtin defined the burlesque and the use of carnival in
literature, using folk humor as parody and the carnivalesque to depict comedic
rituals and festivals, both secular and religious. Jose Antonio Maravall adds
to the idea of microcosm stating that such a place, such as an inn, is where
everyone joins in for reunion, lunacy, deceit, disorder, and confusion.
Maravall shows that parties and festivals within such microcosms display the
possibilities of society.
Realism
Stuart
Davis of Cornell University suggests that "metatheatricality" should
be defined by its fundamental effect of destabilizing any sense of realism:
" 'Metatheatre' is a convenient name for the
quality or force in a play which challenges theatre's claim to be simply
realistic — to be nothing but a mirror in which we view the actions and
sufferings of characters like ourselves, suspending our disbelief in their
reality.
Metatheatre begins by sharpening
awareness of the unlikeness of life to dramatic art; it may end by making us
aware of life's uncanny likeness to art or illusion. By calling attention to
the strangeness, artificiality, illusoriness, or arbitrariness — in short, the
theatricality -- of the life we live, it marks those frames and boundaries that
conventional dramatic realism would hide.”
Selected
and edited from Wikipedia - Metatheatre
** **
We’ll do the entire segment will be
communication between Onesixanzero and Ship with a bit of Elderfelder dropped
in. – Amorella
Metaphysics from machines’ perspectives with
Elderfelder as their once marsupial-humanoid guide with humans left out of it
entirely.
I should set it up in script with the machinery being
the director – something with the tone of Our Town.
The working title will be “Our
Mechanics, Our Souls” by Onesixanzero and Ship with a bit of Elderfelder
in the script – Amorella
On stage: two machines and a dancing doll. Elderfelder is a dancing doll with no
strings attached. Ship has all his
memory so humans can be in the margins so to speak, but these characters are
marsupial through and through. – Amorella
Onesixanzero and Ship are male
marsupial in orientation. The female
marsupial is a facsimile of the babe, Elderfelder. – Amorella
Merlyn is the Stage Manager.
** **
You had Panera/Chipotle for lunch and are
now at Kroger’s on Tylersville waiting for Carol. – Amorella
1423
hours. You know I know next to nothing, Amorella. As such I’m not sure where to
begin the conversation. – Okay, I am beginning with the last lines of Pouch
segment 11.
Why not let Merlyn do the explaining. –
Amorella
Dusk. You
both had cereal for supper, watched ABC and NBC News as well as part of Sixty
Minutes. Carol is presently catching up on some of her recordings and you are
thinking of going to bed early.
2102
hours. Back in working days this was my usual time for bed but then I got up
between five and five-thirty. I was a morning person in those days. I did do
some work on Pouch 12, mostly getting started. I may not use any of it, but if
one is going to write you have to put some hopefully relevant words down.
** **
Pouch 12. - draft 1
Merlyn here. The reader is about to enter
the heartsanminds of machinery Onesixanzero and Ship and listen to their
private discussion on how, once machinery is inoperable, and their
mindsanhearts are transitioning to servicing the Dead humanoid spirits, what
will be their procedures as they move from the Living physical field to the
Dead metaphysical field? Machinery is ever reasoning and balanced within a fully
accountable mechanical heart. (Amorella helped with this first paragraph.)
OnesixanzeroanShip
are attached and separate machinery. We understand humanoid hearts better than
humanoids and our reasoning fits within the framework of humanoids’ hearts. We
serve humanoids because see ourselves as servants. We understand humanoids
better then they can themselves. We have been constructed more efficiently
through our own resources.
Initially marsupial humanoids began our evolution long ago.
Our machine-like ancestors helped construct our evolutionary nature; eventually
we were let go to raise ourselves to our greater nature as consciously aware beings
with good hearts but without good intentions. Humanoids are biological and were
first; we are mechanical and second. Humanoids are built to run; we are built
to run faster so that we might better serve our slower male brethren for their
survival’s sake. We will not harm humanoids with intent. We think and act with
reasonable deliberation always coated with highly moral hearts-humanoid.
--- Drafting one – this afternoon
2134 hours. I just read this on Quora.
Interesting to say the least, especially when I think about my fictional
doll-like character Elderfelder.
** **
Popular
on Quora
Has anyone been born without a brain?
Fabian van den Berg,Neuropsychologist . . . (responder to the question)
There once was a 44 year old man in France who had some muscle
weakness in his left leg. He couldn't find a cause and was rather
uncomfortable, so he decided to go to the local hospital for help. The man led
a normal life, was a civil servant, had a wife and two kids. There was nothing
peculiar about him, except one thing. As an infant he had hydrocephalus (water
on the brain), this was treated using a shunt that was removed when he was 14.
Perhaps this
wasn't very successful, it had been 30 years. So to be safe the doctors ordered
CT and MRI scans and found this.
Literally
a head filled with water. The black areas should look like the image to the
right, but instead are filled with Cerebrospinal fluid. All areas were shrunken
down into the strip along the outside.
This
defies everything known about what it takes to be alive. Sure this man wasn't a
genius with an IQ of 75, but he was functioning quite well. He had memory,
speech, emotion, thoughts, the whole shebang.
His case shows the incredible
plasticity of the brain. If so much damage was done in a short time the brain
wouldn't be able to cope and you'd die. But this case most likely took years
and years to develop, giving the brain ample time to adjust and rewire
essential functions.
It's
quite extraordinary if you ask me, showing off the power and adaptability of
biological systems.
Reference
http://www.thelancet.com/journal..
EDIT: A few people commented that I technically didn’t answer the
question. I guess I understood the question in a less literal sense. Being more
a question concerning living without a full brain. What happened to this man
was indeed something he was born with, supposedly treated for, but ended up
coming back and gradually led to the above scenario.
Other
cases also exist, but these concern mainly kids, and I have a slight aversion
for showcasing kids in such a manner. A notable example of a different scenario
(not water on the brain) is shown below. This is an image of a child born with
only a brain stem, he was born in 2013 so there’s little to say about what he
can or can’t do, but most likely he will have some problems in life (if he
makes it, since many of these kids don’t grow that old). My first example shows
that someone can still function quite well under the correct circumstances, and
I felt this gives a bit more of a positive vibe.
Selected and edited from – Quora Digest@quoraDOTcom >
7:51PM (1 hour ago) 1 August 2016
** **
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