Performance, Style and Gesture in Western Theatre

Download or read book Performance, Style and Gesture in Western Theatre written by Nicholas Dromgoole and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-02 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the beginning of the 20th Century, when naturalism began to assert its powerful influence on western theatre, acting was a very different business indeed. Rather than attempting to reproduce realistic behaviour, actors conveyed their characters' feelings and intentions by using a vocabulary of minutely prescribed and highly stylised movements and gestures, each with it's own meaning and significance. In this wide-ranging, illustrated survey, Nicholas Dromgoole traces the origins and evolution of this lost 'language of gesture' from ancient Greece to the contemporary stage, and asks what it would actually have been like to watch the great plays - and the great actors - of western theatre in their own day.