Laurence Senelick | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | Northwestern University (B.A.). [1] Harvard University (A.M. Ph.D.) [2] |
Occupation(s) | Educator, scholar, actor, translator, theater director |
Partner | Michael McDowell (1969-1999) |
Awards | Barnard Hewitt Award, George Freedley Award, George J. Nathan Award, Oscar Brockett Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education, Betty Jean Jones Award of the American Theatre and Drama Society. |
Laurence Senelick (born October 12, 1942) is an American scholar, educator, actor and director. [3] He is the author, editor, or translator of many books.
Senelick joined the Department of Drama at Tufts University in 1972, where he was later named Fletcher Professor of Oratory and served as Director of Graduate Studies for 30 years. He retired in 2019. [3] [4]
Senelick's scholarship has focused on popular entertainment, with research into music hall, vaudeville, circus and pantomime. [5] [6] [7] His work on Russian and Soviet theater was honored by the St. George Medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture. [8] His writings also studied gender in performance, culminating in The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (2000). [9]
Senelick has directed productions for many groups, including the Opera Company of Boston, [10] Boston Baroque, [11] the Loeb Drama Center, [12] and the Purcell Society. [13] His productions include the US premieres of the Seneca the Younger/Ted Hughes' Oedipus , Robert David MacDonald’s Summit Conference, and Pedro Miguel Rozos’ Our Private Life. [14] As an actor, he performed Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape when he was 73. [15] He serves on the Board of Directors of the Poets Theatre. [16]
Senelick's work in the classroom has been honored with the Oscar Brockett Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education Award of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education [17] [18] and the Betty Jean Jones Award of the American Theatre and Drama Society as Outstanding Teacher of American Theatre and Drama. [19] His books have received prizes such as the Barnard Hewitt Award of the American Society for Theatre Research, [20] the George Freedley Award of the Theatre Library Association, [21] and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. [22] His research has been recognized by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation [23] and he has been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, [24] the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, [25] and the Berlin Institute for Advanced Studies [26]
Laurence Senelick's brother is the neurologist and author Dr. Richard Senelick. [27] [28] Senelick’s life partner was the novelist and screenwriter Michael McDowell; they were together for 30 years until McDowell’s death in 1999. [29] [30]
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays which are a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between characters and is intended for theatrical performance rather than mere reading. Ben Jonson coined the term "playwright" and is the first person in English literature to refer to playwrights as separate from poets.
Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, often employing rhyme, and composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.
Edward Henry Gordon Craig, sometimes known as Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of theoretical writings. Craig was the son of actress Dame Ellen Terry.
A theatrical culture flourished in ancient Greece from 700 BC. At its centre was the city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and religious place during this period, and the theatre was institutionalised there as part of a festival called the Dionysia, which honoured the god Dionysus. Tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play were the three dramatic genres emerged there. Athens exported the festival to its numerous colonies. Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements.
The satyr play is a form of Attic theatre performance related to both comedy and tragedy. It preserves theatrical elements of dialogue, actors speaking verse, a chorus that dances and sings, masks and costumes. Its relationship to tragedy is strong; satyr plays were written by tragedians, and satyr plays were performed in the Dionysian festival following the performance of a group of three tragedies. The satyr play's mythological-heroic stories and the style of language are similar to that of the tragedies. Its connection with comedy is also significant – it has similar plots, titles, themes, characters, and happy endings. The remarkable feature of the satyr play is the chorus of satyrs, with their costumes that focus on the phallus, and with their language, which uses wordplay, sexual innuendos, references to breasts, farting, erections, and other references that do not occur in tragedy. As Mark Griffith points out, the satyr play was "not merely a deeply traditional Dionysiac ritual, but also generally accepted as the most appropriate and satisfying conclusion to the city’s most complex and prestigious cultural event of the year."
Medieval theatre encompasses theatrical in the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century and the beginning of the Renaissance in approximately the 15th century. The category of "medieval theatre" is vast, covering dramatic performance in Europe over a thousand-year period. A broad spectrum of genres needs to be considered, including mystery plays, morality plays, farces and masques. The themes were almost always religious. The most famous examples are the English cycle dramas, the York Mystery Plays, the Chester Mystery Plays, the Wakefield Mystery Plays, and the N-Town Plays, as well as the morality play known as Everyman. One of the first surviving secular plays in English is The Interlude of the Student and the Girl.
Rush Rehm is professor of drama and classics at Stanford University in California, in the United States. He also works professionally as an actor and director. He has published many works on classical theatre. Rehm is the artistic director of Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT), a professional theater company that presents a dramatic festival based on a major playwright each summer. SRT's 2016 summer festival, Theater Takes a Stand, celebrates the struggle for workers' rights. A political activist, Rehm has been involved in Central American and Cuban solidarity, supporting East Timorese resistance to the Indonesian invasion and occupation, the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights, and the fight against US militarism. In 2014, he was awarded Stanford's Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education.
Platonov is the name in English given to an early, untitled play in four acts written by Anton Chekhov in 1878. It was the first large-scale drama by Chekhov, written specifically for Maria Yermolova, rising star of Maly Theatre. Yermolova rejected the play and it was not published until 1923.
Maly Theatre is a theatre in Moscow.
The University of Texas Performing Arts Center (PAC) is a collective of five theaters operated by The University of Texas at Austin, College of Fine Arts. The theaters are the Bass Concert Hall, McCullough Theater, Bates Recital Hall, B. Iden Payne Theater and Oscar Brockett Theater. Theaters range in size from the Oscar G. Brockett Theater, which has 244 seats, to the Bass Concert Hall, which seats 2,900. In addition to the theaters, the PAC also has offices and meeting rooms, rehearsal spaces and shops which are located in the PAC building and across the campus. PAC provides students an opportunity to interact with professionals in staging events and performing arts and extends an opportunity to the surrounding community to participate in all-age programs.
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory.
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres", as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
Brooks Barry McNamara (1937–2009) was an American theater historian, professor, and contributing editor of The Drama Review.
The history of theatre charts the development of theatre over the past 2,500 years. While performative elements are present in every society, it is customary to acknowledge a distinction between theatre as an art form and entertainment, and theatrical or performative elements in other activities. The history of theatre is primarily concerned with the origin and subsequent development of the theatre as an autonomous activity. Since classical Athens in the 5th century BC, vibrant traditions of theatre have flourished in cultures across the world.
The Kamerny Theatre was a chamber theatre in Moscow, founded in 1914 by director Alexander Tairov (1885–1950). Over the next 35 years, this small, intimate theater became "recognized as a major force in Russian theater". Considered among the better presentations staged at the theater were: Princess Brambilla (1920), Phèdre and Giroflé-Girofla (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1926), Day and Night (1926), The Negro (1929), The Beggars' Opera (1930) and Vishnevsky's An Optimistic Tragedy (1933). Tairov's primary collaborator in building the sets was Aleksandra Ekster, and these were based upon the period's constructivist style. The decor for the theatre was designed by Konstantin Medunetsky.
The Hamburg Dramaturgy is a highly influential work on drama by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, written between 1767 and 1769 when he worked as a dramaturg for Abel Seyler's Hamburg National Theatre. It was not originally conceived as a unified and systematical book, but rather as series of essays on the theater, which Lessing wrote as commentary on the plays of the short-lived Hamburg National Theater. This collection of 101 short essays represents one of the first sustained critical engagements with the potential of theater as a vehicle for the advancement of humanistic discourse. In many ways, the Hamburg Dramaturgy defined the new field of dramaturgy, and also introduced the term.
Russian Serf Theatre refers to theatrical productions performed by serfs for their owners.
Oscar Gross Brockett was president of the American Theatre Association. An American Theater historian, he was Dean of the College of Fine Art at the University of Texas in Austin.
Alisa Solomon, is a writer, Professor of Journalism, and the Director of the Arts and Culture concentration at the Columbia Journalism School. Born in 1956, Solomon served as a story consultant for the documentary on the musical Fiddler on the Roof titled Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles. Solomon has written two award-winning books: Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. Additionally, she has served as a reporter for The Village Voice, The New York Times, The Nation, and many other publications.
Edna Nahshon is professor of Jewish theater and drama at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Her interests include Yiddish and Israeli theater and drama. She is also and a senior fellow at Oxford University's Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.