Street scenes: Late Medieval acting and concepts of performance.
Item
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Title
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Street scenes: Late Medieval acting and concepts of performance.
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Identifier
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AAI3144076
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identifier
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3144076
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Creator
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Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Pamela Sheingorn
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Date
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2004
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater | Literature, English
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Abstract
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In this dissertation I offer an aesthetic reading of the late fourteenth-century Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge and argue that this text demonstrates the existence of a late medieval theoretical discourse that was concerned with issues raised by the performance of holy characters and subjects. This performance discourse differentiated between the performative function of the actor and that of the character, and led to an acting style that explicitly emphasized this duality. This kind of aesthetic has two main manifestations that can be termed "epic acting" and "total acting." This terminology associates medieval acting with twentieth-century post-realist theories of acting such as those of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud that also seek the explicit performative tension between actor and character. Accordingly I suggest that there are phenomenological similarities between late medieval concepts of performance and modern ones. An example of "epic acting" is when an actor not only wears a mask but also explicitly refers to the difference between her/himself as a performer and the character that the mask denotes. "Total acting" on the other hand occurs, for example, in scenes that demand extreme use of violence. In such cases one is overtaken by the phenomenology of performance, and attention is drawn not only to the suffering character but also, or even more so, to the suffering body of the actor. The theatrical complexity of the English mystery cycles that this dissertation takes as its prime example demands both kinds of acting, and therefore I suggest that the tension between "epic" and "total" theatricality best typifies late medieval concepts of acting.;I argue that the methodological approach that best addresses this kind of theatre is the examination of actor/character dialectics in the different episodes of the mystery cycles. The characters' mythological and religious status demanded an acting style that maintained their fixedness and remoteness from the actors who performed them. Simultaneously the interest of the producers, performers, and spectators in their own contemporary lives created in this theatre space for the actors to display and negotiate their own questions of identity while representing the biblical episodes. Accordingly, I suggest that the actors in the mystery cycles purposefully functioned as mediators who enacted mythological characters and at the same time performed their own identities, maintaining a recognizable and dialectical tension between the two performing functions.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
