Watching a play unfold onstage has an effect on the participating audience, largely due to the intricacies of each scene. While a good play must start out with a good script, there are specific visual elements that help create an argument and make an audience feel a certain way in a play. I am going to use theatre and some of the components of McCloud’s Definition of Artistic Process to show how visual rhetoric is just as effective and important as textual rhetoric. In McCloud’s Definition of Artistic Process, he breaks down visual rhetoric into seven components, the first being the idea or content of the piece.
In theatre, this component is the script which is used as a framework for the entire play. Reading a script is much like reading a story, except it typically strips the story down to just dialogue and some stage directions. The second component of McCloud’s Process is form, or the genre of the piece. A script can be performed a multitude of different ways, but one way that is very common is a dramatic reading. This allows the piece to be performed without stage direction, and usually with the actors sitting and reading from a piece that they have rehearsed.
This is where I find visual rhetoric winning out-although an audience can capture some of the author’s intentions through a dramatic reading, the audience is not as affected by it as they would be if it was done full-out. Acting out a piece brings the story to life, which brings us to one of McCloud’s next components, which is structure. The way a play is structured is entirely up to the director. As a theatre minor, I had the opportunity to take a directing class here at Marquette. Our first big project in the class was creating a floor plan meant to tell a tory without any script involved. The class discovered that the most powerful stories are often told using body language rather than words. Although at the time I did not think of what I was learning as visual rhetoric, I realize now that it is because theatre uses visuals to persuade an audience to feel a certain way. In directing, we learned that the smallest gesture can make a big impact. For example, one actor facing another with an outstretched, upturned palm will tell a completely different story than an actor standing in the exact same spot with their arm pulled back in a fist.
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Comparison and Contrasting Experience of Drama Everyone has a preference when entertaining one's self with a drama. Live theatrical performances, video production, and reading novels or poems are a few examples of how an individual may want to expand the mind. Personally, I feel that reading a drama is the best way to experience a story, depending on the author. The mind can produce extraordinary ...
Something as simple as the direction an actor faces tells a story as well-if two actors sit facing each other, it might create a picture of intimacy, whereas one or both facing the opposite direction might show the audience tension or an issue between the two. Another component that goes into the structure of creating a persuasive stage picture is the lighting. Lighting can direct an audience where to look by highlighting certain areas of the stage or characters, it can create a mood based on the intensity of the light, or it can add effects to the set.
Bright light on the stage may often suggest daytime, or help add to a happy or enthusiastic scene. Dark lighting, on the other hand, might suggest nighttime, or help to create a sense of foreboding or mystery. Effects can also be added to create feeling-directors can add foils over the lights used to create lights with special effects. These special effects can add to a plain set, such as leaves to a forest. A director can also choose to use colored lights, such as a blue or violet to create a moonlit effect or yellow for a sunlight effect. The last component of McCloud’s Process is surface.
This is the final product; it is all of the components coming together to create the argument. Once all of the previous components are weaved together, the audience is persuaded to feel a certain way about the story and may take away certain feelings and elements of it. One example I can think of is in the play Billy Elliot, which tells the story of a young boy and his family during Margaret Thatcher’s reign in the UK. Billy’s dad is a coal miner, and he and the other miners go on strike and eventually lose. While the whole play leading up to this point is an emotional experience, this scene caused me to mpathize with the coal miners: not because of the story itself, which I had been previously familiar with, but because of the way it was enacted onstage. The scene uses the components discussed to create a powerful and moving argument on behalf of the miners. While singing a song called “Once We Were Kings,” the miners all loud into their elevator to be lowered down into the earth to return to their jobs. Each miner wears a helmet with a light on the front and carries their pick axe and other equipment needed. At first, the audience focuses on each individual miner as they board the elevator with an air of misery.
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Sunrise in my Pocket, an American folk drama originally written by Edwin Justus Mayer, but adapted by Jeffrey Hayden for the Play makers Repertory Company recounts the epic adventure of Davy Crockett, Tennessee statesman and frontiersman and his subsequent journey to Texas. Davy Crockett, portrayed effortlessly by Playmaker's leading actor, Kenneth P. Strong, is accompanied by his faithful ...
They board in a straight line, which creates a united front despite their loss. This united front is emphasized when all of the lights on stage turn off except for those on the miner’s helmets, which points straight into the audience. Blinded by these lights, the audience is no longer able to distinguish the individual miners, which creates a moving and powerful stage picture. The fact that the audience is illuminated has a jarring effect which creates a line between the miners as they are lowered into the stage and the audience as they watch helplessly.
The miner’s voices get softer and eventually the audience is left in complete darkness, which creates an uncomfortable and almost empty feeling. This is the exact feeling the audience should feel-it matches how the miners feel after losing their strike and being forced to return to work in unsatisfactory conditions. Another scene from a play that uses many of these elements described is one of the final scenes from a play Marquette just recently did called The Foreigner. This play follows a very shy man staying at a small, family owned inn.
He pretends he speaks very little English after accidentally overhearing an important and private conversation between a husband and wife. He continues the act throughout the play, and it culminates in a scene where the Ku Klux Klan comes to the inn to harm this man and the family that owns the inn. On their way up the road to the inn, the KKK cuts out all the power in the house, leaving the stage completely dark except for the flashing of lights used to simulate lightning outside.
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Othello, the Moor of Venice is one of Shakespeare greatest tragedies and one of the greatest examples of his genius as a writer and a thinker. It was first published in 1622; six years after Shakespeare! s death, but it is believed that it have been written in 1604. Othello, like all of Shakespeare! s plays, is renowned for the manipulation of the English language. In Othello, it is easily assumed ...
This creates an eerie stage picture, especially when the characters start entering the inn in their white KKK robes. This is a startling image for the audience and persuades them to feel nervous for the protagonists that live at the inn. The KKK circles the stage, facing upstage where the protagonists are, which causes the audience to feel as though they are seeing things through the KKK’s eyes. This is an uncomfortable feeling, as all that can be seen is the backs of the KKK members and the cowering innkeeper and her family as they close in on them.
It was a powerful scene because it showed how powerful the KKK is and was in this scene, and how frightened the main characters were by their large number and angry demeanor. The lightning also added to this-thunderstorms often have a negative connotation and are used to affect visual rhetoric in scary movies frequently. The lightning lends the same effect here, adding to the terror of the main characters and the menace of the KKK. Although I only discussed four of the seven components of McCloud’s Definition of Artistic Process, it is clear that theatre is a form of art and of visual rhetoric.
Theatre is much more than mere entertainment-it makes an audience think and react and can be used as a catalyst for conversations about real issues in our world. The two plays discussed both used McCloud’s components to address real-life events and societal issues and persuade the audience to feel a certain way about them. While the script and the story are very important in both instances, the thing that makes the audience empathize with the characters and situations is the way they are portrayed onstage.
While a dramatic reading of one of these plays might make an audience member think about the issue addressed, they would not react the same way as they would after watching the events unfold in front of their eyes. Theatre is a peek into someone else’s story, and the stage pictures created force the audience to become a part of these character’s lives. It is much easier to remember the way one felt about an issue after actually experiencing it rather than just reading about it and theatre makes this happen.
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Realizing that it has been an eternity since my computer has pinged the address that is the existence of Live Journal, I was in class today and we were discussing: What Makes Theatre a Success? I have my own ideas of this, as everyone does, but I feel bold enough to post them to the world. Although, frequently whenever I express my viewpoint and opinions to the class, or the world for that matter, ...
