The Process of Becoming a Professional Actor

The article concerns the process of becoming a professional actor; the author investigates the motivations of young people who decide to study acting. She is particularly interested in the impact of their significant others at various stages of the career path. The text is also an attempt to look at the stereotypes related to education in public theater schools. The empirical basis of the work involves free interviews conducted by the author with actors from Polish public drama theaters (in the period of 2015–2017) as well as journalistic interviews with theater artists published in books and popular monthly magazines in the period of 2011–2016.

Production Complexity of the Iranian Performing Arts

Theater is referred to as a cultural product which plays a major part in the cultural paradigm of civilized societies. Public theater is a type of performing arts in which the production receives financial support from the government. Therefore, the public theater production follows a complex trend controlled by a particular socio-economic system. The aims of this study are to identify interactions among financial and economic factors in the Iranian public theater and to find the possible threats and suggest effective policies in order to improve the position of the Iranian theater. For this purpose, the authors use system dynamics methodology to build a model that can explain or mimic the system. They present their analysis in accordance with principles of microeconomics. The analysis is conducted in three acts, namely production, distribution, and consumption. Findings reveal that the position of the Iranian public theater is undesired due to accumulated workforce, lack of distribution networks, and underconsumption. Finally, policies are suggested to overcome the shortcomings.

Jonson, Marston, Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Topicality

The revival of commercial “private” theater by the Children of Paul's in 1599 and the Children of the Chapel in 1600 transformed the culture of playgoing in London at the end of the sixteenth century. It was during this period that John Marston at Paul's and Ben Jonson at Blackfriars attracted attention at these theaters by ridiculing each other personally and denigrating each other's work. In doing so they converted these playhouses into forums for staging ideologically opposed interpretations of drama. Rather than aligning themselves with each other against the “public” theater, as Alfred Harbage had assumed in his influential chapter on “The Rival Repertories” in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Jonson and Marston's satire of each other's work used Paul's and Blackfriars to debate the question of the legitimacy of the drama they staged and the status of the writers who composed it. Their debate on what drama should and should not be constitutes one of the most significant critical controversies in early modern English theater. It constitutes part of the first significant criticism of contemporary drama in English. The point of this essay is to account for how, when Jonson began writing for the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars in 1600, Marston at Paul's became one of his principal targets through personal invective framed as a series of generalized strictures excoriating the obscenity and plagiarism of contemporary private theater.

From Birth to Death

This chapter deals with music participation in the public fiestas, both religious and secular, and other public spectacles during the colonial period. The first section studies “Nativity celebrations,” such as Christmas, the birth of members of the royal family, and others. The analysis of two villancicos, composed for some of these occasions, shows how the genre was integrated into these festive contexts and how it interacted with other genres and styles. The second section is dedicated to different kinds of fiestas, in both the city itself and its margins, also dealing with official prohibitions to non-official music. Along with civic and religious ceremonies, this section considers the stage as a privileged space for the performance of music and dance, in spite of the absence of a public theater during most of the period studied. The final section examines music presence in burials and, in a broader sense, the relationship between music and death, showing that the former was frequently considered as a tool to reach the supernatural life.

P.P. Pertsov and gazeta «Novoye vremya» (1898–1901) (New aspect of creative biography)

The article examines the early stage of cooperation between the writer and philosopher P.P. Pertsov and the conservative newspaper Novoe Vremya (1868–1917). Fragments of Pertsov's archival correspondence with the philosophical writer V.V. Rozanov, Pertsov's father and the critic of the liberal magazine «Russian wealth» A.G. Gornfeld are partially introduced into scientific circulation. The author analyzes the reasons for Pertsov's difficult attitude to the publisher and editor of Novoye Vremya, the playwright and founder of the Maly theater in St. Petersburg, A.S. Suvorin. The author substantiates the conclusion about Pertsov's fundamental differences related to the position of Novoye Vremya in the case of the French officer A. Dreyfus. An overview of Pertsov's publications in the newspaper related to the beginning of his collaboration with the newspaper is given. The author traces the evolution of the attitude of a young critic, a liberal in the recent past, to the «New time». Russian Russian theater and drama is the first time that Pertsov's correspondence with A. Suvorin is introduced into scientific circulation, filled with reflections on Russian theater and Russian dramaturgy. The letters discuss Pertsov's theatrical articles: «About the new theater» (about the production of a play by the German playwright G. Gauptmana «Lonely») and «a Satire or a drama» (about productions of new plays by A.P. Chekhov). Pertsov and Suvorin discuss performances of the Art public theater (Moscow art theater), which opened in Moscow in 1898. In a polemic with a young critic, Suvorin defended the national theater, represented by plays by Russian playwrights, primarily A.N. Ostrovsky. Pertsov advocated a new theater, focused primarily on the production of plays by modern playwrights regardless of their nationality.