At the dawn of the 21st century, the French theater was developing slowly and covertly in the areas of play production and on-stage performances. The core purpose of this study is to accurately analyze these facts by focusing on phenomena that have ...
At the dawn of the 21st century, the French theater was developing slowly and covertly in the areas of play production and on-stage performances. The core purpose of this study is to accurately analyze these facts by focusing on phenomena that have already been authenticated in the history of theater or the most natural currents of change on the actual stage. This study will be conducted in two stages. In the 1st stage we shall attempt to understand from the perspective of the genre of literature the changes in dramaturgy and the authors’ roles that surfaced in the way the plot unfolded itself and the process of writing it in the plays of the last 20 or so years(1990~2010). In the following second stage we will seek to analyze the actors’ skills and innovations in stage direction which were revealed in the acting, narration, performance forms, etc. which bind together the playwright and the stage workers with the theater language, props, and other tools of the stage-technique environment from the perspective of the genre of performing arts.
For this study I have chosen the playwrights Minyana, Novarina, and Renaude. These three have bridged the gap between the 20th and 21st centuries, and published works in which one can sufficiently sense the general changes taking place in the French theater, and they also suggest new directions in dramaturgy. Consequently, the primary task of this study will be done in these following subdivided areas based on the above-mentioned authors and their works.
First, in the process of the ‘novelization of drama’ which first emerged in the 1990s, and had a key role to play in the liberation of playwriting, we have identified ‘dialogue’ and ‘stage directions’, which are the key components of a play, and analyzed them separately. As for the ‘dialogue’, the identity of the speaker of the dialogue is ambiguous or there is a disunity in the dialogue, and the stage directions which has a change of status now actively joins the realm of the dialogue and lives up to its full potential. Even though both ‘dialogue’ and ‘stage directions’ have independent theatrical values, they are used to achieve the same goals.
Secondly, if the key words of the theatrical world were ‘reading’ and ‘re-reading’ by the directors in the 1970s and 1980s, the corresponding key words were ‘writing’ and ‘re-writing’ by the so-called ‘stage authors’ in the 1990s and 2000s. The ‘stage authors’ have torn down the barrier between ‘textual writing’ and ‘scene writing’, and set a milestone in the development of dramaturgy through innovative and creative production methods. We will seek to find out their roles by separating them into strictly defined categories.
Thirdly, dramatization signifies a form of ‘transforming operation’ where one transforms the original text into a new text that fits the conventional formalities and regulations in the sense of ‘adapting’ the original text. But in today’s world where the distinctions among the various play genres have been all but blurred, the significance of dramatization has changed. Therefore we need a new interpretation of dramatization and the core of the matter must be related to the process of ‘re-writing, correcting, right writing’ by directors who emphasize a stage of movement.