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Contents
Peter Brook: The Empty Space
Peter Schumann: Gates of Hell
Bertolt Brecht
Brother Bread, Sister Puppet
How
to Make Giant Puppets
Oba Koso: Nigerian Music and Dance Drama
Early Dance: From the Greeks to the Renaissance
American Musical Theater:
1800s-1970s
The Jazz Singer (the first sound
film, 1927)
Peter Brook: The Empty Space.
A film by Gerald Feil, showing the methods and theatrical approach of Peter
Brook. Mystic Fire Video. 1975. 60 min. (UMVID
2995).
Comments from this video box:
"It is clear that there can't be any human difference between
what's called actor and what's called audience. We are all the same
thing in that way. But there is a difference because the audience
can't be prepared, it's just assembled. The actors, on the other
hand, prepare for the event. Everything comes from what makes this
difference right, and what makes it possible for this difference to change."
-- Peter Brook
Peter Brook, acclaimed director of stage and screen, is best known for
his productions of Marat / Sade, King Lear, A Midsummer
Night's Dream and The Mahabharata. Brook started the International
Centre of Theatre Research in Paris in 1970 and, in its first three years,
the Centre traveled extensively, conducting a wide range of theatrical
experiments in body movement, voice and radical staging techniques.
During a series of day-long sessions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
the group performed and gave demonstrations of its exercises, in which
members of the audience participated, and exchanged ideas with the New
York theater community, students, theatergoers and journalists. The
Empty Space features a dozen members of Brook's acting company, including
Helen Mirren, working with four musicians, and noted composer, Elizabeth
Swados.
Peter
Schumann: Gates of Hell
A pageant performed at the Last Domestic Resurrection Circus in Glover
Vermont, August 8 and 9, 1998. Video taped by Green Michael Sacca
and Robin Lloyd. Produced by Green Valley Media, Burlington, VT.
40 min. (UMVID3617).
Comment from the video box:
Gates of Hell is a virtuoso performance by the Bread and Puppet theater
troupe on the grassy amphitheater and hills of their farm in Glover Vermont.
Involving several hundred performers, it is an epic portraying the corrupting
force of capitalism on humanity, told through fragments of a poem by Bertolt
Brecht which get assembled and crucified on a burning pyre.
In an interview that follows the pageant, director Peter Schumann says,
"This pageant is about the citizenry who get attacked and sacrificed and
resurrected. Out of this population comes the butcher who is professional
and obedient, himself a sheep or a calf, and also the slaughterer of the
calf - the real Nazi and also the proper citizen doing what he's told to
do."
Schumann believes that the forces that created the Nazi era are still
at work. "We have to act like prophets in this situation and yell
at people and tell them it is ot finished and that they are doing horror
and not the peace and beauty their politicians tell them."
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was an
important German playwright and poet, active in Germany and the United
States in the first half of the 20th century. He tried to show that
social forces determine human nature, and that the evils of capitalism
brutalize the poor and make the rich corrupt. He wrote about 35 plays,
the most famous being The Threepenny Opera. In 1949 he moved
to Communist East Berlin, and formed the Berliner Ensemble, which still
performs his plays.
Brecht wrote the poem Hitler Chorale III between 1929 and 1933.
"The great industrial captains need you for their vast plan.
You have not been forgotten; they want you, little man.
And if, O Calf, you're slaughtered then is your glory sure
It shows how well you're thought of, it's what you were made for.
O Calf so often wounded direct your steps to where
His knife is being sharpened whose dearest charge you are.
He who devised new crosses on working men to lay
He'll find a way to butcher you too some sunny day."
Brother Bread, Sister Puppet
Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater. 59 min. (UMVID
2987).
How to Make Giant Puppets
A video featuring puppeteer Sara Peattie. 54 min. (UMVID 1690).
Oba Koso: Nigerian Music and Dance Drama
Produced by Creative Arts Television Archive, Kent, CT. 1975.
29 min. (UMVID 2989).
Excerpts from the famous Yoruba folklore drama about a wicked man who
tries to overthrow the king. Intricate dance steps, brilliantly colored
costumes, and Yoruba instruments and singing. Performance by The
National Theater of Nigeria. Commentary and explanation by drama
writer Margaret Croyden.
Early Dance: From the Greeks to the Renaissance
Produced by Harold and Isa Bergsohn. 1995. 22 min. (UMVID
).
American Musical Theater:
1800s-1970s
1 hour 33 min. (UMVID 1800, 1805).
The Jazz Singer
The first motion picture with spoken dialogue.
A Warner Bros. Pictures Production, 1927
A Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. and The Vitaphone Corporation Presentation
of a Photo-dramatic Production of Samson Raphaelson's play The Jazz
Singer.
Starring Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland.
Directed by Alan Crosland.
Musical score and Vitaphone Orchestra directed by Louis Silvers.
Renewed 1955 Warner Bros. Pictures Inc.
Package design 1991 MGM/UA Home Video, Inc. and Turner Entertainment Co.
"Wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet," went the eight best-remembered
words out of the approximately 280 spoken by Al Jolson in the film, premiered
in New York on October 6, 1927. In The Jazz Singer, Jolson,
the Broadway sensation in the 1920s, and heralded as the world's greatest
entertainer, plays a New York Jewish youth whose desire to enter show business
put him at odds with his rabbi father (Warner Oland). Other highlights
in the movie include Myrna Lay in a bit role, plus the songs "Toot Toot
Tootsie Goodbye," "Blue Skies," "Mammy" and more. The film's dialogue
sequences are linked by musically backed "silent" scenes.
1 hour 29 min. (UMVID 3336).
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