意大利教授讲稿.docVIP

Stage-direction and drama I want to say first of all that in the Western culture the first forms of performance we still have some traces of date back to the fifth century b[efore]. C. and they harmoniously combined song and recitation; that is to say: there was a text (written by an author before the staging and learnt by heart by the actors during the rehearsals) and this text on the stage was partially sung and partially recited, said by the actors. In the performances of the pre-Christian age – that, incidentally, arose and developed in Greece – the dance was a fundamental part and had an important role. Today we don’t know exactly how song, recitation (speech) and dance were combined, but we know well that they were simultaneously present. We can say that between the sixth century b. C. and nowadays the recited part grew more and more and took a bigger and bigger power, to such an extent that in many forms of Western theatre song and dance totally have disappeared. But, of course, this is true only if we speak in a very general way. In fact, today and during the previous 2500 years, some forms of performance combined recitation, song and dance in various ways, and other forms combined two of them. The most long-lived example is the Italian opera, that arose in 1600 and that today still exists. Nowadays in the Western culture the most popular is the theatre which is only “spoken”, “said”, without dance and song. We can say that it was born in the fifteenth century in Italy, in the period that we call Renaissance, when some researchers found the Greek and Latin ancient theatrical texts, i. e. the dramas written in Greece and in Rome: in Greece by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes during the centuries before Christ, and in Rome by other authors as Plautus, Terence and Seneca some centuries later than in Greece. As I said, in the ancient times these texts were recited, sung and danced (or rather: they were staged in this way in Greece; the situation