Study of the concept of detention in theater’s Jean -Paul Sartre

The two plays, No Exit and The Condemned of Altona, are works of modern French theater. The author presents the detainee’s suffering and his relationship with others within a specific reality and time circumstance. In the first chapter, we review the play of a closed session and the story of three criminal suspects living their fate after death in Hell in a strange and unimaginable atmosphere. As for the play the Condemned of Altona, the writer portrays the tragedy of a generation of young people after World War II as they live the tragedy of their actions that they took against humanity during the war. In the second chapter, we examine the study of the pre-detention period and the world of memories, in order to reach the reality of the events separating the detainee between his past and present, once with himself and the other with others. In the third chapter, we examine the detention between illusion and reality, and that the detainee in theater’s Sartre is nothing but confined to others' view of what he is doing and how voluntary detention will ultimately be the existential act. And how that encourages the individual to make conscious choice embodied in personal freedom to commit and acknowledge his actions to the end of his life.

« La lutte des sexes », ou les stéréotypes sur les femmes dans Une vie secrète de Lenormand, La Valse des toréadors d’Anouilh et Capitaine Bada de Vauthier

August Strindberg is considered the herald of modern drama. His protean work, which goes from naturalism to mystical aesthetics, anticipating surrealism and the theater of the absurd, even today defies, as it did in his epoch, by its brutal or cruel aspects. Without any doubt, the origin of a certain mistrust towards the author of Inferno would be his declared misogyny. It could be criticized on this subject for disclosing prejudices against women, which in the form of stereotypes, survive to this day. Nevertheless, many French playwrights are inspired by the infernal conflict between man and woman that the Swede describes with a stripping frenzy. Indeed, by analyzing the plays of the French theater of the first half of the 20th century, we notice that some authors take up the motive of the “struggle of the sexes” that will be reworked or “modernized” in their own way. It is interesting in this regard to study the vehicular discourse of clichés on women, found in the works of writers such as Henri-René Lenormand (A Secret Life), Jean Anouilh (Waltz of the Toreadors) and Jean Vauthier (Captain Bada). While none of these playwrights has ever openly declared their hostility to the so-called weaker sex, their texts provide a valuable reservoir of common ground on male-female relationships, which in most cases have not lost their actuality.

The Ballet “Les Noces de Pelée et de Thetis” (1653) Preserved in Visual Images

The article is devoted to the ballet “Les Noces de Pelée et de Thetis” which was produced in 1693 in the Petit Bourbon Palace in Paris (according to the rules of the French theater of that time period) in order to complement the opera with the same name composed by Carlo Caproli. The basis for the plot of the production was the myth widely disseminated in art works about the mortal Peleus and the Nereid Thetis, transformed in correspondence with the aesthetics of that time. The Dance entrées followed each scene of the Italian opera and were connected with its each content, in its turn, forming a consistent, logically delineated narration. The published libretto conveys the plot, and at times the outer form of the action quite vividly and fi guratively. A description of the decorations and machines used in the ballet has also been preserved, as the result of which in our time it becomes possible to create a visual impression from the production. In addition, important defi ning details capable of providing a perception not only of the protagonists’ outward appearances, but also of a concrete distribution of roles between the performers are the sketches for numerous costumes preserved up to our time. Thereby, it turns out that in 17th century musical performance a considerable role is played by its visual solution, which, having been preserved in iconographic materials, is capable of helping create an impression from the overall conception of the production a few centuries after it happened.

Chez Paul Niquet: Sound, Spatiality, and Sociability in the Paris Cabaret

Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proletarian leisure spaces offered a relational form of sociability that was at odds with the spectacular aesthetic of Haussmannization. The sounds emanating from Niquet’s cabaret, from clanging glasses to spontaneous songs, defined the cabaret institution spatially: not merely in acoustic terms, but also as a democratized site of leisure for workers and literati alike.

The establishment of literary canon of French dramaturgy of the XVI century

This article reviews gradual development of the literary canon of French theater of the Renaissance Era, which in many ways predetermined the emergence and further evolution of classicistic dramaturgy. The subject of this research is the principles of dramaturgical art formulated by the poets and theoreticians of the XVI century within the framework of poetic texts and treatises. The goal consists in description of the stages in establishment of the theatrical canon in France of the Renaissance Era, juxtapose its principles to the medieval theater, determine to which stage is attributed the emergence of representations on the classical theater, and highlight the factors that influenced its development. The novelty of this research lies in the attempt of comprehensive analysis of the poetic texts and treatises that allow reconstructing the processes unfolded in the XVI century in French theater, as well as comparing them to medieval tradition, as well as to gradually forming classicism. The relevance is substantiated by the need that occurred in literary studies to understand the formation of classical principles of French dramaturgy based on the materials of poetic works of the Renaissance Era. The author delineates three staged in the process of formation of the canon of French theatre of the Renaissance Era. The first is associated with the publication of Joachim du Bellay's manifesto, which indicates the “gap” in French literature in the area of drama and appeals to fill it. For realization of the second stage, pivotal becomes the figure of Étienne Jodelle, the author of tragedy “Cléopâtre Captive”, which epitomized an attempt to revive of antique tragedy, and comedy “Eugène”.. So in France of the XVI century. This led to the emergence of French national theatrical tradition that can be considered a literary canon. The third stage of its formation became the recognition of Jodelle's achievements in the theory of poetry. In 1555, Jacques Peletier in “Art Poétique” cited both compositions as the examples of tragedy and comedy, which contributed to consolidation of the canon.

Part II – Poussin’s Women—Cultural and Social Frames

Part II examines Poussin’s works from the perspective of attitudes about women in seventeenth-century Italy and France. His ancient and contemporary literary sources are investigated from a gender studies viewpoint, as are his ideas on art. The impact on Poussin of changing views of gender in French theater is analyzed, and the values of his patrons are explored.

HISTRIONICS AS A SUPREME LIFE FORM: JIM JARMUSH’S “DEAD MAN” IN THE CONTEXT OF ANTONIN ARTAUD’S LIFE

The article is a kind of aesthetic experiment that reveals patterns between two stories from the life of the fictional character William Blake from the film "dead Man" by American Director Jim Jarmusch and French theater theorist and philosopher Antonin Artaud. The complexity of the work lies in the fact that the comparison takes place between a fictional hero and a real person who made identical metaphysical trips to the bosom of an ancient civilization. The path is presented as an experience of reincarnation with the possibility of gaining new knowledge, liberation from the burden of pain and illness, fears and anxiety. The author is interested, among other things, in the stages of transformation of the personality and its transition from a reasonable state to a mad state with the exit to purification and liberation of the hero in death. The metamorphosis of the transition to the territory of the transcendent (mad) develops into a holistic individual performance-a challenge to society. Theatricality as the highest form of life itself and its completion determine the initiation process of Artaud and Blake. Artezianka theatricality and tragedy are the tears of all life and the creative forces. Blake's theatricality is realized in a gradual alienation from the everyday world and immersion in the ritual world, which requires him to perform a number of mandatory rites, for example, applying the blood of a slaughtered animal to the face. Comparative analysis takes into account the concept of disease and morbidity, which is considered not from a medical point of view, but in philosophical and aesthetic discourses. For both characters, the fact of theatricalization of life, the Monstration of its aesthetic and moral categories through the optics of ritual and ritual practice of the Indians is postulated.

Theater as a Dictate of Power. The Problem of Freedom of the Dramatic Author in the Classical Epoch

The author of the article aims at revising traditional approaches to the definition of classicism, viewing it as an intrinsically mobile and heterogeneous semantic system. On the example of the tragedy as a dominant genre, it reveals that the French theater of the 17th century may be seen from two perspectives: as a social and cultural phenomenon and as а system that functions and transforms itself through the author’s efforts. The mobility of this dramatic practice relates to the paradigmatical relationship between the “power” and the “author”. The power is understood both in the narrow political and in the wider textual sense (e.g. violence that reveals itself on the textual level). The author is seen as a writing agent who consistently develops her own principles of dramatic writing and discloses herself in the text through the figures of the drama’s personas and the structure as a whole. The article seeks to show how Corneille the playwright simultaneously succumbed to the prevailing classical tendencies of his time and tried to distance from them. With this purpose in view, the article examines in detail how the rhetorical structure of the tragedy Horace was built; in particular, this concerns interaction, via attracrion and repulsion, of two different discursive positions represented by Horace and Sabina.