The World on Stage

• Signs achieve vitality by being of the world.
• theater is a language and its words consist to an unusual degree of what things appear to be
• Peter Handke: a chair on stage is a chair acting to be another chair.
• Viktor Shklovasky: art exists to make people feel things, to portray things as perceived. Not as they are. By making familiar things unfamiliar, it wakes up the audience to a fresh way of looking at a single object.
• sign: a sign of semiotic attitude which can be dialectical or correlative (signifier/signified)
• signifier/signified: a form of background of "intelligibility" to the other
• Makes other things easier to read.
• An ex: sound. reoccurring sounds or speech set up a feeling for the play

• Image: any likeness/ representation made of materials of medians. An image is unique and irreproducible.
• When a play is performed, the play becomes real and concrete for the audience. When a play is read by the reader, the play is left to the reader's imagination.
• A working clock is never put on stage because it gives the audience the sense of time and it governing the play.
• Running water is seldom used in a play because it retains this "primal strangeness" in a set.
• Children and dogs add surprising behavior elements and a little bit of wonder to the play. A dog does not know it is in a play and will act like a dog.
• when one plays a character that is himself, he looses the "freedom to be himself"
• Nelson Goodman said art is not a what but a when. A rock can be a rock on a driveway but when placed in a museum, it is a piece of art. Similarly, what is on stage is theater but before it was on the stage, it was reality. That raw sense of reality is needed in order to create an illusion of a certain reality.
• Montigny: first man to place tables and chairs on stage in the 1850's and revolutionalized blocking.
• a chair is a "permanent tool" of art
• a chair places actors in a time boundary of the present in reality.

-Miyou