Unit 15. Modernism

I 1.Write three things you know and three things you want to know about modern art.

2.Study the words.

3.Match the names of various trends of modernism and their definitions.

II 1.Read the text. After reading it, write a detailed plan of the text. Follow the instructions:

1)How many parts can the text be divided into? Think of a suitable heading for each part.

2)Within each part think of smaller parts with their own sub-headings.

The twentieth century is marked by a violent enhancement of the struggle between the two opposing tendencies in art – the realist tradition and the academic and modernistic trends. Modernism is represented by a multitude of trends but with all their apparent differences all modernistic trends have one common decisive feature: al of them are aggressively opposed to realism in art and materialism in aesthetics; they advocate extreme subjectivism (“self expression”) in creative work.

While Henri, Luks, Sloan and Bellows were successfully struggling against conservative academism and exalting the primacy of life over art, a new vanguard was emerging and gathering force in America under the aegis of art for art’s sake. A decisive role in fostering modernism in America was played by the famous Armoury Show of 1913, which was the first vast exhibition of modern European art. It included Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, Cubists, and “Dada” (Derain, Dufy, Manguin, Villon, Friesz, Picasso, Braque, Leger, Picabia, Duchamp, Gleizes, de la Fresnaye) The Armoury Show speeded up the decay of art evinced already by some artists such as Morris Prendergast and Arthur Davis, who paved the way for the frank departure from realism to purely formal and subjective experiments.

This vast demonstration of new and bold experiments of the most avant-garde artists of many countries shocked and bewildered the American public. It had a shattering effect on some young artists, who, lured by the tempting paths of “free” art – free from any obligation to life – abandoned realism to experiment with avant-garde styles, imitating now one now another European painter, dabbling voraciously in Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Fauvism. They contrived to combine in their largely eclectic and derivative work the imitation of the most contradictory of European avant-garde trends. American modernism was a feeble and hasty imitation of European formalistic experiments.

The first wave of modernism in America was represented by Cubism (L.Feininger, Ch.Demuth, Ch.Sheeler), Futurism (J.Stella), abstractionism (M.Russell and S.Macdonald-Wright) and Expressionism (M.Weber, A.Maurer, M.Hartley, J.Marin). Expressionism was by far the most widespread form of modernism in America in the period between the Armoury Show and World War II. After a few years of experimentation many artists returned to more representational styles, and about 1925 this first wave of modernism had passed.

There were some serious and undoubtedly very gifted artists who gave up

realism in search of new forms of expression and squandered their talent in fruitless experimentation. Among purely formalistic works they would sometimes produce a work revealing a keen awareness of the beauty of American nature.

One of the most sensitive among the artists converted to modernism, was John Marin (1870–1953). He was an expressionist and like all other expressionists, he concentrated on his own emotions, the intensity of which far surpassed his range of vision. Drawing on the Fauves and late Cezanne for his stylistic devices, he developed his own spontaneous and generalized style of painting, a colouristic shorthand, with a number of abbreviated personal symbols of colour and line – a green triangle for a pine, a zigzagfor a wave. His favourite medium was water-colour which he used with great richness and suggestiveness. He found his subject matter in New York or in the state of Maine. In Maine he did his most memorable work – his breezy and buoyant water-colour landscapes of the coast of Maine. His best landscapes are a lyrical expression of the expansive, joyful poetry of earth and sea. He transmuted the rugged coast of Maine into a remarkable and lyrical harmony of form and radiant colour.

Marsden Hartley (1887–1943) as a painter is characterized by frequent changes of style. His early landscapes of the Maine mountain countryside reveal his profound admiration for Ryder. In France he was influenced by Cezanne and Picasso and experimented with a cubistderived style. In Berlin, under the influence of Kandinsky, he began experimentation in abstraction. But it was German Expressionism that had the strongest impact on his style.

After years of experimentation, he returned to his native Maine, where he found his subject matter and his ultimate expressionistic manner. He painted the fishermen, pinewoods and rockbound coast of Maine with an elemental simplicity and with great power. His best Maine landscapes, rough, blunt, with their simple colour areas and heavy-handed execution have the direct and uncomplicated impact of a primitive.

Charles Demuth (1883–1935), more known for his “architectural” and industrial scenes, which are rendered in the geometric mode of precisionism, is best in his more realistic water-colours of flowers, fruits and also in his night-club and vaudeville subjects. Even more expressive are the water-colour illustrations for Poe, Zola, Balzac and Henry James, which he made for his own pleasure. In these highly original and elegant water-colours he “taps a vein of psychological power practically unique in American art”, as D.C. Rich put it.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887) began with abstractions, giantsized flower forms - irises, sunflowers, petunias, Jacks-in-the-pulpit enlarged until they had lost their identity as flowers. In the late twenties she moved to New Mexico and desert landscape provided her with new subject matter; she painted its sands and skies, its crouching, hump-backed hills and bleached bones and skulls lying in the sage-brush. Her pictures of dried cow skulls placed against an abstract red, white and blue suggest a parallel with surrealist paintings.

The second wave of modernism began in the thirties. The positions of modernism were largely strengthened by the arrival in America of many representatives of the European avant-garde at the beginning of World War II. In the early forties New York became the centre of cosmopolitan surrealism. Surrealists used traditional painting techniques, but objects of the real world were torn from their accustomed environment and recombined illogically and arbitrarily. Surrealists drew for their expression on the subconscious, on dreams, fears and morbid fancies. They rendered their fearful, enigmatic and hallucinatory visions, their obsessions and complexes, in terms of realistic images. Their works are filled with the arbitrary and the monstrous, with a morbid eroticism and horror of death.

The European fugitives Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Matta, and Andre Breton spent some years in New York, while Yves Tanguy and Pavel Tchelitchev settled in America for good. They went on with their exploration of the subconscious and the irrational and translated their dreams and obsessions. The American variant of surrealism was represented by P. Blume’s and E. Berman’s hallucinatory visions and I. Albright’s pathologic scrutiny of the wrinkles of old age, and his obsessions with sensation of disintegration. This surrealistic unsubstantial intensity of mood continued in the work of the so-called “magic realists” like Henry Koerner and Bernard Perlin.

Another group of surrealists was influenced by the “psychic automatism” of Andre Breton. They employed symbolic, semi-abstract forms, a direct outpouring of subconscious impulses, sometimes in symbolic form, often of sexual derivation or of a purely gestural nature. This variety of surrealism led to the subsequent gestural Abstract Expressionism or “action painting” exemplified by Bradley Walker Tomlin, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and others.

A second abstract movement, which began in the mid-thirties, had become by the forties the dominant trend in American art overshadowing a vigorous school of realist painting which had continued to flourish. Like surrealism, abstractionism was nurtured by disillusion, fear and the awareness of helplessness in the face of the insoluble contradictions of contemporary reality. For many artists it became a refuge from reality, a withdrawal into an egoistic “self-expression”. Abstractionism is an extreme form of modernism, and evidence of the deep crisis of modern culture. It deforms the outside world to the point of making it unrecognizable and resulted in the complete disintegration of form. The abstractionists severed the last ties which connected their art with visible reality. They maintain that art does not reflect, does not cognize reality, but is a means of expressing the personal, instinctive, subconscious emotional experience of the artist. Their works are practically devoid of any image-bearing, intellectual, emotional or ideational content and sense. Their paintings are a confusion of patches and lines, their sculptures - a conglomeration of absurd forms of metal, wood or stone. Preaching unlimited arbitrariness and subjectivism in artistic creation they violate the fundamental principles of art: they discard drawing and composition in painting and the reproduction of actual forms of the material world in sculpture. By denying the criteria of artistic values in art, and by discarding national forms and traditions, abstractionism corrupts people’s aesthetic taste, diverts them from the cognition of human life and human struggle and cankers their love for their national culture.

Abstractionism has a number of varieties. Joseph Albers, Bradley Walker Tomlin and Irene Rice Pereira represented the geometric or precise mode of abstraction which prevailed in the mid-thirties. Free-form abstraction was dominant in the forties and fifties. This mode of abstraction goes by the name of “Abstract Expressionism” and is represented by American art critics as being “the most significant movement”, “the triumph of American painting”. Abstract Expressionism developed by the fusion of expressionism – with its emphasis on emotional intensification, abstraction - with its rejection of representation of reality, and surrealism – with its reliance upon automatism. The way for Abstract Expressionism was paved by Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb, who were deeply involved in surrealist argument. About 1950 Abstract Expressionism broke into gestural abstraction or “action painting” (Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning), symbolic Abstract Expressionism (Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Theodores Stamos) and chromatic or colour-field abstraction (Mark Rothko, Barnett Newmann, Clyfford Still, Mark Tobey). They have different styles and techniques, but all of them have one common feature – they have nothing to do with real life and very little - with art.

The “action painting” arising out of the " psychic automatism" of surrealism, came closest to pure automatism. With “action painters” planned designing was replaced by purely instinctive methods, in which the physical action of painting determined the final forms. Traditional brushwork gave way to dribbling, flinging or pouring the pigment on to the canvas. The most celebrated “virtuoso” of “action painting”, Jackson Pollock, placed his enormous canvases on the floor and moved around them, spotting, puddling and splashing paint from buckets, producing a vortex of swirling lines, spatters, and drips.

Some of Pollock’s paintings (and a few of Mark Tobey’s, James Brooks’, Fritz Glarner’s) possess at least a certain decorative quality which is lacking in the works of A. Gorky, R. Motherwell, M. Rothko, A. Gottlieb and others, whose harsh and muddy colours and slovenly helterskelter combinations of smears produce a cheerless impression. But nothing can surpass in ugliness and sickening repulsiveness Willem de Kooning’s woman series in which monstrous fullbodied, wide-eyed, toothy female figures materialize from a chaos of slashing brushstrokes and anatomical fragments spread across the canvas.

Around 1960 abstractionism appeared to have run its course. The decade of the sixties saw new trends, some as outgrowths of abstraction, some as reactions against it. The most notorious and influential " movement" of the sixties was pop art, which opposed to abstractionism the rude world of actual objects that are passed as “works of art”. Pop art utilizes the most common banal features of American daily life – comic strips, billboards, and all sort of rubbish from a dump. In spite of its name, pop art has nothing to do with popular or folk art. The return to real objects is based upon concepts borrowed from the earlier “schools” of modernism: complexes of “stream of consciousness”, refusal to express a concrete idea. These concepts are expressed by the alogism of scraps of visual information and commodities wrenched from their habitual context, by fetishization of actual objects as such. Pop art works offer to the viewer an unlimited set of disconnected associations, political, commercial, sexual, which break in upon one another. No evaluation, interpretation or commentary is possible, they merely express a frigid attitude of noninvolvement. “The implication is, ” an American art critic remarks, " that nothing can be done about a materialistic, worldly society plunged into situations, so that the only sensible attitude is one of the unemotionalized acceptance of the realities." Though pop art was a reaction against abstraction there is much in common between them. They both display a dispassionate concern with visual experience unrelated to any social ideals.

The leading exponents of pop art in America were Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

R. Rauschenberg combines abstraction with pop art devices, incorporating commonplace mass-produced items into his canvases, The result is a conglomeration of cloth, bits of newspaper, strips of canvas, splashes, blobs or drips of paint with furniture, kitchen utensils, bottles, road signs, stuffed animals, photos and the like protruding from the canvas or merging into it. His notorious “masterpiece” “The Bed” represents an actual pillow and a patchwork quilt splashed liberally with paint.

Andy Warhol, perhaps the most publicized of the pop artists, takes his inspiration from such images of mass culture of a depersonalized and standardized consumer society as labels of manufactured products, newspaper headlines, magazine photographs, currency and stamps. He makes pictures of soup-cans, tomato ketchup, Coca-Cola bottles; of famous personalities (Jacqueline Kennedy – Jackie), film stars (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Tylor); of works of art (Mona Liza, Thirty Are Better Than One). Warhol has created several Disaster series depicting car crashes, suicides, the electric chair, etc. Each image is mechanically repeated a great number of times by means of mass-reproduction devices (photomechanical silk screening), e.g. One Hundred Campbell’s Soup Cans, Green Coca-Cola Bottles or 5 Deaths 11 Times in Orange.

Roy Lichtenstein draws upon comic strips for his inspiration. His pictures are like comic book illustrations painted in bright colours and enlarged to a gigantic scale (over 13 feet in length).

James Rosenquist is inspired by advertizing, especially the huge omnipresent billboard. He is known to have produced the largest pop painting, entitled F-lll. The canvas is larger than the fighterbomber it represents and is 86 feet long. It consists of 51 interlocking panels.

Tom Wesselmann found his inspiration in the bathroom. He is best known for his Great American Nudes and bathroom collages in which real objects (toilet paper, toilet seat, towels, etc.) are incorporated with airy female figures painted flat.

Claes Oldenburg is famous for his sagging soft sculptures of food items and household utensils made of vinyl stuffed with kapok and enlarged to an absurdly gigantic size (Giant Hamburger).

By the late 1960s pop art became outmoded. “The rapidity of artistic change in the 1960s was unusual even in a period accustomed to the swift dispersal of outmoded styles into inglorious obsolescence, ” remarks Milton Brown. It is impossible to classify the bewildering number of modern “movements” that rocked the American art world in the sixties and seventies. Pop art, junk, assemblage, hard edge that flourished in the sixties, were superseded by Op, Minimal, Land, Systemic, Primary, Performance, Body, Process, Conceptual, Post-Studio, Story and Light and Movement Art, that dominated the scene in the seventies. These trends carried still further the drastic switch from tradition, and a nihilistic attitude to the culture of the past and to humanitarian ideals. The boundaries of American art became so flexible that anything might be included from earthworks and videotape events to cornflakes scattered in an open area, grease, dirt, leaves, ice blocks melting on a gallery floor or merely verbal statements and print. The search for novelty is very characteristic of the present day art world and very often this is the primary concern of the artist. Speaking about the accelerated pace innovation, Jack Levine very aptly compared it with the rat race: “I think that the abstract, the non-objective, the modernistic artists have lost themselves in the wilderness. I think they have been motivated by a continuous sequence of rebellions, one against the other, so nobody remembers which came first, the why and wherefore of what they are doing... I think that simple cognition, simple reason has been dispelled by the ceaselessness of the rat race.”

2.Answer the questions.

1)What is modernism opposed to in art and aesthetics?

2)What played a decisive role in speeding up modernism in America?

3)What was the reaction of the public to the avant-garde exhibitions?

4)What made many new artists abandon realism?

5)What and who was the 1^st wave of modernism represented by?

6)Why was John Marin considered to be one of the most sensitive among modernists?

7)What is the main feature of M. Hartleys’s works?

8)Ch. Demuth can be called unique in American art. Explain why.

9)What are the two major themes of G. O’Keeffe’s works?

10)What is peculiar of the 2^nd wave of modernism?

11)Can you recall different trends of surrealism and their representatives?

12)What can you say about the abstract movement of the 30s?

13)Describe different varieties of abstractionism and give examples.

14)What trends were popular in the 60s, when abstractionism had run its course?

15)Give a brief account on the works of R. Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg.

16)Why is it impossible to classify the modernistic movements of the 60s and 70s?

III 1.Say what you think of the following quotation: “Paintings and fighting are best seen at a distance.” (Benjamin Franklin)

2.Write a review for a popular magazine of a modern art exhibition you have recently visited.

3.Speak on the problem “Is modern art really an art? ”

Unit 16. The Eloquence of Silence (by Julia Marlowe)

I 1.Study the words.

scorching – палящий

delineation – изображение, описание

impersonation – воплощение, исполнение

deficient – лишенный, несовершенный

twit – насмехаться, поддразнивать

eminent – знаменитый, выдающийся

hit off – подражать, копировать

contemplate – обдумывать, намереваться

allude – намекать, ссылаться

ruse – уловка, хитрость

stolid – вялый, флегматичный, тупой

slight – относиться с невниманием

ripple – журчание

daintiness – изысканность, утонченность

martial – воинственный

tramping – тяжело ступающий

grandeur – великолепие, величие

tumult – шум, смятение

ephemeral – недолговечный, преходящий

render – превращать, делать

insignia – знаки отличия (мн. ч.)

transfix – пронзать, прокалывать

2.Note the difference:

Repertory – the practice of performing several plays with the same actors and in the same theatres, one after the other on different days. E.g. a job in repertory, a repertory theatre.

Repertoire – the collection of plays, pieces of music etc., that a performer or theatre company can perform. E.g. He has a larger repertoire of funny stories.

3.Fill in the gaps with Participle I or Participle II of one of the words in the box.

1)Her silence pictured her _ state of mind.

2)This quality is essential of a _ artist.

3)This actor’s voice is particularly adapted to _ fiction.

4)His voice was like the martial music of a _ host.

5)“The silent rhetoric of _ eye ” is important for any actor.

6)The sound of his voice resembles a harp _ upon with a hammer.

7)Acting is more important than the _ delivery of lines.

II 1.Read the text.

Julia Marlowe (1870–1950) was born in England and brought to America when she was five. When she was thirteen she was engaged to play a small part in one of the juvenile companies which were popular in those days. Later she appeared in a Rip Van Winkle company and by 1883 had minor roles in Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night in a touring company. After a period of study and training in New York she appeared in a long list of plays. She specialized in dramatic novels and popular melodramas. Her association in the Shakespearean repertory with many outstanding players of the day put her talents to work in a long and distinguished career as a famous interpreter of the Bard.

A carefully trained voice, able to follow all the “windings of the lengthened oh ”, is, of course, of great importance to the actress; yet it would seem to me, from observing great players, that they achieve their most impressive results through depicting in the countenance “the events of the soul”.

Too much importance has been given to the human voice. It is for this reason that many players have given their whole attention to its cultivation, forgetting that in the delineation of character by impersonation, there are other and even more important aids.

It is curiously the case, that very many great actors were woefully deficient in the matter of enunciation. It was said, for example, of the great Colley Cibber that he had a “shrill voice apt to crack”; that Betterton’s voice was “low and grumbling, like the notes of a harp played upon with a hammer”, that Garrick’s generally failed him in great roles; and that Edmund Kean’s was generally hard and husky, not naturally agreeable, and was wont to mount into a squeak.

John Philip Kemble, generally acknowledged during his time as a great actor, was constantly twitted by dramatic writers on account of his painfully singular enunciation. Reviewers of her time generally referred to Peg Woffington’s voice as being harsh, and Mrs. Abington’s as “not naturally pleasing to the ear”. Another case in point is that of the famous French actress, Sophie Arnould. She was a great favorite during the time of Louis XIV and holds a high place among the idols of the French stage. Yet it was said of Sophie that she had “the finest asthma ever heard”.

It will be seen, then, that these eminent players were able to achieve distinction in their calling despite the fact that their voices possessed qualities ungrateful to the ear. In other words, they were able to delineate and depict the “deep events of the soul”. Great acting then does not depend upon the voice solely. Indeed, some of the most effective pieces of acting are achieved solely through the ability of keeping silent. A poet during Garrick’s time hit off this truth in a couplet:

A single look more marks the internal woe

Then all the windings of the lengthened oh.

I recall, when a young girl, the first time I saw Edwin Booth. He and Lawrence Barrett were appearing in Othello. Barrett impersonated Othello, and Booth, Iago. As I have never seen Booth, I did not know him when he appeared on the scene. Suddenly I discovered a figure at the back of the stage intently watching the Moor. You could see plainly that he contemplated some demoniac act. His eye and manner at once caught the attention of the house long before he had said a word. The look on his face was crafty and devil-like. This one incident proved to me that there was very much more in acting than the polished delivery of lines.

I recall an even more striking example. Years ago, I saw a dramatization of Zola’s novel, Therese Racquin. In this play there was the character of an old woman who became paralyzed through seeing a murder committed. This character during the entire action of the piece uttered not a word, and pretended that she could not hear. The audience knew that this was a ruse, yet she sat through the entire action of the play listening to the conversation of the guilty persons. Now this old woman, who did not once used her voice after the paralytic stroke, proved to be the most important figure in the play.

In Gordin’s The Kreutzer Sonata, there is quite a remarkable example of the eloquence of silence. It will be recalled by those who saw the play that the wife, suspicious of her husband, sits down in silence by the window during an entire evening. The woman’s sister and her husband have gone to the opera. She utters not a word, and after some little time, during which there is a most impressive silence, the curtain descends. Three hours are supposed to elapse before the next act, and when the curtain rises, the woman is still in the same attitude, silently meditating. This device pictured better than the words her agonizing state of mind.

Another equally effective example is supplied by Crime and Punishment, a dramatization of Dostoyevsky’s novel, which Paul Orleneff, the famous Russian actor, presented in New York two years ago. A critic described this incident: “The scene is in a little drinking place. A few stolid, roughly dressed men sit around wooden tables, with vodka before them. Among them is an old, broken-down drunkard. Orleneff, as the student Raskolnikoff, enters, sits himself before a glass of vodka, and listens to the old drunkard telling the story of his life.

For nearly half an hour Orleneff does not say a word, and hardly moves. As the old man tells about his wife and children, how drink has ruined him and his family, how his young daughter has sold her virtue for the sake of the others, how he has learned to adore and worship the abandoned girl, who seems to him almost a saint, Orleneff’s face, without the help even of his hands, reflects the drama of the old man’s life. It does far more than that. By subtle, perfectly natural pantomime, the actor expresses not only sympathy and growing understanding of the old drunkard’s situation, but a solemn, intensely serious criticism of all that poverty means. One feels that the Russian student is in line with the Nihilist tradition of Russia, and that what has been theoretical philosophy with him is taking concrete form as he listens to the old man. It is one of the most dramatic scenes I ever witnessed, and yet nothing happens in the usual sense of the word. But Orleneff’s face tells the story of what is happening to him spiritually, and that accounts for the murders he commits in the next act.”

A similar case is to be found in Bernstein’s play The Thief. It will be recalled that the husband, while extracting a confession from his wife, utters not a word - a most effective piece of stage business…

The inability to listen and depict in the countenance what others have said has spoiled many a good actress. Only last winter I saw a young actress in a comedy who, had she not slighted this necessary requirement, would have been a most effective performer. When called upon to speak a line, or enter actively in a scene, she was excellent; but during intervals in which she was not engaged, she seemed utterly unconscious of what was going on. Her stolid inability to enter into the life of the play greatly marred its effectiveness, and utterly ruined her own part in it.

We have seen that many great actors such as Betterton, Garrick, Kean, Kemble, Woffington, and others, though handicapped by faulty enunciation, yet rose to the highest distinction in their calling. These actors, however, were exceptions to the rule, for we are informed that Barry’s voice “could charm the birds off the bushes”; that Mrs. Oldfield’s was particularly adapted to the proper interpretation of ripples of daintiness and fascinating fiction, and that Forrest’s was like the martial music of a tramping host. But after all, it is the actor with an “eye” speaking like the star of night, who has won the greatest applause. A look often speaks volumes and reveals what the tongue could not - “the silent rhetoric of persuading eyes.” The voice is important only when in use; the eye is never at rest. I think it was the late George Meredith who said that the flash of a woman’s eye is an idea striking a light inside.

There is grandeur in stillness, and it is the eye that is the mind’s signal and the soul’s interpreter. It is the actor’s chief business to express the emotions of the human heart. The eye discloses the tumult that rages within, and speaks the inner thought even more completely than can the tongue. It has a language of its own - an expression that is as far above any language as the eternal firmament is above the ephemeral butterfly.

Horace Walpole said that the voice of Mrs. Cibber, the soul of Mrs. Pritchard, and the eye of Garrick, formed a combination which in one actor would render him superior to all the actors the world has seen or should see. Walpole does not, however, give his opinion as to which of these – the voice or the eye – is more important. Howbeit, Garrick was the greatest of the trio, and it was his eyes and expression that made him so.

The imperfection of Edmund Kean’s voice has been alluded to, yet a writer who had known him said: “He was remarkable for the silence and shyness with which he took his seat in the green room, his eye alone discoursing most eloquent music.” His eyes at time “threatened like a loaded and levelled pistol”, gleaming with scorching lustre. All who saw him act were struck with their marvelous power, in which might be seen the flash and outbreak of a fiery soul. He was able to still an angry audience with a single look, and his most tragic flights, the superb play of his eye was said to be magnificent. Beneath the drooping lashes “slept a world of eloquent meaning”.

All the mightly histrions of the dead past had singularly beautiful and expressive eyes – the unfailing symbols and insignia of a great soul. Tony Aston, in his Brief Supplement, dwells at considerable length on Betterton’s wonderful and expressive eyes – eyes that spoke the soul’s thoughts before the voice uttered them. He could transfix with a look, and a soft glance melted the hearts of the hardest listeners. In silence they had a speech which all could interpret.

Theatre-goers of today recall Edwin Booth’s ever-glowing and radiant eyes, able unfailingly to express melting tenderness of withering scorn, love, anger, and avarice – all visibly moved those beautiful black orbs.

In brief, unless the actor is able to discourse most eloquently without opening his lips, he lacks the prime essential of a finished artist.

Note

1)a Rip Van Winkle company – one of the strolling companies playing Rip Van Winkle only

2)the Bard = the Bard of Avon – Shakespeare

3)I did not know – I did not recognize

4)to be in line with – to accept the views of, agree

5)had she not slighted this necessary requirement – if she had not slighted this necessary requirement

2.Answer the questions.

1)According to the author, what is the greatest means that helps the actors to achieve the most impressive results?

2)If an actor is deficient in the matter of enunciation, does it mean he will be a complete failure?

3)Give some remarkable examples of the eloquence of silence from the text.

4)What inability can spoil a good actor or actress?

5)“A look often speaks volumes and reveals what the tongue could not – “the silent rhetoric of persuading eyes”. The voice is important only when in use; the eye is never at rest”. Do you agree with it?

6)The author states: “It is the eye that is the mind’s signal and the soul’s interpreter”. Is it the only means of disclosing the “tumult that rages within”?

3.Find in the text the formal variants of these neutral words:

face, sad, pronunciation, likely, expressiveness, eyes, brightness, the sky, greed, actor.

4.Replace the italicized words with words and word combinations from the text.

1)After a period of training Julia Marlowe appeared in many plays.

2)The countenance of an actor shows “the events of the soul”.

3)Some actors’ voices possess qualities unpleasant to the ear.

4)Three hours passed by before the next act.

5)His state of mind explains the murders he commits in the next act.

6)The actress’ inability to enter into the life of the play spoilt its effectiveness.

7)Many actors lack the perfection essential of a finished artist.

5.These are names of characters in popular fiction. They are so well-known (even by those who have never read or even heard of the original work) that they are often used in ordinary conversation. Put each one in its correct place in the sentences below.

a)During the war he was sent on dangerous secret missions abroad. Very exciting! He was a sort of _.

b)I think Alan should go on a diet and get more exercise. He’s beginning to look like _.

c)He still has very youthful enthusiasms, and he’s as slim and fit as he was 20 years ago. He’s a _.

d)There are times when most of us would like to escape from all the pressures of city life and live a more simple, basic kind of _ existence.

e)Come on! I’ve never met anyone so reluctant to spend money, you _!

f)He’s not very practical. What he needs is someone to look after him and do everything for him. He needs a _.

g)The firm is doing very badly and facing bankruptcy. I don’t think it can survive. We don’t just want a new director. We want a _.

h)Well, yes, he was a criminal and he stole a lot of money, but he helped a lot of people with it. He was a bit of a _.

6.Instructions as above.

a)He’s a strange person. Usually he’s very pleasant and reasonable, but there are times when he gets very bad-tempered and almost violent. He’s got a _ personality.

b)How on earth did you guess his nationality, occupation and all those other things about him just from his appearance? You’re a proper _.

c)I don’t like this new government proposal to put details of everyone’s private life on computers. I can see it will mean greater efficiency and all that, but, well, it’s a bit like _, isn’t it?

d)I think the neighbour’s kids should be allowed a bit of freedom to wear what they like and get dirty having fun, not made to look like _.

e)She’s really exploited by her family. They make her do everything for them, cook, clean... She’s a sort of _.

f)He’s a body-builder and weight-lifter. Have you seen him in a swimsuit? He looks like _.

g)He sounds very impressive when he talks about his adventures and achievements, but it’s all fantasy. He’s a _ character.

h)Come on, _, wake up! It’s nearly lunch-time.

7.The following are parts of newspaper reviews of visual and performing arts and literature. Identify the subject of each (film, novel, etc.) and mark at least six words which helped you to decide.

a)The first movement is dominated by the strings with only occasional percussion participation. So many bows dancing in unison made this a visual as well as an aural delight and I abandoned my score to watch. In the second movement the wind section takes command, and with such vigour that the baton seems to struggle to keep up rather than the reverse. For once I did not envy the man on the rostrum, and was content with my seat in the stalls.

b)His favourite medium is now oil, and the canvas which dominates this show, a still-life of bottles, is a masterpiece of representational skill (his early abstracts and collages were never good). His technique is superb. The brushstrokes are invisible, the bottles real. Every section of his palette is used. I shall never again think of bottles as colourless. Every hue of the spectrum is there.

c)Her weaknesses are characterisation and dialogue. Her strengths are plot and feeling for place. Her characters are two-dimensional, their words wooden, but the events are plausible and the places vividly depicted. The setting is now Mexico City, now Tokyo, now Johannesburg. The twist at the end defies prediction. For once the blurb on the back is true. It says, ’Unputdownable’.

d)This new young choreographer has given us an exciting and unconventional piece. Called simply Mixture, it is indeed influenced by classical, folk, progressive and even tap and ballroom besides. The men are agile and athletic, the girls loose-limbed and supple. The leaps are high, the pirouettes prolonged. What more can you want? The night I went they received a standing ovation.

e)First-night nerves are notorious, but I have never heard so many lines fluffed, so many cues missed. The promoter was busy last night and the director (and doubtless the backers) in tears. I do not expect this piece to have a long run, but critical reception and box-offices success are often two very different things and, if it does survive, it will have been saved by a number of well-played supporting roles and a stunning set. But the final final curtain cannot, I think, be far off.

III 1.Which do you think is more important in an actor’s performance – the voice or the eye? Or maybe something else? Give an example from your own experience.

2.Write a review of a play or a film. Be sure to describe the actors’ performance. Some of these expressions might help:

… was directed by … … is based on the life of a notorious bank robber/the author’s experience in … It is based on a book of the same name. … tells the story of…, and as the story unfolds, we see … It stars X in the title role of the Y. It’s set in rural England at the beginning of the 19^th century. It is about A’s relationships with her ex-husband. In the end B … What we don’t learn until the end is that …There are several flashbacks to when he was a child …