The Storyteller's Shadows: Live-acted shadow plays for today
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9780648175698
Publisher: Reed Independent
Published: Mar 1 2018
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.22
Height: 0.85 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The live-acted shadow play of today uses live actors to evoke fantasy combined with realism to illustrate a fully-rounded play narrated by a storyteller sitting in full audience view.
It is not a puppet show. It does not demand actors contort themselves into amazing shapes like trees of elephants. It is a play-behind that theatrically lies in the unfurrowed field between mime and the theatre we conventionally know today. It has hardly, if ever, been attempted in a full play's setting until now.
The modern live-acted shadow play can be seen (at least conceptually) to need two directors working in unison - one to conduct how the shadow play portion of the performance can be welded into an amusing and poetic distillation of the storyteller's tale; the other to take care of the overall dramatic interaction between the storyteller and the shadow play behind him or her.
Here are 14 pioneering live-acted shadow plays especially written for wholesale professional stage production, or for 'picking-and-choosing' by workshoppers and educators. Three of them are world classics by Gogol, Morton and Runyon especially adapted by Bill Reed; the others are of his own making. Each contains probably a deliberate over-fullness of shadow-play directions, but only to give the director the widest choice of possibilities to get his shadow play to keep pace with the story, even if it's not really practical to wholly keep up with every narrative twist and turn.
What each play has in common are elements of the fantastical and the magical threading through the down-to-earth, a blending that only the shadow play can evoke in any sort of encompassing harmony.
In its dynamic interplay of shadow acting and voice, the live-acted shadow play of today almost represents a new form of theatrical genre.
Also in
Plays
Four Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night
Shakespeare, William
Paperback
The Major Plays: Ivanov, the Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, the Three Sisters, the Cherry Orchard
Chekhov, Anton
Paperback
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem
Miller, Arthur
Paperback
The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Euripides
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Paperback
The Laramie Project and the Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
Kaufman, Moises
Fondakowski, Leigh
Pierotti, Greg
Paperback
FRANKENSTEIN or The Modern Prometheus (The Revised 1831 Edition - Wisehouse Classics)
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paperback
Four Major Plays: A Doll's House/Ghosts/Hedda Gabler/The Master Builder
Ibsen, Henrik
McFarlane, James
Arup, Jens
Paperback
A Doll's House and Other Plays: With Pillars of the Community, Ghosts and an Enemy of the People
Ibsen, Henrik
Paperback
KJV, Pew Bible, Large Print, Hardcover, Burgundy, Red Letter Edition (Large Print Edition)
Thomas Nelson
Hardcover
Our Town and the Cosmic One-Acts: The Long Christmas Dinner, the Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, and Pullman Car Hiawatha
Wilder, Thornton
Paperback
Five Plays: Ivanov, the Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and the Cherry Orchard
Chekhov, Anton
Hingley, Ronald
Paperback
