The Art of Theater

Prologue.
<p>Part I: The Basics:.</p>
<p>1. The Emergence of the Art of Theater: Background and History.</p>
<p>1.1 The Backstory: 1850s to 1950s.</p>
<p>1.2 The Decisive Influences: Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski.</p>
<p>1.3 The Decisive Years: 1961 to 1985.</p>
<p>1.4 The Final Threads: Absorption of New Practices into the Profession and the Academy.</p>
<p>2. Theatrical Performance is an Independent Form of Art.</p>
<p>2.1 Theatrical Performance as Radically Independent of Literature.</p>
<p>2.2 Theatrical Performance as a Form of Art.</p>
<p>3. Methods and Constraints.</p>
<p>3.1 Idealized Cases that Help Focus on Features Needing Analysis.</p>
<p>3.2 Three General Facts about Theatrical Performances and the Constraints they Impose on any Successful Account of Theatrical Performances.</p>
<p>4. Theatrical Enactment: The Guiding Intuitions.</p>
<p>4.1 Enactment: Something Spectators and Performers do.</p>
<p>4.2 The Crucial Concept: Attending to Another .</p>
<p>4.3 What it is to Occasion Responses.</p>
<p>4.4 Audience Responses: Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Acquired Beliefs, or Acquired Abilities?.</p>
<p>4.5 Relativizing the Account by Narrowing its Scope to Narrative Performances.</p>
<p>Part II: The Independence of Theatrical Performance:.</p>
<p>5. Basic Theatrical Understanding.</p>
<p>5.1 Minimal General Success Conditions for Basic Theatrical Understanding.</p>
<p>5.2 Physical and Affective Responses of Audiences as Non–Discursive Evidence of Understanding.</p>
<p>5.3 The Success Conditions for Basic Theatrical Understanding Met by Moment–to–Moment Apprehension of Performances.</p>
<p>5.4 Immediate Objects, Developed Objects, and Cogency .</p>
<p>5.5 Objects of Understanding having Complex Structures.</p>
<p>5.6 Generalizing Beyond Plays.</p>
<p>5.7 The Problem of Cognitive Uniformity .</p>
<p>6. The mechanics of basic theatrical understanding.</p>
<p>6.1 The Feature–Salience Model of Spectator Convergence on the Same Characteristics.</p>
<p>6.2 What it is to Respond to a Feature as Salient for Some Characteristics or a Set of Facts.</p>
<p>6.3 A Thin Common Knowledge Requirement.</p>
<p>6.4 A Plausibly Thickened Common Knowledge Requirement.</p>
<p>6.5 The Feature–Salience Model, Reader–Response Theory, and Intentionalism .</p>
<p>6.6 Generalizing the Salience Mechanism to Encompass Non–Narrative Performances.</p>
<p>6.7 Some Important Benefits of the Feature–Salience Model: Double–Focus, Slippage, Character Power, and the Materiality of the Means of Performance.</p>
<p>6.8 The Feature–Salience Model and Explaining How Basic Theatrical Understanding Occurs.</p>
<p>7. What Audiences See.</p>
<p>7.1 Identifying Characters, Events, and Other Objects in Narrative Performances.</p>
<p>7.2 Re–identification of Characters and Other Objects in Narrative Performances.</p>
<p>7.3 The Special Nature of Theatrical (Uses of) Space: Performances and Performance Space.</p>
<p>7.4 Cross–Performance Re–identification.</p>
<p>7.5 Identifying and Re–identifying Objects in Non–Narrative Performances.</p>
<p>7.6 Added Benefits of the Demonstrative and Recognition–Based Approach to Identification and Re–identification.</p>
<p>7.7 Theatrical Performance as a Fully Independent Practice.</p>
<p>Part III: The Art of Theatrical Performance:.</p>
<p>8. Deeper Theatrical Understanding.</p>
<p>8.1 General Success Conditions for Deeper Theatrical Understanding.</p>
<p>8.2 More Precise Success Conditions: Two Kinds of Deeper Understanding.</p>
<p>8.3 Some Puzzles about the Relation Between Understanding What is Performed and Understanding How it is Performed.</p>
<p>8.4 Deeper Theatrical Understanding and Full Appreciation of a Theatrical Performance.</p>
<p>9. What Performers Do.</p>
<p>9.1 What Performers Do and What Audiences Can Know.</p>
<p>9.2 The Features of Performers and Choices That Performers Make.</p>
<p>9.3 Theatrical Conventions as Sequences of Features having Specific Weight .</p>
<p>9.4 What is Involved in Reference to Theatrical Styles.</p>
<p>9.5 More about Styles, as Produced and as Grasped.</p>
<p>9.6 Grasp of Theatrical Style and Deeper Theatrical Understanding.</p>
<p>10. Interpretive Grasp of Theatrical Performances.</p>
<p>10.1 Success Conditions for Interpreting What is Performed and Interpreting How it is Performed.</p>
<p>10.2 Eschewing Theories of Work Meaning .</p>
<p>10.3 Interpretation and Significance.</p>
<p>10.4 Interpreting Performers.</p>
<p>11. Full Appreciation of a Theatrical Performance.</p>
<p>11.1 The Case of the Culturally Lethargic Company.</p>
<p>11.2 Broader Implications of the CLC Problem.</p>
<p>11.3 The Imputationalist Solution.</p>
<p>11.4 Solving the CLC Problem Without Resorting to Imputationalism.</p>
<p>11.5 Full Appreciation of a Theatrical Performance and the Detection of Theatrical Failures.</p>
<p>Epilogue.</p>
<p>A. The Idea of a Tradition and Tradition–Defining Constraints.</p>
<p>B. Constraints Derived from Origins in Written Texts.</p>
<p>C. What Really Constrains Performances in the Text–Based Tradition.</p>
<p>D. The Myth of Of .</p>
<p>Glossary.</p>
<p>Index</p>