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How is theater relevant to a modern audience, when we have movies and television? Or is it? Do we still need live performance, and what role does it fill?
Today in America, the average person would most likely turn down a day in the theater for a more in-your-face sort of entertainment. “The theater’s a bore,” my sister would say. Modern viewers want surround sound and flashing movies screens. Why? Because today’s spectators want to feel as if they are inside the scenes. That’s why we have IMAX, 3D glasses, and movie Scratch-n-Sniffs. Spectators don’t want to just witness the action they want to hear, feel, and breathe it.
But then couldn’t one argue that a live performance easily beats a front row seat at a 3D movie? What could be more convincing than a person acting out right in front of you? What could be more tangible, more noticeable, more … real?
In a time when practically everyone has the technology necessary to stay in touch (computers, cellphones, etc.), the very devices that are supposed to keep us connected are actual pulling us away from the real world. And a simple thing such as attending the theater is a little step further away from that. It forces us to put down our gadgets and gizmos to pay attention to what is actually in front of us. Crazy right?
The theater is absolutely relevant to the modern audience because it gives us what we are constantly striving for through all our glitzy special effects: a step inside the action. Live performances are necessary not only because they force us to put down our electronics, but the theater also forms a more personal and riveting entertainment experience.
Tutorials
Hi all,
If you have any questions regarding joining the site, editing your profiles, writing weekly blogs,…etc. Please see the tutorials
Welcome!
Welcome to Professor Healey’s “The Arts in New York City” course website.
Here students will blog weekly on assigned topics throughout the semester, create their photojournal projects, and comment on each others’ work.
Course Overview:
Seminar 1 explores the diverse arts in New York City. During the semester, students attend performances and exhibits of the current cultural season. In addition to the four genres (opera, dance, theater, and the visual arts) covered in all sections of the Seminar, faculty choose from a variety of textual, photographic, musical, and performance genres. Students tackle such questions as: What does each genre offer? How does each speak to us? How does art create, serve, and represent the people of the city and its diverse communities? Aesthetic appreciation is supported by social and historical investigations so that students are provided with opportunities for different kinds of engagement with art forms, including interpretation, analysis, and creative endeavors. The culminating event of the Seminar, Snapshot NYC, is an ongoing accumulation of photographs of student views of New York City.
This semester, we will explore artists’ contrasting views of New York City- light and dark, rich and poor, insider and outsider- and discuss our community’s role in the larger American culture as iconic dreamland and urban blight. You will be asked to write and reflect on the work you see, as well as create your own original work that reflects your view of this particular cultural moment in New York City.
