STAYLESS, PERFORMANCE, STAGE, SOLD-OUT, BANOIR BOX, MEYERHOLD, BACKSTAGE, PROPS, DIONYSUS. And more than 200 more words about theater, playwrights, actors, and directors are collected in this book. It's a dictionary because theatrical terms used by people all over the world are collected here from A to Z. These words come from Ancient Greece, from France during the Enlightenment, where drama, directing, and acting were born and developed. Our turn came in the 20th century, when Diaghilev's Russian Seasons enriched not only theater but world art as a whole with their innovations, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold developed systems for preparing actors for roles, and Chekhov wrote plays that have been performed on stages across the continents for over a century. It's also a workbook with assignments. Almost every article contains tips, advice, or exercises for developing acting skills, and special pages offer master classes on mask-making, props, puppetry, and makeup.
REVIEWS FROM READERS AND CRITICS
An aesthetically flawless dictionary, a textbook, an encyclopedia, and a workbook, its pages offer a history of theater from A to Z. This engaging, sometimes even playful reference book explains how modern theater has integrated literature, music, architecture, dance, visual arts, and even cinema. The Portuguese authors provide answers to any question: what was the fault of the ancient Greeks, what is a curtain, who makes up a theater crew, what is the meaning of the phrase "Russian Seasons," and who are these Angry Young Men? The workbook also includes numerous master classes—for example, how to make a papier-mâché skull of Poor Yorick.
A dictionary of theatrical terms, stories about the history of theater, an encyclopedia of theatrical backstage, a gallery of the main characters of world theater—the genre of "The Theater Dictionary" can be described in any number of ways. The main thing is that it is a gripping, exciting, informative, light, funny, profound, and heartfelt book, written and translated by people who love theater and know it from the inside (translated by Rinat Valiulin, edited by Ksenia Larina).
