Amphitheater staging: In-the-round or to the front (and what about asides)?

When the existence in Utrecht of the DeWitt/Van Buchel drawing of the Swan Theater became known in 1888, William Poel was already seven years into his inquiries into the best means of staging the public amphitheater and great hall plays of the English Renaissance.1 I mention this to emphasize that the discourse came before the fact: the belief that Shakespeare's plays are best staged as it was then imprecisely imagined they had once been staged-simply, without elaborate settings or time-consuming scene changes, with direct actor-audience address, "in-the-round"-had as much to do with reactions against the late nineteenth-century stage's pictorialism, with its set-changing interruptions and cut-and-paste revisions to Shakespeare's texts, as it had to do with presenting the Bard "authentically." Some of the confusion caused by the uneasy mixing of historical scholarship and the assumptions and practices of our own contemporary theater profession can be glimpsed in the phenomenon of modern in-the-round staging, often claimed as a more "authentic" approach to Shakespeare in performance, but one which is then modified to make possible post-Stanislavsky acting methods and to satisfy modern audience expectations.

The mirror-ball effect: Investigating channels, messages and participation levels

Journalists have always used equipment which has been generally available in the communities in which they worked. This has been a result both of economy and necessity, since they found they had to connect with their audiences using means that were available to the audience, not just to the sender. Newspapers sold on street corners in the very early media days; SMS and email have become the rule for the early 21st century. This development also admits the possibility of the roles of the communication professional and the community merging during the “public journalism” process, and has become most recently evident in the areas around the Bay of Bengal, struck by the tsunami on December 26, 2004, especially in the Indonesian province of Banda Aceh, and in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where tiny portable radios, featuring solar panels and hand-cranked dynamos, have suddenly become part of a vital news media channel. In this article participant-observation and personal interview techniques are used to record and compare many of the digital channels used by news and information senders up to 2005. It also investigates the level of genuine participation which these new technologies have brought to the communications process.