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Show HANDBOOK FOR TEACHERS OF INTERPRETATION 20 As a standard of adaptability to the platform, only and harmony to the should be used as will Standards. such means give unity selection, and will help to make the literature better understood; will detract while, on the other hand, any, and every means which distract the listener should be treatment violates this standard because it from the purpose of the author avoided. or Impersonative the at destroys the unity and harmony of selection by attracting listeners' the distracts tention of the audience to the performer. It attention from the purpose of the author, and directs it to the how rather than to the what of that which is being read, and further to the visual destroys the purpose of interpretation by appealing Those lyceum "artists" who sense rather than to the imagination. adorn their advance advertising with photographs of the many faces they can make, are not readers, but rather facial contortionists, whose efforts will not attract the "one must in your judicious, whose censure allowance, outweigh a whole theatre of others." Exact impersonation can by no means be considered helpful to interpreta tion. Nor may we say that it is harmless; in fact, it must be set down as absolutely baneful, since it is "from the purpose" of in . terpretation. Examples. That such impersonations are being done all the time should be no criterion to those who are striving for better ideals, as all teachers should be. That the public like them is no good reason; the public like what they are accustomed to. A certain young appeared in a western city, gathered about her a group of students, and in a few months presented them in a recital at one of the theatres in that city. The program lasted from two o'clock in the afternon until some time after six-thirty. Each "piece" was set with scenery and stage properties, while the hours were consumed in long waits for the changes, interspersed with selections and posing. Imagine an entire stage setting for the three minutes of Brete Harte's Entertaining Her Big Sister's Beau! The audience, naturally, was bewildered to see a child talking to a young The stilted, unnatural in dumb show. man, sitting at a table was made more evident, and was much less the of poem language woman clear trained in "elocution" by such realistic treatment. audience because there were two Another selection mystified the scenes in the story and only one |
