andrewlawrenceking.com - Andrew Lawrence-King | Text, Rhythm, Action! (Historically Informed Performance) & The Flow.Zone

Description: Text, Rhythm, Action! (Historically Informed Performance) & The Flow.Zone

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The ‘enargetic’ approach to the arts may be described as rhetoric of presence and display, or aesthetics of evidence and imagination. Visual imagination plays a major role in the concepts of effect in oratory, poetry, and drama of … the Early Modern Age, above all in the works of William Shakespeare.

Enargeia (Greek εναργεια, in Latin evidentia , in 17th-century English visions ) is one of many artistic and performance concepts taken into 17th-century aesthetics from Classical Antiquity. It is of fundamental importance in the performing arts, but there has so far been almost no attempt to study its historical meaning in order to shape a modern approach to the practicalities in performance in Early Music and period drama.

As a literary device, Enargeia seeks to heighten emotional effect by intense, richly detailed visual description, so that the listener sees what is described, as if it is there, before their own eyes. Perhaps the best-known examples are Shakespeare’s detailed descriptions of imagined scenes, performed on the bare stage of the Globe Theatre. Enargetic writing is often introduced by the cernas (you see) formula – Behold! Ecce ! Siehe ! Ecco ! – or by deictics – Here! There!

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