The Art of Producing Pageants

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Walter H. Baker Company, 1925 - Pageants - 269 pages

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Page 2 - It is the representation of the history of a town, in dramatic form, from the earliest period to some later point, forming a fitting climax. This is set forth in verse and prose of the most direct sort, and is embellished with choruses, songs, dances, marches, and every legitimate spectacular adjunct. It is acted in some beautiful and historical spot, which is left without any artificial embellishment whatever. It is acted by the citizens of the town themselves, their wives, their children and their...
Page 2 - Pageantry," says Professor Baker, " seems likely to be for us [in America] a combination of the Chronicle-Play and the Morality, a free dramatic form which teaches, though not abstractly, by stimulating local pride for that in the past which makes the best incentive to future civic endeavor and accomplishment. Already in the communities where it has been tried, it has quickened patriotism, strengthened civic pride, and stimulated or revealed latent artistic powers.
Page 2 - ... choruses, songs, dances, marches, and every legitimate spectacular adjunct. It is acted in some beautiful and historical spot, which is left without any artificial embellishment whatever. It is acted by the citizens of the town themselves, their wives, their children and their friends .. . . It is acted in a spirit of simplicity and reverence, and the audience must bring the same spirit in watching its progress. It is not a stage play. It is a lofty and dignified panorama of the town's history.
Page 39 - Allegory is a figurative representation conveying a meaning other than, and in addition to, the literal.
Page 3 - A pageant is a part of the great Festival of Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the past glory of a city and for its present prosperity. Such an interpretation removes the whole thing at once to a high plane and out of the atmosphere of the mere spectacular entertainment. The actual pageant should be — in the case of my pageants it always has been — opened and closed by great commemorative services on the previous and concluding Sundays in all the places of worship.
Page 127 - Those desirous of pursuing the subject of composition in detail will find in the books listed in the Bibliography at the end of this volume all the main ' rules
Page 5 - ... highly suggestive, and a sentence or two taken from it, and herein quoted, should be so memorized and practised by the pageant author or producer that it becomes an instinctive ideal constantly making an impress upon the finished work. These are the sentences : " Synchronous with every speech should occur in production effects of pantomime, lighting, music, and movement, with due proportion and emphasis. (The pageant should be) not a structure simply of written words, but a structure really of...
Page 85 - ... us, they somehow do not seem to come out, as it were. They are not understood. There is something beneath that we cannot get hold of. The artist eludes us. So we make up wild things of our own, with whoops and leaps. And the louder we whoop up and the higher we leap, the more the audience likes us.
Page 2 - ... history of a town, in dramatic form, from the earliest period to some later point, forming a fitting climax. This is set forth in verse and prose of the most direct sort, and is embellished with choruses, songs, dances, marches, and every legitimate spectacular adjunct. It is acted in some beautiful and historical spot, which is left without any artificial embellishment whatever. It is acted by the citizens of the town themselves, their wives, their children and their friends .. . . It is...
Page 120 - In the thirteenth century it was the custom on Christmas Eve to have a threefold vesting: first of black, to signify the time before the declaration of the law to Moses ; on the removal of this, white, to indicate the days of prophecy ; and then red, to symbolise the love and charity to mankind that the coming of the Christ brought into the world.

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