Word: proscenium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Working in a profession that puts a premium on action shots, photojournalists have long turned out scenes with the same laissez-faire approach to composition. But in general, the exemplary pictures of the . camera-reporting tradition have bowed to pictorial convention, treating the edges of the frame like a proscenium arch around a quickly readable image. Anyone who doubts that this time-honored method can still be affecting need only look to David Burnett's elegant and straightforward pictures of minor league baseball. But Burnett is the odd man out in this show, where the prevailing tone is more hectic...
...birds, for instance, or a garland of branches - shoot up around the landscapes of Alan Herman. More established figures are also working in the same vein. Howard Hodgkin, whose canny strokes of pigment hint at enclosed views, sweeps paint across the frame to twit its pretensions as the final proscenium...
...from costumes and lights might have made this scene bearable as it is the silliness of the situation is heightened by frumpy shrouds and light too bright to allow for any sense of mystery. The set too hampers the actors efforts by staging the scene on a second recessed proscenium, the director removes the actors even further from the audience Moments like this sport the second act, which could and should be both powerful and horrifying...
...stage is set for fantasy--literally. It is transformed into a larger-than-life garbage dump, full of oversized bicycle wheels and car tires, discarded beer bottles and cereal boxes. All of it spills over the proscenium and into the loge boxes; lights strung across the theater also contribute to the colorful chaos...
There was a time when the deathbed was a kind of proscenium, from which the personage could issue one last dramatic utterance, full of the compacted significance of his life. Last words were to sound as if all of the individual's earthly time had been sharpened to that point: he could now etch the grand summation. "More light!" the great Goethe of the Enlightenment is said to have cried as he expired. There is some opinion, however, that what he actually said was "Little wife, give me your little...