THE STRUCTURE OF THE DRAMATIC DISCOURSE AND ITS RELATION TO MEMORY IN AMALIA TAKES A DEEP BREATH BY ALINA NELEGA
RRSS 2015 No. 8 - Romanian Review of Social Sciences
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Authors:
• Caraiman Carmen Daniela -
Keywords: post-communist Romanian feminine drama, the translation of memory through and into drama and theatre, stage-audience communication, monologue, author-reader communication
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Abstract:
The present paper aims at identifying the dramatic instruments which Alina Nelega used in her best known play – “Amalia Takes a Deep Breath” – in order to make her artistic message heard and discovered by the Romanian and foreign theatre audience.
\r\nWe have approached Alina Nelega’s play through a semiotic perspective, conceiving it as a set of signs and codes that may be identified both at literary level (the play seen as a dramatic text) and at the level of stage representation (the play seen as stage-acting), with the result that the reader and the theatre amateur are invited to interpret them in accordance with his/her horizon of expectation.
\r\nOn a first level of interpretation, we have analysed the structure of the dramatic discourse: the succession of episodes that compose the play, the dramatic tension created within them, the use of rhetorical instruments and the theatrical dimension which the text reveals through its ‘openness’ towards the audience.
\r\nOn a secondary level, we appreciate that the play illustrates one of the main features of drama and theatre: its capacity ‘to translate’ individual memory by making it audible to the others (including to other generations and geographical areas) with the result that it becomes known and (re)interpreted and finally accepted as a collective experience about that community’s own past. In our opinion, this is the most important message which Alina Nelega’s play tries to express - respectively that Amalia’s dramatic destiny (destroyed by the oppressive totalitarian factors of the communist regime) is an active remembering about the collective experience of our people who experienced totalitarism and a matter that comes to justify the identity issues with which the Romanian society is confronting today.
\r\nHowever, ‘Amalia Takes a Deep Breath’ is not a lesson about the past, it is not a text that is meant to teach, but rather an attempt to awaken the others’ awareness as regards collective memory and an attempt to cure historical traumas through art.
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