Creativity

What is atmosphere or mood?

What is the emotional affect of the product on the audience? How does it make the audience feel?

In what way does the product tap into cultural myths, symbols, or archetypes?

How does the product offer enlightenment or meaning?

How does the product artistically tie to the rest of the production?

What is Atmosphere or Mood?

To create atmosphere or mood means that the audience engages in emotional and intellectual activity when confronting the relationship between mise-en-scène and dramatic action at a particular moment in time.

Let's break this down.

Emotional activity means that the patron feels something.

Intellectual activity means that something is meaningful to the patron, that the patron understands something.

What the patron is actually seeing and hearing is the mise-en-scène. Mise-en-scène is the physical (both sight and sound) surroundings and includes the space relationships defined by the theatre architecture and all of the design and technical elements. It also includes where the actor is in the performance space and the actor's physical and vocal expression. Mise-en-scène is the totality, the whole, of all of these parts.

Dramatic action is what connects the drama to the audience. For lack of a better way to write this, it is the action of a thread moving outward from the human soul of the actor portraying a character and connecting to the human soul of the audience member. When exploring dramatic action, the theatre artist looks at dialogue and its subtext as a kind of action, characterization, themes, plot structure, motivation, character objectives, relationships between characters, movement of the actors, rhythm, pace, and directing style. Dramatic action as connecting thread is the whole of all of these parts. Its focal point is the character as portrayed by the actor.

And, finally, because theatre is contextual and active, the atmosphere or mood changes from moment to moment.

To create atmosphere or mood, the mise-en-scène must closely relate to the dramatic action. It needs to be so close, that the mise-en-scène becomes one with dramatic action. When it's right, when all elements of both mise-en-scène and dramatic action are excellent, they catalyst one another; and when they mix, a transformation can take place. It is that transformation that creates an emotional and meaningful experience for the audience.