Sekilas tentang Drama dan Perkembangannya
Drama adalah karya sastra yang ditulis untuk dipentaskan. Orang seringkali bingung membedakan antara drama, yang berkaitan dengan teks tertulis, atau naskah, atau script, untuk pementasan, dengan teater, yang menyangkut pementasan naskah drama atau script tersebut. Banyak sekali karya sastra terkenal, berpengaruh besar, serta bergengsi, ditulis dalam bentuk drama. Mulai dari tragedi-tragedi Yunani tentang Aeschylus, Sopochles, dan Euripides dan berkembang terus hingga drama-drama besar karya William Shakespeare dari Inggris, Moliere dari Perancis, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe dari Jerman, Henrik Ibsen dari Norwegia, dan August Strindberg dari Swedia. Di Barat, penghargaan terhadap drama begitu tinggi. Dalam perkembangannya drama semakin mendapat tempat karena naskah-naskah tidak lagi hanya dipentaskan di panggung seperti Broadway, tetapi juga diangkat ke layar kaca atau layar lebar. Dengan semakin canggihnya perfilman, para penulis drama atau script film mendapat penghargaan yang tinggi pula karena sehebat apapun sebuah film, pada mulanya dia adalah sebuah screenplay atau script yang digarap sedemikian rupa oleh seorang sutradara beserta seluruh crew pembuat film (film maker). Jadi sebuah film dibuat oleh banyak orang, mulai dari penulis naskah dramanya (script writer), produser, sutradara, kameraman, hingga sopir yang membantu team pergi syuting ke sana kemari.
Ciri-ciri Drama
Kebanyakan karya sastra, termasuk novel, cerpen, puisi, sengaja ditulis untuk disuguhkan sebagai bacaan, baik untuk dibaca dalam hati maupun sambil menyendiri. Meskipun drama bisa juga dibaca dengan cara seperti itu, namun pada dasarnya drama ditulis untuk dipentaskan di hadapan pemirsa atau di hadapan umum oleh sekelompok pemain yang masing-masing berpura-pura menjadi salah satu tokoh yang ada dalam cerita drama itu. Drama-drama yang lebih kuno lagi, misalnya yang ditulis oleh sastrawan-sastrawan Yunani atau oleh William Shakespeare, berisi kata-kata yang diucapkan oleh para pemerannya itu, yang biasa kita kenal sebagai dialog (dialogue). Drama-drama yang lebih modern atau kontemporer tidak hanya berisi materi yang harus diucapkan saja tapi juga menyertakan stage directions yang memberi tahu para aktor dan aktrisnya kapan mereka musti memasuki atau meninggalkan ruang pementasan atau panggung. Drama modern juga memberi saran-saran atau anjuran bagaimana sebaiknya dialog atau baris-barisnya diucapkan, dan menjelaskan kostum apa yang mesti dikenakan serta keadaan lingkungan sekitar (setting) seperti apa yang sebaiknya mendukung drama itu.
Filsuf Yunani terkenal, Aristoteles, yang meletakkan dasar kritik atau studi drama, mengungkapkan teori bahwa drama terdiri atas beberapa elemen dasar berupa plot atau alur, karakter, pikiran, bahasa, dan spektakel. Aristotle menganggap plot—cerita pokok dan bagaimana menceritakannya—adalah elemen yang paling penting diantara elemen-elemen lainnya itu, dan biasanya memang demikian. Meski begitu, bisa dikata, sampai tahap tertentu, hampir semua drama menggunakan elemen-elemen lainnya juga, dan mengungkapkan cerita dengan cara menginteraksikan para tokohnya, yang mengekspresikan pikiran melalui medium bahasa dalam setting visual yang khusus. Bagaimanapun, keseimbangan atau keserasian paduan elemen-elemen tersebut sangat bervariasi tergantung drama macam apa yang diinginkan. Selama beberapa periode dan dalam beberapa tradisi, banyak atau kebanyakan drama menekankan pada elemen lain kecuali plot. Ada beberapa drama yang memfokuskan karakater tertentu atau hubungan antara tokoh-tokoh tertentu, misalnya drama Shakespeare yang berjudul Hamlet (1601?). Drama-drama seperti itu bisa begitu populer karena para pemirsa atau audiens-nya selalu penasaran dan tertarik melihat aktor-aktor atau aktris-aktris favorit mereka menginterpretasikan peran yang begitu penting dan sulit.
Teater Barat juga sudah lama memiliki tradisi menekankan pada pemikiran atau thought. Drama-drama seperti itu kadang memperlakukan tema tertentu dengan sangat khusus dan sering disebut drama filosofis atau thesis plays. Beberapa penulis besar drama modern yang menekankan pada tema atau pemikiran tertentu antara lain George Bernard Shaw dari Inggris atau Ibsen, yang mengetengahkan masalah-masalah sosial pada jamannya, dan Bertolt Brecht dari Jerman, yang drama-dramanya mengkritik Kapitalisme dan membujuk audiens memihak pandangan politiknya yang berbau "kiri" itu.
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Poetry is special and has a special power. The supernatural “force of the word’ (called Logos) is said to be inherent in poetry. Ages ago poetry was used for religious ceremonies because it was considered magical. And poetry is magical—it is outside our everyday consciousness of life; it excites an absoultely unique awareness and experience.
When someone says, “I don’t undestand poetry,” usually this means he has found that poems don’t present facts, don’t serve up information the way magazine article does, for instance. He has tried to read poetry as if it were like a conversation or expository writing. The problem is that poetry isn’t trying to explain events, ideas, feelings, or perception in a form or logic we we’re used to. Poetry is not explaining experience. It is a state of experiencing. Somehow great poetry has the force to go beyond our feelings or ideas, and even if we disagree with the content or find the sentiments alien, we can still discover a “sense of rightness, or truth” in a poem. We might find someone offensive personally or politically, but if he writes a poem that works, we forget the man and are moved by the experience. This poetry’s magic. It takes us beyond ourselves, beyond our everyday limitations, or perhaps, in another sense, into ourselves.
But poetry baffles the reasonable mind. We wonder, “How can I tell when it simply means what it says?” or “Why do these poets say one thing and mean something else? Why don’t they just say it directly?”
Reading poetry requires a trained, a special state of mind that our daily experience with thought and language don’t demand. Poetic language cannot be understood in the same way that ordinary language is understood. To try to understand it in those terms would be frustating. The words are ordinary words, but something happens to them in a poem, transform them, and that is what we want to understand.
We could try to do it by looking separately at all the techniques that generations of scholars and critics have painstakingly identified as “poetic” (rhyme, meter, verse form, figurative language) and then obeserving how some poems have this but don’t have that, have more of this than that, and so on. To a certain extent, we may have to do this, but if we break poetry up too much in order to see it, we may intensify our difficulty because the poem’s magic lies in its wholeness, its complete effect on us. Is there some way to unify our poetry the way we can learn to think in music or in a foreign language? In this we’re asking a fundamental question: Why read poetry at all? And perhaps we’ll discover that we experience poetry that the question answers itself.
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Analisa Puisi
Poetry is special and has a special power. The supernatural “force of the word’ (called Logos) is said to be inherent in poetry. Ages ago poetry was used for religious ceremonies because it was considered magical. And poetry is magical—it is outside our everyday consciousness of life; it excites an absoultely unique awareness and experience.
When someone says, “I don’t undestand poetry,” usually this means he has found that poems don’t present facts, don’t serve up information the way magazine article does, for instance. He has tried to read poetry as if it were like a conversation or expository writing. The problem is that poetry isn’t trying to explain events, ideas, feelings, or perception in a form or logic we we’re used to. Poetry is not explaining experience. It is a state of experiencing. Somehow great poetry has the force to go beyond our feelings or ideas, and even if we disagree with the content or find the sentiments alien, we can still discover a “sense of rightness, or truth” in a poem. We might find someone offensive personally or politically, but if he writes a poem that works, we forget the man and are moved by the experience. This poetry’s magic. It takes us beyond ourselves, beyond our everyday limitations, or perhaps, in another sense, into ourselves.
But poetry baffles the reasonable mind. We wonder, “How can I tell when it simply means what it says?” or “Why do these poets say one thing and mean something else? Why don’t they just say it directly?”
Reading poetry requires a trained, a special state of mind that our daily experience with thought and language don’t demand. Poetic language cannot be understood in the same way that ordinary language is understood. To try to understand it in those terms would be frustating. The words are ordinary words, but something happens to them in a poem, transform them, and that is what we want to understand.
We could try to do it by looking separately at all the techniques that generations of scholars and critics have painstakingly identified as “poetic” (rhyme, meter, verse form, figurative language) and then obeserving how some poems have this but don’t have that, have more of this than that, and so on. To a certain extent, we may have to do this, but if we break poetry up too much in order to see it, we may intensify our difficulty because the poem’s magic lies in its wholeness, its complete effect on us. Is there some way to unify our poetry the way we can learn to think in music or in a foreign language? In this we’re asking a fundamental question: Why read poetry at all? And perhaps we’ll discover that we experience poetry that the question answers itself.
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