QUOTE(robertngo @ Sep 17 2010, 03:42 PM)
it is not the same, to proof the sorcery exists you just need to demonstrate a single act that can be duplicated, to proof it does not exists you will have to prove everywhere in the world, every single claim of sorcery is false.
it is like in court case where
presumption of innocence mean the prosecution can not make argument like "You can’t prove that the defendant didn’t commit the crime" as the basis for his case. he need to present evidence that show the defendant have indeed commit the crime.
it depends on which part of the world you are in. Under
British law a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty but under
French law
a person is guilty until proven innocent.
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n/b: this may not be sorcery but like sorcery there are detractors that this sort of thing doesn't exist. it makes for good reading anyway so enjoy.
QUOTE
Ghosts and corpses
2010/03/20
U-EN NG
uen-nst@gmail.com
Believe it or not, resident spirits do roam our theatre venues. U-EN NG talks about his ghostly encounters
MOST theatres have a ghost, and some have more than one. It is difficult to say precisely why this is so — dissatisfied customers, possibly, or maybe the veil separating this world from the other is thinner in places where illusions are frequently made.
Over the centuries theatre managers have seen fit to set “ghost lights” in the middle of the stage during dark nights (such as when the theatre is closed) to let resident spirits put on their own shows or to chase away malevolent remnants of past performances, and in the age before electricity the use of bare candles for this purpose was one of the main reasons why so many theatres burnt down.
The more prosaic dismiss this as mere superstition: ghost lights prevent technicians walking into sets or falling off the stage into the orchestra pit, thereby resulting in personal injury and the sudden manifestation of other frightening entities, to wit, lawyers — but sometimes reason can be a poor mirror to an uncanny reality.
At one of the major Kuala Lumpur venues some years ago, the ensemble of a large musical (sadly, mine) were subject to an inexplicable attack of nosebleeds that stopped after the stage manager discovered an unsettling “young woman” sitting on the electrical console during the show.
On another occasion, while escaping hostile critics displeased with another of my shows, I sneaked into the stairwell by The Actors Studio in Bangsar, only to be lectured to by disembodied whispering. I could not make out what the voice was saying, but gathered that it had to do with my reliance on violence to drive the plot — in any case this was what the critics had a problem with.
On still another occasion, a stage manager watching the monitor during a mixed media production (equal parts film and live theatre) saw me drag across the stage a “corpse” wrapped in a sheet (that is, another actor pretending to be a corpse in a sheet) — when in fact this happened five minutes previously.
Other people have other stories, most of them involving locked dressing-room doors becoming unlocked, or vice-versa; lights going on or off for no apparent reason; sound equipment acting up despite not being plugged in to begin with; and at least one instance of costumes crawling on the ceiling.
There is another kind of corpse, however, that appears very frequently on stage: the term “corpsing” applies to the action of an actor at the moment of distraction: a line is forgotten or one is assailed by crazy-laughter — whatever the cause, the character disappears and the illusion of the stage is broken.
Corpsing really happens only when it is bad enough that the audience notices, as, for example, if Sir Ian McKellen playing Titus Andronicus is unaccountably amused by someone’s phone going off and thereby ceases to be Titus and starts being Ian McKellen, or Gandalf, or Magneto.
However terrifying it might be for the corpse, it is generally very amusing for everyone else: an actor needs to think very quickly to get him or herself out of the problem in a timely and acceptable fashion, with the illusion intact, and this requires a great exercise of wit under pressure.
Sometimes people invent lines on the spot, which is not difficult to do if the play is a modern one. Harold Pinter, for example, was famous for inserting long “pregnant” pauses in his lines that one may exploit with ease; and Samuel Beckett’s lines were so notoriously dense that you can get away with making it up if you know his vocabulary well enough.
It all becomes funnier, however, when one has to do it with Shakespeare or some other ancient dramatist — Sir Peter Ustinov, for example, once famously extemporised Sheridan at length to help a fellow actor who had gone off the rails — but mostly we get away with short-term mumbling, a melodramatic hand to the forehead, or a convincing fumble.
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U-En Ng is a former parliamentary correspondent and leader-writer. He has dallied with theatre for some time in an effort to prove that you can make a fool of yourself in more ways than one.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- Arthur C. ClarkeThis post has been edited by wongpeter: Sep 18 2010, 01:47 AM