Remember
• Theater is the foundation art of all drama
• Theater creates a relationship between performer and audience
• Live
• Personal
• Immediate (unmediated)
• Theater teaches “timeless observations about the human condition”
• Commonalities & Differences
•Theatre approximates experiential knowledge to elicit empathy.
•Elements of Theater: Audience, Dramatic Action Embodied in a
Script, Performers, Director, Theater Space, & Design Elements.
Theatre is
collaborative
Theatre’s Origins
Children’s Play
Storytelling
Ritual
Ancient Greece – 5th Century BCE
 Polytheistic
 Artistic
 Increasingly
commercial & literate
 Democratic
– Demes
– Tribes
 Misogyny
City Dionysia
 Celebration of Dionysus
 Three Trilogies produced, each with a Satyr
play afterward
Theatron
Skene
Parados
Orchestra
Mechane
Ekkyklema
City Dionysia
 Actors wore masks – played several parts
 Chorus (audience’s representative on stage)
danced in orchestra
 Aulis was a double reeded flute that was
played
 Audience knew stories
Know the difference between Story and Plot
City Dionysia
 3 main tragedians – Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides
 Comedy came later
 Old Comedy was satirical in nature –
Aristophanes - added parabasis
 New Comedy romantic and domestic farce
 Aristotle’s poetics 335 BCE - 6 elements
– Plot, Character, Theme, Language, Music,
Spectacle