The Essential Theatre, Essay Example

Describe the history of theaters from Ancient Greece to the 20th century. Describe the locations, the types of stages, scenery, lighting, and general architecture. Explain why theaters developed as they did.

The Ancient Greece theatre is a culture of theatrical nature that developed in ancient Greece between 550 and 220 BC (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 21). In the start Greece theaters in ancient times were normally rebuilt and modified, the existing theatre remains offer very small clear nature evidence of the dramatic/theatrical space exist to the Classical dramatists in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries B.C. There is no substantial evidence for a rounded orchestra before than that of the great theater at Epidauros dated to approximately in 330 B.C (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 31). Almost certainly, the audience from onward to sixth and seventh century B.C. Athens was seated near to the stage in an arrangement of rectilinear nature, for instance appears at the well-settled theater at Thorikos in Attica. During this period in period and onward, the whole stage and perhaps the skene i.e. the building of stage building were made purely with wood. The paintings of vase representing Greek comedy from the late seventh, eighth and early ninth centuries B.C. propose that the stage positioned approximately a three feet high with a flight of ladders in the center (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 57-58). The actors and actresses entered from any side and from a middle door in the skene that also accommodated the ekkyklema, a platform of wheeled nature and with sets of scenes (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 93). A crane or mechane, situated at the exact right ending of the stage, was employed to hoist heroes and gods all through the air on the top of the stage. In 10^th and 11^th century Greek theatres obviously made the many of the tremendous contrasts among the actors on stage and gods up high, and among the dazzling daylight and the dark interior of the stage building (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 103). The theatre of Ancient Greece developed with religious rites that date back to at least 12^th century (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 136). In this time, Greece was grouped by tribes that they in their superiority might label primitive. However this continues to 18^th century (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 156). It has been noted that the first astonishing show in 1882 heralded one of the most astonishing developments in the theatre of modern western (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 176). Since the start of 20th century, ancient Greece tragedy plays have turned out as part of the culture of all modern theatres and since the 1960s the most remarkable changes in performances of Greek tragedy across the world occur (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 178). Today the Greece theaters consisted on orchestra essentially, the flat and smooth dancing floor of the chorus, and the theatron which is the real structure of the theater building.

Compare Romanticism to Modernism using specific examples. How did the general goals of these movements differ? What changes were made in the theater to accommodate these goals?

Romanticism is a complicated literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that started in Western Europe in the 2^nd half of the 18th century, and obtained potential in response to the Industrial Revolution (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 219). It was somewhat a revolution against aristocratic political and social standards of the Enlightenment Age and a response alongside the scientific nature rationalization, and was personified most powerfully in the music, visual arts, and literature. (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 243)

Whereas the Modernism, in its broadest explanation, is modern character, thought, or practice. More particularly, the term explains both an arrangement of connected cultural movements and a collection of cultural tendencies, initially developing from far-reaching and wide-scale changes to the society of Western area in the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 256). The term modernism involves the output and activities of those who realized the conventional types of architecture, art, literature, religious beliefs, social organization and everyday life were turning out as outdated in the new social, economic and political situations of a developing completely industrialized world. (Brockett and Ball, 2009, pg. 283)

Work Cited

Brockett, Oscar G. and Ball, Robert J. The Essential Theatre, 10th Edition. New York: Wadsworth Publishing, 2009, pp. 459.