Theater

The actress Sarah Bernhardt like Hamlet in 1899.

The theatre (from the Greek: θέατρον, théatron or «place to behold» derived from θεάομαι, theáomai or "look") is the branch of performing arts related to acting. Represents stories acted out in front of spectators or in front of a camera using a combination of speech, gestures, scenery, music, sound, and spectacle.

"Theatre" is also understood as the literary genre that includes plays performed before an audience or to be recorded and reproduced in the cinema, as well as the building where said plays or recordings are traditionally presented. In addition to the common narrative, dialogue style, theater also takes other forms such as opera, ballet, film, Chinese opera, or pantomime.

World Theater Day has been celebrated since 1961. Specifically, this date is celebrated on March 27 of each year, defined by the International Theater Institute, a reason to show what theater represents worldwide for culture.

Historical approach

Most studies consider that the origins of theater should be found in the evolution of magical rituals related to hunting, like cave paintings or agricultural gathering that, after the introduction of music and dance, they engaged in authentic dramatic ceremonies where the gods were worshiped and the spiritual principles of the community were expressed. This character of sacred manifestation is a common factor in the appearance of theater in all civilizations.

Ancient Egypt

In Ancient Egypt, in the middle of the second millennium before the Christian age, dramas about the death and resurrection of Osiris were already represented. The theater begins by means of masks and dramatizations with them and testimonies of actors have been found explaining that they made trips, so according to the researchers Driotton and Vandier it is possible that groups of traveling comics existed since the Middle Kingdom.

I accompanied my master on his tours, without failing in the declamation. I gave him the replica in all his parliaments. If he was a god, I was sovereign. If he killed, I was raised.

Greece

Teatro de Epidauro

The Greek theatre in Taormina, Sicily

The roots of the theater of ancient Greece are based on the Orphic rites and on the festivals celebrated for Dionysus, where the staging of the life of the gods was carried out accompanied by dances and songs (Dithyrambs). Later, the first properly dramatic performances began, performed in town squares by companies that included only one actor and a choir. At the end of the VI century a. C., the legendary poet and performer Thespis achieved extraordinary celebrity, in whose honor the phrase the chariot of Thespis alludes, even today, to the entire world of theater.

Greek theater arose after the evolution of Greek arts and ceremonies such as the grape harvest festival (offered to Dionysus) where young people went dancing and singing to the temple of the god, to offer him the best lives. Later, a young man who stood out among the group of young people became the choirmaster or choirmaster, who directed the group. Over time the bard and the rhapsode appeared, who were reciters.

Over the course of the century V a. C., during the classical age of Greece, the traditional models of tragedy and comedy were established, and the playwrights Aeschylus and Sophocles respectively added a second and third actor to the action, which gave it a complexity that made it necessary to creating bigger scenes. For this purpose, large stone theaters were erected, including the one still preserved in Epidaurus in the V century BC. C., capable of holding about 12,000 people, and that of Dionysus, in Athens, in the IV century B.C. c.

Sophocles

Its construction was carried out by taking advantage of the slopes of a hill, where the stands that surrounded the orquestra were arranged in a semicircle, a circular space in which most of the performance took place. Behind the orquestra stood a building called skené, scene, intended for the actors to change their clothing. In front of her rose a columned wall, the proscenium, which could support painted surfaces evoking the scene of the action. These sets, together with the robes and masks used by the actors and machines, constituted the entire scenic apparatus.

The representations of the Greek theater were made in the open air, it had a choir (directed by the Corypheus or choirmaster) who sang and danced around an altar. In the Greek theater two types of works were represented: tragedy, a dramatic work with an unfortunate ending that dealt with themes of heroic legends and used, opportunely, the gods for its ending; and the satirical comedy, which humorously criticized politicians and works and incurred mimicry initiated by a chorus of satyrs, and comedies that had everyday life issues as their theme; they were all written in verse and used masks.

Rome

Roman theaters inherited the fundamental features of the Greek ones, although they introduced certain distinctive elements. Initially built in wood, only in the year 52 a. C. Pompeyo, erected in Rome the first in stone. Unlike their Hellenic models, they stood on a flat ground and had several floors erected in masonry. In order to improve the acoustics, Roman architects reduced the orchestra to a semicircle, and the performances were presented on a platform, the pulpitum, raised in front of the ancient skene which It constitutes the origin of the modern scenarios. The frons scaenae was a monumental façade with several floors, which served as a backdrop. The stands (cávea) are divided into 3 parts: Ima, media and suma , the first being located on the lower zone where the senators and the ruling class sat; women and slaves being settled in the upper one and the common people in the middle. The whole could be covered with a velum. Rome also opted for comedy, since they took the theater as a way to have fun or entertain themselves.

America

In pre-Hispanic American cultures, theater reached a remarkable development, particularly among the Mayans. One of the most representative works of Mayan theater is the Quiché drama Rabinal Achí. The Mayan theater was partially linked to the agricultural cycles and the epic of its historical events, and among the Aztecs and Incas, societies that in correspondence with their theocratic structure gave their theatrical activities an eminently warrior and religious nuance. The latest deposits indicate that the Mayan theater spaces could be used, in addition to representing works, to show dramatized political acts such as negotiations, alliances and humiliation of captives.

European Middle Ages

After centuries of mysterious oblivion, the recovery of theater in the West had the main support of the clergy, who used it for religious purposes. Thus, from the XI century, the representation in the churches of mysteries and moralities, whose objective was to present Christian doctrine in a simple way to the faithful. In order to facilitate understanding, Latin gradually gave way to vernacular languages, and in the 13th and centuries ="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">XIV, both religious plays and flourishing profane farces began to be performed.

Renaissance

The emergence of the Renaissance in Italy had decisive consequences on the evolution of the theater, since, as a dramatic production of a cultured nature emerged, inspired by classical models and destined for the aristocratic classes, it became generalized in the course of the century XVI the construction of covered rooms equipped with greater comforts.

Theater in Italy

The Olimpico in Vicenza, designed by Andrea Palladio and completed in 1585, was often cited as the first of the modern theaters. It was a version of the Roman models and presented, at the back of the stage, a three-dimensional perspective with urban views. The classic model of the Italian theater, current in many aspects, was nevertheless the Farnese theater in Parma, erected in 1618, whose structure included the stage, framed by a proscenium arch and separated from the public by a curtain, and an audience in the shape of a horseshoe surrounded by several floors of galleries. During this time a form of popular theater, the commedia del arte, also developed in Italy, which with its emphasis on the actor's freedom of improvisation gave a great advance to acting technique.

England: Elizabethan Theatre

William Shakespeare.

The theaters erected in England during the reign of Elizabeth I of England were very different from each other. This period stands out for the exceptional splendor of the dramatic genre, among which stood out the London The Globe where he presented the works of William Shakespeare. Roofless and built of wood, its most characteristic feature was the raised rectangular stage, around which the audience surrounded the actors on three sides, while the galleries were reserved for the nobility.

Spain: the corrals of comedies

In Spain, and at the same time as the Elizabethan theater in England (XVI and XVII), fixed installations for the open-air theater called Corrales de Comedias were created, with which they bear constructive similarities. Unlike the English case, in Spain some examples of these buildings have survived. Exponents of this period are the authors Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca, clear exponents of the important Spanish Golden Age.

Zaguán del Teatro Quintero de Sevilla. March 2017

Baroque and Neoclassicism

The Comédie-Française in the centuryXVIII.

The course of the XVII and XVIII gave rise to a great enrichment of the scenery. The recovery by the classical French drama of the rule of the three units —action, time and place— made the simultaneity of sets unnecessary, with which only one was used in each act, and soon the custom of changing them at different times became general. intermissions. Subsequently, the growing popularity of the opera, which required several stagings, favored the development of improved machines that gave a greater appearance of truth to effects such as: the disappearance of actors and the simulation of flights —the so-called "glories" For example, they made it possible for a cloud carrying the singers to descend from the heights of the stage. The La Scala theater in Milan, completed in 1778, is an example of the large dimensions that were necessary to house both the public and the stage equipment and stage equipment.

Modern Theater

For most of the XIX century, architectural and scenographic ideas remained essentially unchanged, although the demands of creative freedom initiated by the romantic authors led at the end of the century to a general rethinking of dramatic art in its various aspects.

In this sense, the construction of the monumental Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany, erected in 1876 according to the instructions of the composer Richard Wagner, was fundamental, which constituted the first break with respect to Italian models. Its fan-shaped design, with the staggered stalls, the darkening of the auditorium during its performance and the location of the orchestra in a small pit; they were elements conceived to focus the attention of the spectators on the action and to abolish as much as possible the separation between stage and public.

This demand for integration between the architectural framework, the scenery and the representation was accentuated in the last decades of the XIX century and early 20th century due to the growing importance given to the figure of the director thanks to personalities such as the German Max Reinhardt, author of spectacular productions, the French André Antoine, champion of naturalism, the Russian Konstantín Stanislavski, director and actor whose method of interpretation would exercise great influence on modern theater, or the British set designer Edward Gordon Craig, who in his defense of a poetic and stylized theater advocated the creation of simpler and more ductile sets.

The appearance of modern theater, then, was characterized by its absolute freedom of approach through dialogue with traditional forms and new technical possibilities would give rise to a unique transformation of theatrical art. In the field of architectural and set design, the greatest innovations were due to the development of new machinery and the rise of the art of lighting, circumstances that allowed the creation of scenes with greater plasticity (circular, mobile, transformable, etc.) and they freed the theater from the pictorial appearance provided by the classical structure of the proscenium arch.

Africa

African theatre, between tradition and history, is currently taking new paths. Everything predisposes in Africa to the theater. The sense of rhythm and mime, the fondness for words and verbiage are qualities that all Africans share to a greater or lesser extent and that make them born actors. The daily life of Africans takes place to the rhythm of various ceremonies, rituals or religious, generally conceived and lived as true shows. However, although Africa has always known this type of ceremonies, it is worth asking if it was really theater; in the eyes of many, these shows are too loaded with religious significance to be considered as such. Others consider that the types of African theater bear a certain resemblance, as in other times the Greek tragedy, with a pre-theater that would never fully become theater if it is not desacralized. The strength and chances of survival of the black theater will reside, therefore, in its ability to preserve its specificity. In independent Africa a new theater is taking shape.

• New Theatre: It is a committed, even militant theater, designed to defend the identity of a people who have achieved their independence.
• Vanguard Theatre: It is currently directed towards an investigation into the role of actor, close to that of Jerzy Grotowski and his lab theatre. Thus, in Libreville, Gabon, an avant-garde theatre was formed in 1970 and performed two shows that left a lasting mark on the young generations of comedians. Another way of research is the silent theatre, created by François Rosira, whose purpose was to perform shows in which singing, reciting, music and dancing are complemented in the theater in perfect harmony.

Types of theater

Drama

Drama should be considered to be a mode of fiction represented in a play, not a genre in its own right. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action", which derives from from the verb δράω, dráō, "to do" or "act". The staging of a drama in the theater, performed by actors on a stage in front of an audience, presupposes the adoption of collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. Unlike other forms of literature, the dramatic structure of the texts is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception. Shakespeare's early modern tragedy Hamlet (1601) and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BC) by Sophocles are some of the best works of dramatic art. A modern example would be Long Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill (1956).

The dramatic mode has been considered a genre of poetry, and has been contrasted with the epic and lyrical modes beginning with Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BC), the oldest work on dramatic theory. The use of the word "drama" in a strict sense it is used to refer to a specific type of play from the 19th century. In this sense, drama refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy, for example, the play Thérèse Raquin (1873) by Émile Zola or the play Ivanov (1887) by Chekhov. In ancient Greece, however, the word drama encompassed all types of plays, tragedies, comedies, and other forms in between.

Often the drama is combined with elements of music and dance: usually in opera the entire text of the drama is sung; musicals for their part usually contain both spoken dialogue and songs; and some forms of drama include incidental music or a musical accompaniment that accompanies and reinforces the dialogue (for example melodrama and Japanese Nō). In certain historical periods (Ancient Rome and modern Romanticism) some dramas were written to be read. instead of being staged. In improvisation, the drama does not exist prior to the moment of the work; the actors create and develop a dramatic plot spontaneously before the audience.

Tragedy

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and has some magnitude: in a language with the various types of artistic ornaments, the various types associated with the different parts of the work; in the form of an action, not a narrative; through compassion and fear affecting the development of these emotions.

Aristotle, Poetic

Aristotle's phrase "the various types associated with the various parts of the work" is a reference to the structural origins of the drama. In it the various parts with dialogue were written in the Attic dialect while the choral parts (recited or sung) were performed in the Doric dialect, these discrepancies reflected the different religious origins and poetic metrics of the parts that were fused into one. new entity, the theatrical drama.

Tragedy is rooted in a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role in the historical definition of Western civilization. The tradition has had multiple discontinuous expressions, the term often being used to mean reference to a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and Elizabethans, as a cultural format; the Hellenes and Christians, in a daily activity," as put by Raymond Williams. From its obscure origins in the theaters of Athens 2,500 years ago, where only a fraction of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides have survived, through particular elaborations through the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, and Schiller, to Strindberg's more recent naturalistic tragedies, Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss, and suffering, and Müller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has continued to be a important field of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle and change. In the path of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BC), tragedy has been used to mark gender distinctions, either with poetry in general (where the tragic is contrasted with the epic and lyrical) or with drama (in which tragedy is faced with comedy).

Basic Elements of Theater

Theatre, as has been observed, constitutes an organic whole of which its different elements form an indissoluble part. These elements, however, each have their own characteristics and laws and, depending on the time, the personality of the director or other circumstances, it is common for one or the other to be given greater relevance within the set. These elements are:

Text

Dramatic works are written in dialogues and in the first person, in which there are actions that go between parentheses, (called stage language).

In the Western tradition, the text, the dramatic work, has always been considered the essential piece of theater, called "the art of the word". Given that, in a more nuanced way, this orientation also predominates in oriental cultures, it is at least possible to admit such primacy as justified. In this regard, however, two considerations must be made: firstly, the text does not exhaust the theatrical fact, since a dramatic work is not theater until it is represented, which implies at least the element of performance; secondly, there are numerous archaic dramatic forms and modern shows that completely dispense with the word or subordinate it to elements such as mime, body expression, dance, music and stage display.

The fact that the work only acquires full validity in the representation also determines the distinctive character of dramatic writing compared to other literary genres. Most of the great playwrights of all time, from the Greek classics to the English William Shakespeare, the French Molière, the Spanish Pedro Calderón de la Barca or the German Bertolt Brecht, based their creations on a direct and deep knowledge of scenic resources. and interpretive and in a wise use of its possibilities.

Address

The director's personality as a creative artist was consolidated at the end of the XIX century, although his figure already existed as coordinator of theatrical elements, from scenery to acting. It is up to him to convert the text, if it exists, into a theater, with the procedures and objectives that are required. Powerful examples of this task were the Germans Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, who devoted their energy to getting the maximum capacity for reflection from the viewer, or the asceticism of the Pole Jerzy Grotowski.

Performance

Acting techniques have varied enormously throughout history, and not always uniformly. In classical Western theatre, for example, the great actors, the "sacred monsters", tended to emphasize emotions in order to highlight the content of the work, in commedia dell'arte the performer gave free rein to his instincts; The Japanese actors of Nō and kabuki show certain moods through symbolic gestures, either very subtle or deliberately exaggerated.

In modern theater, the naturalist orientation has generally been imposed, in which the actor, through the acquisition of bodily and psychological techniques and the study of himself and the character, tries to recreate his personality on stage. This option, evolved in its fundamental features from the teachings of the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski and very widespread in the cinematographic field, is certainly not the only one and ultimately the choice of an interpretive style depends on the characteristics of the show and the indications. from the director.

Today, however, at the turn of the 21st century, theatrical performance with a naturalistic bent is being seriously rethought. Contemporary theatricality requires a critique of naturalism as a simple reproduction of human behavior, but without ties to its environment. Currently there have been great transformations of Stanislavski's work, the most important being Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowsky, Étienne Decroux and Eugenio Barba. These techniques, currently called extra quotidian, imply a complex synthesis of scenic signs.

Other elements

The balcony of Juliet, in Verona, of the work created by Shakespeare.

Strictly speaking, decoration is understood to be the environment in which a dramatic representation takes place, and set design is the art of creating the decorations. Today, it tends to be introduced into the concept of "scenographic apparatus" to all the elements that allow the creation of that environment, among which we should mainly highlight the machinery or stage machine and the lighting.

Throughout time and at different moments in the history of the theater, the set design has undergone important transformations. Before the theater existed as we know it, the representations were carried out with a ritual sense and in them the decorations were already used to give more enhancement, mystery, setting, as well as scenic image and spectacularity to the ritual acts.

In the Greek theater the periacts were used, which were pointers with a triangular base, they had screens or prismatic panels, on whose planes or faces different sets were drawn, according to the requirements of the scene being enacted.

In antiquity, the scenery was conditioned by technical and architectural limitations, a circumstance that was maintained throughout the Middle Ages. It was already at the end of the Renaissance and, above all, during the XVII and XVIII, when the scenery began to acquire prominence, thanks to the improvement of pictorial perspective, which allowed the decoration to be given a greater appearance of depth, and later to the development of machinery theatrical. In the 19th century, with the introduction of realistic drama, scenery became the basic element of performance. The discovery of electric light, in short, gave rise to the rise of lighting. The footlights, which were originally an accessory item, are now poetically considered a symbol of theatrical art.

Closely linked to the scenic conception, the costumes have always been found. In the Greek theater, the coarseness of the decorations was compensated by means of tragic or comic masks and the stylized tunics of the actors, whose purpose was to highlight the archetypal character of the characters. During the Baroque and Neoclassicism, make-up and costumes became important, although they were often used in an anachronistic way —for example, a play set in Rome was represented in French clothing from the XVII until the appearance of realism. At present, the choice of costumes is just one more element within the general conception of the production.

The parable-teller does well to openly show the viewer everything he needs for his parable, those elements whose help he intends to show the ineluctable course of his action. The stage builder of the parable thus openly shows the spotlights, the musical instruments, the masks, the walls and doors, the stairs, chairs and tables, with whose help the parable is to be built.

Living room in front of the stage

Room facing stage in contemporary theater to the Italian. Bielefeld Theatre, Germany.

Interior of a modern theater (Teatro Colón)

In the traditional Italian layout, in older theaters, the room in front of the stage is often in the shape of a horseshoe. The lower part, the widest, is the stalls or stalls, where the armchairs or armchairs are distributed in rows separated by a central aisle and framed by two lateral aisles. In the older theaters, the floor of the stalls is flat and slightly inclined to preserve a minimum of visibility. In contemporary theaters, behind the stalls are the boxes and a tiered amphitheater that allows good visibility of the stage from the furthest rows.

To take better advantage of the height of the theatre, the hall is divided into several floors. Above the stalls there may be one or two large, cantilevered and setback floors. The central and lateral walls are dedicated to the boxes or to balconied galleries that are spread over several floors. Traditionally, the highest part of the theater is called the chicken coop; It is the least visible and the most economical.

In this way, the theater is structured into stalls (ground floor), boxes (located on the mezzanine) and amphitheater (located on the upper floors), ordered from highest to lowest ticket price.

Superstitions

There are many superstitions that have been preserved in the theatrical environment of Western culture, beliefs and customs that have been losing strength in more recent times but that still determine the "modus operandi" in different aspects of the show. From the long list of superstitions we can mention:

About the premieres

1. Tuesday and Friday are days of little luck for a premiere.
2. To wish you good luck a night of premiere is unacceptable, so if someone does, he must be answered with a simple "merde", following the French tradition. It appears that the origin of this superstition dates back to the time when the spectators attended the theater by horse car: a lot of booth at the door of the theater indicated that the function had had a lot of concurrence.
3. In a general essay they are signs of evil omen: to hear a whistle; peacock feathers; and in general, gafes colors like yellow (the supposed perdition of Molière, even though he did not die on stage but on his bed), green and even violet.
4. A general essay without any mistake is equivalent to a failure in the premiere, hence, if this happens, the actor who interprets the last paragraph or reply will not pronounce it. On the contrary, finding nails forgotten by the stage players is a good sign.
5. That an old man is the first spectator to take his place at the theater box office on the opening day, is a benign prognosis of many performances.

About the actors

1. Many actors seem to like of bad taste that, in public, they are called by the name of the character they interpret.
2. For prudence, an actor should never whistle, if necessary he can swap.
3. Sticking the suit in the decoration is a notice of mistake in the recitation of your paper.
4. It's bad luck looking back at someone who's making up.
5. Many actors still go on stage with some kind of "magic" or amulet object. The most traditional has been rabbit leg.
6. It's bad luck to put the shoes inside a box or on the table.
7. Except in works in which the script or the involvement of the public is sought, it may be a bad omen to look at the courtyard of armchairs.
8. Among the English, that an actress makes point during a rehearsal, even in the dressing room, will ensure a good mess in the performance.
9. It is advisable to start and finish the season with the same suit or dress and the "moon" fabrics are not recommended.
10. For a long time, gafes were considered on stage: natural flowers, children and horses.

Glazy Works

1. Macbeth of Shakespeare, and especially its scene of witches, is one of the most negative superstitions. It is always remembered as an example that in 1964 a new theater of Lisbon was burned where the play was represented.
2. In Spain, in the 1930s, it was a shame to represent the work of Jacinto Grau, The Lord of Pigmalion.
3. Also in Spain, winning the Lope de Vega Award could mean not to re-start.