Theatre (also theater in American English) is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance. Elements of design and stagecraft are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, “a place for viewing”), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, “to see", "to watch", "to observe”).
Modern Western theatre derives in large measure from ancient Greek drama, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre scholar Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical language, stage writing, and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that differentiate theatre from the other performing arts, literature, and the arts in general.
Theatre today includes performances of plays and musicals. Although it can be defined broadly to include opera and ballet, those art forms are outside the scope of this article.
Read more about Theater: History, Theories of Theatre, Technical Aspects of Theatre, Theatre Organization and Administration, See Also
Other articles related to "theater":
... Community theater, first established in 1854, continues in the town through the efforts of the Volcano Theater Company ... The company conducts a full season each year, performing in both the 35-seat Cobblestone Theater and in the larger outdoor Volcano Amphitheater ...
... And how else should one behave? Backstage at our own theater it's just like a saloon ... words of mine about the Bolshoi Theater and Chaliapin...I said that we often have regrettable confusion backstage at the Bolshoi Theater...I also said that I had heard rumors that since Chaliapin had ...
... Russian agitprop theater was noted for its cardboard characters of perfect virtue and complete evil, and its coarse ridicule ... Bertolt Brecht developed a highly elaborate and sophisticated new aesthetics--epic theater--to address the spectator in a more rational way ... the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, It's Allright to be a Woman, Spiderwoman Theater, Women's Interart Center, and the New Feminist Theater ...
... - May 29, 1880) was an Austrian actor and theater manager ... Steiner was manager of Vienna's Theater an der Wien from 1869 to 1875 with Marie Geistinger, a Viennese actress, and from 1875 to 1880 on his own ... Steiner gradually phased out spoken-word dramas from the Theater program, contributing to the Viennese opera boom ...
... with several production houses to introduce classical drama and contemporary theater productions to Israel ... In Los Angeles, Tabac has worked within several different theater projects, including becoming a member of the Beverly Hills Playhouse ... Founded by theater director and drama teacher, Milton Katselas, the Beverly Hills Playhouse is one of Los Angeles' oldest acting schools ...
Famous quotes containing the word theater:
“...I have never known a “movement” in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various “uplifting” activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)
“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.”
—Ilka Chase (1905–1978)