Theatre and Feeling: 1

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Having been an important part of human culture for more than 2,500 years, theatre has evolved a wide range of different theories and practices. In addition to the categories of comedy and tragedy at the City Dionysia, the festival also included the Satyr Play. Most Athenian tragedies dramatise events from Greek mythology, though The Persians—which stages the Persian response to news of their military defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE—is the notable exception in the surviving drama. Three famous romantic plays written by Kālidāsa are the Mālavikāgnimitram ( Mālavikā and Agnimitra), Vikramuurvashiiya ( Pertaining to Vikrama and Urvashi), and Abhijñānaśākuntala ( The Recognition of Shakuntala). The first form of Indian theatre was the Sanskrit theatre, [43] earliest-surviving fragments of which date from the 1st century CE.

The king would have the best seat in the house: the very middle of the theatre, which got the widest view of the stage as well as the best way to see the point of view and vanishing point that the stage was constructed around.In Indonesia, theatre performances have become an important part of local culture, theatre performances in Indonesia have been developed for thousands of years. On 24 January 1643, the actors protested against the ban by writing a pamphlet titled The Actors remonstrance or complaint for the silencing of their profession, and banishment from their severall play-houses. o] In certain periods of history (the ancient Roman and modern Romantic) some dramas have been written to be read rather than performed.

The general trend was away from the poetic drama of the Greeks and the Renaissance and toward a more naturalistic prose style of dialogue, especially following the Industrial Revolution. Participation in the city-state's many festivals—and mandatory attendance at the City Dionysia as an audience member (or even as a participant in the theatrical productions) in particular—was an important part of citizenship. Civic participation also involved the evaluation of the rhetoric of orators evidenced in performances in the law-court or political assembly, both of which were understood as analogous to the theatre and increasingly came to absorb its dramatic vocabulary.The only surviving plays from the Roman Empire are ten dramas attributed to Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE), the Corduba-born Stoic philosopher and tutor of Nero. These developed in the Yuan dynasty into a more sophisticated form known as zaju, with a four- or five-act structure. Theatre took on many alternative forms in the West between the 15th and 19th centuries, including commedia dell'arte from Italian theatre, and melodrama. The prominent puppet theatres— wayang golek (wooden rod-puppet play) of the Sundanese and wayang kulit (leather shadow-puppet play) of the Javanese and Balinese—draw much of their repertoire from indigenized versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Other theatre companies, as well as dance companies, who do not have their own theatre venue, perform at rental theatres or at presenting theatres.

The theatre of ancient Rome was a thriving and diverse art form, ranging from festival performances of street theatre, nude dancing, and acrobatics, to the staging of Plautus's broadly appealing situation comedies, to the high-style, verbally elaborate tragedies of Seneca. The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The powerful Indian emperor Harsha (606–648) is credited with having written three plays: the comedy Ratnavali, Priyadarsika, and the Buddhist drama Nagananda. Athenians re-enacted the incorporation of the god's cult every year in a preliminary rite to the City Dionysia. In it the spoken parts were written in the Attic dialect whereas the choral (recited or sung) ones in the Doric dialect, these discrepancies reflecting the differing religious origins and poetic metres of the parts that were fused into a new entity, the theatrical drama.The Roman historian Livy wrote that the Romans first experienced theatre in the 4th century BCE, with a performance by Etruscan actors. Repertory theatre generally involves a group of similarly accomplished actors, and relies more on the reputation of the group than on an individual star actor. Theatre in the medieval Islamic world included puppet theatre (which included hand puppets, shadow plays and marionette productions) and live passion plays known as ta'ziya, where actors re-enact episodes from Muslim history. Improvisation has been a consistent feature of theatre, with the Commedia dell'arte in the sixteenth century being recognised as the first improvisation form. The ancient Vedas ( hymns from between 1500 and 1000 BCE that are among the earliest examples of literature in the world) contain no hint of it (although a small number are composed in a form of dialogue) and the rituals of the Vedic period do not appear to have developed into theatre.