The Meaning And History Of Theatre

Theatre has been a powerful medium of human expression and exploration for thousands of years, offering its community a deeper understanding of itself, both as a collective and as individuals, through a synthesis of entertainment and instruction. Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers, typically actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage.

The word comes originally from the Greek Theatron, meaning roughly, 'a place to behold'. ... In British English, 'theatre' means a place where live plays are performed.

The history of theatre charts the development of theatre over the past 2,500 years. While performative elements are present in every society, it is customary to acknowledge a distinction between theatre as an art form and entertainment and theatrical or performative elements in other activities.

The first people we know created plays were the Ancient Greeks, about the year 500 B.C. They divided plays into two kinds: tragedy and comedy. This division is still used today. The best known Ancient Greek writers of plays are Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Some of their plays survived, and are still performed today. The mask was to ‘melt’ into the face and allow the actor to vanish into the role. Therefore, onlookers did not think about the actor, but thought about the character.

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church began to use theatre as a way of telling the stories from the Bible to people who did not know how to read. They wrote Mystery Plays, where each part of the Bible story would be a play put on by a different group of people. They wrote miracle plays which were about the lives of the saints. They wrote morality plays which taught the audiences how to live a good Christian life.

Twentieth-century theatre describes a period of great change within the theatrical culture of the 20th century, mainly in Europe and North America. There was a widespread challenge to long-established rules surrounding theatrical representation; resulting in the development of many new forms of theatre, including modernism, Expressionism, Impressionism, political theatre and other forms of Experimental theatre, as well as the continuing development of already established theatrical forms like naturalism and realism.

Everyone is an actor living in this world. Different people has different character or role to plat towards this society, which show a there personality and identity. We know them from their unique character and world is theatre. We can acting every day when we meet with different peoples.