- What is the origin and history of theater?
- The Greek origin of the theater
- The Origin of Non-Western Theater
- Liturgical drama and medieval theater
- The flowering of Japanese theater
- Renaissance theater and the commedia dell'arte
- The entrance to modernity
- The 20th century and contemporary
We explain the origin and history of theater in different parts of the world, from ancient times to today.
What is the origin and history of theater?
The theater, the artistic genre in which the literature (dramaturgy) and the performing arts (theatrical performance), is one of the oldest forms of artistic expression in history. humanity.
Although its origin commonly goes back to the Antiquity classic of the West, the truth is that almost all the ancient cultures they had some form of theater or very similar spectacle, with which they educated their young people, prayed to their gods or remembered their myths foundational.
However, the first to understand theater as an art form in itself, that is, as "dramatic art", were the ancient Greeks of the 6th to 4th centuries BC. c.
The ancient Greeks celebrated certain rituals religious in honor of Dionysus, god of wine and fertility, known as the bacchanalia. In these rites the dance and trance states were normal, but also a certain narrative and staging of the founding myths, and the latter was what gave rise to the theater.
The Greek origin of the theater
It originated in the 6th century BC. C. thanks to a priest of Dionysus, called Thespis, who introduced an important modification to the rituals: a dialogue which he held with the choir during each festival.
Thus, Thespis became the first stage actor. In fact, according to chronicles of the III century a. C. It was Thespis himself who won the first theatrical competition in Greece, held in Athens in 534 BC. c.
From then on, theatrical competitions became very common at festivals in honor of Dionysus, which lasted four whole days and used partitioned wooden structures for the orchestra, audience and stage around the statue of Dionysus.
Throughout the 5th and 4th century BC. C. the Greek theater flourished and became independent of the worship religious. However, it continued to be a mechanism of Greek society to educate its young people in the religion, the mythology and classic civic values.
At that time the three great Greek playwrights emerged: Aeschylus (525-456 BC), Sophocles (496-406 BC) and Euripides (484-406 BC), authors of an extensive set of plays tragic that addressed the great Greek myths. Along with them, great Greek comedians such as Aristophanes (444-385 BC) proliferated.
The theater was so important in Greek culture that the philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) was inspired by them to write the first treatise on dramatic art in the history of mankind: the Poetics from 335 BC c.
In the same way, it was so important for the Mediterranean region of the time, that the Roman culture took it as a model and inspiration to develop its own theater between the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC. C. This is how authors of such renown as Plautus (254-184 B.C.) and Terence (185-159 B.C.) emerged, whose plays they were part of a much larger event in Roman culture: the Roman Games in honor of the gods.
The Romans also incorporated the Greek dramaturgical legacy into their culture, preserving it in Latin for much later readers.
The Origin of Non-Western Theater
There were also, in ancient times, rich theatrical traditions in the East of the world, especially in the ancient culture of India. The theater of India grew out of religious and ceremonial dances.
This theater acquired a formal study around the 4th and 2nd century BC.C., judging by what the Natia-shastra, an ancient Hindu treatise on dance, song and drama, attributed to the musicologist Bharata Muni (dates uncertain). This work studies, especially, the Indian classical theater, the peak of Sanskrit literature.
In this kind of drama very stereotypical figures appeared as the hero (nayaka), the heroine (nayika) or the clown (vidusaka), in the midst of mythological and religious stories about the origin of the gods. The performance consisted more than anything of the dance and dialogue of the actors, dressed up and made up, but without a stage or decorations.
Indian theater was practiced almost without interruption or change for a long time, reaching its peak between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD. Two of the great dramatists of this tradition were Sudraka (3rd century AD) and Kalidasa (4th-5th centuries AD), the latter author of great love plays.
Another important non-Western tradition, the theater of China, originated around the 6th century BC. C. It was composed mostly of dances, acrobatics, mimes and ritual acts without a defined genre.
The actors, all male, could play different types of stereotypical roles, whether male (sheng), feminine (so), comics (chou) or warriors (ching). In many cases masks and makeup were used.
The Chinese tradition inspired similar versions in Japan and other Southeast Asian nations, which flourished in later centuries, and were not known in the West until almost the nineteenth century.
Liturgical drama and medieval theater
After the fall of Roman empire, the theater in the West lost its old popular and religious relevance: this is because the Christianity rejected the legacy pagan of Europe and he did everything possible to distinguish himself and distance himself from that tradition. However, by the 10th century, the Christian liturgy and the celebration of Easter were central events in Christian culture, and were performed with great pomp and scenery.
Thus, in the Middle Ages a liturgical theater arose, which reproduced the most important scenes of Christian mythology, such as the visit of Mary Magdalene to the tomb of Jesus Christ. With this was born a rich tradition of later Christian dramaturgy.
Around the eleventh and twelfth centuries, many French monasteries began to stage biblical stories on a platform outside the temple, also abandoning the Latin cult to use vernacular languages, closer to the people. The staging of Genesis or the Apocalypse, or the tormented lives of saints, such as that of Saint Apollonia or Saint Dorothea, was common.
As these theatrical acts gained complexity, they began to be exhibited on floats or mobile stages, to take the liturgy and the ecclesiastical story to the different corners of the country. This was particularly popular in Spain, and they became known under the name of Sacramental cars, that is, dramas of the Eucharist.
Similar events were undertaken in England at the time, especially during the Corpus Christi, and became popular forms of theatre, common throughout Europe until the 16th century.
From then on, his main detractors emerged: the Protestant puritans who condemned the predominant humor and daring in his representations, and the humanists Renaissance who saw with bad eyes their frivolity and its link with a certain medieval tradition from which they sought to break away.
Consequently, many of these works were banned in Paris and in the countries of Protestant Europe, while they flourished in Counter-Reformation Europe, mainly in Spain. great authors of baroque Spaniards such as Lope de Vega (1562-1635), Tirso de Molina (1583-1648) and Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) are considered among the greatest authors of the sacramental act.
The flowering of Japanese theater
Meanwhile, in 14th century Japan, a performing culture was crystallizing. Heir to Shinto dances and Buddhist rituals, both their own and copied from China and other Asian nations, the Japanese theater took its most important steps.
From then on, three great tendencies took their first steps:
- The refined lyrical drama of noh and kyogen theatre.
- The Bunraku Literary Puppet Theatre.
- Later, the kabuki theater, the dramatic spectacle of the bourgeoisie.
Noh theater arose in Kyoto around 1374, under the tutelage of the shogun Yoshimitsu, beginning an important tradition of theatrical patronage by Japanese feudal lords.
Most of the works of this style, performed with infinite grace and refinement by always male actors accompanied by a small choir, were written in the following decades by Kanami Motokiyo, his son Zeami Motokiyo and later the latter's son-in-law. , Zenchiku. Few new plays have been written for Noh theater since the 15th century.
Perhaps for this reason, towards the 16th century, the Japanese theatrical panorama presented a certain decline. To this must be added the 1629 ban on all theatrical performances starring women, after the presentations of the Shinto priestess O-Kuni brought a stir among the public in Kyoto.
That is why, at the beginning of the 17th century, a new Japanese theater emerged to fill the void, reflecting the new bourgeois sensibilities of the time: the Kabuki, a successful café theater, which used lavish settings and elaborate costumes, whose works they came from the literary tradition and the puppet theater.
Renaissance theater and the commedia dell'arte
As in many other art and knowledge, the Renaissance European marked a before and after in theater and dramaturgy. The works became more natural, stripped of their religious obligation and rescued the theoretical legacy of Aristotle, as well as the ancient myths and classical symbols.
The triumph of bourgeoisie as the new dominant social class determined a change in theatrical sensibilities and soon the birth of new genres and new styles was witnessed, such as the Spanish baroque theater and the English Elizabethan theater, in whose tradition great names such as Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare.
However, the most important of the new forms of theater was the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, which emerged around 1545 as a form of street and popular theater, but performed by professional actors. Many of the theatrical groups were itinerant, moving from town to town and setting up makeshift stages.
There they represented pieces of comedy physical, theatrical improvisations and own pieces whose characters they were easily and quickly recognizable, since they always wore the same masks. For example, pants he was a pompous and ill-tempered old man to whom jokes and pranks were played, while Harlecchino was the joking and daring servant, and Pulcinelli he was the paunchy, hunchbacked beating specialist.
From then on, new forms of theatrical spectacle began to become popular in a Europe that valued dramaturgy more and more. The tragicomedy became a popular genre, a kind of intermediate link between comedy and tragedy. Opera also emerged in the 17th century, and the so-called “Italian style” of theater spread throughout Europe.
In this same context, the French theater had an important boom, at the hands of renowned playwrights such as Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and Jean Racine (1639-1699), great authors of tragedies, and especially Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière (1622-1673), actor and author of comedies, farces, tragicomedies and some of the most celebrated works in the French language.
The entrance to modernity
The next great change in the Western theatrical tradition came with the Romanticism German, especially Sturm und Drang in the second half of the eighteenth century.
As in the rest of the arts, theatrical Romanticism emphasized sentimentality and drama against the rationalism that emerged with the Illustration French. He preferred dark, mysterious themes, especially those from popular culture and folklore.
The legacy left by authors such as Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), with great dramatic works such as Faust or William Tell at the beginning of the 19th century, was the inspiration for the birth of a new genre: the melodrama, which incorporated music to emphasize the emotions of the characters.
From the hand of nationalism European, this new style caught on in almost all countries and produced renowned works and authors such as Georg Büchner, Victor Hugo, José Zorrilla and many others.
However, the foundation of modern theater, properly speaking, took place well into the 19th century, with the foundation of realistic theater, the triumph of rationalism over the romantics. Realism emphasized the need for a naturalistic theater: sets similar to real ones, believable performances and stripped of grandiloquent diction or gestures.
As expected, realism was born in France, the cradle of the Enlightenment.However, it reached its expressive peak in the pen of Nordic authors such as the Swedish August Strindberg (1849-1912) and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), or even with the also prominent Russian short story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904).
The 20th century and contemporary
The arrival of the turbulent 20th century brought with it the vanguards, an incessant source of innovation formal and aesthetic that gave rise to numerous theatrical schools in Europe and America.
In general, the avant-garde sought greater intensity and psychological depth in their characters, abandoning the three classical Aristotelian units and often embracing denunciation and political militancy. In addition, thanks to them, the role of the theater director gained prominence over the actors; a role comparable to the film director.
Avant-garde theatrical movements are too numerous to enumerate in their entirety, but it is worth noting the expressionism, the "epic theater" of Bertoldt Brecht, the theater of the absurd linked to the philosophy of existentialism and the works of Antonin Artaud, Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.
In addition, the nonconformity and the anti-bourgeois sentiment of the Angry Young Men: Harold Pinter, John Osbourne and Arnold Wesker. Other great names of the time were Luigi Pirandello, Alfred Jarry, Arthur Miller, Federico García Lorca, Ramón de Valle Inclán, among others.
Since 1960, contemporary theater has tried to reconnect with the spectator's emotions, moving away from epic theater and political messages. There are numerous theatrical aspects that seek to break away from the stage and take theater to the street, or incorporate the public onto the stage, or even resort to happening or improvised situation theater in real life.