1. Introduction to Theatre
What is Theatre?
Chapter 1: The Audience
Chapter 2: Background and Expectations of the Audience

2. What is Theatre? It is a number of paradoxes:
It is spontaneous, yet it is rehearsed.
It is participatory, yet it is presented.
It is real, yet it is simulated.
It is understandable, yet it is obscure.
It is unique to the moment, yet it is repeatable.
The actors are themselves, yet they are characters.
The audience believes, yet it does not believe.
The audience is involved, yet it remains apart.

3. What is Theatre? A performance in front of an audience.
“Whereas literature is a private act of the imagination (for writer and reader), theatre happens in the present tense (fleetingly) before the eyes of the audience. In order to be theatre, it must have witnesses.” Tracy C. Davis

4. What is Theatre?
Theater requires an audience because it is in the mind and imagination of the spectator that the final step in the creative process occurs.
No matter what the playwright or performers had in mind, audience members observing the theatrical event unfolding arrive at their own interpretations of what was intended

5. What is Theatre? A performer (the “doer”) An audience (the “watcher”)
A space (the “seeing place”)

6. What is Theatre? British Director Peter Brook :
“A man walks across an empty space
while someone else is watching him,
and this is all that is needed for an act
of theatre to occur” (from The Empty
Space, 1970).
But take note that Peter Brook’s definition leaves out the need for a scripted play. What are your thoughts?

7. Introduction to Theatre
Theatre is everywhere and All around us.
Concerts
TV/Movies
Ceremonies
The Actor and Audience Encounter:
Theater is live and happens before our eyes.
Live theatre – defined as the enactment of a drama onstage before an audience.

8. What is an Audience?

9. What is an Audience?

10. What is an Audience?

11. What is an Audience ?

12. What is an Audience?

13. What is an Audience

14. What is an Audience?

15. What is Theatre? A place where “something is seen” The building?
The Performance?
The Performers?
The Script
The Art?

16. What is Theatre?
The Building: The Greek ancestor of theater is theatron, “a place for seeing, especially for dramatic representation, theater.” Theatron is derived from the verb thesthai, “to gaze at, contemplate, view as spectators, especially in the theater,” from the , “a viewing.”

17. What is Theatre?
The Building
Theatron – seeing place

18. What is Theatre? The Performance
When a performance is effective, audiences can experience directly and immediately:
The developing action;
The relationships among the characters;
The spectacle;
The overall implications of the production as a whole.
As a result, spectators absorb the play as they would events from real life–through watching and listening—rather than, as in reading, seeking inwardly both to see and hear everything.

19. What is Theatre? The Performers Impersonation vs Acting
Inhabit Characters
Persona - mask
The character should have life and the actor’s themselves should disappear.

20. What is Theatre? A Collaborative Art Occupation
Many people are involved in a variety of ways.
Companies or Troupes
Occupation
The “work” of theatre is hard work.
Rehearsals
Pre-production
More people backstage than onstage
Producers
Directors
Actors
Designers
Building – construction
Crews
Stage managers
House managers
Playwrights
Composers

21. What is Theatre? A play vs. to play Theatre is making play into work
‘work of art’
That is the challenge
All of the components of production (script, acting, scenery, costumes, lighting, music, dance) can be manipulated to create varying effects. And all may be so skillfully integrated that the audience is aware only of a single unified impression.

22. Introduction to Theatre
Theatre is transitory and immediate – What does that mean?
Changes each time.
Spontaneous and in the moment
Human Beings – the Focus of Theatre
Theatre is Universal
All over the world.
Every culture has developed some sort of theatre.

23. Introduction to Theatre
Began as religious ritual or ceremonies
Most basic definition is that theatre is a presentation in front of an audience.
Add costumes; Pope various robes for specific rituals. Medicine men who used to wear mask.
Storytelling: teach lessons, myths, origin of man
Ceremony: Formal religious or social occasion usually led by a authority figure. Example?
Ritual: Acting out of an established, prescribed procedure. Example?

24. Introduction to Theatre
In the “West” we refer to Greece as the birthplace of Theatre. In the 5th century BC
Began in parts of Asia between 350 and 1350 AD.
Modern theater can pull from both traditions.

25. The Audience
Not all events which an audience attends are a theatrical performance, but a theatrical performance is not complete without an performance in front of an audience.
Film – always in the presence of the image not the actor. (Film is dead)
The heart of a theatre experience if the performer- audience relationship.
No two theatrical performances are the same even if all the elements are the same.

26. The Audience The Group experience.
People must gather at one place and one time.
Mob mentality: people behave differently in large groups than they might as individuals.
Our relationship to other audience members, family, friends, alone, Influence our experience.
Aesthetic distance – perspective or the separation between the audience and the work of art.

27. The Audience Observed vs. Participatory theatre
Observed: no audience participation except to watch and react
Vicarious and empathetic
Participatory: audience brought in.
Magicians, Renaissance festival, comedy sportz
Book definition: Not attempt to follow a script Emphasis is on education, personal development, or therapy – fields in which theatre techniques are used. Sociodrama, psychodrama, drama therapy.
Aim is not public performance.

28. The Audience The audience imagination allows for the following:
Illusion : an erroneous mental representation
something many people believe that is false; "they have the illusion that I am very wealthy"
Flashbacks: abrupt movements from present to the past to the present again.
Anachronism: Placing some character or event outside its proper time sequence
Symbol: A sign, token, or emblem that signifies something else. Religious symbols, letters numbers, marketing Flags
Metaphor: One thing is another.
Dreams are imagination. Many plays feel like a dream. (surrealism is based on dreams state)

29. The Audience Realism vs. Non realism
Realism is based in a specific movement in theatre but for the audience it tends to be how much like life it is.
Working kitchen. Performances seem more real. Film/TV tends to be more realistic.
Nonrealistic is not like life. Language can be different – poetic. Setting, costumes, characters.
Example: Avatar, star wars, 300, Shakespeare Tempest, Julie Tamor Titus.
Some theatrical devices:
Soliloquy; Actor speaks to the audience not interacting with cast
Pantomime: Act like driving a car opening a door.
Most productions have both aspects:
The Glass Menagerie – Tom’s memory play

30. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Background of Individual spectators.
Background of the Period – The period the play was written informs the subject and style of the writing. The period of the show informs mores, style, of the performance
“Art grows in the soil of a specific society.”

31. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Greek theatre and culture:
Aristotle poetics: informed and shaped theatre even today.
Limited number of scenes
One day
Violence happens offstage
Hubris often subject in tragedies.
Reflected the Greek’s sense of Balance and Order
Observe when read Oedipus

32. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Elizabethan Theatre
Shakespeare
Many locations and may be over a long period of time
Many characters played by same actors, boys played women
Liked to show blood – Titus Andronicus ends and begins with dead corpses
The expansiveness and sense of adventured mirrored the temper of the age.

33. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Modern theatre and culture
3 developments
Bringing together of cultures due to populations shifts and communication
Challenge of long held beliefs
World wars
This has caused a variety of theatre styles, subjects, diversity.

34. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Background of the play or playwright
Shakespeare – like reading a foreign language.
Dictionaries can show the origin of words.
Language was as important as plot
Brecht – theatre of cruelty and alienation affect. Wants audience to think about the subject matter. Deeply tied to ritual. (Wrote during the 1940’s)
Wanted to force the audience to think about what they were seeing.
Post World War II

35. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Why go to the theatre?
Entertainment
Stimulated or challenged
Both

36. Introduction to Theatre
Theatre of Diversity
For everyone, there is theatre for that audience.
Theatre of Infinite Variety
Performance spaces
For profit/non profit
Experimental

37. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Broadway – refers to a specific group of theatre in new York. Used to be much larger number.
Tours – Wicked
Resident Professional Theatre
Equity – theatre unions
Repertory companies – Alley
Regional Theatre
Theatre festivals
Alternative theatre
Off Broadway – professional companies with permanent spaces but small houses.
Off-Off Broadway – Professional theatres with found spaces. May or may not have a permanent space. Often experimental in nature.

38. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Children’s theatre
Can be for youth. Often more participatory in nature.
Can be performed by children.
Subject can be teaching, recreate books or literary classics, often more fantastical
College and University theatre
Quality varies.
Often have professional staff to support the productions.
Community and Amateur Theatre.
Many in Houston area. If you want to be involved in theatre but not work (for fun) many are available. Country playhouse (some professionals involved)

39. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
African American theatre
Ensemble theatre
Tyler Perry came out of this tradition
Asian American theatre
M. Butterfly and Miss Saigon
Hispanic theatre
Native American Theatre
Global theatre
Exchange of ideas from various areas of the world
Political theatre
Politics is often subject matter
Helps inform the audience on a political subject in a personal way
Feminist theatre
Not just plays but companies dedicated to women’s issues

40. Background and Expectations of the Audience:
Gay and Lesbian theatre
Deals with issues and subject.
Avenue to entertain and discuss.
Performance Art
Single artist often autobiographical and unusual and creative environment.
Avant Garde and experimental theatre
Surrealism, absurdism, theatre of cruelty
Can be political, feminist, etc.
Crossover theatre
Theatre that comes from one of the theatres of diversity but crosses into mainstream audience. M. Butterfly is an example.

41. Summary Theatre is immediate and transitory
The Audience is a integral part of the production
Theatre began as ritual
Western Theatre began in Greece
Can be realistic or Non-realistic
Modern theatre comes out of our diverse culture.
Variety of theatres available to the modern audience.