Ancient Greek Theatre Architec
ture
We all look for our beginnings. Whether we look for them in our personal life or in our professional life, we still look for them. As I was looking around the theatre recently, I was looking at and wondering where the idea of the theatre came from. Rather, who built it and why it is built the way it is. Who made the first one? Where do the roots of the theatre lay? All very good questions that I hope will be answered.
In the beginning of time, man did not understand the complex workings of the universe. To compensate for this not understanding, man created mythical gods that held the power to cause nature to be nature. People who performed extraordinary accomplishments, like ...
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conditions of performer-audience relationship, and these have varied from a patch of beaten earth to complicated built structures (Leacroft 1).
The various Greek tribes worshipped many different gods. Dionysus, or Bacchus, was an important god for the Thracians, a tribe who lived in the northern part of Greece. When the Thracians discovered how to make beer, they thought intoxication divine and gave honor to Bacchus, and when they came to know wine, they thought even better of him. Greek songs honoring the god of wine, Dionysus, which were originally sung by masked choruses, developed later into a singing exchange between a leader and the choruses. During the fifth century BCE, music, costumes, and dancing all became more elaborate, and antiphonal singing between leader and chorus evolved into dramatic dialogue.
Everywhere in Greece, the festivals were regarded as public acts of worship, but only in Athens did these crude beginnings develop into tragedy. The tragic ...
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entirely choral until the prologue and speeches were first introduced by Thespis. Thus, Thespis was indeed the first "actor," and tragic dialogue began when he exchanged words with the leader of the chorus. The term Thespian, which is still used today, comes from here.
As theatre started to become a more accepted form of ritual, characters or roles started to become more refined. There were several groups of actors. The main actors’ roles were that of the gods or leading characters. They would play roles such as Apollo, Agamemnon, or Aegisthus.
The chorus served many functions in Greek drama. First, it was an agent in the play; it gave advice, expressed opinions, ...
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"Ancient Greek Theatre Architec." Essayworld.com. December 4, 2005. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Ancient-Greek-Theatre-Architec/37446.
"Ancient Greek Theatre Architec." Essayworld.com. December 4, 2005. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Ancient-Greek-Theatre-Architec/37446.
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