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Week 6 Lecture: Theater and Dance

DANCING

In many cases, where there is music there will also be dancing.  The tradition of dancing is probably as old as the musical tradition it accompanies: in terms of hard evidence, there are a number of prehistoric statues of dancing figures such as the one above; there is a particularly good one in the Heraklion museum of a group of Mycenaean women, and Homer mentions dancing in the Iliad (18.570ff) .

Dancing is often a spontaneous performance and is thus not easy to track historically until after the Middle Ages in the western world, when music also began to be formalized and, more importantly, written down.  As we have seen, music was very important in the Church, and it was in the religious sector (especially the monasteries) that music grew and became so complex that it was necessary to write it down. As we have already discovered, the invention of musical notation (Adventures, 147-9[154-5]) was perhaps the single most important event in the history of music, although we also discovered in Week 3 that the discovery of the mathematical relationship of musical tones went as far back as the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, in the 6th century B.C.E. (Adventures, 58-9[52]).

Once a system of musical notation was devised and universally accepted, music as a genre began to grow and diversify in both quantity and quality, from the monastic purity of plainchant to the semi-private entertainments of Court troubadours, to the massive public concerts that we know now, involving large numbers of different instruments, players and singers. The core musical instruments (stringed, wind and percussive) began to multiply into more and more variations, so that, for example, a simple lyre (still played here in Crete) could develop such offspring as the violin, viola, cello and double bass, as well as the guitar, banjo and ukulele-type instruments.

Dancing also became much more formal, and was particularly developed at Court.  I’m sure we have all seen movies like Shakespeare in Love or Elizabeth, where a very formal style of dancing is performed. Later, in the Baroque period, (Bishop, 273[275]) came the invention in France of classical ballet, principally by Jean-Baptiste Lully, which from simple origins has become the most stylized of our modern types of dance.  

By Alexander Kenney / Kungliga Operan [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

We will see as we read through the Adventures chronologically that dancing features very little again until the 20th century, when the new styles of music gave rise to new kinds of performance which are grouped generally under the term ‘modern dance’.  We shall look at this a bit more in Week 7.

THEATER

We saw in Week 2 that the origins of theater as we know it also lie with the classical Greeks. There seem to be no predecessors (that we know of) for the theatrical tradition, which evolved out of the music and dancing taking place at the festivals of Dionysus: 

“Classical tragedy and comedy (both originated in the Greeks') [arose from the] worship of Dionysus..., god of wine, revelry, and intoxication. Worshipers of Dionysus disguised themselves with masks, dressed in animal costumes, carried oversized fertility symbols, and sang hymns of praise to the god. The most solemn hymns were sung and danced by a chorus of performers. From this elemental beginning evolved the Greek tragedy, a drama involving mythic characters whose pride leads them into suffering and death. Athenian tragedy as we know it had evolved by the early fifth century B.C.[E.}” (Adventures, 56[63].)

 

The Theater of Dionysus (above) still remains in Athens as a tribute to this tradition, although it is not in such good condition as the great amphitheater at Epidauros (below, and on Adventures, 56[64]), where performances still take place in the summer and where it is still possible to hear a pin drop (yes, really!) in the acoustic “sweet spot” in the middle. 

Bishop also tries in the Beginner’s Guide (64) to give us some psychological reasons behind the tradition: 

“The roots of theater must lie somewhere in the human gene. Other animals pretend - the nesting bird that feigns an injury to protect its young - but only humans don a mask and pretend to be someone else. When hunting societies act out the hunt, one hunter is costumed in the skin of the hunted animal and must act out his own sacrifice. Class societies upend the hierarchy when, for a day, the peasant plays the lord or the priest plays the pope. In this carnival drama, the lowly are exalted and the exalted brought low. All this play-acting, this theatrical fiction, helps us give shape to our social world. Through its artifice, the play teaches us the deeper nature of reality. The mask conceals and reveals. The play is both pretense and deadly serious.”

As with so many things Greek, the Romans adopted the theatrical tradition, although their tastes ran more to comedy (Adventures, 85-87[93-95]) and, of course, combat.  

The Colosseum (above, and at Adventures, 67[74]) is one of the greatest theaters ever built, but as we know it was used for massive staged fights - between men, men and animals, and sometimes between ships, when it would be flooded for mock naval battles. A good example of fighting in this arena was seen in Gladiator .

We have seen also that during the “Dark Ages” after the fall of the Roman Empire, theater was no longer such a popular form of entertainment, and it wasn’t until the Mediaeval Period that any kind of formal acting re-emerged, this time in the familiar guise of religion. The literature of the ancient era had been lost (at least temporarily), so when people began to act again they acted out the texts they knew - the Bible (Adventures, 150[156-57]). During the Gothic era, theater once more broke away from the church (Adventures, 169-170[175-76]), but it wasn’t until the Renaissance that theater really took off once more as an independent art form, primarily driven by the rediscovery of the ancient texts via the School of Toledo  (Adventures, 137[143) and the work of the Italian humanist poet, Petrarch  (Adventures, 180-81[185-86]).  Geoffrey Chaucer (Adventures, 177-179[184]) took his lead from the Italian poets, Dante and Boccaccio, and launched England into an era of tremendous creativity, especially in drama.  Queen Elizabeth 1 was a great patron of the arts and it was during her reign that theater developed into the art form we know today, and both Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare came to prominence (Adventures, 237-240[242-45).

The reconstructed Globe Theater in London

 

Shakespeare is considered by many to be the greatest playwright who ever lived, and I am sure we have all had to study at least one of his plays at high school.  Shakespeare’s plays were heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance tradition (Adventures, 243-45[247-49]), which in their turn drew on the comic heritage of the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence, but he also culled information from other ancient texts, including Plutarch, a Greek biographer writing during the early Roman empire, who produced comparisons between the lives of great men such as Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. One of his most fascinating plays, also made into movies, is Antony and Cleopatra , which relies heavily on Plutarch’s “Life” of Mark Antony. (An excellent treatment of this subject, though not Shakespearean, also appears in the HBO Series, Rome .)   Other plays were based on stories and traditional folk tales from Italy, Scotland, England and Denmark. Hamlet is one of the greatest of Shakespearean tragedies, and if you have never seen it on stage, take a look at this outstanding movie , made of the recent production by the Royal Shakespeare Company and very true to the original performance. Yet other history plays relate the stories of the English kings (Henry IV, V, VI, VIII, Richard II and III and King John).

In the Baroque period, the classical tradition was taken up in France by two great tragedians, Racine and Corneille, and the comedian Moliere (Adventures, 273[274-75]), and all of Europe’s greatest cities started to have theaters and opera houses as an integral feature of their cultural environment. In Paris there was the Comédie Francaise, and in London, especially after the fall of the Puritan republican government, theaters in Drury Lane saw a great revival of drama, especially comic drama, known as “Restoration Comedy” (because it flourished during the time when a king was restored to the throne).  For the first time, women were allowed on stage and professional actresses became both popular and notorious (Nell Gwyn, for instance, who was a mistress of Charles II).  In later centuries, great actors such as Edmund Kean and Sarah Bernhardt (Adventures, 352[353])  graced the stages of the world, while simultaneously an interest was increasing in Italian Opera and the more publicly accessible forms of entertainment which developed in the 19th century, such as the music hall and burlesque.

 

Opera as a genre is akin to theater and to music, linking the two in a new form of entertainment which was deliberately devised in Renaissance Italy: 

“The inventors of opera … set out to re-create the tragic drama of classical Greece. The first experiments were nobly conceived but pretty dreadful as theater. Amateur actors sang translations of Greek tragic drama in droning declamation. But the Italians loved a good show and the idea of a grand and noble musical drama appealed to aristocratic patrons in Italy. Within a century, the Camerata’s first wooden productions had evolved into something we call opera.” (Beginner’s Guide, 80). 

As a genre, opera is eclectic and is constrained by both social and linguistic barriers (Beginner’s Guide, 80), but if you like singing as well as a visual show then it is something you should try: certainly as a modernization of the style, the musical has achieved great popularity. “Operagoers who took in the 1990s Broadway hits Miss Saigon and Rent noticed something familiar … Both musicals were rewrites of Puccini’s operas Madame Butterfly and La Boheme, updated to the Vietnam War and heroin-chic New York City, respectively.” (Beginner’s Guide, 84).

During the latter part of the 18th and the earlier part of the 19th century, theater took a back seat to the dramas being enacted in the real world, as Europe and the United States (amongst others) went through the vast social upheavals of Revolution, but “By 1870, theaters throughout Europe were recovering … based in part on the success of plays in the realist mode. Usually written in prose, realist plays had plots contrived according to strict rules of plausibility. … Stage directions and sets were carefully defined, and the use of curtains and electric lighting further enhanced the stage’s realism.” (Adventures, 377[376]). Playwrights such as Ibsen and Chekhov enjoyed great success with works exploring issues of real importance to real people, performed in a clear and logical style, which later took on overtones outside the personal arena, to include politics (Adventures, 403[402]).

As it did in so many disciplines of the arts at that time, the modern influence in the 20th century rebelled against realism and the previous traditions of classical and comic theater, and came up with something called the “Theater of the Absurd”, which“rejected realistic devices or explicit political messages. Instead, absurdists used dream, burlesque comedy, and nonsensical language as dramatic metaphors for the emptiness of the human condition.”(Adventures, 417[416])

In general, theater is a public arena in which to explore any issue of interest to the human being where, instead of reading in a solitary artistic endeavor, the experience is performed physically and shared by many.  Similarly, performances of music and dancing are a communal experience and these tend to generate a great amount of energy and joy.

 

 

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Bishop, P.E. Adventures in the Human Spirit (6th[7th] Edn.). Upper Saddle River, NJ. Prentice Hall, 2011[2014]. Print.

Bishop, P.E. A Beginner’s Guide to the Humanities (3rd Edn.). Upper Saddle River, NJ. Prentice Hall, 2011. Print.

 

 

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