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It started as a religious festival to honor the god Dionysis. Early Greeak theatre were hymn-type passages that were recited by a large chorus. Later on, Thespis, introduced the concept of an actor. He would have one person, that would respond to and intereact with the chorus. Other playwrights extended this idea. Eventually one actor became two, then three, etc.
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MaxineAncient Greek theatre was in, its basest form, a ritualistic celebration in honor of the cult of Dionysus, the god of wine, drama and fertility. Theatre took much of its original form from pre-extant choral dithyrambs (i.e., circular hymns & dance rituals performed by choruses often culminating in the sacrifice of a live animal; supposedly, a goat -- hence, the word tragoidia, meaning "he-goat-song"), and as rooted also in the various arts of oration extant at that time, such as rhapsodic recitation of the Homeric epics.
The Ancient Greeks loved the performative arts of rhetoric, debate, oration, recitation, declamation, chanting, dance, music, etc. And, all of these were equivocally synthesized into the theatre of the time. Performative oratory arts were so popular during the Attic age of Ancient Greece, that the most heavily attended public festival of all festivals in Ancient Athens was the City Dionysia.
The City Dionysia was a festival featuring many smaller and some larger performative competition, pitting orator against orator, rhapsode against rhapsode, chorus against chorus, and most significantly, playwright against playwright. The mainstay of the festival was the competition between three tragic playwrights who each presented a tetralogy of plays (i.e., three tragedies and one comic satyr play) for performance by up to three masked professional actors, a chorus of between 12 and 15 amateur or pre-professional actors, and a lone musician.
What made theatre so eminently popular to the Ancient Greeks was that it provided in no lesser terms a mirror for their society. The conversive binary dichotomy between community (e.g., chorus) or a community representative (e.g. corphyaeus or corphye) as moral center and the interrogated individual citizen/actor (i.e., hipokrites or "answerer"), is interpolated easily to evoke a similar dichotomic interrogative relationship between the playwright, as teacher/instructor/commentator, and the spectactor, as individual citizen/answerer/student.
The central heroic characters of Ancient Greek tragedy and comedy were often thwarted and ruined by their hubris, listening to their own self-motivated whims and delusions of grandeur rather than to the sobering and benevolently didactic interrogations of the chorus (or the lone coryphaeus) which often evoked major maxims and mores both of the pre-antique hero cult heritage (c. Homer) and of the democratic Attic city-state society itself.
The heroic protagonists of Ancient Greek Theatre were represented to be semi-divine both through ornamented, ornate and very colorful, iconographic costuming, platformed shoes, evocatively sculpted individualized masks, and extremely provocative, intense story-lines of patricide, matricide, infanticide, etc., which pulled the heroes out of the realm of naturalism and into the realm of the mythological or occult.
The Attic era audience would thus have been led by the physical, psychological and narrative performance elements of the ancient theatre to identify more readily with the sober-minded, socially obedient survivors of the story, the group personae, that of the chorus.
This self-to-group identification, therein by, reinforced the great ideals of the antique Athenian democratic polis which valued a homogenized, peaceful, obedient citizenry of the city-state.
Greek theatre may thus be interpreted as both contributing to the formation of the democratic polis, but provoking, either via the engines of tragic katharsis or comic parody & satire (cf. satyr), an exploration, interrogation, and possible critique of that same society's assumptions, shortcomings, exclusions, violence and barbarism.
Theatre was so important to the Ancient Greeks because it provided them with a mechanism by which to secularize the mythological, to politicize the godly or mundane, to critically examine the nature of their society, and to mold socially an audience to be accordant with the proper etiquette, attitudes, values, maxims and mores of the time.
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Who sat on the front row of a greek theatre?
the good greek priests
Who is the greek god of art?
Actually, the nine Muses were the goddesses of all creative things: poetry/writing, theatre, art, etc.
What was the name of the creator of Artemis greek goddess?
Artemis the greek god of the hunt and of birth
How is Hebrew theatre tied in with Hebrew culture?
There is no tradition of Hebrew theatre in Hebrew Culture. Jews of Europe had a tradition of Yiddish theatre, but Yiddish is completely unrelated to Hebrew.There is no tradition of Hebrew theatre in Hebrew Culture. Jews of Europe had a tradition of Yiddish theatre, but Yiddish is completely unrelated to Hebrew.
Greek word meaning for an actor or actress?
THESPIAN: Name for Thespis, who played an important part in the history of Greek drama Actually, the Greek word meaning actor is "hypokrites" which literally translates into "one who interprets." This is where we get the words "hypocrite" and "hypocrisy." Actors are called Thespians to honor Thespis because of his role in Greek tragedy. Some accounts say he was the first winner of the City Dionysia festival (where Greek theatre began) while others claim he was the first person to speak lines onstage instead of singing them. The answer is hypokrites, not thespian.
