hey there I'm Mike Rugnetta and this is
the first episode of crash course
theater welcome in the episodes to come
we're gonna have it all tragedy comedy
history pastoral pastoral comical
historical-pastoral tragical historical
tragical comical historical past oracle
expialidocious yeah I mean this series
could go on forever and let me introduce
you to Dionysus the Greek god of theater
and wine I mean they can't all be
charming genius Birdman I guess in this
series we'll explore the history of
theater and how we can understand and
analyze it we'll take a look at
significant plays and performances along
the way but in this episode we're gonna
define theater and look at some theories
about how it got started
so prologue over act 1 scene 1 begin
[Music]
first let's define theater the building
a theater is a place in which a play is
performed if you trace the word back to
its Greek origins it literally means the
seeing place it can be big or small
indoors or outdoors purpose-built or
just borrowed sometimes plays are
performed in spaces that aren't really
theatres at all in a park or a parking
lot on a sidewalk or in a private home
theater also refers to the performance
of plays and to the body of literature
and other documentation that has a
company debt some plays known as
closeted dramas aren't even written to
be performed and that's theater - so our
improvised plays that don't have a
script and plays that have a script but
don't use words like some of Samuel
Beckett's shorts a familiar definition
is that theatre requires at least one
actor and at least one audience member
and that definitely covers a lot of
stuff but like what's an actor
what's an audience member while most
plays use human actors there are plays
performed by robots and laptops with
voice synthesizers there are plays
performed by animals and by puppets
though usually there's a human helping
out with those I hope so
is everything theater if you want a
really extensive definition the composer
John Cage said that theatre takes place
all the time wherever one is an art
simply facilitates persuading one this
is the case so is this theatre well not
for you you're watching a video recorded
earlier but here in this room I'm
performing right and there's an audience
if you include stand-ins Alejo watching
me am i doing theater do you guys want
to hear am I to be or not to be Yorick
do you want to you know they say no
every time a plague on both your houses
what is and isn't theatre is a kind of
question that can make your head spin
we're gonna come back to it a couple
times especially when we talk about
political theater and protest theater
and immersive theater but for now we're
gonna use a more narrow definition
theater is a deliberate performance
created by live actors and intended for
a live audience
typically making use of
cryptid language we may meet some
exceptions along the way
looking at you robo actors but this will
work for now and before we get too far
let's confront the perennial controversy
should you spell theatre with an re or
an ER and the short answer is both of
them are fine re is more common outside
of the US but for some folks this
spelling acts as a Shibboleth you may
have heard someone say that a theater is
a building but the theater is an art or
theater is a destination but theater is
a journey here at crash course we don't
mind either but we've chosen to stick
with ER for consistency there's no
origin story for theater that everyone
agrees on but there are some theories
that we can explore in the West at least
up until the 6th or 7th century BCE we
didn't have theater as we know it today
but we did have religious ritual which
can get pretty theatrical rituals are
often ways of mediating between the
human and the supernatural they can
serve to enact or reenact significant
events in the human or supernatural
world's worst marriages deaths harvests
in ritual according to the mythology
scholar Mirta Iliad a the time of the
event that the ritual commemorates or
reenacts is made present so ritual
represents literally re presents old
stories or ideas and makes them happen
now which is a lot like what theater
does this doesn't mean that ritual is
identical with theater ritual is sacred
and theater is usually secular they're
not always as we'll see theater and
ritual can draw on similar mythological
sources but ritual typically treats
those sources as fact and theater is
fiction in ritual the audience often
participates and in theater they usually
sit politely
unless there's audience participation
which is universally adored
in the late 19th century a group of
classical scholars decided to search for
the origins of theater they took an
anthropological approach and saw theater
as a direct evolution of religious
ritual this theory really got going with
James Frazer whom we also discuss in the
crash course mythology episode on the
of myth in the Golden Bough written
between 1896 and 1915 Fraser and his
contemporaries the Cambridge ritualists
which by the way is obviously the name
of my new band tried to take a
scientific approach to the question of
theatres origin he looked around at
so-called primitive societies in Africa
and Asia societies he didn't really know
that much about and decided that
theatres had emerged as a sophisticated
refining of ritual according to Fraser
here's how it goes you start out
worshiping some kind of God or practice
and that worship gets distilled into
rituals to attract the attention of that
God or to guarantee good fortune once
your primitive society really gets going
those rituals then generate myths and
those myths get transmuted into theater
so eventually you arrive at jazz hands
and sequence as the media theorist
Marshall McLuhan puts it in this view
art became a sort of civilized
substitute for magical games and rituals
art like game became a mimetic echo of
and a relief from the old magic of total
involvement for an example of the
sometimes questionable evidence that the
Cambridge ritualists drew on to support
their idea that ritual evolved into
theater let's look at the Greek
historian Herodotus writing in the fifth
century BCE describing a ceremony he
witnessed in Egypt that bubble take the
stage this ceremony occurs at sunset in
a temple some priests attend to a statue
of Ares but most of the people involved
are doing something very different the
majority of them hold clubs made of wood
and stand at the temples entrance while
others make vows more than a thousand
men all holding clubs and those few left
behind with the statue
pull a four wheeled wagon carrying the
shrine and the statue which is in the
shrine and the others standing at the
front gates
do not let them
enter if things seem tense to you very
perceptive probably the clubs that
tipped you off right Herodotus says
those who vowed to defend the God strike
those resisting as I understand many
even died from their wounds the ritual
continues all through the night and as
you might if you were her ah Titus he
asks some locals why the poundings and
they tell him there lived in this temple
Ares mother and Ares who was raised
elsewhere came after having become a man
wishing to lay with his mother and the
servants of his mother for not having
seen him before did not look the other
way when he entered rather they fended
him off and he fetching men from another
city handled the servants roughly and
went inside to his mother for this
reason this fight in behalf of Ares at
the festival has become a tradition they
say thanks thought-bubble
so the ritualists look two stories like
this to illustrate their idea that
worship becomes ritual ritual becomes
myth and myth becomes performance
someone writes a few songs to go along
with the skull splitting someone else
turns the battle into a dance you let it
all simmer for a millennia or two and
voila
West Side Story this ritualism theory is
useful in some ways and as we'll see in
the next episode it fits very nicely
with Greek drama mostly because the
whole theory is pretty much based on
Greek drama that's a welcome fix to how
previous generations of scholars viewed
Greek drama as something pure and
stately not as something that might have
evolved from passion and magic but this
theory causes problems when you try to
apply the history of Greek drama to
other dramatic traditions Fraser and his
colleagues didn't actually know all that
much about the so called primitive
societies whose theater they wanted to
study the rich and sophisticated
cultures the ritualists encountered
throughout Africa and Asia were lost on
the Cambridge types because Eurocentrism
so they did a lot of pretty non
scientific guessing working backwards
from what they knew about classical
theater and hypothesizing about what
kinds of rituals may
have produced it Fraser also operates
with the underlying belief that all
societies basically evolve in the same
way and that even though in his view
so-called primitive societies are
inherently inferior given enough time
and care they'll get more and more
sophisticated until they too can produce
cats okay
Fraser didn't talk about Broadway
musicals but maybe you're starting to
understand a couple of the major
problems with this theory and the
assumption that all societies are on a
trajectory towards Western civilization
which in this view is just getting
better and better all the time this view
by the way is known as positivism
another theory that gets going after
Frazer is the idea that people create
myths out of a desire to explain and
rationalize the world around them in
ritualism myths and theater emerge as a
response to preexisting rituals but in
this other theory known as functionalism
myths serve an etiological function a
way of explaining how and why things
came to be the way they are according to
one of the leading of functionalist
theorists bronislaw malinowski myth is a
statement of primeval reality which
lives in the institutions and pursuits
of a community it justifies by precedent
the existing order
unlike the ritualists the functionalists
didn't assume that all societies operate
and evolve in the same way or will
create the same kinds of myths
malinovski didn't really discuss theatre
but some of his followers did and they
locked on to the idea that many early
Greek dramas have their origins in myth
and some of those myths are at t
illogical the Oresteia explains the
legal system Prometheus Bound explains
that liver is tasty just kidding it
explains how we get fire and Technology
so if myths explain the world and
theater is based on myth we can think
about theatre as a way of explaining the
world to ourselves but such a view does
have some drawbacks take one of the very
earliest recorded plays Aeschylus's the
Persians that was based on
contemporaneous historical events not in
myth besides the ritualists and
functionalists there are a few other
two one is that theater derives at least
in part from the clown figure who's the
sort of secular equivalent of the shaman
in early societies their job was to make
fun of the head man and other
establishment figures and practices we
can maybe see this influence in the
satyr plays which we'll visit in the
next episode and it's linked at least a
little to the idea that theatre may
originate from games and the playful
instincts of humankind
a phenomenon called the ludecke impulse
another related theory which really gets
going with Aristotle is that human
beings have a mimetic impulse humans
have an inbuilt desire to imitate to act
and to pretend and that's how we learn
according to Aristotle this desire
eventually gets refined and codified
into theater so to sum up ritual myth
clowning playing games playing pretend
somehow out of all of this or maybe out
of none of it we get Hamilton and now
let's turn to our last question for
today why should we care everybody's
favorite question in other words why
does theater matter well that's a
question we're gonna be coming back to
throughout the series as we see how and
why people make theater and the impact
it has throughout history but let me
leave you with one idea borrowed from
percy bysshe shelley the highest moral
purpose aimed at in the highest species
of the drama is the teaching the human
heart through its sympathies and
antipathies the knowledge of itself
thanks for watching and Curtin crash
course theatre is produced in
association with PBS Digital Studios is
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studio in indianapolis indiana
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