Name: 【TED】Oskar Eustis: Why theater is essential to democracy (Why theater is essential to democracy | Oskar Eustis)
Uploaded: 2018-06-25T16:18:35.000Z
Duration: 13 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Transition words & phrases

Theater matters because democracy matters.

Theater is the essential art form of democracy,

Basic passive voice

and we know this because they were born in the same city.

but the idea that power should stem from the consent of the governed,

that power should flow from below to above,

And in that same decade, somebody -- legend has it, somebody named Thespis --

Well, we know that the Festival of Dionysus gathered

and they would listen to music, they would watch dancing,

and they would have stories told as part of the Festival of Dionysus.

And storytelling is much like what's happening right now:

And you are sitting back, and you are receiving what I have to say.

And you may disagree with it, you may think I'm an insufferable fool,

but that dialogue is mostly taking place inside your own head.

But what happens if, instead of me talking to you --

and I talk to another person onstage with me?

because at that moment, I'm not the possessor of truth;

and it's drama, remember, conflict -- they disagree with me.

There's a conflict between two points of view.

And the thesis of that is that the truth can only emerge

in the conflict of different points of view.

It's not the possession of any one person.

And if you believe in democracy, you have to believe that.

If you don't believe that, you're an autocrat

But that's the basic thesis of democracy,

that the conflict of different points of views leads to the truth.

I'm not asking you to sit back and listen to me.

what this looks like and feels like to me as a character.

And then I'm asking you to switch your mind

and imagine what it feels like to the other person talking.

And the idea that truth comes from the collision of different ideas

are the necessary tools for democratic citizenship.

is the community itself, is the audience.

And you know from personal experience that when you go to the movies,

you walk into a movie theater, and if it's empty, you're delighted,

because nothing's going to be between you and the movie.

You can spread out, put your legs over the top of the stadium seats,

and you see that the theater is half full,

You were coming to have the collective experience

of laughing together, crying together, holding your breath together

You may have walked into that theater as an individual consumer,

you've walked out with a sense of yourself as part of a whole,

That's built into the DNA of my art form.

Twenty-five hundred years later, Joe Papp decided

that the culture should belong to everybody in the United States of America,

and that it was his job to try to deliver on that promise.

And Free Shakespeare in the Park is based on a very simple idea,

the idea that the best theater, the best art that we can produce,

should go to everybody and belong to everybody,

to see the best theater we can provide for free.

In 1967, 13 years after he figured that out,

which is that the democratic circle was not complete

We had to actually let the people create their own classics

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【TED】Oskar Eustis: Why theater is essential to democracy (Why theater is essential to democracy | Oskar Eustis)

extraordinary

figure

empathy

realize