Name: What Is Theater? Crash Course Theater #1
Uploaded: 2019-05-05T12:18:21.000Z
Duration: 14 min 7 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...

I'm Mike Rugnetta and THIS is the first
episode of Crash Course Theater.

In the episodes to come we'll have it all:
tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,

historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral-expealidocious.

And let me introduce you to Dionysus, Greek
god of the theater.

[[[Maybe Dionysus belches from offstage.]]]

They can't all be charming, genius birdmen,
I guess.

In this series we'll explore the history
of theater and how we can understand and analyze

We'll take a look at significant plays and
performances along the way, but in this episode

we're going to define theater and look at
some theories about how it got started.

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
and 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 theaters 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

Some plays, known as closet dramas, aren't
even written to be performed.

So are 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 theater requires
at least one actor and at least one audience

member and that definitely covers a lot of
stuff.

While most plays use human actors, there are
plays performed by robots and laptops with

There are plays performed by animals and by
puppets, though usually there's a human

If you want a really expansive definition,
the composer John Cage said that “theater

takes place all the time, wherever one is;
an art simply facilitates persuading one this

You're watching a video recorded earlier.

And there's an audience if you include Stan
and Zulaiha watching me.

Want to hear my “To be or not to be,”
guys?

What is and isn't theater is the kind of
question that can make your head spin.

We'll come back to it a couple of times,
especially when we talk about political theater

and protest theater and immersive theater,
but for now we'll use a more narrow definition:

theater is a deliberate performance created
by live actors and intended for a live audience,

typically making use of scripted language.

We may meet some exceptions along the way—lookin'
at you, robo-actors—but this'll work for

And, before we get too far, let's confront
the perennial controversy: should you spell

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 “a theater
is a building; but the theatre is an art!”

or “theater is a destination, but theatre
is a journey”.

Here at Crash Course, we don't mind either...
but have chosen to stick with er for consistency.

There's no origin story for theater that
everyone agrees on, but there are some theories

In the West, at least, up until the sixth
or seventh 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 re-enact significant
events in the human or supernatural world—births,

In ritual, according to the mythology scholar
Mircea Eliade, “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,

This doesn't mean that ritual is identical
with theater.

Ritual is sacred, and theater is usually secular
(though not always, as we'll see!).

Theater and ritual can draw on similar mythological
sources, but ritual typically treats those

In ritual the audience often participates;
in theatre, they usually sit politely.

Unless there's audience participation, which
is universally adored.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of
classical scholars decided to search for the

They took an anthropological approach and
saw theater as a direct evolution of religious

This theory really got going with James Frazer,
whom we also discuss in the Crash Course Mythology

In The Golden Bough, written between 1896
and 1915, Frazer and his contemporaries, the

Cambridge Ritualists (btw, this is obvs the
name of my new band) tried to take a “scientific

approach” to the question of theater's
origins.

He looked around at so-called “primitive”
societies in Africa and Asia, societies he

didn't really “know much about,” and
decided that theater had emerged as a sophisticated

According to Frazer, here's how it goes:
You start out worshipping some kind of god

or practice, and that worship gets distilled
into rituals to attract the attention of that