Name: Nostrils, Harmony with the Universe, and Ancient Sanskrit Theater: Crash Course Theater #7
Uploaded: 2019-05-05T14:04:00.000Z
Duration: 12 min 38 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...

Sentences with advanced comparative

This is Crash Course Theater, and as much
as we may all adore the violence and raunch

of Roman performance.. it's time to move
on.

I know it well, you're a fan of the rope
dancing maidens aren't you?

The theater of Greece and Rome is only one
tradition, and today we're going to survey

We could devote several episodes to classical
Indian theater, but because we have two and

a half millennia of opening nights from around
the world to cover in this series, today is

more of a highlights reel—and those highlights
include happy endings, rectangular theaters,

INTRO
We don't really know when Sanskrit theater

started or how it evolved, but likely it followed
a process similar to Greek drama and—spoiler

alert!—the future reemergence of theater
in the medieval period.

Basically: People create religious rituals
to honor their gods.

Someone gets the bright idea that, instead
of just singing praises, it might be cool

And before you know it, you have characters
and plots and sometimes a chorus of frogs.

Sanskrit literature starts around 1500 BCE,
and like Greek literature, it was originally

Its great works—the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana—weren't written down until much,

The Mahabharata is an epic tale of a battle
between two groups of cousins.

The Ramayana is a more intimate family narrative
… that also involves a monkey king.

Most Sanskrit dramas are based on excerpts
from these epics.

There's no solid date for the first Sanskrit
dramas, either, though we do have a bunch

of surviving plays from the first century
CE, suggesting this tradition had already

The golden age for Sanskrit drama comes a
little bit later, around the 4th and 5th centuries,

Which was a good time if you were into science,
math, or ... theater.

All told, about two-dozen dramas survive;
we're going to look at one later in this

The plays were typically written in a mix
of Sanskrit, the fancy literary dialect, and

If the Greeks have taught us anything, it's
that if you want to have a great age of drama,

you need someone to come along and lecture
you on how to do it right.

In Sanskrit theater, instead of Plato and
Aristotle, we have Bharata Muni.

Speaking historically, he may not actually
have been a real person, but more of a literary

construct like Homer, except he was also semi-divine.

Sometime in the common era, Bharata Muni wrote
the Natyasastra, which is basically an all-purpose

guide to theater: How to write it, how to
stage it, how to watch it, all the different

It's like Aristotle's Poetics if, after
writing about tragedy, Aristotle decided to

Oh and the Natyasastra, is also structured
as a 6000 verse poem.

Obviously we're not going to have time to
summarize all of the Natyasastra–turns out

there are LOTS of nose movements; I'm partial
to this one [C/U ON SOME NOSE MOVES] –but

we will look at the philosophies that underlie
the composition of plays.

We'll also look at how plays should be performed,
at least according to Bharata Muni.

But first, let's check out the Natyasatra's
theory of the origins of drama.

Theater, it says, was created by Brahma, because
Brahma's job is creating stuff.

See CC World Mythology, with this handsome
half bird sir - don't worry Thoth and I

Brahma and some other gods are worried that
the scriptures are just too literary, so he

comes up with drama as a religious teaching
tool.

Brahma teaches it to the god Bharata, who
teaches it to his 100 sons.

They prepare a play about that awesome time
the god Indra defeated some demons.

The gods in the audience love the play, the
demons not so much.

They start wilding out, and Indra has to defeat
them—again!

The demons are still pretty upset, but they
are reassured that some plays will make fun

of the gods, so they agree to stop their attack.

Man, and you thought your preview audiences
were tough!

After that exciting origin story, the Natyasastra
introduces the idea of rasas.

Greek and Roman plays were divided by genre—comedy,
tragedy, satyr plays.

Instead of genre, plays are defined by the
kinds of moods they evoke.

There are initially eight of them: erotic,
comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible,

Eventually a ninth rasa, is added: peace!

How do you evoke these rasas, you might ask?

A playwright does it by drawing on eight major
human emotions, which are called bhavas.

There are eight of those: pleasure, mirth,
sorrow, wrath, vigor, fear, disgust, and wonder.

You put the bhavas together in the right combination
and you evoke the appropriate rasa.

Hold the odious phone, though: not only are
there nine rasa-moods and eight bhava-emotions,

there are also ten categories of play, somewhat
based on length, because a Sanskrit drama

These categories don't have precise English
translations, but most surviving plays belong

to two main categories: nataka plays and prakarana
plays.

They usually borrow stories from the classic
Sanskrit epics and deal with gods and heroes

These plays are a little like tragedies, except,
like most Sanskrit plays, they end happily.

This helps the audience live in harmony with
the universe - which I mean hey, not a terrible

Prakarana plays are also five to ten acts
long.These are closer in spirit to Roman comedies

in that they often have urban settings and
deal with everyday human characters.

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Nostrils, Harmony with the Universe, and Ancient Sanskrit Theater: Crash Course Theater #7

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