1. The Basic Elements of Theatre
3 Basic Elements of Theatre:
(1) THE TEXT - What is Performed
(2) The Performance – How it is presented
(3) The Audience – provides feedback, arrives
with expectations
The most basic definition of theatre is: someone
performing something for someone else.
A performs B for C
(Eric Bentley)

2. Interaction Between the 3 Basic Elements of
Theatre
Text
Audience Performance

3. TEXT: What is Performed
• Many types of activities may be considered Theatre
• What is the essence of theatrical performance?
Possibilities:
• The staged performance of a text
• Storytelling
• Entertainment such as juggling or improvisation
• Since Theatre has a broad range of possibilities, the
essence of What is Performed is difficult to define
• Therefore Theatre, as a performing art, is difficult to
define

4. The Performance
The Performance translates the potential of a script, scenario, or plan
into actuality.
Key Components of the Performance include:
• Performance Space
where the performance takes place and what the relationship is
between the performers and the audience
• Artistic Collaboration
how the playwright, director, designers and others work together
to create the Performance
• Theatrical Elements
Scenery, Costumes, Music, Lighting and other effects that
contribute to the Performance

5. Performance Studies perspective
What other forms of performance exist?

6. The Audience
“The only thing that all forms of theatre have in common is the need
for an audience.” Peter Brook
The Audience:
• Completes the cycle of Creation/Communication
• Provides Immediate Feedback to the Performers
3-Way Interaction:
Performers Audience
Audience Performers
Audience Audience
(And also Performer to Performer in and out of character)

7. Elements of Theatre Spectatorship
“Willing Suspension of Disbelief”
• Term from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• We know that the events of the play are not real.
• However, we agree, during the experience of the
performance, not to disbelieve the events of the play.
Example:
• When a character kills another character onstage, we do
not rush to the stage to help the victim, yet we may still
weep or feel an emotional response to the action.

8. 3 Thing Theatre can do:
Educate
Entertain Inspire

9. Special Qualities of Theatre
Lifelikeness
Theatre recreates everyday experiences.
Ephemerality
Theatre is live performance, and becomes a part of the past
immediately after it occurs.
Objectivity
Theatre “presents both outer and inner experience through speech
and action.”
Complexity
Theatre combines varied elements such as movement, lighting
and sound while also drawing from all of the other Arts.
Immediacy
Theatre is psychologically immediate, because it transpires in the
simultaneous presence of live actors and spectators in the same
room.

10. Popular Culture vs. Elitist Culture
Popular Culture
Reflects tastes of the general public
Theatre that appeals to Popular Culture = entertainment,
storytelling, familiar character types and situations, MTV,
Rap, Hip Hop, Real World programs and Reality TV.
Elitist Culture
Reflects tastes of a smaller group with particular
standards
Theatre that appeals to Elitist Culture = seeks new types of
artistic expression, challenges views and assumptions, raises
questions. (BUT how might this also be part of popular
culture entertainment?)

11. Question:
what does class have to do with the attendance and
appreciation of live Theatre?
Does economics play a role in how people
appreciate theatre in society today?

12. Useful Arts =
Arts that can be taught and mastered through specific
techniques
Fine Arts =
Products of genius that cannot be reduced to rules or
principles
Examples:
• Literature (including Drama)
• Painting
• Music
• Dance

14.  Fountain
In 1917, one "Richard Mutt" entered a urinal as a sculpture in
an exhibit organized by the New York Society of Independent
Artists (of which Duchamp was a founding member and whose
stated policy was to accept "any work by any artist who paid
the six dollar fee"*). The piece was rejected without discussion.
Duchamp defended the piece in the magazine The Blind Man,
(which he edited), with these words:
"Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made
the fountain or not has no importance. He
chose. He took an ordinary article of life,
placed it so that its useful significance
disappeared under a new title and point of
view ...[creating] a new thought for that
object." When the "morality" of such an
object was questioned he responded, "It is a
fixture that you see every day in plumbers'
show windows... The only works of art
America has given [us] are her plumbing
and her bridges."

15. What do YOU think?
1. What is ART?
2. Is theatre only for the affluent?
3. Why does theatre not thrive as a form
of entertainment in society like the
cinema?

16. Purposes of Art
• Art as a means to understand one’s world
• Like other disciplines, such as history, Art
seeks to discover and record patterns in
human experience.
• While historians, scientists and other scholars
appeal to the mind/intellect, Artists appeal to
the senses.
• Both are valid forms of acquiring knowledge
and learning more about the world in which
we live

17. Purposes of Art
1. Art is mimetic
a. Imitation of something natural or imagined
b. It is not real, it cannot be
c. Hence since it is contrived it can be
controversial.
d. Art condenses human experience by
stripping away the irrelevant details.
Does it reflect reality or create it?
Does it describe behavior, or
prescribe behavior?
Give an example in either Style,
fashion, attitude, language.

18. Genres
1. Tragedy
2. Neoclassic Tragedy
3. Shakespeare & Jacobean drama
4. Romantic Drama
5. Modern Tragedy
6. Comedy
7. Tragic Comedy
8. Melodrama
9. Postmodernism