1: Introduction- What is Theatre?

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As far as we know, theatre has always been with us.

The earliest evidence of theatre may lie in the 40,000-year-old cave paintings discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. These paintings, some of the oldest figurative artworks on Earth, depict human–animal hybrids engaged in what may be ritual action. These images may suggest early performance traditions—perhaps dance, chant, or masked enactments designed to commune with forces beyond our understanding (Aubert, et. al. 2019, 442). Theatre as a live, embodied, collaborative form of storytelling is one of humanity’s oldest tools for understanding the world.

1. Live: Theatre happens in front of an audience in real time. Unlike the far more recent mediums of film, television, and internet videos, theatre is not pre-recorded or edited. If a performance lasts ninety minutes, then ninety minutes will have passed in the lives of both the performers and the audience in a shared space.
2. Embodied: The primary medium of theatre is the actor’s body. While paintings might employ stretched canvas and pigment applied with a paintbrush to create a unified image, in theatre, the actor’s body is paint and paintbrush.
3. Collaborative: Theatre occurs in the moment where actors meet onstage and tell a story together. Creating this moment requires many other collaborators: a playwright, who writes the story; a director, who composes the stage action; and designers, who create the environment in which the story unfolds. The most important collaborator is the audience viewing the performance. The play takes place in their collective and individual imaginations. There is no king. There is only an actor wearing a gold-painted crown, sitting in a rickety wooden chair, and yet the audience sees a king. That is part of what people refer to as the willing suspension of disbelief, or the “magic” of theatre. Playwrights, directors, actors, designers, and audiences work together to tell the story.

Theatre emerges from a mimetic impulse, a basic human tendency to imitate, role-play, and perform. Mimesis, from the ancient Greek word for “imitation,” refers to our instinct to embody others, retell stories, and act out what we observe.[i] In early childhood, we pretend to be parents, animals, heroes, or imaginary creatures. This impulse doesn’t fade. It becomes more structured, stylized, and intentional. Theatre arises when these instinctive performances are connected to a story, rehearsed, and shared with an audience. Though the practice relates to the role-playing that occurs in childhood, theatre is more than child’s play. It speaks about what we already know and what we dare to hope. Theatre is a form of symbolic communication, shaped by culture, tradition, aesthetics, and purpose. It is a technology for memory, imagination, and meaning making.

[i] The term mimesis comes from ancient Greek philosophy and refers to imitation or representation. The concept was central to Aristotle’s theory of drama, which argued that theatre imitates human action in ways that allow audiences to reflect on moral and emotional questions.

Theatre is a global phenomenon. The word theatre comes from the ancient Greek theatron, meaning “seeing place,” which refers to both the physical space of performance and the communal act of witnessing. While Western traditions often dominate theatre studies, theatre is not the sole possession of Europeans. People across different cultures and at different times have used performance to transmit knowledge, preserve cultural values, confront social injustices, grieve, celebrate, teach, heal, and dream. Every human society, from every historical period, appears to have developed its own performance practices with its own rituals, aesthetics, and social functions. Consider the masked dances of the Dogon in Mali, the shadow puppet theatre of Java, Indian Kūṭiyāṭṭam (Sanskrit dramas) and Kathakali (dance theatre), Japanese Nōh and Kabuki, Chinese xìqǔ, Aztec temple rituals, and Indigenous storytelling ceremonies across the Americas and Australia. Cultures that, to our knowledge, had no contact with each other nevertheless developed practices that share many of theatre’s elements: storytelling, direction, role-playing, costume, lighting, music, setting, and audience. Theatre serves not only as entertainment or art, but as a cultural technology: a shared space where we represent the world, challenge it, and reimagine what it might become.