A. Initial Questions, Terms, and Goals
- 1.Why study theatre history today—when information about the past is readily available on the Web and we are often more concerned about the present and future in our current “postmodern” era? It is important for artists to know the history of their art form. But are there other ways to benefit, too, from a deep yet global sense of theatricality and its many histories (or her-stories)?
- 2.We all engage in creative play as children, gaining a fuller sense of self (or possible selves) through imaginary interactions with others, sometimes with big people watching, providing a larger symbolic framework. Peers, parents, and other adults also model the roles we take, offering implicit scripts and explicit directions, along with costumes, props, and settings for meaningful identities. This play-acting as children and later in life involves our family, neighborhood, schools, and other communities, yet also television, movies, and interactive online media—expanding the arenas of our self and other awareness. It may also involve “deep play,” which performance theorist Richard Schechner explains as mischief, rebellion, games, and gambling with serious risks. Degrees of joyful or deep play continue from our youth into adulthood through formal theatre, sports, and videogames, on various stages with boundaries and rules.
- 3.Such theatric(k)s extend the animal drives of cooperation and competition from the nurturing, hierarchical, ego-creative, and traumatic spaces of childhood to related arenas of adulthood. The art of theatre reflects this in a safe, entertaining, yet often challenging space, which draws on plays and traditions of the past, along with current cultural conflicts. Thus, theatricality—exemplified by the art of theatre—is key to our lives as human beings, as malleable animals with remnant instincts and moral rules, struggling to know who we are and what to do, while seeking a bigger meaning to it all.
- 4.We also have an “inner theatre” that produces various dreams each time we sleep, some of which we remember, from subconscious yet real energies within us. When we are actively involved in the art of theatre, onstage, backstage, or in the audience, we share a formal sense of play, in a collective dreamlike space. So, studying theatre history can help us understand the conventions of theatrical play in the past, affecting our practices today, and give us glimpses of the shared dreams and nightmares of our ancestors—or of their allies and rivals in other parts of the world. This relates to the larger sense of theatricality in religious, political, and military theatres, as well as the “presentation of self in everyday life,” involving backstage and onstage aspects (as sociologist Erving Goffman put it), in various cultures around the globe, across many generations.[How does your experience of theatre as an art form relate to performances in everyday life and your “inner theatre” thus externalized?]
- 5.Each generation, including yours, defines what it values from the past, revising its history. So you are part of that project, now and in the future: choosing what to learn from theatre’s past, how to reflect on it, and where to apply it, through your inner and outer theatres of memories, dreams, everyday life, and art. This book offers a “treasure map” of global theatricality, sketched from its deepest history to initial extensions in screen media and current postcolonial developments. TIMELINES show the theatricality of geopolitics, with war, terrorism, and major cultural developments. Numbered paragraphs outline various theatre histories, for your further exploration online and in the library. Questions in bold suggest how you might reflect on present parallels, making your own map of global theatre histories, regarding the world around you and the theatre inside your brain.
- 6.Our understanding of theatricality in history comes through the art of theatre (from the ancient Greek theatron or “seeing place”), especially its Afro-Eurasian traditions, starting with ancient Egypt, Greece, and India. But theatricality extends globally and much further back in time, to the beginnings of humanity in our animal–human ancestry (in Africa), through the evolving awareness of Self, performing with others for a transcendent Other. This awareness extends to our current screen devices with mass media, social networks, and virtual realities. Thus, theatricality has a specific meaning in this book, related to the broader notion of “performativity” in the field of performance studies. Theatricality is performance plus the awareness of audience, of role-playing and being seen or being in the role of watcher. It occurs even when you are alone with your dreams and imaginings, or when you hear the voice of yourself speaking to yourself, yet involving memories of others as absorbed personalities, and projections of an identity framework, in your inner theatre .
- 7.Try it now. Listen to that inner voice in your head, departing from these words—as you become the performer and audience of your thoughts. That is an aspect of the “theatre of the mind.” In this introduction, we will also consider the “theatre of the brain,” with specific neural functions akin to elements of external theatre today.
- 8.Through the traditional elements and developments of theatre, we can see its heritage as an art form: what we might use from the past or change. And yet, by also considering the prehistory, inner theatre elements, and current extensions of theatricality, we might view the lures and errors of the past being repeated in the present—with choices for the future. Thus, global theatre history acts as an uncanny mirror, revealing our repressive blind spots and stereotypical projections in wider arenas of theatricality today.
- 9.In common speech, the terms “theatrical” and “dramatic,” regarding everyday life, often suggest hyperactive pretense or false posturing, with stressful demands on others, as in the “kabuki theatre” of politics or “too much drama” at home. “Theatricality” can connote silliness and superficiality, as too pretentious and emotional. In written English, its earliest recorded use was in 1837, yet it has been used in so many ways since then as to become almost “empty of meaning,” according to some theatre scholars (Davis and Postlewait 1–2). It also relates to a longer history of “antitheatrical prejudice,” with insights and fears, from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato to various religious and secular censorings of theatrical activity as dangerous to society (Barish). And yet, it has come to mean an awareness of spectatorship and performance elements, through modern and postmodern “theatricalist” styles, against the realist paradigm of verisimilitude with a “fourth wall” at the edge of the stage.
- 10.Recognizing yet deepening such associations, this introduction investigates the significance of global theatricality in its “deep history” (Smail), regarding the animal-to-human evolution of our brains, bodies, and cultures. The next chapter then focuses on our ancestors’ early emergence of Self and Other awareness, of role-playing and being seen, with inner-theatre projections in prehistoric cave, temple, and domestic images. These artifacts offer evidence of collective meaning-making performances about nurturing yet deadly forces of nature and potential afterlife realms.
- 11.Reflect on how these primal elements of theatricality relate to your own life and to the hyper-theatricality of politics, mass media, and social networking today. Also, apply such connections to the mapping of various forms of theatre across cultures and time periods in the chapters ahead. Thus, you will engage your inner theatre with new perspectives on the theatricality of life: from bio-cultural identity needs to reflective stage/screen simulations, in changing social frameworks, from the globe of your brain to the world around you. Perhaps you will glimpse the playing out of your life story through such inner and outer, global contexts.
B. Culture’s Cave and the Brain’s Inner Theatre (from Plato to Neuroscience)
- 1.In Plato’s Republic (380 BCE), the ancient Greek philosopher offers an allegory, through a dialog between his older brother Glaucon and his teacher Socrates, about people chained for their entire lives in a cave, facing a wall where they see a shadow play, not knowing any other reality. One such prisoner is released and forced to see the firelight and figures, behind the prisoners, which produces their shadow-life on the cave wall. Squinting and resisting this insight, the freed prisoner is then dragged out of the cave, resisting even more the pain of the sunlight. Eventually, he sees the truth outside the cave, as Platonic ideas, whose shadows are within it. He tries to save others in the cave, yet they resist like he did.
- 2.This allegory of the cave relates to Plato’s critique of theatre and other art forms as removed from the truth, even further than objects in reality, which are already just copies of ideal forms. Yet Plato’s student, Aristotle, suggested in his Poetics (335 BCE) a theo...