The Origins of Theatre

To start the A-Level course, we looked at the most primitive forms of theatre, and explored, through practical work, the need for communication that spurred on the creation of performance.

Theatre was born out of a need to communicate for survival - rituals, celebrations and performances are the ancestors of this whole subject, and from this evolved everything from religious festivals to West End musicals. Our need to communicate has never stopped, which is why this subject will never be redundant. The property of life to imitate art - to be able to effectively portray a message to an audience in the most engaging way possible - renders this subject a powerful tool. Equally, the property of art to imitate life, to be able to hold a mirror to our world and society, holds an immense force of change. Combined with the pure entertainment of performance, theatre will always be relevant to us, despite the fact it may have grown and diversified since the days of pre-civilisation. In the modern day, we have many luxuries that have allowed this. Firstly, developing technology has given us time to focus on other things, like theatre. We have also developed language, before acting, song, dance, and many other media so that we can show ideas more clearly. In addition to this, humans have come up with a far better understanding of the world and ourselves, giving us a lot of ideas to talk about. All this has produced the myriad of theatre genres we can see today. Furthermore they all also have different purposes - to make you laugh, to make you cry, to make you remember or feel, to give you a political idea, or a personal idea, to have fun, or to think - all of this is rooted in the origin of theatre we explored in these lessons.

Exploring the idea of where theatre originated from, we engaged in some practical work.

EXERCISE 1

We were given the prompt to create a scene in which someone within a primitive tribe returns to a camp to warn the group of a threat of an opposing tribe. We were challenged to create characters in the group and show reactions and communication without language. We had to solely rely on physicality (posture, gestures, facial expressions and body language) and limited grunts and noises resembling grammelot to show the characters communicating which was very challenging and forced us to think about not only how a primitive man may move, but how you can show ideas and emotions in this state.

EXERCISE 2

The next prompt contained two different scenes - within the frame of a primitive tribe again, and allowed to use a more sophisticated yet fictional language, the first scene should show one of the tribe doing something to save everyone from a fatal threat, whilst the second scene, 50 or more years later, would show a ritual or celebration surrounding this event to commemorate and remember the action. We chose the discovery of fire, saving the tribe from freezing to death (and showed different characters reacting differently, with fear, curiosity and appreciation, portrayed through grammelot, gestures and body language) as our action, and then were told to focus more on the second scene, which was a ritualistic lighting of a fire to remember this initial event. In this scene we had two characters performing the ritual and another two who were introduced to the ritual and fire for the first time, specifically to show a transfer of information through theatre between two parties. Our ritual included a type of repetitive dance and chant, symbolic of lighting the fire, and we tried to communicate with the others through gestures and grammelot - all of which showed how theatre is used so effectively spread ideas (even those as fundamental to human development as fire as per our example).