This document provides an overview of key concepts related to performance and theatre. It discusses what performance is, different types of performances, the common elements they share such as actors, actions, audiences, arenas, and arrangements. It also examines what specifically makes theatre unique as a performance art, noting its ephemeral live nature, the connection and consciousness between actors and audiences, and how no two performances can ever be exactly the same.

1. What is Performance?
And what is some other stuff too!
Use your arrow keys to move
throughout the powerpoint

2. Intro to Theatre
In this class we will explore questions like…
- What is art?
- What is performance?
- What is theatre and where does it come
from?
- Should we care?
- What can we take from theatre into everyday
life?
- Can we really call what Keanu Reeves does
acting?

3. Theatre is for Everyone
• You’ll find that people have written plays
about pretty much everything: code breaking,
lawyers, love stories, physics, calculus, medical
ethics, stamp collecting, racism, sexism,
baseball, corporate ethics, dancers, movie
stars, journalists, politics… this list goes on and
on. On the next slide you can click around for
descriptions of just a few plays.

4. A pretty tense A dissenting A biography of mathematician
drama about juror in a murder Alan Turing who helped break
two sisters trial tries to the German Enigma Code during
fighting over convince his WWII
whether or not fellow jurors that Based on the true
to sell two very everything is not story of girls
rare stamps to as cut and dry as whose cancer was
this thug stamp it seems. caused by the
collector. radium based paint
they used to paint
glow in the dark
An African- watch dials, and
With three The story of a
the corporate plot
American patients and onegay professionalto escape
politician tries to A writer of Middle heart, a hospital baseball player
responsibility
reconcile his Eastern decent is committee and the
plans to develop brutally meets to decide challenges he
his old questioned under whose life will faces as he
neighborhood suspicion of being be saved. comes out to his
with an a terrorist
team and the
appreciation for
public.
his past

5. Words from everyday life that came
from the theatre
• Drama
• Melodrama
• Prima donna
• Character
• Acting out
• Role
• Deus ex machina
• The stage is set
• In the spotlight
• Etc.

6. What is art?
• “art is a mirror or reflection of life; an
extension or a projection of how we live,
think, and feel. Art reveals to us what people
treasure and admire, and what they fear most
deeply. Art is not only something we find
desirable and enjoyable; it seems to be an
absolute necessity for human survival.” –
Theatre the Lively Art
– Do you agree?

7. Make sure
to click on
this link!
What is art?

8. What is Performance?
• Basically, performance
is every type of activity
in which people are
watching other people
doing stuff.

9. TYPES OF PERFOMANCE
• Sports
• Auctions
• Concerts
• Religious Rituals
• Code Switching
– The roles you play in daily life: you act differently
when you’re talking to your significant other than you
do when you’re talking to your teacher or your
grandmother
• Politicians performing as human beings
• Etc…

10. What do all performances have in
common?
Wow!...Excellent question!
• Actor (the doer)
• Action (what they’re doin’)
• Audience (who’s watchin’ ‘em do what they’re
doin’)
• Arena (where it’s bein’ done)
• Arrangement (how it’s bein’ done)

11. Take a moment to think about the last summer Olympics, which I’m
assuming most of us could only watch from home. When Michael
Phelps was swimming for that 7th gold, it was pretty intense back here
in the states…
What would it have been like to be there?
Think about the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feelings, the
camaraderie of the other spectators, the energy of the room…

12. Purpose of Performance
• We’ve already talked about what all forms of
performance have in common. But what sets
them apart? Different kinds of performances will
have different:
– Objectives (what they want to achieve/make the
audience feel or think)
– Organization (how they are arranged, what are the
rules)
– Consciousness (how aware are the actors and the
audience of each other? how important is this
awareness to the performance?)

13. Types of Performances
Look at these various performance types and
think about the objective, organization and
consciousness of each:
• Football game
• Rock concert
• Political speech
• Movie
• Theatre
• Poetry Reading

14. Okay… so what makes a specific
Performance Theatre?
• In theatre we see human beings “enact stories
about human beings before other human beings”
(4)
• In theatre, we don’t have the luxury of film or
novels to fill in all the details, so “the imagination
of the live audience is more important in the
absence of a camera” (4)
• Unlike many other art forms, theatre is
ephemeral – it’s there and it’s gone. It’s not
recorded and it can’t be reproduced exactly.
• There is a distinct and important connection
between the audience and the actors

15. Performance as Ritual
Like any good ritual, in performance :
• We have a text of some kind that tells us how to
behave
• We arrange time symbolically
• There is some sort of special occurrence or event
(usually)
• There is often an intention of doing something
good for the community through the execution of
the ritual (think about it – people go to religious
services because prayer is supposed to DO
something to make their lives better. How about
theatre?)

16. Performance as Ritual
• On the next slide you’ll see two pictures of
two very different weddings. One is my
brother and his wife. The other is the
wedding scene from the famous play Our
Town by Thornton Wilder. What do these two
events have in common? What sets them
apart?

17. Performance as Ritual

18. Performance as Art
Like any good art, in performance:
• The thing being presented is self-conscious – it
is aware that there is a creator and a viewer
• The creators are attempting to evoke an
aesthetic response from the viewers
• The thing being presented has aesthetic
and/or social value to both the creators and
the viewers (or it attempts to!)

19. How Film and Theatre are Alike
• Actors impersonate people other than
themselves
• Require audiences
• Usually depend on scripts of some kind
– There is improvised theatre and even improvised film,
but improvised pieces are still organized by some kind
of structure.
• The worlds are more “condensed and powerful”
than the real world
– People write about days when something special
happens… because who wants to watch a play about a
totally normal day?

20. How Film and Theatre are Alike
• Real spaces and things artificially arranged
– Events and characters are carefully constructed to
ensure that they lead somewhere and have meaning –
the details should help tell the story, whereas in our
daily life, not everything leads somewhere.
• Symbolic and real time
– The time that passes may not always be the literal
time it takes for these events
• Collaborative
– There are far more people involved in creating these
performances than the audience sees in the course of
watching them

21. So...
What is it about Theatre?

22. What is it about Theatre?
• It’s immediate and unique – happening live in
front of the audience
• The audience itself actually affects the
performance
• Because the audience and the actors are so
intimately connected, no performance can ever
be exactly the same as the one before. The night
you go could have a totally different energy from
the night I go. So the lines are the same, the
actors are the same, but the performance is
totally one-time-only!