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As a performing art, theater is collaborative, utilizing live performers, typically actors, to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific location, often a stage.

By British convention, the spelling is theatre, and that is the preferred spelling everywhere in the English-speaking world, except the United States.

In the United States, theater is the standard spelling, although theatre is also widely used, particularly in the arts world. While there is no official rule, a common informal distinction has emerged: Theatre is often used to refer specifically to live stage performances, while theater is frequently associated with cinemas or movie houses. However, theater is the default American spelling for all contexts. Style guides like the AP recommend theater for all uses, but in the arts community, theatre serves as a badge of identity, and is sometimes even used to refer to the cinema.

Whatever the spelling, theater is one of the oldest art forms. It is a live, collaborative act of storytelling through performance, blending literature, music, movement, and visual design into a shared experience between performers and audience.

The roots of theater are in communal storytelling and ritual. Early performances often honored deities, marked the passage of seasons, or preserved cultural myths. These early forms combined music, dance, masks, and symbolic gestures, and formed the groundwork for formal drama.

In 5th-century BC Athens, theater became a civic institution. The City Dionysia festival celebrated Dionysus with tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. Playwrights established dramatic structures and themes, such as fate, morality, and politics, that still resonate today.

Rome adapted Greek forms, but with an emphasis on spectacle, including elaborate sets, mime, and popular entertainment. Roman playwrights had a profound influence on later European comedy and tragedy. The Romans also introduced permanent stone theaters and professional acting troupes.

In India, Sanskrit drama blended poetry, music, and dance. Classical Chinese opera combined stylized movement, elaborate costumes, and symbolic staging. In Japan, there was an emphasis on minimalism and spiritual themes, with a focus on spectacle, color, and popular appeal.

After the fall of Rome, theater in Europe was largely tied to the Church. Liturgical dramas evolved into morality plays and mystery cycles performed in public squares. The Renaissance revived classical ideals. In England, the Elizabethan stage flourished with Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson, whose plays explored human ambition, love, and folly.

Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism shaped European and American theater during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Theater became a laboratory for experimentation during the 20th century. Expressionism and absurdism challenged narrative logic, political theater sought to provoke social change, and musical theater became a dominant form in the United States, blending song, dance, and narrative.

Today's theater spans Broadway blockbusters, immersive site-specific performances, digital streaming productions, and global festivals. Genres and forms include tragedy (serious themes, human suffering), comedy (humor, satire, happy endings), musicals (storytelling through song and dance), opera (fully sung drama with orchestration), experimental/avant-garde (breaks convention, explores form), puppetry (storytelling with puppets), physical theater (movement-based performance), and cultural/traditional (rooted in specific heritage).

Subcategories of theater by function include Broadway, community, dinner, fringe, immersive, interactive, Off-Broadway, Off-off Broadway, playback, regional, site-specific, street, summer stock, and touring theater.

Broader categories might include commercial theater, political theater, community theater, and site-specific theater.

For the purpose of categorization, we will cover cinematic theater in our Movies section, and Puppetry has its own category.

 

 

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