Fathers of Theater

Fathers of Theater

In Greece around the sixth and fifth century there was a blossoming of beautiful living and artistic views, such as mankind had never known before. The Greeks not only accomplished expanding their civilization in feats of physical perfection, but more especially in the fields of artistic and intellectual accomplishment. They made their buildings lovely; they learned to embellish beautifully rather than lavishly regarding the mind, and the aesthetic senses. Out of this magnificent way of thinking the Greeks not only performed theater, but perfected it.

To understand Greek theater you first have to understand where it came from. Dionysus was the Greek god of nature, wild things, including the human wild impulses. Most of all Dionysus was the god of joy-giving vine, and of mystical inspiration. He brought to his celebrants a spiritual intoxication. He exacted neither adoration nor warship from the Greek people; rather he accorded them to share in his ecstasy. Drama grew directly out of the Dionysian celebrations. There would be rites, dances, and the songs that were sung all in the name of Dionysian. The Greeks with cymbals, torches, and masks honored Dionysus. They started consecrating places fore these festivities called "theaters". Some of the celebrants became priests, and these were latter called "actors". Others, who had led in the singing, who could even invent new songs, became poets or dramatists. Then there was the audience, those who asked no more then participation in the emotional experience of the Dionysian celebration.

As time went on, the festivals of Dionysus grew in popularly. Eventually groups of players went out to provincial celebrations to present more dramas. These "artists of Dionysus" may be considered the first players' guild, or "actors" union. Athens had claimed a group if dramatists who stand in the small company of stage immortals. Men known as Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus are the very flowering of dramatists' genius. Greek theaters for eight or nine centuries after their era keep going on dramas wholly inferior to these masters.

In the golden age of Greek playwriting, it had been a comparatively simple arrangement of ringed seats, flat space for choral movement and acting, and a low painted skenet at the back. Gradually, the dancing-space, the orchestra, was contracted, and the stage building brought in closer making it more important. Finally by the end of the fifth century BC, around the time of the Peloponnesian War, the skene, the back wall, were two stories high.

There were several prop items commonly used in the theater. The Machina was a crane that gave the impression of flying actors coming on and off the stage. They also used trap doors or similar openings used to lift people on and off the stage. The ekeclema was a wheeled wagon used to bring dead characters into view for the audience. The Greeks were so profound in the arts that they created theater mechanisms that are still used two thousand years later.

Costumes were a very important factor in the production of Greek theater, because they could determine the characters by gender or social status. In the early productions Greek actors used body paint, animal skins, even feathers. When the Greek dramatists introduced real costumes, they imitated the contemporary dressing: the "chiton" and the "hemateon". The chiton was made of linen or silk and it was worn like a long dress. The hemateon was an exterior cloth, worn over