theater

Noun

theater (plural theaters)

1. A place or building, consisting of a stage and seating, in which an audience gathers to watch plays, musical performances, public ceremonies etc.

   "The theater is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, it is also the return of art to life." — (w:Oscar Wilde)

2. A region where a particular action takes place; a specific field of action, usually with reference to war.

   His grandfather was in the Pacific theater during the war.

3. A lecture theatre.
4. (medicine) An operating theatre or locale for human experimentation.

   This man is about to die, get him into theater at once!

5. (US, Australian, New Zealand) A cinema, or picture theatre.

   We sat in the back row of the theater and threw popcorn at the screen.

6. Drama or performance as a profession or artform.

   I worked in the theater for twenty-five years.

Theatre (or theater, see spelling differences) is a branch of the performing arts. While any performance may be considered theatre, as a performing art, it focuses almost exclusively on live performers creating a self contained drama. A performance qualifies as dramatic by creating a representational illusion. By this broad definition, theatre had existed since the dawn of man, as a result of the human tendency for storytelling. Since its inception, theatre has come to take on many forms, utilizing speech, gesture, music, dance, and spectacle, combining the other performing arts, often as well as the visual arts, into a single artistic form.

The word derives from the Ancient Greek theatron (θέατρον) meaning "the seeing place."

Theatre (Greek "theatron"), enjoys the distinction of two spellings: in British English, "theatre" and in American English, "theater". There is no technical distinction between the meanings of the two spellings, however most theatre artists prefer the English spelling because it creates a historical nod to the ancient Greek term theatron. Some also use the American spelling to designate a theatre building and the English term to reference the art itself, as in the "art of theatre." Theatre is that branch of the performing arts concerned with the creation of stories or narratives for (or with) an audience using combinations of acting, speech, gesture, music, dance, object manipulation, sound and spectacle — indeed, any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as opera, musicals, ballet, mime, kabuki, classical Indian dance, Chinese opera, mummers' plays, and pantomime.

Sourced

• The theatre is a machine of transformations: everything is transformed into another thing; a bald man has thick hair on his head; a man with strong legs gains a limp and a sharp-eyed person becomes blind; an actor who is an atheist immediately turns into the most pious priest on earth!
  • Mehmet ildan, William Shakespeare, Theatre Play, ed. 1st, Act II, Scene IV, p. 65, (2002).

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Wed Mar 3 07:25:44 2010