Thursday19th March 2015

Thursday 19^th March 2015

Today in class, we focused on the historical context of Greek theatre. We watched three videos in class and two of them were about performances of Greek tragedy from long ago in history. I took many notes in during the video, which helped me to understand even more about Greek theatre, and the way it was performed and also the effect it had on the audience. This was useful videos to watch as it helped us to understand the concept of Greek theatre and what it meant to Greek people.

Here are the notes I made during the first video:

• ·         The plot of the performance was realistic and was very emotional and quite traumatic for the audience. However they were excellent plays and can relate to people and are very effective.
• ·         It had universal themes which meat that it was suitable for anywhere in the world and that people could relate to the story. For example, fighting is something that occurs everywhere.
• ·         Often the good heroes in Greek theatre do not always do the right thing, this shows that nobody is perfect and everyone can make mistakes even good people, which can also reflect on life today.
• ·         Most likely, in all Greek tragedies, someone dies during the play. When they were going to die they would usually say something to do with the sun because to the Greeks the sun was an important thing when you were about to die.
• ·         The chorus is a group of people that start the play and would often come onto the stage to interrupt the acting to explain briefly to the audience what is happening or what is going to happen next.
• ·         The story told through Greek theatre is always set in the life of one day.
• ·         The Greek tragedies were mostly about loss, love, war death, fighting, sadness, affairs, inappropriate sex between relatives.

Notes I made on the second video:- The Greatest show on Earth BBC

•      Although the performances were very tragic violent and sad for the audience to watch, there was also comedy involved in the show. This was used to break up the sadness of the play and make the audience feel less sad and traumatised. They would do this by usually having a half human half goat man come onto stage and act out comedy which would make the audience laugh.
• ·         The Greek performances were created by taking real life scenarios from things that had happened in Athens, Greece.
• ·         Athens invented drama and invented the idea of actors and performance.
• ·         There were usually 3-4 actors and a chorus which included roughly 5 people. The chorus people would dance sing and act to explain to the audience what is happening in the play, they were similar to a narrator.
• ·         The plays opposed serious questions to the audience.
• ·         Theatre was seen as religious and people would go to the theatre not only to watch performances but to socialise and discuss important matters for democracy and democratic action.
• ·         Actors always wore masks; they said this would make them a total different person.

Watching these videos really helped me to understand Greek performances more and it made it easier to understand why the tragedies were made so horrific and violent. It was definitely useful for the class and will definitely help us to make our performance a lot better as we k=now know a lot more about Greek tragedy and Greek theatre and what it meant to the Greek community. These videos were very important to watch as they helped us widen our minds and opinions and we certainly got to think outside the box.