When did the first theater appear? Detailed answer

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When did the first theater appear? Detailed answer

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When did the first theater appear?

Theater as we know it originated in Greece as part of a religious ritual. The stage was a circle covered with turf, on which the faithful danced around the altar of Dionysus. The stage was usually located at the foot of the hill so that the audience, who sat on its slopes, could see the dancers. This marked the beginning of the traditional arrangement of Greek theaters - a semicircle of seats located on the slopes of a hill.

The word "theatre" is of Greek origin and means "a place for viewing". Theater built in Athens around 500 BC. e., was round and was called parterre. There were performances. Outside the circle, special rooms were built that looked very majestic. This was the prototype of the current scene. These rooms served as a dressing room for the participants in the performance. They were also the screen that became the backdrop for the action of the play. The Greeks made very little use of decorations and did not resort to artificial lighting at all, because the plays were staged during the daytime.

In Rome, the first stone theater was built in 52 BC. e. Roman theaters were very similar to Greek ones, but they were built on level ground. The Romans were the first to install seats in the stalls, and the piece was played on a raised stage behind which was a screen. After the Romans converted to Christianity, no theaters were built for thousands of years.

The first modern theater was the Farnesi Theater in Parma, Italy. It was built in 1618 or 1619. His stage did not move far into the hall, into the stalls, but was located along one of the walls. A curtain was used to separate the auditorium from the stage, and the change of scenery could be done out of sight of the audience.

Author: Likum A.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

What shape was the Earth in the representation of the people of the Middle Ages?

Not the way you think.

Around the XNUMXth century BC. e. Almost no one thought the Earth was flat anymore. Although if you really needed to show the Earth as a flat disk, you would end up with something similar to the current UN flag.

Generally speaking, the myth of the flat earth originated in the 1828th century. The reason for this is the semi-fiction novel by Washington Irving "The Life and Travels of Christopher Columbus" (XNUMX), where the author erroneously wrote that Columbus went on his famous journey to prove that the Earth was round and not flat, as supposedly believed at that time.

The idea of a flat earth was first taken seriously in 1838 by an eccentric English eccentric named Samuel Burley Rowbotham, who published a 16-page work entitled "Cethetic Astronomy: A Description of Some Experiments Proving that the Sea Surface Is a Perfect Plane and the Earth is Not a Globe." . (The word "cetetic" comes from the Greek zetein, "to seek, find out".)

A little more than a century later, Samuel Shenton, member of the Royal Astronomical Society and devout Christian, transformed the World Cethetic Society into the International Flat Earth Society.

In theory, this question should have been buried once and for all by the NASA space program of the 1960s, which culminated in the landing on the moon. However, Shenton was not at all embarrassed. Looking at pictures of the globe taken from space, Shenton commented: "These astronauts are big cunning. For some reason, they needed people to believe that the Earth is round. That's why they falsify photographs so godlessly." And the Apollo lunar landing, in his opinion, was nothing more than a thorough Hollywood hoax, directed by Arthur C. Clarke. The membership of the Society skyrocketed.

Shenton died in 1971, having, however, managed to appoint a successor to the presidency of the Society. Shenton handed over the reins to the eccentric but terribly charismatic Charles K. Johnson, who set himself the goal of gathering under the banner of the Society all who are ready to join the heroic movement "Against Big Science". By the end of the 1990s, the number of members of the Society reached 3500.

Johnson, who lived and worked in the Mojave Desert, was convinced that the world we live in is a flat disk with the North Pole in the center, surrounded by a solid 45-meter wall of ice. The sun and moon are 52 km in diameter, and the stars are "as far from Earth as from San Francisco to Boston."

In 1995, Johnson's desert retreat burned to the ground, and with it all the archives and membership lists. Charles K. Johnson died in 2001 with only a few hundred members left in the Society. Today, the Society exists as a web forum, www.theflatearthsociety.org, with about 800 registered members.

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