Concept
Performing arts
Overview
The performing arts are arts such as music, dance, and drama which are performed for an audience. They are different from the visual arts, which produce physical or static objects. Performing arts include a range of disciplines which are performed in front of a live audience, including theatre, music, and dance. Performances may take place in purpose-built buildings, such as theatres and opera houses, as well as in open air festivals, street settings, and recorded formats like film or television.
Performing arts traditions are present in every society. Music and dance date to prehistoric times, while theatrical forms appear in Ancient Greece, India, and China. Performance served combinations of religious, ceremonial, and entertainment functions. Traditions including Japanese Noh and Kabuki, as well as Indian classical dance, have been recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Western performing arts history spans ancient Greek tragedy and comedy through medieval mystery plays, the emergence of opera and ballet in the Renaissance, and the Romantic expansion of grand opera. In the modernist revolutions of the early 20th century, figures such as Isadora Duncan, Konstantin Stanislavski, and Sergei Diaghilev reworked the principles of dance and theatre. Postmodern performance increasingly challenges the boundaries between disciplines.
Live performances before an audience are a form of entertainment. The development of audio and video recording has allowed for private consumption of the performing arts. In narrative performance, characters express emotions.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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What the ancients called Rhythmus, what we call Time or Measure, is the connecting principle of those two arts; Music consisting in a succession of a certain sort of sounds, and Dancing in a succession of a certain sort of steps, gestures, and motions, regulated according to time or measure, and thereby formed, into a sort of whole or system; which in the one art is called a song or tune, and in the other a dance…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Performing arts is.
The most fanciful plays of children rarely lose all touch with the mutual fitness and pertinency of various meanings to one another; the "freest" plays observe some principles of coherence and unification. They have a beginning, middle, and end. In games, rules of order run through various minor acts and bind them into a connected whole. The rhythm, the competition, and cooeperation involved in most plays and games…
John Dewey, How We Think
States what Performing arts is.
Wrestling is to be pursued as a military exercise, but the meaning of this, and the nature of the art, can only be explained when action is combined with words. Next follows dancing, which is of two kinds; imitative, first, of the serious and beautiful; and, secondly, of the ludicrous and grotesque. The first kind may be further divided into the dance of war and the dance of peace.
Plato, Laws
States what Performing arts is.
Related ideas
- Aristophanes
- Ritual
- India
- Iran
- Music
- Yuan dynasty
- Mahabharata
- Aeschylus
- Motion
- Drama
- UNESCO
- Opera
- Postmodernism
- Puritans
- Renaissance
- Work of art
- Romanticism
- Sophocles
- Southeast Asia
- Thomas Edison
- Tamil Nadu
- William Shakespeare
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Visual arts
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Modernism.