Ancient Performing Arts

  

Artifacts from 30,000 years ago indicate that Ice Age people may have been performing religious rituals, and it is likely that the performing arts of music, theater, and dance formed the crucial elements of that ritual. Some 10,000 years later, drawings in caves in France, Spain, and Africa show performers in costumes representing various animals. Some of these performers are also carrying musical percussion and string instruments.

The earliest historical records of performing arts come from Egyptian pyramids circa 2,800 to 2400 b.c.e. These so-called pyramid texts consist of hieroglyphics and scenes depicting trials through which a spirit must pass before being admitted into a happier place. Some scholars believe that these texts were actually dramas, danced and enacted with accompanying music by performer-priests to ensure the well-being of the dead pharaoh and to demonstrate the continuity of life. Other scholars cite the Ikhernofret stone (c. 1868 b.c.e.), which contains the primary evidence about the Abydos passion play, said to be the first recorded text of a performance presented in ancient Egypt. The annual play, which concerns the life, death, and rebirth of the god Osiris, probably contained elements of all the performing arts. In addition to such passion plays, the Egyptian pharaoh was expected to demonstrate publicly his mastery of several sports, including archery, throwing, and chariot racing. It is from these Egyptian spectator events that most scholars date the beginnings of the performing arts in ancient civilizations.

The most fundamental of the performing arts is dance, for in its most simple manifestations, dance requires only the human body in motion. The basic dance is that of wild and vigorous jumping and leaping in rhythm, the so-called ecstatic dance. Used in religious ceremonies from sub-Saharan Africa to ancient Israel to Classical Greece and Rome, the ecstatic dance usually begins with restraint but becomes so wild that the dancers often fall unconscious from exertion. It was believed that during such a dance the god being worshiped actually took possession of the performer’s body. The Greeks called this phenomenon enthousiasmos (literally “possessed by the god”), from which is derived the English word “enthusiasm.” Such a dance was practiced by the Hebrew prophets when attempting to get in touch with the word of God. A similar dance seems to have been performed by the ancient inhabitants of Crete where priestesses danced in worship of the great mother goddess. Young Cretan men performed a kind of bull dancing, a very dangerous art form akin to modern Hispanic bullfighting, in which young male dancers executed such maneuvers as somersaulting between the horns of the raging animal. Those that failed to execute these moves were often gored to their death, in effect being sacrificed to the divinity.

Throughout the ancient world, dance was associated with the most basic of human needs and activities. Members of the Tarahumara tribe in Mesoamerica use the same word for dance and work. Fertility of the soil, animals, and people was invoked and celebrated in ancient dance. A painting by English painter John White in 1585 records a Virginia Indian ritual of ancient origin in which seminude young men are seen dancing in a circle around the three most beautiful virgins of the tribe. A similar painting by American artist George Catlin (1832) depicts a Mandan Indian traditional buffalo dance in which the people wearing animal heads dance to ensure abundance of the valuable bison. Other animal dances are practiced by primitive peoples who mask themselves as an animal, such as a lion, in order to acquire the desired characteristics of that animal. An interesting cave painting from North Africa depicts dancers costumed as the praying mantis insect.

The Talmud of the ancient Hebrews describes dances of Hebrew maidens that seem related to fertility dances of primitive peoples. Perhaps the most famous of the Jewish women’s dances are those mentioned in the Christian Bible when Salome, daughter of Herodias, “danced before him and his guests and pleased Herod.” Also famous is King David’s dance before the Ark of Covenant. Muslim dances of Turkey and the Mideast are famous for the ecstatic, spinning movements of the holy men known as whirling dervishes, a dance that is now outlawed. A more playful form of Hindu-Arabic dance is the famous singki of the Muslim princesses. The dance tests the performer’s grace and skill as she dances between two pair of bamboo poles clapped together in syncopated and ever-accelerating rhythm.

Ancient Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa are alike in that their dances often involved death and journeys into the world of the spirit. The Yoruba people of southern Africa have elaborate dances associated with ritual journeys of the spirit, as well as elaborate dance-dramas devoted to the mother goddess. These latter dances have been well documented in film. The most significant spirit dance of all comes from the Hindus of India. According to Hindu theology, the god Śiva actually danced the world into existence. To this day, young women, following a tradition of many hundreds of years, start training at the age of five or six in the intricate steps and gestures that make up Indian temple dance. These dancers are in some way “married” to the deity in whose temples they are found. Known as kathakali, the dance-dramas of northern India have survived to the present. Also surviving from a tradition more than a thousand years old are the dances of India’s neighbors: Ceylon, Cambodia, Bali, and Siam. Each of these dance forms is unique to its region but all are based on the radical flexing of hands, wrists, ankles, and feet, as opposed to the more fluid use of these body parts by Western cultures.

Island peoples from around the globe have distinct dances. In New Guinea, the Dani, whose customs and living conditions are still Stone Age, have various ritual dances, including a ritual dance-battle between warring villages in which actual violence and death may take place. Filipino dance draws its background from the various invaders of the islands, including Hindu, Muslim, and Chinese, the latter of whom are most famous for the dance-drama known as Beijing opera.

The Chinese, as well as the Koreans, contributed to the famous Japanese classical music gagaku and its accompanying dance-drama known as bugaku. The performers of bugaku were known as dancers of the right, who performed dances drawn from Korea, and dancers of the left, who performed dances that originated in China or South Asia. Right dancers are dressed predominantly in green and dance to music produced on percussion instruments. Left dancers are dressed mostly in red and perform to woodwinds. Bugaku is still danced today and is clearly the basis for the classic Japanese theatrical forms of Noh and Kabuki, which date from the eleventh century c.e.

Just as the Japanese borrowed dance forms from China and Korea, the ancient Greeks borrowed dance from Crete. Therefore, as in Crete, the ecstatic dance in archaic Greece (before 600 b.c.e.) was done by women, the maenads, in honor of Dionysus, the god of fertility. Many visual depictions of the maenads exist. They carry a sacred staff, the thyrsus. Their heads are thrown back, and their clothes twist wildly about them. The name maenad is the source of the English word “maniac,” and indeed the women became so wild and maddened in their dancing that they are said to have had seizures. The chorus of dancing maenads were later replaced by men who performed a more sedate, controlled, military dance in honor of the god Dionysus, known as the dithyramb. Groups of young men were organized into dithyrambic choruses, and in the name of Dionysus, they competed against one another at spring fertility festivals.

Other dances were also practiced by the ancient Greeks, including the geranos, or snake dance, and various other animal dances depicting lions, bears, foxes, and even birds. Numerous vase paintings and other visuals show dancers wearing animal masks and headdresses, as well as full animal costumes. The great comic playwright Aristophanes wrote an entire play, Ornithes (414 b.c.e.; The Birds, 1824), which featured a dancing chorus of avian creatures. Of course, the satyrs, or male goat-dancers, were a standard feature of dramatic choruses. Satyr dancers, wearing horns, hooflike foot gear, and short furry pants, are depicted in many vase paintings. Because the satyr dancers are sacred to Dionysus, god of wine, vegetation, and fertility, they often wear vine leaves in their hair and display large, false genitals.

All young male citizens in Classical Greece were trained in dance because, like modern-day military marching, it was considered good preparation for group discipline in battle. Like modern marching bands, Greek dance groups were trained to form shapes or schemata that had particular meaning for the spectators. Dance also taught communication skills as each dancer learned the effective and graceful use of meaningful gesture known as cheironomia. Moreover, dance was considered the most sacred of arts, having been associated with the saving of the life of the great god Zeus. According to legend, the Titan Rhea had taught the art of dance to the Curetes, sons of earth who dwelled in Crete. When Rhea gave birth to Zeus, she fled to Crete to avoid Cronus, the father Titan who devoured all of his children immediately after they were born. She gave the baby to the Curetes. When Cronus came looking for the infant, the Curetes performed the dance taught them by Rhea, filled with wild, leaping, noisy, and ecstatic choreography. The vigorous visual and vocal activity diverted the attention of Cronus so that he did not see the baby nor hear it crying. Zeus survived to overthrow Cronus and become king of all the gods. Because of its sacred nature, dance was assigned a special muse, Terpsichore, one of the nine great muses of ancient culture. In the fifth century b.c.e., the greatest honor that could come to a young Greek man was to be selected a member of one of the dancing choruses that performed in the sacred dramas given at the major theatrical festival, the city Dionysia.

Dancers not only appeared in festivals and theatrical performances but also were considered an important part of private entertainments in both Greece and Rome. Although neither culture encouraged couples dancing as a social activity, dancers did appear at lavish all-male Greek dinners known as symposia and at Roman banquets of various types. Dancers at these events were often accompanied by related kinetic artists such as acrobats and contortionists. In Classical Greece, most dancers were amateurs, but later professional actors and dancers banded together into a quasi-religious group known as the Artists of Dionysus.

In Rome, most entertainers were professionals or even slaves. Performers from the Roman animal shows or circuses were part-time dancers and part-time contortionists and acrobats. An unusual and significant Roman dance form was the pantomime, a dance-theater presenting narratives entirely without words. Invented in 22 b.c.e., the pantomime became the most popular of Roman entertainments, aside from such violent forms as the gladiatorial games, staged animal hunts, staged naval battles, and chariot races. In later Roman times, professional dancers from Africa and other exotic areas of the empire and various curiosities such as dwarf dancers were introduced. Christians were especially offended by a Roman dance of increasing popularity known as the kordax, a dance originating in theatrical comedies that featured rolling and swaying of the hips and other movements that the early church fathers considered sinful and lewd. The Christian ban on the kordax led to a general ban by the Church on all forms of dance in the ancient world.

Dance was an intricate part of theater in the ancient world, and the cultures of India, China, Japan, Greece, and Rome drew little distinction between the actor and the dancer. The plays of the Greek theater, known as dramenon, or happenings, featured dancing choruses as a major element of all productions. The word “theater” is drawn from the Greek theatron, or seeing place. The relation between theater and dance is nowhere better illustrated than in the fact that the large performing circle found in most Greek theaters is called the orchestra, or dancing circle. Although theatrical presentations are as old as humankind, modern Western theater seems to be a product of ancient Greece. Its origins were in the funeral rituals of Egypt, the sacred dance-drama of India, and the fertility rituals of Crete.

The Greek city-states had developed public religious festivals around two important seasons: spring and fall. The spring festival was devoted to Dionysus and was called the Dionysia, at which a number of rituals and dramas were performed. The Dorian Greeks claimed to have invented drama, but it was the Athenians who brought it to its classic form. In 534 b.c.e., Pisistratus, the ruler of Athens, made the Dionysia a legal state function. Thereafter, all male citizens of Athens were required to attend the plays each year. Thespis, the famous leader of a dithyrambic chorus, was named the first archon (producer) of Athens’s city Dionysia. Thespis is credited with formalizing dialogue in theater in that he would call out to his dancing chorus and they would answer him in a call-response pattern. Such performers were called answerers, or hypokritoi, which became the Greek word for actor and the English word “hypocrite.” At first only two types of dramenon were performed at the Dionysia, tragedies, or plays about the death of a hero and his replacement by another hero, and satyr plays, or comedies about the sexual escapades of the gods. It was the satyr plays that featured a chorus of singing and dancing goat-men or satyrs. Tragedies also featured a singing-dancing chorus, thought to be as large as fifty persons. All performers in Greek theater were men, although they frequently played women’s roles. The plays themselves were composed of two types of narrative elements: choral odes and the scenes between characters, known as the episodes. Choral performers were amateurs, young men chosen for their dancing ability. The actors were professional priest-performers. Costuming was very elaborate, and actors and chorus wore masks that completely covered the head.

The playwrights were known as poets (or makers) of dramenon. Three playmakers were selected each year, and each was responsible for one day of plays, which consisted of three tragedies and a satyr play. At the end of three days, a jury of twelve tribal leaders voted on the winner of the Dionysia, and that poet received a large sum of money. The vote was supposed to be directed by the hand of the god. Each day of plays was paid for by one of the three wealthiest men of Athens of that particular year, and one of those men, known as the choregus, or choral leader, was given the honor of being named the winner of the agon, or dramatic contest. Usually, the winner would put up a monument commemorating his victory and listing the names of the playwright and the hypokritoi, so that considerable information survives about the Dionysia. The most famous playwrights of fifth century Athens were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their most famous plays are Agamemnōn (458 b.c.e.; Agamemnon, 1777), Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), and Mīdeia (431 b.c.e.; Medea, 1781), respectively.

Never as highly respected as tragedies or even satyr plays, comedies were not admitted into the Dionysia until 587 b.c.e. Only the comedies of Aristophanes survive in written form, of which the most famous is Lysistratī (411 b.c.e.; Lysistratī, 1837). No satyr plays survive.

After Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.e.), the performing arts declined in Athens and throughout Greece. A special form known as New Comedy, or comedy of manners or character type, developed, of which Menander was considered the master. The Romans took up new comedy and produced two playwrights of comic genius, Plautus and Terence. Roman theater can be said to have begun officially in 240 b.c.e., when the Iudi Romani (Roman games) were established. However, Romans preferred the pantomime to spoken drama, and spectacles such as the circus, gladiatorial and wild animal fights, or even Christians being devoured by lions. These spectacles were presented in circular arenas such as the famed colosseum. Chariot races were held at the Circus Maximus, and sea battles were presented in special water theaters known as numachia. When Rome converted to Christianity, most of these shows were banned. Although some theater continued in the Byzantine Empire, and an actress, Theodora, even became the wife of an emperor, it may be said that with her conversion to Christianity in 527 c.e., the ancient Western performing arts, at least symbolically, drew to an end.

In the East, the sacred dance dramas of India continue to this day, as do the Noh and Kabuki theaters of Japan (descendants of the bugaku dancers) and the shadow puppet theater of Malaysia. In China and Korea, ancient theater forms, which included dance and acrobatic skills, are recalled by the present popularity of the modern Bejing opera. Indian drama began as dance narratives performed in temples. It was codified in a book compiled in the second century c.e. This work contained sections on theater architecture, dramatic technique, musical accompaniment, speech, choreography, and characterization. Specific gestures of the hand, head, eyes, cheek, neck, eyes, and even six gestures for the nose were listed. The temple performances of India, at first supported mainly by the aristocracy, gradually moved into popular culture where they embraced the other aspect of Indian theatrical performance, the storytellers and clowns of village theater, as well as the more ancient form of puppet theater known as the shadow puppet theater in which intricate two-dimensional forms are used to create shadow images on a white screen. The temple dance gave Indian theater its serious drama; the clowns and storytellers contributed comedy and farce. The strict division of dramatic forms that was typical of Greece and Rome was combined into a single narrative in Indian theater. The oldest surviving Indian play scripts are known as Sanskrit dramas, the most famous of which is Sudraka’s Mrcchakatikā (c. 300-c. 600 c.e.; Mrchhakatika, 1898).

As in India, Chinese theater was a product of the temples, where eighth century b.c.e. records show that performers were part of holy worship, and even as early as 1500 b.c.e., there is evidence that members of the ruling class maintained theatrical entertainers. By 210 b.c.e., China came under the control of the Han Dynasty. The Han emperors maintained so large a group of entertainers—from tight-rope walkers to actors, mimes, dancers, and musicians—that the nights were known as “the hundred plays.” The actual performance space of ancient Chinese theater very much resembles an English Elizabethan playhouse. A large structure housing the backstage area had a raised stage before it. As in Elizabethan England, the stage was open on three sides so that the audience stood on the ground around the stage. A balcony with seating for more important personages was also provided. Theater became so popular with the Chinese rulers that in 714 c.e., an imperial acting school known as the Pear Garden was established. Chinese actors are still known as “students of the Pear Garden.” What now remains of the early Chinese theater is a contemporary form known as Beijing opera, whose highly acrobatic and richly costumed actors, performing in a stylized tradition, are reminiscent of the glories of “the hundred plays.” The Chinese also borrowed from India the shadow puppet theater, which became widely popular by 260 b.c.e.

Indeed, throughout Southeast Asia, the theater of the shadow puppet is perhaps the dominant form of indigenous entertainment. Although the shadow puppet play is known to have started in India, the details of its origins are lost in antiquity. The Malaysian puppet, like most others, is an intricately carved leather figure between 6 inches (15 centimeters) and 3 feet (nearly 1 meter) in length. Performances are at night so that a light can be placed behind the figure whose shadow is then projected on a white silken screen. A single manipulator performs the whole show, which can last throughout the night. Most narratives are adventures of heroes fighting giants or dragons.

Music

Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 1452

Of all the performing arts, music in the ancient world is the least known because little evidence remains. The first musical instruments would most likely have been the human voice and body, with the voice providing melodic statement and the body creating basic percussion in the form of clapping and stamping. One only has to think of modern tap dancing to realize that to have a body and to be human means that music is immediately possible. However, undoubtedly, musical instruments were present from early times, and considerable visual evidence of instruments exists in Egypt and other parts of Africa, India and China, the Near East, and all about the Mediterranean Sea. Flutes, lyres, drums, and stringed instruments akin to the guitar, such as the Indian sitar, are abundantly pictured in archaeological remains.

In southern France, in the cave of Trois Fères in Ariège, there is a crude painting of a dancing man dressed in a bison skin. In his mouth, he holds a musical bow. With his left hand, he supports the instrument, which he twangs with his right hand. This painting is at least seventeen thousand years old. Yet this same instrument, a one-string “guitar” using the mouth and skull as a sounding board and called the okongo, can still be heard in areas of sub-Saharan Africa. A version was also used by Native American peoples. It is clearly the ancestor of all stringed instruments, and its acoustical principles are virtually identical with other chordophone instruments that can still be heard around the world in the form of gourds strung with gut strings, turtle shells strung with fiber chords, or silken strings mounted on wooden bowls. A more sophisticated version, in which the sounding box is a large, hollow ball, is still used by the Baule tribesmen of Africa’s Ivory Coast. The rhythms created with this instrument and with the drums of these and other African tribes go back millennia but are still heard today in modern jazz, spirituals, and other forms of contemporary music.

The simple drums and resonating chambers of Neolithic times were replaced in the ancient world by stringed instruments of various types. The original single-string instrument evolved into the Abyssinian lyre, the Arabian rebab, the Indian sarangi carved from a single piece of wood, and finally the Indian sitar, an instrument so ancient that its name predates any known visual representation of the musical object.

The sitar has a documented history of some four thousand years. It developed from an earlier stringed instrument, the veena, sacred to Sarawarthi, the Hindu goddess of art and learning. The sitar is a very elaborate instrument with six or seven main playing strings and a dozen or so sympathetic strings that echo the main musical mode. It is an extremely demanding instrument to play, and yet it has become the queen instrument of Indian music to the present day. Only about 10 percent of the music practiced on the sitar is written down. The vital 90 percent consists of improvisation within a strict range of ragas, or melodic patterns. In this sense, the music of the Indian tradition is not unlike modern American jazz. The rhythm and melodic patterns of Indian music are passed from master to student, from generation to generation in a pattern of listening and playing known as guruparampara. This tradition of master-to-pupil learning is not uncommon in musical practice throughout the ancient world. From Japanese koto players to Nigerian drummers, music has traditionally been learned by hearing someone play it.

Another widely used musical instrument of ancient times was the harp, which was a dominant instrument of the ancient Egyptians. In the eastern Mediterranean, art depicts people playing guitars and recorders. In Greece, the double flute was also very popular.

However, no written musical literature is available until Classical Greece, and then only a few fragments of compositions survive. Many musicologists believe that Greek music was oriental in sound, but more is known about the names of musical types than about the quality. Plato in his Nomoi (360-347 b.c.e.;Laws, 1804) reports that there are various classes and types of Greek music, including hymns, dirges, paeans (songs of joy and praise), and dithyrambs (songs and dances to the god Dionysus used in public festivals and theatrical performances). Pictorial evidence reveals that the dithyrambs and choral odes of tragedy and probably even the solo speeches were accompanied by two basic musical instruments: the lyre and the aulos, or double-pipe flute. The lyre is a stringed instrument used for the less raucous and vigorous chorus speeches, hence the English term “lyrical.” It was the instrument sacred to the Greek god Apollo, the divinity of light, healing, and music, who is usually depicted carrying the lyre. The aulos, however, seems to have produced a sound that was a cross between an oboe and a bagpipe and was used with the more tumultuous odes and episodes in the theater. Percussion instruments, the most fundamental of all musical devices, were used throughout Greek performances. Tambourines were special favorites of Roman musicians, as were flutes and wind instruments made of brass or, following a more ancient Hebrew tradition, of animal horns.

Greek music is known to have used various modes or scales. The music was written down in two systems, one for vocal music and one for instrumental, both of which were unlike modern Western systems for transcribing music. Both consisted of indicating notes by using letters of the alphabet above the song word, but neither is clear in application, and only a few fragments survive. Also surviving is a treatise, De musica (proably third century c.e.; Aristides Quintilianus: On Music, 1983) by Aristides Quintilianus, dealing with musical harmony and rhythm; the moral, educational, and therapeutic values of music; and music’s scientific and mathematical aspects. Part of the education of every Greek youth was training in music, as much for its mathematical as for its aesthetic value.

The ancient Romans generally seemed to have valued music less than classical Greeks; however, it was used extensively in ceremonies and in theatrical performances. Apparently up to two-thirds of the lines in Plautus’s plays were accompanied by music. Roman pantomimes required a sizable orchestra of flutes, pipes, cymbals, and other percussion instruments. Although almost nothing is known of Roman musical modes, something of their quality can be surmised from the plain song used by early Christian churches and taken directly from Roman ceremonial chants, as well as from Hebrew religious chants.

Music was very important in the religious services of the Hebrew peoples. Every synagogue had its song leader, or cantor, who led the worshipers in “lifting a joyful noise unto the Lord” and in making “song in the house of the Lord with cymbals, psalteries, and harps.” The First Corinthians mentions a total of 225 skilled musicians in the service of Solomon’s temple. Portions of the Jewish sacred service—especially the “Hallelujah” and the “Holy, Holy, Holy”—were taken directly into the Christian liturgy. Many other traditional synagogue chants were altered to suit Latin texts. The antiphonal singing of certain Jewish sects—in which a chorus of men and a chorus of women both sing in unison and also sing in call-and-response patterns—became the basis for most of the great body of so-called plain-song music of the early Christian church.

There was apparently little difference between early Church music and the music of everyday life, for Saint John Chrysostom of Constantinople (400 c.e.) comments on the similarities of church psalms to the lullabies sung by mothers to put their children to sleep. Indeed this similarity between sacred music and that of the people would follow the Hebrew tradition, for Saint John Chrysostom observed that God aided people in understanding the scriptures by giving them the music of the Psalms and the words of King David, “For nothing so uplifts the mind, giving it wings and freeing it from the earth . . . as the modulated melody and the divine chant.” In the sixth century c.e., Pope Gregory the Great collected almost four thousand plain-song compositions, which would henceforth be known as the Gregorian chants, still in use in Christian liturgy. Most of the instruments used in church services as well as in everyday European life were, like the Hebrew chants, imported from the Near East. When the Arabs invaded southern Spain, they brought with them the musical achievements of the ancient civilization of Persia. The Spanish took up the Arabian music and its varied instruments and spread their use into all of Europe. However, it would take more than four centuries for the Spanish to invent the five-line stave that would become the basis for modern musical notation and literature.