The Beginnings

What is drama? It is the art of telling a story. And the earliest forms of storytelling were from prehistoric times, the times of cavepeople. So to understand theatre we have to take it to its roots.

Story telling was originally used to inform the tribe of things like an incoming predator or some easy prey that if killed could save the tribe. So drama is used to communicate something that will lead to survival. And since these people spoke only in grunts and other noises they couldn't just tell a story, so to explain thy must have used extreme gestures and body language to explain what had occurred in order to survive. This was very interesting to me as it would be incredibly difficult to tell a story without telling the story. This lead to us in class behaving like cave men. We completely improvise a scene to make it as realistic a possible, in the scene one actor would come in (walking hunched over, planting his fist on the floor for balance occasionally) and he used a wide range of gestures like waving his arms frantically around to emphasize excitement and eagerness. He was alerting us to a heard of cattle that would get us through the winter and lead to survival. The scene was very fun to do but it was extremely difficult to accomplish. It was very worth going back to the roots of theatre.

However, story telling wasn't always just for survival, there were festivals and such used to celebrate a great hunt or the discovery of fire for example. This is the beginning of rituals, another form of theatre that was used to either celebrate some important event or to explain certain things; like sacrificing an animal to let winter end.