...Definition and Beginnings of Theatre Arts Theatre or theater is a branch of the performing arts. While any performance may be considered theatre, as a performing art, it focuses almost exclusively on live performers creating a self contained drama. A performance qualifies as dramatic by creating a representational illusion. By this broad definition, theatre had existed since the dawn of man, as a result of the human tendency for storytelling. Since its inception, theatre has come to take on many forms, utilizing speech, gesture, music, dance, and spectacle, combining the other performing arts, often as well as the visual arts, into a single artistic form. The word theatre means "place for seeing". The first recorded theatrical event was a performance of the sacred plays of the myth of Osiris and Isis in 2500 BC in Egypt. This story of the god Osiris was performed annually at festivals throughout the civilization, marking the beginning of a long relationship between theatre and religion. Elements and Principle of Theatre Arts There are six elements necessary for theatre: Plot, Character, Idea, Language, Music, and Spectacle. Script/Text, Scenario, Plan: This is the starting point of the theatrical performance. The element most often considered as the domain of the playwright in theatre. The playwright’s script is the text by which theatre is created. It can be simplistic, as in the 16thcentury, with the scenarios used by the acting troupes of the Commedia dell’ arte...
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...years revolving around 500 BCE, great advances in religion, philosophy, science, democracy, and many forms of art - occurred independently and almost simultaneously in China, India, the Middle East, and Greece. In these times of social upheaval and political turmoil, a new crop breeds became the carrier of a new cultural and social order. Great religious leaders rose to prominence attracting a mass following, and many sociological, cultural, economic and spiritual changes were made. In China, for instances many individual thinkers, such as Confucius, Lao-Tse, and Mo Tzu, began to reflect on the ethical and metaphysical implications of human existence and reasoning. From their teachings arose Confucianism, Daoism and Jainism ideologies of religion. In India, the authors of the Upanishads expanded the scope of their explorations to include metaphysical thinking in the search for the ultimate truth and the meaning of life , death & its causes of existences. India experienced a dramatic socio-political and intellectual transformation, and produced the teachings of the Buddha and Mahavira. Like China, new teachings ran the whole gamut of philosophical schools of thought, including even materialism, sophism, and nihilism religion beliefs. In ancient Mesopotamia, cultural developments were relatively close to those in ancient Israel. However, concepts including the belief in a transcendent creator God, and full subservience of the political rulers to a God did not materialize for the Mesopotamia...
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...it to scare-off enemies in the time of war. Chinese firearms, fireworks and gunpowder were also popular items of trade along the Silk Road to Europe. As we can imagine this invention had a profound effect on human history and although gunpowder was invented by the Chinese, it gave rise to the powerful western world while it inevitably left China and the Eastern World behind. B. Description of the Chinese Culture (Brandy Miller) 1. Chinese Society: Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their individuality. There are many different realms of Chinese society. China is well known for its centuries of traditional values, customs and beliefs. These beliefs are deeply linked with the language, religions and collective values which have always been the center of traditional festivals, customs and everyday life of man as a collective in harmony with nature (Needham, J., 1986). Despite the strong Chinese cultural traditions, the last century has seen a great deal of social change in China. Most recently, increased involvement in the global economic market has led to a high level of prosperity in China which is unfortunately not shared by all. Global influences have also led to the increased interest in science and technology, which are...
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...origins are believed to lie from ancient times, it is widely accepted that both the Romans and Greeks [never an ancient Olympic sport] played a game very similar to what today we might identify as ‘football’. However this game was very violent and was viewed almost as a test of bravery. Actions such as hacking, punching and generally assaulting the opponent were accepted as part and parcel of the game. There are indications that the game existed in Britain in the 12th century. Here the game was a crude street game. The ball would be kicked and chased by groups of youngsters egged on by their parents. This form of the game often involved two hundred or more participants, always male. This type of football was entirely based within rural communities. It was often played on important days of the year; one such case is Shrove Tuesday and local festival days. Sport of all kinds, particularly football was essentially local as opposed to national. It was played to rules set often by the local participants. In a world wide perspective, there are those who believe that an early version of the game played with the bladder of a pig existed in China as long ago as 2500 BC. Here the ball is believed to have been kicked between poles as high as thirty foot and may have served a military purpose, for example the training of warriors. By AD 50 the Chinese had named this game ‘tsu chu’ and early records compare the ball and square goal to Yin and Yang, the ancient symbols of harmony. Often matches...
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...Ruining Jin His 425 July 27, 2014 Professor Shana Brown In this module, we learned many heroic females in ancient East Asia. Though the stories of these females vary dramatically through a vast historical period, the function of these stories are alike: descriptions of heroines--such as poetry, drama, fictions, folktales, etc.--all function to meet the need of ideological requirement to better serve the political purpose of certain groups by that time. This essay is going to examine the specific principal and value embodied by Hua Mulan in a historical review, and arguing that Hua Mulan and her tale is still affecting the youngster due to the latest revision and reinterpretation from a nationalism/patriotism perspective. According to Kua & Idema, the tales of Hua Mulan all come from one text: 木兰诗 (Mu Lan shi). In this 62 lines, 332 characters poem, Hua Mulan is depicted as a brave female who substituted her father to fulfill the Khan’s conscription demand. She concealed her true gender in the military, fighting along with other soldiers as a “man” for several years. After their triumph, she was provided a high position in the government by Khan as a reward. However, she rejected this proposal and asked for a return back home. Not until she arrived home did her true identity as a female revealed to the other soldiers. This is the main story line that seldom changes during the vast historical periods. Edwards, a scholar in Hong Kong University, explained in his paper Transformations...
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...University “Leave it to a playwright who has been dead for 2,400 years to jolt Broadway out of its dramatic doldrums” begins a recent New York Times review (December 4, 1998) of a British Electra by Sophocles starring Zoe Wanamaker and Claire Bloom. This fall the Times has repeatedly remarked on the “deluge” of Greek tragedy in the 1998-99 theater season: the National Theater of Greece’s Medea, Joanne Akalaitis’ The Iphigeneia Cycle (a double bill that combines Euripides’ two Iphigeneia plays), a revival of Andrei Serban’s famous Fragments of a Greek Trilogy, and a four-and-a-half-hour adaptation of the Oedipus Rex were announced at the start of the season. Off-off Broadway versions will inevitably follow. The Brooklyn Academy of Music even hosted a dance/theatre piece based on the Eleusinian Mysteries. 1 The Classic Stage Company, an off-Broadway theater group devoted to performance and adaptation of Western classics, currently receives more scripts that re-work Greek tragedy than any other category of drama. 2 From a global perspective, New York is simply reflecting a trend set by important modern playwrights and directors worldwide. Greek drama now occupies a regular place in the London theater season. In the past twenty years, acclaimed productions have been mounted not only in Europe but also in Japan, India, and Africa. Translations are even beginning to proliferate in China, occasionally with unexpected results. A recent Chinese translator of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex referred...
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...China and India: The Pattern of Recent Growth and Governance in a Comparative Political Economy Perspective By Pranab Bardhan The two largest countries of the world with ancient agrarian civilizations, with many centuries of dominance in the world economy in the past and recently with impressive economic growth performance, draw obvious comparison. Over the last more than sixty years the two neighboring countries having adopted sharply divergent political and economic systems also provide a point of reference in any study of comparative systems. In this short essay we shall first briefly describe their patterns of economic growth primarily in the last three decades and their implications for the massive poverty and inequality in the two countries, and then move on to discuss the nature of governance both in public and private spheres, which shape those patterns. In 1820 the two countries contributed about half of world income (measured in 1990 prices), in 1950 they contributed less than 10 per cent (the preceding century in the case of China and nearly two centuries in the case of India included rather unpleasant encounters with the international powers), and the very rough projection is that in 2025 the two countries will contribute about one-third of world income (China much more than India). In the 1870’s as well as the 1970’s per capita income in comparable prices was somewhat higher in India, but since then China has shot far ahead. Even accounting for...
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...To understand the driving factor for internationalizing Chinese higher education is imperative to describe the position of education in China which is fundamental starting point. Any society give education due attention to education be call it modern or traditional, in its own way, like wise Chinese society. From their ancient history it is evidenced that the place Chinese give to education is comparatively high. This can be found particularly from the great educator Confucius（孔子）（551B.C~479 B.C）teaching that education is regarded as an important component of social development. I think and believe, Chinese are one of the early people, societies who think social development through education, that show their position for education. With regard...
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...Abstract This assignment is on the Chinese culture. I will be talking about their beliefs, traditions, and values. Ever wonder about another’s person culture when you’re around them? Well I have. Before I begin my paper on the beliefs, traditions, and values on the Chinese culture, let me give you a little history on the Chinese culture. More than 1 billion people live in China, China is one of the world's four ancient civilizations, from at least 1766BCE to the twentieth century of the Common Era, and China was ruled by dynasties. A dynasty is a family that passes supremacy from one generation to the next. A state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing; something believed; especially: a tenet or body of tenets held by a group; conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence are all meanings of the word belief. It’s said, “China’s history includes a wide variety of belief systems that flowed from one into another and that religions that required a belief in a personal creator (such as Christianity or Islam) were harder for the Chinese to embrace than one of an unbroken line of family relationships stretching back to the past.” So these 6 beliefs all had their part. First, Confucius was a divine being that tried to attempt to convince rulers of the right way to govern, as well as employing scholars to study the classics. Second was Buddhism who...
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...No.35: 4010–4017 doi: 10.1007/s11434-010-4197-x SPECIAL TOPICS: Experimental measurement of growth patterns on fossil corals: Secular variation in ancient Earth-Sun distances ZHANG WeiJia1,3,4*, LI ZhengBin2,3 & LEI Yang1 1 2 Department of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; 3 State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems & Networks, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; 4 Committee of Yuanpei Honors Program, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China Received June 3, 2010; accepted July 22, 2010 In recent years, much attention has been given to the increase in the Earth-Sun distance, with the modern rate reported as 5–15 m/cy on the basis of astronomical measurements. However, traditional methods cannot measure the ancient leaving rates, so a myriad of research attempting to provide explanations were met with unmatched magnitudes. In this paper we consider that the growth patterns on fossils could reflect the ancient Earth-Sun relationships. Through mechanical analysis of both the Earth-Sun and Earth-Moon systems, these patterns confirmed an increase in the Earth-Sun distance. With a large number of well-preserved specimens and new technology available, both the modern and ancient leaving rates could be measured with high precision, and it was found that the Earth has been leaving the Sun over the past 0.53 billion years. The Earth’s...
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...Deviance is shaped by one’s culture and is relative in space and time. When you violate society’s normal set of standards and arouse negative reactions, it is perceived as deviant. Because the perception changes over time, deviant behavior hundreds of years ago is completely different then deviant behavior today. “In the late 1800s, many Americans used cocaine, marijuana, and opium, because they were common components of over-the-counter products for symptoms like depression, insomnia, menstrual cramps, migraines, and toothaches. Coca-Cola originally contained cocaine and, perhaps not surprisingly, became an instant hit when it went on sale in 1894” (Goode, 2008). Today, the use of drugs is deviant and illegal. Deviance is a very subjective field of study and can be considered very controversial. There are nine theoretical perspectives of deviance that is viewed from different historical standpoints. The first is a demonic perspective where the roots are from metaphysical causes. This perspective explains how evil forces influence us toward temptation and possession causing deviant behavior. The classical theory of deviance deals with deviance as a freely calculated choice to increase or decrease pain. Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham were enlightened reformers arguing that social control is based on rational human reasoning. Both views have been seen mostly outdated, being replaced with the concern of the causation of deviance. The third perspective is the pathological...
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...sensitive information that governments disagree with is widely and rapidly spread. In order to control the dramatic increase of this sensitive information censorship occurs. According to a report, censorship is defined as “…one of the tools used by governments to filter out unwanted information and to prevent the spread through the World Wide Web”. (Antonio Lupetti) In many countries around the world, government censors restrict access to certain kinds of material for their citizens such as movies with sexual content, news with political ideas, and violent video games. Based on the latest data, censorship is a phenomenon of staggering proportions that affects over 25% of the global population. China, with a population of over 1.3 billion people and 360 million active users of the Internet is by far the nation in which the censors’ activity affects the highest number of citizens (China). It is well known among the Chinese that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all blocked in China because there is too much sensitive information on them. It is clear that since censorship has begun in China, it has hindered China from developing, updating information and limited the freedom of speech. Censorship has been used in China for centuries. According to the Baidu Encyclopedia which is a very popular Chinese online encyclopedia, the extreme censorship first appeared in 1949 when China was under the Communist Party’s rule and at that time the Communist Party controlled almost every aspect...
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...musical instruments in China and known as the “king of plucked string instrument.” It is a plucked four-stringed musical instrument having a pear-shaped wooden body with a varying number of frets ranging from 12 to 26. It has been played for about two thousands years in China and many Chinese ancient literary works and poems are related to pipa praising its refinement through its bright timbre and rapid rolling tremolo. Unlike nowadays situation that everyone could learn how to play pipa or enjoy the pipa performance in the concert, people from upper class in the ancient time rarely played classical instrumnets such as pipa and guqin (a plucked seven-string instrument of the zither family) in public or for commercial purposes. And they always refused to be regard as musician because performing artists in ancient China are usually considered as the lowest social class. “In traditional China, most well–educated people and monks could play classical music as a means of self-cultivation, meditation, soul purification and spiritual elevation, union with nature, identification with the values of past sages, and communication with divine beings or with friends and lovers” (Liu) However, the development of pipa in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) let it became popular in both court music and ordinary people. Indeed, pipa music has a profound impact on the Chinese classical music with its unique historical and artistic value. Actually, pipa is not originated in China and there is a diversity...
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...journey of a hero is an ancient and universal theme. In every culture from ancient Greece to China, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, heroes have embarked on life-altering journeys (Kurtti 1998: 11). Stuart Voytilla states that there are twelve stages to a hero’s journey and no matter what the purpose is for their journey, in the end the heroes or in this case heroine, share the same destination. It does not matter if the hero gains a kingdom or returns home with the elixir, as mythologist Alexander Eliot puts it, “he actually earns self-integration, balance, wisdom, and spiritual health” (Kurtti 1998: 11). One of the most renowned and beloved of these “wandering heroes” says Kurtti, is a young woman named Mulan. It is a story that is well known in China and has been told from generation to generation. “Mulan” is a Disney animated film based on an ancient Chinese folktale about a brave young woman who is faced with the terrible dilemmas of war during ancient China. She is not like any of the other Disney heroines, such as Cinderella or Ariel from the “Little Mermaid”. You do not see her daydreaming or looking for her “Prince Charming” in the film. All she wanted to do was to please and honor her family. But every time she tried, it seemed as though she was destined to fail. She also had one simple motivation and that was to save her father from having to serve in the Imperial Army. So when the emperor sent his orders to the people of China that each family must...
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...development has been due to a growth in inputs (capital and labour) as well as factor productivity. By the year 2020, India is expected to add about 250 million to its labour pool at the rate of about 18 million a year, which is more than the entire labour force of Germany. This so called ‘demographic dividend’ has drawn a new interest in the Human Resource concepts and practices in India. This paper traces notable evidence of economic organisations and managerial ideas from ancient Indian sources with enduring traditions and considers them in the context of contemporary challenges. Intriduction Over many centuries India has absorbed managerial ideas and practices from around the world. Early records of trade, from 4500 B.C. to 300 B.C., not only indicate international economic and political links, but also the ideas of social and public administration. The world’s first management book, titled ‘Arlhãshastra’, written three millennium before Christ, codified many aspects of human resource practices in Ancient India. This treatise presented notions of the financial administration of the state, guiding principles for trade and commerce, as well as the management of people. These ideas were to be embedded in organisational thinking for centuries (Rangarajan 1992, Sihag 2004). Increasing trade, that included engagement with the Romans, led to widespread and systematic governance methods by 250 A.D. During the next 300 years, the first...
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