The core of theater, going back to the Greeks, was to actually see yourself represented on stage. W.E.B. Du Bois said that Black theater should be theater that is written by us, by African-Americans, to be representative for us and to be shown near us.

Now’s the time to create a new representation of Blackness, a new look, and a new authentic appearance in the performing arts.

Performing arts education can help people understand Black theater history better by explaining why some performers did the types of shows they did.

Let’s go back to this idea of seeing yourself appearing on stage. If you were to read an issue of “The Crisis,” which was a magazine that was published by W.E.B. Du Bois, you would encounter stories of authentic Black life. Those stories would be presented on stage eventually, and not just by families by the fireside.

Slowly, over time, across the 1920s to the 1950s and so on, an Americanized version of theater emerged. We tend to imagine and pretend that Black theater came along in the 1960s, and that’s not true. Online performing arts education will hopefully start to dispel this false idea.

We had people in the 19th century like Bert Williams, who began as a blackface performer. He partnered with his friend, George Walker, and they went on stage with one in blackface and one not. They traveled across the vaudeville circuit and performed this way.

George Walker was the straight man to Bert Williams’ more comedic, stereotypical character. With the pairing of those two, they began to strip away the artifice and the mask that was blackface.

By the 20th century, the most heavily laden aspects of the blackface stereotype had gone away. You could begin to see the kind of comedy that was beneath it. That’s what Bert Williams did. He was the most popular performer in all of US theater, certainly in the first decade of the 1900s.

We had other actors who emerged, as well, like Charles Gilpin. Gilpin’s claim to fame was “The Emperor Jones,” which was a play by Eugene O’Neill. Charles Gilpin played the proud, confident character of Brutus Jones, a Chicago-born Pullman porter.

In the play, Jones moves to Haiti and becomes an emperor under somewhat corrupt circumstances. Later, he finds himself haunted and possessed by the spirits of the island.

That play was a Broadway hit for Gilpin, making him a star. George Walker also became a tremendously successful and well-known figure until he was replaced by a young up-and-coming actor by the name of Paul Robeson.

Paul Robeson started performing a national tour of the “The Emperor Jones.” Because of that, it seemed like his career catapulted. He did the film version of “The Emperor Jones” and went on to star in a number of other films. He went back and forth between the concert hall as a singer and Broadway as a performer. And he was there when the LA entertainment culture emerged.

In the world of performing arts, there are multiple different categories, or “buckets,” of theatrical performances. We have a canon of work in which the plays are performed in what would be known as elevated language. In this bucket, you could put the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and Christopher Marlowe. You could also put in the restoration comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. You could even put in latter-day 20th-century verse plays by playwrights like Maxwell Anderson.

When it rhymes, or when the language is particularly poetic or unusual, that would certainly be one canon. And Shakespeare, for one, is still among the most frequently produced playwrights across the United States. Here in New York, we have the New York Shakespeare Festival in the public theaters that still remain committed to classical work. So that covers the first bucket.

There is also another bucket, which consists of new playwriting—plays that have not been produced previously in a professional context. Oftentimes, these plays can be written in everyday conversational language. However, of course, the language of these plays varies enormously from context to context and playwright to playwright.

For example, an Irish playwright like Seán O’Casey or a contemporary Irish playwright like Martin McDonagh would be writing in an Irish dialect, but they’re also experimenting with form enormously. So you could have a black comedy, you could have elements of horror in what is a conversational text-based play. As you can see, it gets harder and harder to actually come up with the different bucket labels for genres.

Playwrights like Ibsen and Chekhov, of course, represent a form of 19th-century naturalism, which was all about character and closely observed character. Now, certain American directors are approaching that work and staging the context in which those plays appear so that we will either discover them anew or see them differently.

Spectacle theater is represented, in some cases, by the Greeks although it is certainly possible to do an intimate production of a Greek play. There has been a tremendous interest, particularly in the last 20 years, in physical theater, in which the movement is certainly as important, or perhaps even more important, than the words.

You can learn much more about the history of theater and the many different forms it takes by exploring online performing arts education. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to enjoy the benefits and lessons of performing arts education from the comfort of your own home.

When online performing arts education professional and NYU Tisch professor Ruben Polendo is in conversations with students on making or engaging in theater, one of the questions that come up is about the history of theater. “How did theater start? Where did it start?” he asks. “How did it develop to the kind of theater that we recognize now?”

Theater in Prehistory

The history of the performing arts probably begins 200,000 years ago with the origin of modern humans on the savannas of Africa. It could go back even further to the evolution of pre-modern ancestors one or two million years ago. “The impulse to tell me a story is really built into us on a very biological level, that we organize the world in terms of stories,” says Dr. Jeff Kaplan, a performing arts professor at Manhattanville College.

We communicate in terms of gestures. The meaning of words really constitutes a very small part of communication. Therefore, having somebody telling a story to the group or expressing themselves through abstracted movement are probably things that go back to the beginning of time.

Theater in Greece

The origins of theater began in Ancient Greece, at least from the Western tradition. It was a series of festivals to the gods: citizens who lived in the area would gather to attend plays. They were treated as competitions and festivals. The playwright Sophocles might have battled it out against Euripides or others, sharing their newest work.

Ancient Greek theater mirrors today’s tradition if you were to see your favorite writer revealing and presenting their newest creation for the first time. “It was new. It was raw. It was kind of like watching Hamilton for the first time,” comments Dr. Harvey Young, the dean of fine arts at Boston University.

It was neighbors sitting next to neighbors, looking down and seeing each act play out on stage. It was not only a chance for people to see how these stories could reflect society. It was also their way of being part of the civic life of Athens or of other places across Greece.

The tradition of a community coming together to hear a new work and see themselves on stage has existed throughout the history of theater. It began in Ancient Greece, where Aristotle walked around lecturing and talking about the work of Homer as an epic poet, all the way through to the early 20th century.

Theater in Broader Geography

People will very quickly refer to the Greeks and the idea that Greek tradition is the beginning of theater. Ruben Polendo pushes back against that statement. “The Greek tradition, which is really remarkable, finds us in about kind of 400 BCE, give or take a few hundred years in that moment,” he says. Though Greek theater is clearly a very important moment in the history of theater, it isn’t the only moment in history where there was a spark on theater.

In fact, looking even further back into history, we see many different traces on theater and the performing arts all over the world. “Because over time and space there’s been this kind of focus on a kind of European inheritance – and Greek history has been attached to that – there’s been this kind of push to really align the beginning of theater with this kind of European narrative,” Polendo explains. He believes that alignment is not the case. Theater has existed in many different geographies and cultural frameworks through time.

Technology and Tradition

As theatrical traditions and techniques blend together in the modern day, there has been a great deal of experimentation with the way technology can be harnessed by storytellers. Technology may coexist alongside ancient theater forms such as the Noh theater in Japan.

Kabuki, Chinese opera, shadow puppets in Indonesia, and kathakali in India are other examples of these ancient forms. “Many of the cultures of the world have developed their own forms,” comments NYU Tisch professor Elizabeth Bradley. “And it would be a mistake to think that they haven’t influenced, in fact, what is felt to be mainstream Broadway theater. Because there would be no Lion King if director Julie Taymor had not been funded to go to Jakarta and learn about shadow puppets.”

Scott Illingsworth tells us that an actor will eventually understand the arc of the story and the world that a character inhabits. That’s the moment to begin zooming in a little tighter on their character’s experience of the script. That’s the time to begin exploring some of the things we often think of more as acting exercises.

He goes on to say, ” I think, especially because working on a role often starts with a piece of text — and sometimes, even the process of looking at the scripts can feel like an academic or analytical process — that it can be easy to forget, in those early stages, that acting is a physical art form. It’s a craft of constructing something over time the way any trade constructs things over time. And the way you construct it is with your body.” This is important to any performing arts education, including online performing arts education.

Working on a role often starts with a piece of text. Sometimes, even the process of looking at the scripts can feel like an academic or analytical one. It can be easy to forget, in those early stages, that acting is a physical art form. It’s a craft of constructing something over time. In the same way any trade constructs things over time, you construct with your body.

Scott thinks actors should develop a tool toolkit that includes using their bodies to explore the world from the beginning. He often discusses with his students how important it is to understand the way your mind works with the rest of your body. “For a long time, we talked about acting as either thinking or doing,” he explains. “We talked about this separation between the mind and the body or working from the outside in or the inside out.”

He feels that the more we understand human beings, the more we understand that this separation is false. Your thoughts influence the way your body exists in space and what you do. All the experiences and events that happen to your body change your thoughts. It’s a continuous integration cycle. It’s important that actors understand this as soon as possible. It should be before they get into a room with other actors or before they get on the set.

It means things like taking a script and traveling around a studio, or even your home, as you explore the world. Does this person change spaces? Do they move from room to room? Are they doing an activity during this scene? What does it mean for you to explore that same activity? What does it mean to say these words while you do some of the things this person does?

Even something as simple as that, acting out the things that the person does, puts your body in space doing things while you speak those words. “And it has a profound impact on people when they really begin to understand how physical an experience acting is for both the performer and the audience,” he concludes.

When determining how to approach a script in Performing Arts, one should take a play like “A Raisin in the Sun”—Lorraine Hansberry’s very, very famous play from the early ’60s. The play starts. You’re reading the pages. What you’ll see on the page first is a little epigram. You’ll see what is almost a little poem, and it’s written by Langston Hughes. It’s basically what happens to a dream deferred. Does it fester-does it “dah, dah, dah,” or does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

That point is meant to set the mood of the play. It’s meant to make you think. It’s meant to hint at what will happen in the play. It is also there to make readers question who is Langston Hughes?

That’s the first place to start. Readers in online performing arts education should adopt the mindset: “Let me find out about who this Langston Hughes is and why would Lorraine Hansberry put that poem on page one before the play even starts?” Then you start with the play, and you look at the stage directions and see what that tells you.

The stage directions tell those in performing arts education that you’re in a sort of a cramped, crowded, tenement apartment in Chicago in the late ’50s or early ’60s. Readers know that it’s cramped because you see a little boy asleep on the couch, and that’s where he sleeps every night. You see another room on the stage. You see a woman who wakes the little boy up.

The reader now understands what’s going on in the story. By the description of the apartment and the stage directions, one understands the family doesn’t have money. Knowing these facts is important things to understanding the characters in the story and the basis for the play. Readers see a black family that doesn’t have money, living in a very crowded situation. You see the wife waking up the son and then waking up her husband.

As the play moves along, readers understand the grandmother — the father’s mother, the little boy’s grandmother — also lives in this cramped apartment, and the family defers to her in a certain way. Very early on, the reader understands that the day portrayed in the play is a very big day. This is a day the family has been waiting on; the grandmother is supposed to finally get the insurance check she’s been waiting on since her husband passed away. The check is supposed to be substantial, and getting this money is going to change the lives of the entire family.

Understanding the family’s misery is due to poverty, what day it is, and why getting this long-awaited check is so important to the family helps readers to analyze the show. Readers will understand that Walter — the father — is a character who is unhappy with his life. However, Walter doesn’t seem to understand how to get the thing that is going to make life better (namely money). He feels constrained by the role society has put on him in his work as a chauffeur. Walter is not the type of person who can simply walk into a bank and secure a loan. The family is growing but unable to get another, larger apartment.

The family doesn’t have money. The expected check could be the ticket to any number of things. For the grandmother, it may be the ticket for a better life for her herself and for her family. For her son Walter, the check is likely to be the ticket for him to make a better life for the family.