Classical Asian Theatre Forms

Asia is home to some of the world's richest and most refined theatre traditions, many of them centuries older than European forms in their present shape. These traditions fuse acting with music, dance, and elaborate visual convention, and they offer the IB theatre student vivid alternatives to Western realism. This lesson surveys several major forms.

Sanskrit theatre and its inheritance

Classical Indian theatre is rooted in the ancient treatise the Natyashastra, attributed to Bharata, which codifies acting, gesture, music, and stagecraft. Central to Indian aesthetics is rasa, the "flavor" or emotional essence a performance evokes in the spectator, and bhava, the emotional states the performer expresses to produce it. Highly stylized gesture languages, including precise mudras (hand gesture