Intellect PlusPerforming arts
253 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 5.
Hamilton earned a record 16 Tony nominations, yet nobody may license itLin-Manuel Miranda turned Ron Chernow's 2004 biography of a Founding Father into a musical that is sung and rapped from start to finish. Hamilton won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for D…
Hanuman's devoted following arose a thousand years after the RamayanaHanuman, the divine vanara who serves Rama in the Ramayana, is venerated in temples and images more than ever. Yet early texts and archaeology show little devotion to him. His ris…
The art of interpretation probably isn't named after Hermes after allPopular lore links hermeneutics, the study of how to interpret texts, to Hermes, messenger of the gods, inventor of speech and celebrated trickster. The fit is poetic, but it is f…
Family Guy was cancelled in 2002, then DVD buyers brought it backFox axed Family Guy after its third season in 2002. That should have been the end. Instead, strong DVD sales and big ratings for syndicated reruns persuaded the network to revive …
Fiddle or violin? Usually the same instrument, played for different endsA fiddle and a violin are usually the very same object. What separates them is how they are played: fiddlers chase a danceable beat, quick note changes and improvised ornament, wh…
Film genres are easier to spot than to define, and they keep shiftingWhen The Great Train Robbery came out in 1903, it was sold as a chase film, a railroad film and a crime film. Today it counts as a landmark early Western. Film genres feel obvious…
Before the Blues Brothers, Dan Aykroyd drummed behind Muddy Waters in OttawaDan Aykroyd's love of the blues was no comedy bit. As a teenager in Ottawa he haunted Le Hibou, a club where touring blues greats played, and one night he sat in on drums for Mudd…
Dick Van Dyke ate bananas to get into the air forceRejected again and again for being too light, a teenage Dick Van Dyke finally passed his wartime weigh-in after stuffing himself with bananas and water. Pilot training soon gave w…
Double entendre sounds French, but the French never used it that wayThe phrase we borrow for a cheeky second meaning is itself a kind of trick. It comes from an old French expression that simply meant ambiguity, and it only picked up its suggestiv…
Is drama even a genre? Some screenwriting theorists say it is too broadFilm and TV drama started as a leftover category: on the stage, a drama was a play that was neither comedy nor tragedy. Screen industries adopted that narrow meaning, and today th…
Epaulettes began as ribbons to stop belts sliding off soldiers' shouldersThe gold-fringed shoulder pieces on dress uniforms started life as a practical fix. In the late 17th century, soldiers tied bunches of ribbon on their coat shoulders, partly for s…- R.E.M.'s drummer wrote Everybody Hurts, then barely played on itEverybody Hurts began as Bill Berry's one-minute country tune with no chorus. After R.E.M. reshaped it into a slow, Otis Redding-flavoured ballad, the drummer ended up absent from…
One Indian royal family ruled for six centuries, split across three capitalsFrom the 6th to the 12th century, the Chalukyas governed huge stretches of southern and central India. They did it as three linked but separate houses, based at Badami, Vengi and …
Ancient India had a school of materialists who doubted every inferenceLong before modern empiricism, Charvaka thinkers in ancient India trusted only what the senses reported. They rejected ritual, treated every conclusion drawn from observation as p…
Broadway's Chicago grew out of two real 1924 murder trialsRoxie Hart and Velma Kelly were not invented. They were modelled on Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two women acquitted of murder in Chicago in 1924, whose trials a young Tribune…
Cumbia began on Colombia's coast and ended up across the AmericasCumbia is one of Latin America's great travelling sounds. It grew on the Colombian coast from a colonial-era meeting of Indigenous, African and Spanish traditions, is said to trac…
Bob Odenkirk wrote sketch comedy for years before becoming Saul GoodmanLong before audiences knew him as the slippery lawyer Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk was a behind-the-scenes comedy writer at Saturday Night Live and co-creator of the cult sketch sho…
Breaking Bad was a modest cable show until Netflix found it an audienceA chemistry teacher with lung cancer turns drug manufacturer in Albuquerque: the premise sounded bleak, and early ratings were modest. Then the first seasons landed on Netflix, vi…
Cabarets started as Paris restaurants that charged by the plateBefore it meant smoky stages and a sly master of ceremonies, a cabaret was simply a smarter kind of Paris eatery, with tablecloths and food priced per plate rather than per mug. T…
By 1945 Carmen Miranda was the best-paid woman in AmericaThe woman in the towering fruit hat was born in a Portuguese village, raised in Rio and started out making hats in a shop. Within six years of arriving on Broadway, Carmen Miranda…
Poems T. S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren became a megamusicalIn the 1930s T. S. Eliot wrote playful poems about cats for his godchildren. Decades later Andrew Lloyd Webber set them to music, investors balked at the premise, and Cats went on…
Ballet's hardest trick is hiding how much the body is sufferingA professional ballet dancer spends years teaching muscles, joints and feet to do things they were never built for, then performs as if it costs nothing. That illusion of ease is …
The silent clown who won a Tony for talkingBill Irwin built a career on wordless clowning, co-founding a San Francisco circus and playing Mr. Noodle for Elmo. Yet his biggest award came for Edward Albee's ferociously verba…
Blue Man Group began by burning a Rambo doll in the streetThree friends in blue masks marched through Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1987, torching a Rambo doll and a chunk of the Berlin Wall. That street stunt grew into a mute, drum-pou…
The Blues Brothers sequel that lost Jake and still floppedEighteen years after the original, John Landis and Dan Aykroyd reunited for a second Blues Brothers movie, this time with John Goodman riding alongside Elwood. It cost $30 million…
Attack on Titan hid its real story behind a wall and a basement doorHajime Isayama's manga opens as a siege story: humans cowering behind three giant walls from Titans. Over twelve years of serialisation it turned that premise inside out, revealin…
The person behind the mixing desk may be an artist or a physicistAudio engineer covers two very different jobs: the studio or concert specialist who places microphones and balances a mix, and the degree-holding scientist who designs the algorit…
Bali's rice terraces are run by water temples, and have been for centuriesAbout 4.2 million Balinese make up 85 percent of their island's people and stand apart in Indonesia by practising Balinese Hinduism. Their farming depends on the subak, a web of c…
Hollywood spent a decade trying to film A Chorus Line, then critics shruggedRichard Attenborough's 1985 screen version of the Broadway hit about auditioning dancers came after years of rights sales, refusals and studio infighting. Producers put in twenty-…
Nobody can define an altered state without first defining normalPsychologists still lack an agreed definition of an altered state of consciousness, because any attempt depends on pinning down what an ordinary waking mind is. Yet humans may hav…
Warrior Pose looks ancient but was probably invented around 1940Patanjali's Yoga Sutras never name a single posture; they simply ask that a seat be steady and comfortable. Many poses now treated as timeless, including Warrior I and the Salute …
Western stages still frame plays like Renaissance picturesMost Western theatres hide three sides of the playing space behind a proscenium arch—the “picture frame” inherited from Italian Renaissance courts. Wings, teasers, fly lofts, apro…
Stand-up grew from vaudeville, music halls, and stump speechesA comic alone on a stage aiming jokes, stories, and crowdwork at a live room feels modern, yet historians root the form in late-nineteenth-century popular entertainments—from vaud…
Live theatre is drama’s oldest form, still borrowing Greek toolsTheatre gathers live performers and a live audience in one place to show real or imagined events. Film and recordings arrived later; Western stages still inherit Greek genres, ter…- Athens turned Dionysus worship into tragedy, comedy, and satyr playsFrom about 700 BCE, Greek theatrical culture centred on Athens and its Dionysia festival. Tragedy took shape in the late 500s BCE, comedy around 490 BCE, and the satyr play comple…
Tragedy began as goat-song and still means structured human sufferingA tragedy stages sorrowful catastrophe for a central character to stir an accompanying response in spectators. The form crystallized in ancient Greece some twenty-five hundred yea…
London’s West End packs about forty commercial theatresLondon’s West End is the city’s commercial theatre district, with roughly forty houses. Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, opened in 1663 and is the oldest still standing. In 2023 audienc…- Bare feet and silk light rebelled against ballet's corsetLate nineteenth-century concert dance in Europe and the United States tossed out pointe shoes and ballet's limited step vocabulary. Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Maud Allan cha…
When speech fails, musicals sing—then dance the restMusical theatre braids song, spoken lines, acting, and dance into one story engine. Nineteenth-century light opera—Offenbach in France, Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain, Harrigan a…
Japan's oldest living major theatre still moves in masksNoh has been staged since the fourteenth century as Japan's oldest major theatre still regularly performed. Supernatural beings often appear as human narrators; masks, costumes, a…
Greek song-beside-song still powers every modern spoofParody imitates a work, person, or style to comment or mock. Aristotle credited Hegemon of Thasos with twisting famous poems from sublime to silly; the Greek roots mean song set b…- Four role types and sparse stages define Beijing's operaPeking opera fused Anhui and Hubei troupes in Qing Beijing into music, mime, martial arts, dance, and acrobatics. Four role families—shēng, dàn, jìng, chǒu—carry the spectacle on …
Live bodies became art when Dada mocked the theater upstairsPerformance art puts the artist inside the work—time, space, body, presence, and public reaction. The label spread in the 1970s, though futurist cabarets and 1916 Dada at Cabaret …
Music, dance, and drama exist only while someone watchesPerforming arts—music, dance, theatre—vanish without an audience, unlike paintings that sit still. Every society keeps traditions; UNESCO lists Noh, Kabuki, and Indian classical d…
A play is speech built to be spoken, not merely readTheatre plays live by scripted dialogue and monologue delivered aloud. From Broadway and the West End to school stages, playwrights write for bodies in rooms. Greek tradition spli…
String-and-shadow figures may be older than actorsPuppetry animates wood, cloth, or leather stand-ins with rods, strings, or hands. Records reach fifth-century BCE Greece; some historians push origins near four thousand years bac…- Deus ex machina began as a real crane over the skeneStagecraft is the technical craft that builds a designer's vision: scenery, lights, costumes, makeup, props, sound, and management. Greek theatres already used the skene, rolling …
- Aristotle sorted drama from epic and lyric by 335 BCDrama is fiction meant to be enacted—on stage, radio, or screen—not merely read. Aristotle’s Poetics, around 335 BC, already set that dramatic mode against epic and lyric. The Gre…
UNESCO listed flamenco as living heritage in 2010Flamenco grew from southern Spanish folk currents, especially Andalusian gitano life, with older footprints in Extremadura and Murcia. Song, guitar, dance, claps, footwork, and im…
Folk dance is social tradition, not every ethnic ritualFolk dance mirrors everyday life in a place, yet ritual sacred dances usually sit outside the label. People with little formal training dance at gatherings to inherited music; beg…
Breaking began in the Bronx before studios sold new styleHip-hop dance covers street styles born with 1970s U.S. crews and later studio versions. Soul Train and films such as Breakin’, Beat Street, and Wild Style broadcast early crews. …
Chicago Compass Players wrote the modern improv rulebookImprov theatre invents dialogue, action, story, and character live, often for comedy, without a fixed script. Western documentation reaches Atellan Farce in 391 BC and Italian str…
Jazz dance grew from Black vernacular before Broadway renamed itEarly-twentieth-century U.S. jazz dance spans social vernacular forms and staged dramatic jazz, both expanding African American styles tied to jazz music. Charleston, Lindy hop, a…
The oldest dated joke is a Sumerian fart proverbA joke builds a short narrative toward a punchline that should not be read literally—pun, irony, or broken logic. André Jolles classed jokes among simple oral forms. One Sumerian …
Robert-Houdin moved magic from fairgrounds into theatresStage magic entertains with apparently impossible feats done by natural means—sleight, misdirection, props—not supernatural claims. Clockmaker Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin opened a P…- Silent whiteface mime crystallised in nineteenth-century ParisA mime tells story through body motion without speech; older English called such players mummers. Greek mimos means imitator, yet ancient mime was not always silent. Jean-Gaspard …
- Choreographer entered Broadway credits only in 1936Designing motion in space, shape, time, and energy is ancient practice, yet American English dictionaries listed choreography in the 1950s. George Balanchine took the credit chore…
Modern circus rings began with Astley’s horses in 1768Philip Astley, a cavalry-trained rider from Newcastle-under-Lyme, opened trick-riding shows at Ha'penny Hatch by the Thames in 1768. By 1770 he filled the gaps with acrobats, rope…
Egyptian tombs held clowns millennia before circus greasepaintThe oldest known clown figures appear in Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty, around 2400 BC, in socio-religious roles that could overlap with priesthood. Western circus clowns—wigs, red noses,…
Comedy once meant happy endings, not only punch linesGreeks and Romans reserved comedy for stage plays that ended well. Aristotle called it imitation of people worse than average—specifically ridiculous, a species of the ugly—while …