A theatre practitioner is someone who creates

theatrical Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communic ...

performance A performance is an act or process of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Performance has evolved glo ...

s and/or produces a theoretical

discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. F ...

that informs their practical work. A theatre practitioner may be a director,

dramatist A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays, which are a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between characters and is intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. Ben Jonson coined the term "playwri ...

actor An actor (masculine/gender-neutral), or actress (feminine), is a person who portrays a character in a production. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. ...

designer A designer is a person who plans the form or structure of something before it is made, by preparing drawings or plans. In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, products, processes, laws, games, graphics, services, or exper ...

or a combination of these traditionally separate roles. ''Theatre practice'' describes the collective work that various theatre practitioners do. The term was not ordinarily applied to theatre-makers prior to the rise of

modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

in the theatre. Instead, theatre praxis from

Konstantin Stanislavski Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski ( rus, Константин Сергеевич Станиславский, p=kənstɐnʲˈtʲin sʲɪrˈɡʲejɪvʲɪtɕ stənʲɪˈslafskʲɪj, links=yes; ; 7 August 1938) was a seminal Russian and Sovie ...

's development of his system is described through

Vsevolod Meyerhold Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold (; born ; 2 February 1940) was a Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting m ...

biomechanics Biomechanics is the study of the structure, function and motion of the mechanical aspects of biological systems, at any level from whole organisms to Organ (anatomy), organs, Cell (biology), cells and cell organelles, using the methods of mechani ...

Antonin Artaud Antoine Maria Joseph Paul Artaud (; ; 4September 18964March 1948), better known as Antonin Artaud, was a French artist who worked across a variety of media. He is best known for his writings, as well as his work in the theatre and cinema. Widely ...

Theatre of cruelty The Theatre of Cruelty (, also ) is a form of theatre conceptualised by Antonin Artaud. Artaud, who was briefly a member of the surrealist movement, outlined his theories in a series of essays and letters, which were collected as '' The Theatre an ...

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a p ...

epic Epic commonly refers to: * Epic poetry, a long narrative poem celebrating heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation * Epic film, a genre of film defined by the spectacular presentation of human drama on a grandiose scale Epic(s) ...

, and Jerzy Grotowski's poor theatre. Contemporary theatre practitioners include

Augusto Boal Augusto Boal (; 16 March 1931 – 2 May 2009) was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical form originally used in radical left popular education movem ...

with his

Theatre of the Oppressed The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) describes theatrical forms that the Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal first elaborated in the 1970s, initially in Brazil and later in Europe. Boal was influenced by the work of the educator and theori ...

, Dario Fo's popular theatre, Eugenio Barba's theatre anthropology, and Anne Bogart's viewpoints.McCullough (1996, 15-36) and Milling and Ley (2001, vii, 175).

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

* Counsell, Colin. 1996. ''Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre''. London and New York: Routledge. . * McCullough, Christopher, ed. 1998. ''Theatre Praxis: Teaching Drama Through Practice''. New Directions in Theatre Ser. London: Macmillan. . New York: St Martin's P. . * McCullough, Christopher. 1996. ''Theatre and Europe (1957–1996)''. Intellect European Studies ser. Exeter: Intellect. . * Milling, Jane, and Graham Ley. 2001. ''Modern Theories of Performance: From Stanislavski to Boal''. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave. . * Pavis, Patrice. 1998. ''Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis''. Trans. Christine Shantz. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P. . 20th-century theatre Entertainment occupations Mass media occupations Theatrical occupations {{theatre-stub