Klevis Tefa Peter Meineck CORE-UA 740: The Necessity of Theater 3 May 2017 The Duality of Theater It is believed that the first evidence of artistic activity is a diagonal itching on a stone with a shark tooth, associated to Homo erectus around 500 000 years ago. However the oldest undisputed form of figurative art is a sculptured Venus figurine around 40 000 years ago. A time where human behavior hadn’t yet developed behavioral modernity which consists of abstract thinking and symbolic behavior, among other things, yet art found its way. These first forms of art were not pure creations of the human mind, but a consequence of primordial forms of mimesis. With the evolution of human consciousness and complex cognitive skills, like language, …show more content…
The mask nowadays it is seemed as a sense of theatricality, but for the Athenian audience present at the birth of theater it didn’t evoke that. However, the masks were seen in precessions and rituals, were the subject of the mask transcends identity and becomes an “actor”. According to Shuyun, “masks are a deposit and a ‘mirror’ of the beliefs, the taboos, and the sense of beauty of specific populations”. When the actor wears the mask he abandons his own identity, integrating itself to a new one that becomes an object for the audience to project their emotions. In the Neuroscience of the Tragic Mask, Meineck argues that given the environment of Greek theater, where spectators “could clearly see the southern city and the country side laid out before them” and no artificial directional lighting “the masked actor needed to earn the focus of the open-air spectator.” He states that the power of masks draws the audience’s attention to the actor and with the help of “speech, song, gesture, and dance … they are all subservient to the mask”. Not only has the mask transformed the psyche of the “actor” but also the audience’s. One can argue that the famous Greek writers did not possess such cognitive knowledge of the mask, and that the use of mask in theater is inherited from its ritualistic origins. That might be partially true, but the playwrights knew the symbolic effect of the mask of Dionysus. A mask that represents the duality of human nature and an opposing force of individuality that protects its subject from social constraint by hiding its identity. Fisher suggests that if the mask of Dionysus covers an alterity designated as “Dionysus”, it may be the case that this mask of the “smiling god” images the horrifying, abjected, maternal stranger within each human psyche”. Beyond its form, the mask itself is a representation of the god of masks,