3,335 articles
Pippin Parker
Pippin Parker is an American playwright, director, and educator, founding member and former Artistic Director of Naked Angels and director of The New School for Drama since 2011; he directed George Packer's Lortel Award-winning Betrayed and wrote Anesthesia and Assisted Living.
Place des Arts
Place des Arts is Montreal's performing arts complex, the largest in Canada, inaugurated September 21, 1963 with Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier; six halls, about 8,000 seats, home of the OSM, Opéra de Montréal, and Les Grands Ballets.
Platonov
Platonov (Безотцовщина, Fatherlessness) is Anton Chekhov's long first play, named after its schoolteacher hero Mikhail Platonov; written in his youth, it went unstaged and was first published in 1923.
Plautus
Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus), Roman comic playwright from Sarsina, Umbria, active late 3rd to early 2nd century BCE; 21 surviving fabulae palliatae adapted from Greek New Comedy, including Amphitruo, Menaechmi, and Pseudolus.
Play (theatre)
A play is a written work in dramatic form meant for staging by actors, divided into acts and scenes; ancient Greece is widely considered the birthplace of theater.
Playbill
Playbill is the American theatre program magazine founded in New York in 1884 by Frank V. Strauss, distributed free at Broadway, Off-Broadway, and classical venues, Birsh-family-owned since 1974, publisher of Playbill.com (1994) and absorber of rival Stagebill (2000); distinct from the unrelated Australian Playbill company founded 1958.
Playland
Playland is a two-character play by South African playwright Athol Fugard, first performed in 1992, in which a black watchman and a white ex-soldier meet at a Karoo amusement park.
Playwright
Playwright: a maker of plays for theatre, television, or radio (synonym dramatist), whose script serves as both literature and production blueprint. Distinguishable from Playwright, the unrelated open-source browser testing framework with context-per-test isolation.
Playwrighting in Asia and Africa: a comparative history
Playwrighting in Asia and Africa is a comparative history of dramatic authorship across both continents, from Sanskrit drama and Kalidasa through the colonial encounter, postcolonial theater, and modern Asia–Africa exchange.
Plenty
Plenty is a 1978 play by David Hare, first staged at the National Theatre in London, following a former SOE courier's disillusionment in postwar Britain.
Pluft, o Fantasminha
Pluft, o Fantasminha is a Brazilian children's play by Maria Clara Machado, first staged in 1955 at the Tablado theater school in Rio de Janeiro.
Poco Lee
Poco Lee (Iweh Pascal Odinaka, born 1996) is a Nigerian dancer, hypeman, and singer from Orlu, Imo State, raised in Ojo, Lagos. Known for the Zanku Legwork video with Zlatan Ibile, the Poco Dance, and introducing Portable to Olamide; distinct from the K-pop artist of the same name.
Poesía en Voz Alta
Poesía en Voz Alta is a Mexican poetry-and-theater project founded in 1956 under UNAM by Jaime García Terrés and Héctor Mendoza, active as a theater group until 1963.
Poetics (Aristotle)
Aristotle's Poetics (Peri poietikes), a two-book treatise of which the comedy book is lost, analyzes poetry as mimesis, defines tragedy by six parts with plot first, and ties tragic effect to catharsis through pity and fear.
Poetry slam
Poetry slam: competitive performance poetry event founded by Marc Kelly Smith in Chicago (Get Me High Lounge 1984, Green Mill 1986); audience judges score 0-10, three-minute limit, 0-30 totals; National Poetry Slam since 1990.
Poi (performance art)
Poi (performance art) is a Māori art from Aotearoa New Zealand: weighted balls on cords swung in circular patterns, traditionally a male wrist-training tool for combat, now a women-led kapa haka discipline and a global flow art in fire, LED, and practice forms.
Pointe shoe
Pointe shoe: satin ballet shoe with a rigid toe box and shank enabling dancing en pointe; first danced fully by Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide (1832); professionals use 100-120 pairs per season.
Pointe technique
Pointe technique (sur les pointes) is classical ballet dancing on the tips of the toes in stiffened pointe shoes, debuted on stage by Brugnoli in 1823 and Taglioni's La Sylphide (1832), with loads up to 12 times body weight and strict readiness criteria.
Pole dance
Pole dance, also called pole fitness or pole sport, is dance and acrobatics on a vertical pole, developed as recreational practice by Fawnia Mondey Dietrich in 1994 and now a regulated IPSF competitive sport with documented strength benefits and high shoulder and wrist injury rates.
Polish absurdism
Polish absurdism is the Polish drama and prose allied to the Theatre of the Absurd, with Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz as precursors and Mrożek and Różewicz as principal figures.
Polonius
Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark in Shakespeare's Hamlet, father of Ophelia and Laertes and Claudius's chief advisor; a verbose, spying courtier killed by Hamlet behind the arras.
Polovtsian Dances (Половецкие пляски)
Polovtsian Dances (Половецкие пляски): Borodin's 1875 choral-orchestral dance scene from Act II of Prince Igor, famous as a 1909 Fokine/Roerich Ballets Russes ballet, and source of "Stranger in Paradise."
Poor theatre
Poor theater is an aesthetic of theater-making defined by Jerzy Grotowski in his book Towards a Poor Theatre, stripping away make-up, costume, scenography, and effects to leave the live actor-spectator relationship.
Popping
Popping is a funk-style street dance from 1970s California, built on rapid muscle contractions creating pops or hits on the beat; credited to Boogaloo Sam Solomon and the Electric Boogaloos of Fresno, popularized on Soul Train in 1979, and distinct from locking and breaking.
Postdramatic theatre
Postdramatic theatre (Postdramatisches Theater): term coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann in 1999 for theatre defined outside the paradigm of the dramatic text, shifting from representation to presentation; English translation 2006.
Practical aesthetics
Practical Aesthetics, or the Atlantic Technique, is an action-based acting method developed by David Mamet and William H. Macy in the early 1980s, taught at the Atlantic Acting School, using four-step script analysis: literal, want, essential action, as-if.
Prahasana
Prahasana (प्रहसन) is a comic genre of classical Sanskrit drama, often translated as farce, one of the ten rūpakas, that satirizes social hypocrisy to make spectators laugh.
Prahlada Nataka
Prahlada Nataka, also called Raja Nata, is a musical folk theater form from southern Odisha, India, that enacts the devotee Prahlada's rescue by the god Narasimha.
Prakarana
Prakarana (प्रकरण) is a classical genre of Sanskrit drama, codified in the Nāṭyaśāstra, with an invented plot, a non-royal hero, and love as its main sentiment.
Prakash Belawadi
Prakash Belawadi, Bengaluru theatre director, actor, filmmaker and journalist; National Film Award winner for Stumble and 2019 Helpmann Award winner for Counting and Cracking; works across Kannada, Hindi and other Indian cinema.