3,335 articles
Sebastien Stella
Sébastien Stella (Seb), French choreographer and director (born 1971), creator of P!nk's Funhouse Tour aerial routines and circus choreography for Water for Elephants; ex-Cirque du Soleil 'O' performer and founder of Espace Cirque Moorea.
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (暗恋桃花源, Ànliàn Táohuāyuán) is a 1986 Taiwanese stage play by Stan Lai, in which two theater troupes accidentally share a stage.
Sekkyō
Sekkyō-bushi (説経節) was a Japanese chanted narrative art of the late medieval and early modern periods, performed with puppets to shamisen accompaniment, peaking in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Self-referential humor
Self-referential humor, or meta humor, is comedy whose material points at itself, its own form, length, or telling. Seen in jokes, meta-theatre like Hamlet's play-within-a-play, and the George Burns sitcom.
Semiotics and sociology of the actor
The semiotics of the actor is a research tradition treating the stage actor as a producer of organized signs, begun by the Prague Linguistic Circle and surveyed again in 2025.
Senecan tragedy
Senecan tragedy is the body of ten Latin verse tragedies written in the first century AD by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, Nero's tutor, which shaped Renaissance drama across Europe.
Sentimental comedy
Sentimental comedy is a dramatic genre flourishing in the 18th century, beginning in 1690s England as a reaction against Restoration comedy; Cibber's Love's Last Shift (1696) is its first example.
Seoul Institute of the Arts (서울예술대학교)
Seoul Institute of the Arts (서울예술대학교, SeoulArts) is a private arts college in Ansan, South Korea, founded in 1962 by playwright Yoo Chi-jin from the Korean Theater Academy and the Namsan Drama Center, offering AFA, BFA, and MFA programs.
Sergei Diaghilev (Сергей Павлович Дягилев)
Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (Сергей Павлович Дягилев, 1872–1929), Russian impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes in Paris (1909), who commissioned Stravinsky's Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring and united Picasso, Bakst, and Nijinsky.
Sergei Polunin (Сергей Владимирович Полунин)
Sergei Polunin, born 1989 in Kherson, is a Russian and Serbian ballet dancer who became the Royal Ballet's youngest-ever principal before resigning in 2012 and appearing in the film Red Sparrow.
Sergio Trujillo
Sergio Trujillo (born 1963, Cali, Colombia) is a Broadway director and choreographer, first Latino winner of the Tony for Best Choreography (2019, Ain't Too Proud), Olivier winner for Memphis, and 2025 Broadway directing debut with Real Women Have Curves.
Sesame Street characters
Sesame Street characters are Muppet and human residents of the American children's series Sesame Street. They premiered in 1969 to teach lessons about letters and social skills.
Set construction
Set construction is the practical craft of designing and building physical scenery for theater, film, and television. It covers planning, materials, and safety for the scenic department.
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers (born 1973) is an American comedian and host of NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers since 2014, after 13 seasons on Saturday Night Live as head writer and Weekend Update anchor.
Seven Against Thebes
Seven Against Thebes (Ἑπτὰ ἐπὶ Θήβας) is a 467 BC tragedy by Aeschylus dramatizing the assault of seven Argive champions on the seven gates of Thebes.
Severino Reyes
Severino Reyes (1861–1942), also known as Lola Basyang, Filipino playwright called Father of the Tagalog Sarsuwela; author of Walang Sugat (1902), founder of Gran Compania de Zarzuela Tagala, and first editor of Liwayway magazine.
Sevil
Sevil is a 1928 play by the Azerbaijani playwright Jafar Jabbarli about a woman's liberation from a veiled marriage, considered a turning point in Azerbaijani literature.
Sewa jōruri
Sewa jōruri (世話浄瑠璃), also called sewamono, is a category of Japanese puppet plays depicting the daily life of Edo-period townspeople, closely identified with playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon's love-suicide plays.
Sewamono
Sewamono (世話物) is a category of kabuki and jōruri puppet plays that depicts the daily lives of Edo-period commoners, in contrast to the historical jidaimono genre.
Sex (play)
Sex is a three-act Broadway play written by Mae West under the pseudonym Jane Mast, who starred in it as the Montreal prostitute Margy LaMont.
Sex show
Sex show: a paid live performance of sexual acts, spanning peep show booths, strip and burlesque venues, and stage theaters such as Amsterdam's Casa Rosso, with roots in 16th-century raree shows and a modern webcam industry.
Shabba Doo
Shabba Doo (Adolfo Quinones, 1955–2020) was a Chicago-born dancer, a founding member of the Lockers and Soul Train Gang, star of Breakin' and Breakin' 2 as Ozone, and choreographer for Madonna and Lionel Richie; not the dancehall artist Shabba Ranks.
Shadow play
Shadow play (shadowgraph, shadow theater): theatre of shadows cast by flat puppets or actors on a backlit screen. Traditions include Karagöz, wayang kulit, Chinese and Khmer shadow puppetry; several hold UNESCO listings.
Shaggy dog story
A shaggy dog story is a long, drawn-out joke that relies on an absurd or anticlimactic punchline, a form that first appeared in print in the 1930s.
Shakespeare authorship question
The Shakespeare authorship question asks whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works bearing his name. Alternatives proposed include Francis Bacon, Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; mainstream scholarship rejects all substitutes while confirming extensive collaboration.
Shakespeare Theatre Company
Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC), also the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, is a not-for-profit classical theater in Washington, D.C., founded from the Folger Theatre Group in 1985, led by Michael Kahn from 1986, performing at the Klein Theatre and Harman Hall, and winner of the 2012 Tony Award for Regional Theatre.
Shakespeare's Globe
Shakespeare's Globe is a theater complex on London's Bankside comprising a 1997 reconstruction of the 1599 Globe Theatre and the candlelit indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, opened in 2014.
Shakespeare's plays
Shakespeare's plays: the roughly 38 dramatic works of William Shakespeare, grouped by the 1623 First Folio into comedies, histories, and tragedies, preserved via Heminges and Condell's folio and marked by disputed chronology and collaborations with Fletcher, Middleton, and Marlowe.
Shakti Mohan (शक्ति मोहन)
Shakti Mohan (शक्ति मोहन), Indian contemporary dancer and choreographer from Mumbai, winner of Dance India Dance season 2 (2010), Dance Plus judge, founder of Nritya Shakti studio, choreographer of Padmaavat's Nainowale.
Shakuntal
Shakuntal, known in full as Abhijnanashakuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntala), is Kalidasa's Sanskrit drama in seven acts telling the love story of King Dushyanta and Shakuntala.