Arts & Culture
Art that exists only while it is being performed.
5 fields · 47 topics · 81 curated works
Making performance happen — acting technique, directing, and the stagecraft, lighting and design that carry it.
Foundations & Overviews · Acting Technique · Stanislavski Method · Directing for Stage · Stagecraft
Performance across cultures and centuries.
Foundations & Overviews · Ancient Greek Theatre · Commedia dell'Arte · Elizabethan Stage · Kabuki & Noh
The body as medium — ballet, modern and contemporary technique, choreography, and the traditions danced socially.
Foundations & Overviews · Ballet · Modern Dance · Contemporary Dance · Choreography
Timing as a craft — stand-up, sketch, storytelling and spoken word, and the theories of why any of it lands.
Foundations & Overviews · Stand-Up Comedy · Comic Writing · Sketch Comedy · Storytelling Performance
Skill-based performance traditions — acrobatics, juggling, illusion and puppetry, where the trick is the point.
Foundations & Overviews · Circus Arts · Acrobatics · Juggling · Magic & Illusion
No prior grounding assumed.
The English Dancing Master
John Playford · 1651
Collects the tunes and figures of English country dances as danced socially, treating the dance itself as living on the floor among ordinary dancers…
+18 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Orchésographie
Thoinot Arbeau · 1589
Teaches French Renaissance social dances through a dialogue between a dance master and his pupil, pairing each dance's steps with a printed rhythmic…
+35 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Poetics
Aristotle · 335 BCE
The first systematic analysis of drama: plot above character, the unity of action, and catharsis as the point of watching people suffer.
+25 more at this level
12 of 81 works
John Playford
Collects the tunes and figures of English country dances as danced socially, treating the dance itself as living on the floor among ordinary dancers rather than on a stage.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Henry Lewes
Surveys great actors of the century to argue that first-rate acting combines natural sensibility with deliberate, learnable technical control, not one or the other alone.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Lilly Grove
Surveys dance across historical periods and cultures — from ritual and folk dance to the ballet and ballroom of its own day — arguing that a society's dances reveal its social structure as clearly as its laws or its art.
440 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Gaston Vuillier
Traces dancing from religious ritual and ancient spectacle through court ballet and the ballroom of his own century, arguing that each era's dance fashions express its manners and social life rather than existing as mere amusement.
350 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Dion Clayton Calthrop
Traces English dress period by period as a resource for stage designers, arguing that historical accuracy in silhouette and detail is what makes a costume read as of its period rather than fancy dress.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Vernon Castle & Irene Castle
Codifies the foxtrot, tango and other new couple dances for a mass audience, arguing modern social dancing should be simplified and standardised rather than left to informal local fashion.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Caroline Caffin
Treats vaudeville's mix of magicians, acrobats and comic turns as a coherent art of variety rather than a lesser form of theatre, cataloguing what made each kind of act actually work.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Marie L. Shedlock
Sets out oral storytelling as a performance discipline distinct from reading aloud, built on selecting the right tale, cutting it to its bones, and using voice and timing rather than gesture to hold an audience.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Arthur Waley
Introduces Noh as a theatre of suggestion built on Zeami's aesthetic of yūgen, arguing that its stillness and mask work demand a different way of watching than Western drama.
link checked 17 Sept 2026A. E. Zucker
Surveys the conventions of Chinese opera for an English-reading audience — its symbolic stage properties, role types and mixed music-and-speech form — arguing they form a coherent alternative dramatic grammar rather than a primitive stage.
192 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026John Dolman
A manual for the ambitious amateur company arguing that a production is one designed whole — the actors' movement, the setting and the play's rhythm all serving a single visual and dramatic idea — rather than a script simply staged as written.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Keith Johnstone
Argues spontaneity is not a rare gift but a skill blocked by fear of failure, and that status transactions between characters, not clever ideas, are what make improvised scenes cohere.