Quick questions on Greek theatre: origins and conventions: HSC Drama elective

The two main Athenian theatrical festivals were:

Aristotle, writing in the Poetics (around 335 BCE, after the great tragedians), codified the elements of tragedy that he saw in the surviving plays:

The audience was citizen-heavy but probably included women, slaves and foreigners (the evidence is debated). Estimates of capacity range from 14,000 to 17,000 in the fifth century BCE. The audience sat through six to nine hours of drama in a day during the City Dionysia.

A circular dancing space, around 20 metres in diameter. The chorus's domain. The altar of Dionysus stood in the centre.

The seating area, semicircular, carved into the hillside. Originally wooden, later stone (built in stages from the late fifth century BCE through the fourth century BCE).

The wooden building behind the orchestra, originally a changing room, later a backdrop with a single door (and eventually three doors). The skene served as palace, temple, or city gate as the play required. Painted scenery (skenographia) developed in the late fifth century BCE.

Two side entrances between the theatron and the skene. The chorus entered down one parodos; characters from elsewhere entered the other.

A wheeled platform on which interior tableaux could be rolled out from the skene. Used to display bodies after off-stage violence (Greek tragedy did not stage violence directly).

A crane used to lift gods or heroes into the air. Source of the term deus ex machina (god from the machine).

Twelve to fifteen members in tragedy (Aeschylus used twelve; Sophocles raised the number to fifteen), twenty-four in comedy. The chorus sang, danced, and chanted. Choral songs (odes) were performed in strophic structure: the chorus moved one direction for the strophe, the other for the antistrophe.

Tragedies used a maximum of three speaking actors. Doubling and masking allowed each actor to play multiple roles. The convention disciplined the dramatic action into structured dialogues.

All actors wore full-face masks with exaggerated features. Masks identified character at distance (a king's mask, a slave's mask, a young woman's mask), amplified the voice, and allowed doubling. Costumes included raised platform shoes (cothurni for tragedy, lower socci for comedy).

Actors moved with formal, stylised gesture. The acting style was declamatory, suited to the scale of the venue.

A piper (aulos player) accompanied the choral odes. Music has not survived in any usable form.

Murder, suicide and other violent acts happened off-stage. A messenger speech (the rhesis) reported the violence after the fact. The ekkyklema rolled out the resulting tableau (the dead body).