Theatre has evolved throughout time. It has traveled around the country from Greece to Rome, from Rome to China, to Spain, to Italy, to France, and finally, to New York. As we travel around the world, we will see all these cultures and countries have created or warped their own unique stages. This gives us many to look at and appreciate. Remarkably, many of these theatres are still standing, but unfortunately not all of them. Nevertheless, each country has at least one theatre that is unique to that country just that is waiting to be rediscovered. And so our journey begins around the world to discover theatres begins.
We begin in the year 600 B.C. in Greece: the Greeks built their theatres on the slope of a hill. This secures sufficient elevation for the back row of seats without the enormous substructures, which the Romans used. If the surface was rocky, semicircles were hewn out, tier above tier. If the ground was soft an excavation was made to the hillside and lined with rows of stone benches. The steps were often faced with marble, forming a circular pit enclosed by a lofty portico and balustrade terrace, and was assigned to the spectators, as in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens. The auditorium was divided by broad concentric belts, named diazomata, which served as lobbies, with eleven rows of seats between each, and these were further divided into wedges by transverse flights of stairs between the lobbies, converging on the centre of the orchestra. The latter resembled the passages in a trireme with its banks of oars, and hence were called selides or gangways. There were eleven subdivisions to each section, suggesting that there were as many benches as there were rowers. "Thus Aristophanes bids the audience to rise for a certain actor, give a splash of applause in good measure, and waft him a noble Lenan cheer with eleven oars."" The orchestra was ten or twelve feet below the front row of seats which formed its boundary, a portion of its space being occupied by a raised platform, which presently superseded the altar of Dionysus in the centre, though still known, at this time, as the thymele.
