Religious

It is generally believed that drama emerged from religious ritual. At what precise point ritual became drama is uncertain, but formal drama is first known from ancient Greece.

Certainly, religious festivals gave rise to dramatic expression by reenacting the passion and trials of the god or demigod on whom the religion centred. In Christian Europe, biblical plays became attached to particular festivities, notably the Feast of Corpus Christi. Similarly, the story of the assassination of the 7th-century Shīʿite hero al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was enacted at the Muslim festival of taʿziyah. As in ancient Greece, these festivals extended over many days and involved the whole community. In the 20th and 21st centuries, as popes and other religious leaders traveled around the world to address the faithful, huge outdoor ceremonies became the norm, often with staging and lighting effects borrowed from the commercial theatre. In many African cultures, the sanctity of dance and music is linked to performance rites of all kinds.

Educational and developmental

Initially, any educational aims of theatre were subsumed under its religious aims. But with the growth of educational institutions in the Renaissance came student productions, such as the commedia erudita often performed at universities. A play might be enacted to cultivate appreciation of its literary qualities, to celebrate a graduation, or to commemorate a national holiday. At first these productions were communal in character and occasional in presentation. Then, for brief periods in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, school and choral masters endeavoured to turn this communal activity into a commercial operation by utilizing boys as professional actors. Subsequently, the stigma against professional performing ensured that the educated classes were more likely to know the dramatic repertoire through reading than through enactment.

Early in the 20th century, the educational philosophy of the dancer Isadora Duncan inspired a new emphasis on education in the theatre. Duncan, drawing inspiration from ancient Greece, sought to free dance from the strictures of classical ballet. Her work in teaching, along with that of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the Swiss founder of eurythmics, provided the cornerstone for educational dance. Children were given dance classes to develop both physical ability and self-expression.

The practice of producing school plays goes back at least to the Elizabethan period in England, when it was used to train pupils in rhetorical skills. In the 20th century a range of alternative activities emerged under the heading of “drama in education.” As such classes exist today, they generally have no direct performance aim and do not make a distinction between performer and audience. Classes can pursue a variety of aims: physical development, self-dramatization and self-expression, the dynamics of group relationships, role-playing, decision making, and fantasy exploration to develop the imagination. Some work has been done to bring drama into the centre of the school curriculum and to use its flexible methods as a medium for teaching other subjects, such as language skills.

Drama has also been used to enable psychiatric patients to reveal and objectify their mental traumas. Drama therapy, or psychodrama, employs theatre to promote healing rather than to analyze.

After 1950 many dramatic techniques were utilized in an entirely new area called theatre for development. Theatre has been used, primarily in the developing world, to foster literacy programs, population planning campaigns, and agricultural development programs. In Indonesia, for example, wayang shadow puppets have been used, with the content of traditional plays altered to include family planning messages. In some projects, theatre programs are prepared using villagers as consultants regarding content effectiveness.

Commercial

Theatre as a purely economic enterprise can be traced to the Renaissance, when there developed a professional theatre of the marketplace. Productions were offered in large population centres or were taken to villages and towns where a potential audience already existed. With a shift from theatre devised for an independently existing occasion to speculative theatre, seeking to create its own occasion, there is a shift from a communal to a cosmopolitan audience. Instead of presenting plays at times that inherently hold sacred or civic meaning and, therefore, draw together the entire populace, commercial companies present plays with some frequency in order to attract a public large enough to support them. Instead of fulfilling a preordained social purpose, the commercial theatre has to justify itself and persuade people to attend by providing novelty and entertainment.