The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to theatre: Theatre – the generic term for the performing arts and a collaborative form of fine art involving live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event (such as a story) through acting, singing, and/or dancing before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of speech, gesture, mime, puppets, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. Elements of design and stagecraft are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Nature of theatre Theatre may be described as all of the following: One of the arts One of the performing arts Source of literature, in the form of plays, operas, dances, literary adaptations as presented in front of a live audience. Theatre scripts are not the same as film scripts. History of theatre History of theatre Western tradition Chronological movements of the Western tradition include: Theatre of ancient Greece – a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece between c. 550 and c. 220 BC. Tragedy (late 6th century BC), comedy (486 BC), and the satyr play were the three dramatic genres to emerge there. Western theatre originated in Athens and its drama has had a significant and sustained impact on Western culture as a whole. Theatre of ancient Rome – diverse art form, ranging from festival performances of street theatre, nude dancing, and acrobatics, to the staging of Plautus's broadly appealing situation comedies, to the high-style, verbally elaborate tragedies of Seneca. Although Rome had a native tradition of performance, the Hellenization of Roman culture in the 3rd century BCE had a profound and energizing effect on Roman theatre and encouraged the development of Latin literature of the highest quality for the stage. Medieval theatre – theatre of Europe between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and the beginning of the Renaissance in approximately the 15th century AD. Medieval theatre covers all drama produced in Europe over that thousand-year period and refers to a variety of genres, including liturgical drama, mystery plays, morality plays, farces and masques. Commedia dell'arte – a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the