Gesture, speech, song, music and dance

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art and stagecraft are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience.

Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals.

Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, and augments regular speech by the use of both tonality and rhythm. One who sings is called a singer or vocalist. Singers perform music (arias, recitatives, songs, etc.) that can be sung either with or without accompaniment by musical instruments. Singing is often done in a group of other musicians, such as in a choir of singers with different voice ranges, or in an ensemble with instrumentalists, such as a rock group or baroque ensemble or as a soloist.

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning action, which is derived from the verb meaning to do or to act. The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception.

A performance, in the performing arts, generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers present one or more works of art to an audience. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. Afterwards audience members often applaud. After a performance, performance measurement sometimes occurs. Performance measurement is the process of collecting, analyzing and/or reporting information regarding the performance of an individual, group, organization, system or component.

Dance is the art of movement of the body, usually rhythmically and to music, using prescribed or improvised steps and gestures. "A dance" is any one prescribed sequence of such movements, or the music to which it is performed, or an event at which it takes place. Dance may also be regarded as a form of nonverbal communication recognisable in other animals; in bee dances and behaviour patterns such as mating dances.

Dance can be categorized and described in various ways. It may be analysed purely by its choreography, its repertoire of movements, or it may be classified according to its time or place of origin. Yet study reveals many generic similarities in many different times and places.

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