Art Attack: The Vocabulary of Creativity: Curtain Call: Dance and Theater Terms

Allegro means "quick" or "lively" in Italian. It's used to describe the fast sections of pieces of music and dance. You may also see allegro, ma non troppo on a musical score. This means "quick, but not too quick."

Arabesque refers to an ornate type of decoration, either visual or musical. It also describes a specific position in ballet, which you will also see in figure skating.

The catchiest part of a song is the chorus, but the term originates in Ancient Greece, where the chorus was a group of actors who stood at the side of the stage and provide insight on the story between scenes.

Dramatourgia means "the composition of dramas" in Greek. Some playwrights today work with people known as dramaturges, who function as editors and advisors.

In Shakespeare's time, plays were printed on two sizes of folded paper. Quartos, below, were smaller, cheaper, and generally full of errors. Folios, because of the much larger paper size and higher cost, were more carefully edited and proofread. These are the versions that continue to be published today. Folio means "sheet" or "leaf" in Italian.

An interval is the distance between two notes in music, and also a period of pause during a dance. It can also be used, especially in Britain, as a synonym for intermission.

This one-piece garment that allows maximum movement was named after French trapeze artist Jules Léotard (1830-1870), who performed wearing them.

Prompt can mean "on time," but it also means "to urge" or "to encourage." In the theater, sometimes someone will stand just offstage, or in some cases below it with a small opening so they can see the actors. They will whisper lines in the event the performers forget what to say; that's a prompt. You may recognize the word from its appearance in teleprompter.

See the folio note above. By folding a sheet of paper in half twice, smaller booklets of many pages were created. These were known as quartos because quattro is Italian for "four."

Any time a beat falls somewhere outside the regular pulse of a rhythm, that's syncopation. Jazz is especially famous for it, and tap dancers regularly play around with syncopated variations on the music they're dancing to. Syncope is a Latin word meaning "irregular heartbeat" or "heart attack."

In Greek mythology, Terpsichore was the Muse of dance. Muses were goddesses who embodied the spirit of the arts and sciences. Choreography, above, is based on her name.

Thespis of Icaria, who lived in Greece during the 6th century B.C.E., is regarded as the father of drama; he was believed to be the first person to ever portray a character on stage.

Any piece of music that's in 3/4 time — or a dance set to that music — can be called a waltz. It's a German word for exactly this.