Drama
Key Stage 3
Year 7
The main areas we want you to concentrate on in Year sevenare COMMUNICATION and WORKING WITH OTHERS.
Drama uses language, movement and space to share ideas and feelings with others. It is a KEY SKILLthat is needed in a range of jobs and to get on with all sorts of people you will meet in your life. We want to help you improve on the skills you already have
Year 8
The main areas we want you to concentrate on in Yeareight are IMPROVING YOUR PERFORMANCE SKILLS and INTERPRETING TEXTS.
By developing your voice, range of facial expression and whole body skills you will be able to communicate more effectively to an audience. You will learn how to use drama to interpret extracts from plays and other types of texts, such as poems and songs through drama.
Year 9
The main areas we want you to concentrate on in Year nineare LEARNING ABOUT DIFFERENT DRAMA STYLES AND EXPLORING IDEAS AND FEELINGS THROUGH DRAMA.
Slapstick, Parody, Realism, Forum theatre – by the end of this course you will be able to create drama in a number of different styles. You will also start to explore more complex characters and situations.
Key Stage 4
1) GCSE Student Guide
2) KS4 Curriculum Guide - GCSE Drama
Downend School follows the Edexcel GCSE Drama course. Over the two years students will be introduced to the following drama strategies:
Still image – also called freeze-frame or tableau. The action is frozen like a photograph. Alternatively the actors may be ‘sculpted’ into position by another person.
Marking the moment – an important moment in the drama is highly:hted or ‘marked’. This may be done by freezing the action, using captions, inner thoughts spoken out loud, using lighting to spotlight the moment or slow motion etc. The moment will be significant in terms of revealing an understanding, an insight or evoking a feeling about the issue or idea being explored.
Narrating – providing a spoken commentary that accompanies stage action, or a story being related by a character.
Forum theatre – a scene is enacted and watched by the rest of the group. At any point in the drama, observers or actors can stop the action to ask for help or refocus the work. Observers can step in and add a role or take over an existing one.
Hot seating – a technique used to deepen an actor’s understanding of a role. The individual sits in the ‘hot seat’ and has questions fired at them that they have to answer from the point of view of the role they are enacting.
Role-play – an individual pretends to be someone else, by putting themselves in a similar position and imagining what that person might say, think and feel.
Thought tracking – when the role-play is frozen or a freeze-frame is made, the actor reveals their character’s inner thoughts at that moment.
Cross-cutting – creating a scene or scenes and then re-ordering the action by ‘cutting’ forwards and backwards to different moments.
Thought tunnel – a character from the drama walks slowly between two rows of performers. These people act as the character’s thoughts. They each say aloud something that the character might be thinking. This technique is useful for exploring a character’s feelings. When used in performance it provides the audience with an insight into the character’s state of mind.
Conscience alley – similar to a thought tunnel but this time the performers on the outside represent the character’s conscience; i.e. what other people might be thinking about them. This means that the performers take on the role of family, friends or colleagues in the character’s life and say out loud what they are thinking about this person.
Sound collage – different sounds are created with voice or instruments that overlap to make a dramatic effect.
Other important drama terminology:
Split focus – >two or more scenes are taking place at the same time. However, in order for the audience to follow what is going on in each scene the actors may freeze or go into mime to indicate that the focus of the action has now been redirected to another area of the stage.
Drama form – the way the story is told, the characters are portrayed and/or the themes are depicted
Content – the themes of the drama, what the performance is about.
Characterisation – the means used to portray a role using vocal and physical skills.
Conventions – using techniques such as slow motion, freeze-frame, audience asides, soliloquy, establishing one part of the space as one location and a different part of the space as another location
Improvisation – making up and acting out a storyline without the use of a script.
Spontaneous improvisation – making up drama on the spot; improvising without having time to prepare.
Facing out of the drama – anyone from the performing group not involved with the immediate action of the drama stands and faces upstage (or at the sides facing into the wings).
Mime –non-verbal communication; acting out part or all of the storyline through movement and gesture without the character speaking.
Stage configurations:
Open stage – (also called ‘end stage’) is where the stage is at one end of the theatre. All of the audience face the same way.
Proscenium - an open stage with a ‘picture frame’ or proscenium arch and sometimes an orchestra pit, separating the audience from the performers.
Theatre in the round – sometimes called the ‘arena stage’. The stage is in the centre and the audience sit all the way around the stage.
Traverse staging – the audience sit on two sides of the stage, so they can see each other as well as the performers.
KS4 Curriculum Guide for downloading
3) KS4 - GCSE Exam Work
Examples of GCSE Drama exam work performed at Bristol Old Vic Theatre 2007
