Drama flashcards

66 QCE Drama cards across 2 modules (32 definitions, 34 key facts, 0 fill-the-gap, 0 formulas). Each session gives you 20 cards, due cards first. Swipe right for easy, left for hard, down for again. Keyboard: Space to flip, 1 to 4 to rate.

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Sample cards from this deck

Definition
Developing a dramatic concept for challenging theatre (QCE Drama Unit 3)
Define Forming
Begin from an issue and an interpretation, the angle you want the audience to leave with. Select a style whose conventions naturally serve that angle, then decide how specific dramatic languages, a recurring symbol, a shift in mood, a manipulation of space, will deliver it. Document the reasoning, because the concept must be communicated, not just felt.
Definition
Directing and devising: shaping a coherent vision (QCE Drama Unit 4)
Define Forming
Directing and devising are intensive forming. You interpret, conceptualise, experiment, block and structure. The plan is a complete account of how the dramatic languages will be manipulated to realise the vision.
Definition
Dramatic tension: the four types and how to build them (QCE Drama Unit 3)
Define Forming
When you devise, decide which type or types of tension carry a scene and plan their rhythm. A challenging political piece might run on mystery (what really happened to the worker) while a quiet domestic moment runs on relationship tension. Structure the build and release deliberately.
Definition
Inherited conventions of Greek, Elizabethan and Neoclassical theatre (QCE Drama Unit 4)
Define Forming
Before building a directorial vision, identify the conventions that carry the inherited text's meaning. A transformation that ignores the chorus, the soliloquy or the unities risks losing the very structure that makes the play work, or misses the chance to reframe that structure pointedly.
Definition
Epic theatre and Brecht: dramatic languages of political theatre (QCE Drama Unit 3)
Define Forming
When you devise an epic piece, choose a social issue with a clear conflict of power, then build it in episodes. Write in a narrator, captions or a song that frames the argument. Design each moment around a gestus rather than an emotion. A useful test: could a spectator leave the theatre wanting to change something, rather than merely moved?
Definition
The practice-led project: transforming a text through documented practice (QCE Drama Unit 4)
Define Forming
Forming is the planning and devising phase, where the vision is set and the dramatic-language choices are designed and first tested in the rehearsal room.
Definition
The three drama processes: forming, presenting and responding (QCE Drama Units 3 and 4)
Define The three drama processes
The interrelated processes on which QCE Drama is built: forming (devising, selecting and shaping dramatic action and the dramatic languages before performance), presenting (realising that action live for an audience through the skills of acting and stagecraft), and responding (analysing and evaluating dramatic action and justifying choices), which loop into one another rather than running in a fixed order.
Definition
Responding through the extended analytical response (QCE Drama Unit 4 and EA)
Define Extended analytical response
A sustained written argument, produced under examination conditions, that analyses and evaluates how the dramatic languages and theatre styles in an unseen stimulus communicate meaning to an intended audience, supported by specific evidence and precise dramatic metalanguage.
Definition
The IA1 performance: realising a challenging text for an audience (QCE Drama Unit 3)
Define Interpret before you stage
Read the whole text, not just the excerpt, to locate the dramatic purpose and the demands of the style. Decide what the audience should think or feel at each beat.
Definition
Transforming inherited texts: directorial vision and reframing (QCE Drama Unit 4)
Define Forming
Read the inherited text closely for a meaning worth amplifying, then build a directorial vision that releases it. Decide how the dramatic languages, space, casting, design, focus, will carry that vision consistently across the whole text, not just one striking scene.