Andalusia PAU Performing Arts II flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Peripeteia

Aristotle's term for the reversal of fortune in a tragedy's action, a change from one state of affairs to its opposite, typically bound to the protagonist's hamartia.

Anagnorisis

Aristotle's term for recognition, a character's movement from ignorance to knowledge, often about identity or kinship, that produces the tragic effect.

Postdramatic theatre

Lehmann's 1999 category for theatre that foregrounds presence, space and media over dramatic plot and character, dissolving the hierarchy of text over performance.

Secondary text

The stage directions and didascalias of a dramatic text, which function as performance instructions rather than spoken dialogue and vary in prescriptiveness.

Arte nuevo de hacer comedias

Lope de Vega's 1609 verse treatise codifying the three-act comedia, the mixing of tragic and comic, and decorum in matching speech to character.

Verfremdungseffekt

Brecht's alienation or estrangement effect, a device that makes the familiar strange so the spectator analyses social relations instead of empathising with the characters.

Dramatis persona

The character as a textual construct produced by dialogue, stage direction and reception, distinct from the actor's physical embodiment of the role.

Apart (aside)

A speech directed at the audience that other characters on stage cannot hear, creating a split between fictional knowledge and the spectator's knowledge.

Romance verse form

A Spanish stanza of octosyllabic lines with assonant rhyme in the even lines, widely used in the comedia for narrative and dialogue passages.

Promenade staging

A spatial arrangement in which the audience moves through the performance space, so that sightlines and the actor-audience relation change continuously.

Commedia dell'arte

Sixteenth-century Italian improvised comedy built on fixed masked types, lazzi comic routines, and a canovaccio scenario instead of a full script.

Neoclassical unities

The rules of action, time and place codified by Castelvetro in 1570 from Aristotelian fragments, enforced in French and Spanish neoclassical drama.

Naturalism

The late nineteenth-century movement (Zola, Antoine) that stages environmental determinism and a slice of life, with the box set and the fourth wall.

Epic theatre

Brecht's episodic, historicising theatre using placards, songs and gestus to make the spectator an analyst rather than an empathetic participant.

Theatre of the Absurd

Esslin's 1961 label for post-war drama (Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter) that dissolves causal plot and logical dialogue to figure existential dislocation.

Expressionism on stage

An early twentieth-century style (Toller, Kaiser) that distorts space, light and language to project subjective states rather than observed reality.

Scenography

The integrated design of the performance environment, comprising set, costume, lighting and sound as a single visual-dramatic system.

Proscenium stage

A frontal stage framed by a proscenium arch, separating performers from spectators and favouring illusionistic, picture-frame staging.

Gobo

A metal or glass template placed in a lighting fixture to project a pattern or texture onto the stage or set.

Diegetic sound

A sound whose source is motivated within the fiction of the performance, such as a radio a character switches on, as opposed to non-diegetic underscoring.

Prompt book

The stage manager's master copy of the script recording blocking, cues, properties and running order, used to call the performance.

Magic if

Stanislavski's device by which the actor asks what they would do in the given circumstances, justifying action within the fiction.

Biomechanics

Meyerhold's actor training and performance system based on precise, rhythmic, acrobatic movement, treating the actor as a worker in the theatre-machine.

Gestus

Brecht's term for a social gesture or posture that makes visible a character's social relations and attitude, shown rather than psychologically become.

Poor theatre

Grotowski's stripped theatre that removes spectacle to concentrate on the actor-audience encounter and the actor's via negativa.

Forum theatre

Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed technique in which spect-actors intervene in a staged problem scene to rehearse social change, guided by a joker.

Laban effort qualities

Weight, time, space and flow, whose combinations produce the eight basic actions such as punch, press, flick, glide and float.

Contraction and release

Graham's core movement principle, a pelvic contraction on exhalation and release on inhalation, generating spiral and fall in her technique.

Contact improvisation

A partnered dance form developed by Steve Paxton from 1972, in which two bodies share weight and momentum through rolling contact.

Compás

The rhythmic cycle of flamenco, such as the twelve-count soleá, that governs the dancer's footwork and the singer's phrasing.

Corral de comedias

The open-air courtyard theatre of the Spanish Golden Age, with a tablado stage, awnings, the cazuela for women and standing yard for men.

Auto sacramental

A one-act allegorical Spanish Golden Age play on the Eucharist, perfected by Calderón and performed at Corpus Christi.