Canary Islands PAU Performing Arts II flashcards

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

Mythos

Aristotle's term for plot, the arrangement of incidents; he ranks it first among the six elements of tragedy because it is the source of tragic effect.

Anagnorisis

Aristotle's term for recognition, a change from ignorance to knowledge, often paired with peripeteia to produce tragic reversal and emotional impact.

Tragicomedy

A genre mixing tragic and comic registers and outcomes; theorized by Guarini and practiced from the Renaissance onward, often ending in reconciliation after peril.

Three unities

The neoclassical rule requiring unity of action, place, and time (a single day); derived from Aristotle and codified by Castelvetro in 1570.

Commedia dell'arte

Italian improvised masked theatre from the mid-sixteenth century using stock characters, lazzi, and scenarios; it influenced Molière, Goldoni, and later physical comedy.

Corral de comedias

A Spanish Golden Age courtyard playhouse with a thrust stage, open patio for standing spectators, and graded seating; central to Lope de Vega's comedia nueva.

Arte nuevo de hacer comedias

Lope de Vega's 1609 verse treatise defending mixing tragic and comic elements and pleasing the audience, codifying the Spanish comedia nueva.

Verfremdungseffekt

Brecht's alienation effect: staging devices that prevent emotional identification so spectators critically examine social and historical conditions.

Gesamtkunstwerk

Wagner's concept of the total artwork uniting music, poetry, drama, and staging, realized at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus from 1876.

Théâtre Libre

André Antoine's Parisian theatre founded in 1887, pioneering naturalist staging, realistic sets, and the fourth-wall convention in production practice.

Didascalia

Stage directions in a dramatic text; they describe setting, action, or delivery and raise the question of whether they are performable instructions or literary description.

Through-line of action

Stanislavski's term for the continuous spine of objectives connecting a character's actions across the play, giving the performance coherence.

Given circumstances

Stanislavski's term for the environmental, historical, and situational facts a character must respond to; actors use them to justify action and emotion.

Adaptation strategies

Approaches to staging a source text: transposition of setting, reduction of subplots, expansion of material, or radical intertextual rewriting.

Dramaturg

The production collaborator who researches context, shapes text versions and translations, and advises the director on meaning and coherence.

Mise-en-scène

The total arrangement of a stage production: composition, blocking, focus, rhythm, and the spatial relationship between performers and audience.

Biomechanics

Meyerhold's actor training system of precise, rhythmic, acrobatic movement, developed in constructivist staging to make performance visible and controlled.

Poor theatre

Grotowski's approach stripping theatre to actor and spectator, using rigorous physical training and via negativa to reveal the performer's presence.

Prompt book

The production document recording blocking, cues, and technical notes; the stage manager uses it to run rehearsals and performances consistently.

Cue-to-cue

A technical rehearsal that skips dialogue to run only the moments where cues change, allowing light and sound operators to set timing efficiently.

Scenography

The design of the whole theatrical environment, including set, costume, lighting, and sound, considered as a unified spatial and visual system.

Proscenium arch

A stage framed by a structural opening that separates performers from spectators, favoring frontal staging and pictorial illusion.

Thrust stage

A stage projecting into the auditorium with audience on three sides, requiring staging that accounts for multiple sightlines and audience proximity.

DMX512

The standard digital protocol for controlling stage lighting and effects; it transmits channel levels from a console to dimmers and fixtures over a data cable.

Light plot

A scaled drawing showing fixture positions, types, channels, and focus on the stage plan; the basis for hang and focus during load-in.

Sound reinforcement

Amplifying live voices or instruments through microphones, mixer, processing, amplifiers, and speakers so the audience hears clearly.

Zarzuela

A Spanish lyric theatre genre alternating sung numbers and spoken dialogue, often with comic and regional themes; distinct from through-composed opera.

Laban effort qualities

Rudolf Laban's movement analysis describing dynamics through weight, time, space, and flow, used to train actors and dancers in expressive movement.

Timple

A small five-string Canarian plucked instrument with a bright timbre, used in traditional genres such as the isa and the tajaraste.

Happening

A participatory, event-based art form from the late 1950s, associated with Allan Kaprow, that is unrepeatable and blurs art and everyday life.

Immersive theatre

A performance format where the audience moves freely through a designed environment, choosing what to watch and often interacting with performers.

Intermediality

The combination of live performance with digital media such as video, projection, sensors, and real-time software, producing hybrid dramaturgies.

Theatre semiotics

The study of performance as a system of signs, analyzing how staging elements signify through denotation and connotation, associated with Barthes and Ubersfeld.