Praxis Theatre flashcards

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

Poetics six elements

Aristotle ranked tragedy's components as plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle, with plot most essential because tragedy imitates action rather than persons.

Hamartia

In Aristotle's Poetics, the error or misjudgment that brings about a tragic hero's downfall; it is not necessarily a moral flaw or vice.

Catharsis

Aristotle's term for the purgation or clarification of pity and fear produced in spectators by tragic drama, cited as tragedy's distinctive emotional effect.

Peripeteia and anagnorisis

Peripeteia is a reversal of the action's direction; anagnorisis is a character's recognition or discovery. Aristotle prized plots combining both, as in Oedipus Rex.

Deus ex machina

A contrived plot device resolving conflict through an unexpected intervention, named for the crane (mechane) that lowered gods into Greek stages.

Three unities

Neoclassical rules of unity of action, place, and time (often a single day), derived from Italian and French readings of Aristotle rather than from his text itself.

French neoclassical rules

Seventeenth-century French practice codified by critics such as Boileau demanded the unities, bienséance (decorum), and verisimilitude; Racine's Phèdre exemplifies the style.

Commedia dell'arte

Italian improvised comedy from the sixteenth century using stock masked characters (Arlecchino, Pantalone, Dottore), lazzi routines, and scenario outlines rather than scripts.

Kabuki

Japanese classical theatre known for stylized movement, onnagata male actors in female roles, mie poses, and the hanamichi walkway extending into the audience.

Noh theatre

Japanese masked drama with slow ritual movement, chant, and a small instrumental ensemble; Zeami's treatises codified its aesthetics of yugen (mysterious depth).

Greek theatre mask and mechane

Masks enabled actors to play multiple roles and project character type; the mechane was a crane used for divine entrances in Athenian tragedy.

Stanislavski given circumstances

The environmental, historical, and situational facts of a scene that an actor uses to justify action and emotion within the character's imaginary life.

Magic if

Stanislavski's prompt asking an actor what they would do if placed in the character's circumstances, bridging personal response and fictional situation.

Super-objective

Stanislavski's term for the through-line of a character's or production's overarching aim, unifying smaller objectives into coherent action across the play.

Emotion memory

Stanislavski's early technique of recalling personal experiences to stimulate stage feeling; he later shifted emphasis toward physical actions and imagination.

Method of physical actions

Stanislavski's later approach building a role from a sequence of concrete physical tasks, allowing inner feeling to arise from purposeful bodily action.

Verfremdungseffekt

Brecht's alienation effect: staging devices that disrupt illusion and empathy so audiences observe social relations critically rather than identifying with characters.

Gestus

Brecht's term for a social gesture or attitude made visible in acting and staging, expressing class relations and character stance toward others.

Epic theatre structure

Brecht's episodic form uses discontinuous scenes, titles, songs, and narration to interrupt narrative momentum and invite analysis instead of emotional immersion.

Theatre of Cruelty

Artaud's vision of theatre as physical and sensory shock, privileging gesture, cries, and spectacle over text to reach the audience's subconscious.

Poor theatre

Grotowski's stripped-down theatre eliminating scenery and effects, concentrating on the actor's disciplined body and voice in direct relation to spectators.

Theatre of the Oppressed

Boal's participatory methods, including Forum and Image Theatre, in which spectators become spect-actors who rehearse and enact solutions to real oppression.

Forum Theatre

Boal's technique where spectators stop a short play depicting oppression and replace the protagonist to test alternative actions, guided by a joker.

Invisible Theatre

Boal's practice of staging a scripted scene in a public place without announcing it as theatre, provoking real bystanders into debate.

Realism in drama

Nineteenth-century movement depicting ordinary contemporary life in prose with plausible settings and psychology, exemplified by Ibsen and Chekhov.

Théâtre Libre

André Antoine's Parisian independent theatre founded in 1887, pioneering naturalistic staging and the fourth-wall convention for new realistic plays.

Fourth wall

The convention of an invisible barrier between actors and audience, central to naturalistic staging and broken by direct address in non-realistic forms.

Expressionism in theatre

Early twentieth-century style distorting setting, light, and dialogue to project subjective states, seen in plays such as Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight.

Theatre of the Absurd

Postwar drama by Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet rejecting logical plot and character to express existential meaninglessness through circular, comic, and illogical action.

Restoration comedy

English comedy after 1660 featuring witty repartee, sexual intrigue, and fops, exemplified by Congreve's The Way of the World and Wycherley's The Country Wife.

Well-made play

Scribe and Sardou's formula of tight exposition, secrets, peripety, and a climactic scène à faire resolved by a logical denouement.

Dramaturg role

A dramaturg researches context and text, advises on script and adaptation, prepares audience materials, and supports the director's conceptual choices.