Dramatic Techniques Flashcards
Anagnorisis
The point in the play during which the tragic hero experiences a kind of self-understanding; the discovery or recognition that leads to the peripeteia or reversa
Blocking
Actors’ movements on the stage during the performance of the play or the musical. Every move that an actor makes (walking across the stage, climbing stairs, sitting in a chair, falling to the floor, getting down on bended knee) falls under the larger term “blocking.”
Catharsis
A purgation of emotions. According to Aristotle, the end of tragedy is the purgation of emotions through pity and terror.
Coup de Theatre
An unexpected and sudden development in drama, which may radically change the outcome.
Deus Ex Machina
“When an external source resolves the entanglements of a play by supernatural intervention. The Latin phrase means, literally, “a god from the machine.” The phrase refers to the use of artificial means to resolve the plot of a play.
Examples: Many of Euripides’ plays have gods coming to rescue the day. In Medea a dragondrawn chariot is sent by Apollo, the Sun-God, to rescue Medea who has just murdered her children. In Joe Orton’s classic play, What the Butler Saw (1969) the deus ex machina comes in
the form not of a god but of a policeman who saves the day.”
Dramatic irony
The words or acts of a character may carry a meaning unperceived by the character but understood by the audience. The irony resides in the contrast between the meaning intended by the speaker and the different significance seen by others.
Example: In Shakespeare’s Othello Othello blames Desdemona for cheating on him. The audience knows that she is faithful and Iago deceives him
Hamartia
Tragic flaw
Hubris
Overweening pride or insolence that results in the misfortune of the protagonist of a tragedy. Hubris leads the protagonist to break a moral law, attempt vainly to transcend normal limitations, or ignore a divine warning with calamitous results.
In medias res
“In the midst of things” (Latin); refers to opening a plot in the middle of the action, and then filling in past details by means of exposition or flashback.
Peripetatiea
“Reversal of fortune for the protagonist–from failure to success or success to failure.
Examples: Oedipus’s and Othello’s moments of enlightenment are also reversals. They learn what they did not expect to learn. “
Proxemics
Contemporary term for ‘spatial relationships’, referring to the physical distances between actors on a stage that communicates the relationship between different characters. Proxemics is also applied to the distance between a performer and elements of the set, which conveys information about character and circumstances.
Scenography
The art of creating performance environments using one or more components including light, costume, set, space and sound.
Tragic hero
According to Aristotle, the protagonist or hero of a tragedy must be brought from happiness to misery and should be a person who is better than ordinary people–a king, for example. In “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Arthur Miller argues that the ordinary man can also be a tragic hero.
