THEA 100 Study Guide - Spring 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - William Shakespeare, Ancient Greece, Time
THEA 100
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
1/10/18
The Dramatic Imagination
• McGregror
o Taught THEA 100 and created textbook for the class
• Theatre Protocol (pg 21):
o Appropriate behavior at a play varies from place to place and culture to culture
o Sitting quietly in the dark with hands in lap signals that performers are failing to
reach them
▪ Sometimes the only appropriate response
o General rule: be sensitive to those around you
▪ Rude, distracting behaviors are not acceptable
o Never appropriate to use cell phone in theatre!
• Performance:
o The Story of Theatre
▪ Ook hunting a lion
• Responding to theatre:
o What was the story? What happened?
▪ Cavemen were celebrating that they killed the lion
▪ Retell story of lion
• New way of telling the story!
• Birth of theatre
o Was there a central conflict? Did someone win?
▪ Looking for best way to tell the story
• That’s not boring!
• The whole community won because they founded theatre
▪ Silence makes us uncomfortable
• Find a way to not be afraid of the dark
• The cavemen triumphed over the dark
o How did the time in which the play was set influence your response?
▪ Set in the stone age and 20th century
• Stone age – cave men hunt lion and grunt
o “Once upon a time”-ness
o Simple tale
o Intended for children
• 20th century – characters speaking to audience
o Were there significant ideas shared or lessons to be learned?
▪ Start at beginning and make our way through time through the course
▪ Answer questions in the form of story
• Key term:
o Suspension of disbelief: while we are an audience, we choose to believe that we
are watching real people experiencing real life
▪ Believe pretend what we’re watching is real
o Aesthetic distance: at the same time, a part of us never forgets that we are
watching a show and that messages are being conveyed to us
▪ BUT we know that it’s not actually real
• Three kinds of theatre:
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
1/10/18
o Live Theatre: performances with actors physically present
o Media (or Screen) Theatre: where electronics take the part of living human beings
▪ Audience has no effect on what’s going on
o Personal Theatre: the theatrical elements in your own life
▪ Entire being is a performance
• Change who you are depending on the situation and who you’re
with
• Change behavior when we realize someone is watching
o Act more kind or show off
o Behave so we don’t get hassled or so we are allowed to join
other people
o Act more graceful, compelling, or powerful than we really
feel
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Conventions: how different conventions make you feel, convention: a rule of conduct or behavior, ex) hand shake, can be a greeting but can come from something else in the past. Dramatic structure: conflict: plays are about days when something of critical importance happens. All dramatic action involves conflict: character v. self, character v. character, character v. society, character v. fate/nature/god. Identifying the central conflict is crucial to understanding a play: protagonist: the central character in the play. The one who the playwright wants us to follow, and who changes the most during the play: can"t be a character that dies early on (ex. This will be a new development in the world of the play. It is often the final confrontation between the protagonist and antagonist, when one of them wins and the other loses. The actor: the actor is the heart and soul of theatre. Imagination exercises: relaxation, concentration, warm-ups, rehearsal experiments, additional stanislavski tools.
