Unit 1 - Dramatic storytelling

Unit 2- Non-naturalistic Australian drama

This unit focuses on creating, presenting and analysing a devised performance that includes real or imagined characters and is based on stimulus material that reflects personal, cultural and/or community experiences and stories. This unit also involves analysis of a student’s own performance work and of a performance by professional drama practitioners. In this unit students use performance styles from a range of contexts associated with naturalism and non-naturalism.

Students examine storytelling through the creation of solo and/or ensemble devised performance/s. They manipulate expressive skills in the creation and presentation of characters, and develop awareness and understanding of how characters are portrayed in naturalistic and non-naturalistic performance styles and document the processes they use. Students also gain an awareness of how performance is shaped and given meaning. They investigate a range of stimulus material and learn about stagecraft, conventions and performance styles from a range of contexts.

In this area of study, the terms ‘character’, ‘performance’, ‘story’ and ‘style’ can be understood as one or more characters, performances, stories or styles.

This unit focuses on the use and documentation of the processes involved in constructing a devised solo or ensemble performance that uses non-naturalistic performance styles. Students create, present and analyse a performance based on a person, an event, an issue, a place, an artwork, a text and/or an icon from a contemporary or historical Australian context.

Students use a range of stimulus material in creating the performance and examine non-naturalistic performance styles from a range of contexts relevant to Australia and Australians. Conventions appropriate to the selected performance styles are also explored. Students’ knowledge of how dramatic elements can be enhanced or manipulated through performance is further developed in this unit.

Students analyse their own performance work as well as undertake the analysis of a performance of an Australian work by other actors. An Australian work might:

• be written, adapted or devised by Australian writers or theatre-makers

• reflect aspects of the Australian identity, for example the indigenous voice, the Celtic perspective,

the twentieth or twenty-first century migrant experience, the refugee experience, the urban and rural perspectives.

Students use performance styles from a range of historical, cultural and social contexts including styles associated with non-naturalism.