AS Drama and Theatre Studies: The Essential Introduction for Edexcel

Alan Perks, Jacqueline Porteous

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135232139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

AS Drama and Theatre Studies: The Essential Introduction for Edexcel is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the new specification. The textbook covers all aspects of the AS year in depth, from exploring play texts to demonstrating skills in performance and theatre design. The detailed guidance and classroom-friendly features include:

• overviews of specification and assessment requirements
• written and practical exercises
• tips from a Chief Examiner
• extension exercises to stretch the more able student
• worked examples to illustrate best practice
• a glossary of useful words and terms.

Written by a Chief Examiner and a Principal Moderator, this authoritative book offers a wealth of informed and supportive exercises to ensure that students reach their maximum potential.

PART I
GETTING STARTED

1 Introduction

It is always good to know where we are coming from at the start of a course, and one of the first things we need to do is to establish very quickly what we understand ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ to mean.

For our purposes, drama is mainly concerned with the process of exploring and is about using a range of techniques to access the given material, often in workshop activities, and theatre is about engaging an audience through a range of performance techniques and elements following a period of preparation and rehearsal.

The Edexcel GCE Drama and Theatre Studies Specification states that:

The AS year requires you to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• A minimum of two published plays demonstrating understanding of how style, form, dramatic structure and characterisation can be interpreted and realised in performance, and how plays relate to their historical, social and cultural context—they must be varied in terms of period and genre.
• The work of at least one influential director, designer, theatre company or other practitioner who has made a significant contribution to theatre practice.

director
The person in control of all aspects of the production, primarily in relation to the actors but also responsible for the ideas to inspire the design considerations to support the overall vision. Most directors will work collaboratively but will exercise the right to have the final say.

designer
Responsible for creating the look and feel of the production. There are usually a number of contributors to design in the professional theatre, each responsible for a particular aspect of design, including set, lighting and costume.

How do we go about it then?

The important thing to remember is that you have chosen Drama and Theatre Studies and you will have had a good reason for doing so. Look around you. All the other people in the room will have good reasons for being there too—perhaps the same as yours, perhaps not, but think about this:

You are all in this together.

Those people sitting around you are going to support you in getting the grade you want from this course, and you will be doing the same for them. Drama and Theatre Studies is about being part of a group, actively engaged in a range of activities. If you wanted a subject where you work much more on your own, then you should not have chosen this course.

It has to be said right from the start, and very clearly, that there was absolutely no point in choosing this subject if you are going to find it difficult to work with others. If you think that this is going to be the case, then you need to close this book, pick up your bag and quietly slip out of the room now.

Should you decide to stay—and we hope you do—then the good news is that this course is all about you, but it is not about you in isolation. Nobody ever did well in drama working in isolation. This course is about you in relation to others and nobody in the room around you can succeed without you all working together and getting to grips with the demands of the subject at this higher level of study.

Cast your mind back to your experience of drama to date. You will almost certainly have had drama at Key Stage 3 and, perhaps, even at primary school. You may belong to a youth theatre or amateur dramatics group or perhaps attend a provider such as Stagecoach on a regular basis, all of which feeds very well into your current decision to develop your interest, understanding and qualifications further at this level of study. Many people taking Drama and Theatre Studies will have followed an examination course at Key Stage 4. GCSE was great, and it was probably your best or equal best grade, encouraging you to want to take the subject now. You will have learned an awful lot that you can use on this A-Level course, but, and this is the important bit: you have to move on.

You cannot sit back on your GCSE laurels and expect the AS course to fall into your lap and the excellent grade to follow. It would be like an athlete saying I won a race once or a footballer saying I scored a goal last season. It is not enough to have done it. What you need to do now is to keep on doing it and finding new ways of extending and developing your knowledge of theatre and performance and your place within that in relation to this higher national standard. We hope you will be challenged by the course and that you will rise to the challenge, pushing your self harder in order to achieve more.

Some things about the course will be more straightforward than others, and some activities will engage you more effectively, but, at every stage, you need to be looking to focus on the task, be clear about what you need to do, and get on with it. We hope this textbook will help you in the structuring of your work.

2 Making good use of this textbook

There are a few basic facts about the course that you need to be clear about before you go any further. These will help you to access the course and to make good use of this textbook. In Unit 1, your teacher is also your assessor with responsibility for marking your contribution to the unit against the published criteria. Your teacher will be leading you into the unit with an understanding of what is required in order for you to be able to access the marks. Every task set, therefore, will be set for a purpose and with the assessment criteria in mind. There is no time for a sloppy response to anything; you must remain focused at all times and keep an eye on deadlines your teacher may set for you.

You must meet your deadlines—so that your teacher can meet deadlines that are set by the Exam Board and are final.

In Unit 1, the deadline for the final submission of work is set each year by the Examination Boards, and, except under exceptional circumstances, there is no variation to this date and no extension.

In Unit 2, the date for the visiting examiner to come and assess your work will be arranged by your teacher. Except under exceptional circumstances, once the date has been fixed, it cannot be changed so the deadline is there for you to meet and to work towards.

examiner
The person who will come to apply the national standard to work presented for examination purposes.

This AS year, then, is about two units, and there is a lot of hard work ahead, but think about the rewards along the way and the skills you are going to develop alongside those people sitting in the room with you. We hope you will find the course enjoyable as well as rewarding and the challenges that you will face will equal anything else you will encounter in other areas of the curriculum. The top grades are there for the taking in a specification that recognises and rewards the contribution of the individual within the group.

There is no reason at all why you should not be aiming for an A* grade at the end of the course. You are going to have to work for it though—and the work starts here. Drama and Theatre Studies demands many different things from students, and talent alone is not enough to see you through. We have never yet come across a student who didn’t tell us they would like a Grade A or an A* at the end of the two year course.

If you are prepared to work at it and really want a chance of achieving a higher grade, then the extension material and homework activities will really help you to develop your work. In line with the aims of the Young, Gifted and Talented Programme (YG&T), the extension activities offer more advanced tasks to raise standards and to give you access to formal and informal opportunities to help you convert your potential into high achievement. You can find out more about YG&T at http://ygt.dcsf.gov.uk/HomePage.aspx?stakeholder=14.

EXTENSION MATERIAL AND HOMEWORK ACTIVITIES

Throughout the textbook, there are shaded boxes to illustrate particular points. Whenever you see one of these boxes, there will be a task that you may wish to follow up. Remember that this is your AS level course. Your teacher will be there to guide you in lesson times, but there is so much more that you can do to develop your studies and, of course, gain a higher grade.

The shaded boxes will usually offer extension material or homework activities and represent an invitation for you to get involved. They are only suggestions; as you work through the book, you may think of other related activities that could help you to increase your subject knowledge. Our intention is to point you in the right direction in a generic way; your response will need to explore in more detail the information we present here.

If you want a higher grade, we strongly recommend that you explore the information in the boxes, ideally for homework or in your free time.

PRACTICAL EXERCISES

Drama is a practical subject, and the best way to understand it is both to see live theatre and to actively participate in it. Practical drama lies at the heart of Units 1 and 2, and there is no better way to explore texts or to prepare for performance than to be up on your feet and improvising, rehearsing or trying out ideas to support the production process. As you start this course, you may already have decided that you are a performer, but don’t let this stop you trying out a range of other practical activities, for example, having a go at costume design or directing a scene. Similarly, you may feel that your main interest is in technical theatre, but, likewise, to experience the play from the actor’s point of view will enhance your overall understanding of the process.

improvising
Exploring character and situation to gain a greater understanding of the who, why and where of the relationships. Sometimes leads to performance but often used as a means of supporting more developed work around scripts.

Never spend too long discussing whether something will work or not, explore your ideas practically, the answer will become obvious.

WRITTEN EXERCISES AND THE QUALITY OF WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

The quality of written communication is very important and it is assessed to varying degrees across all of the units of this specification but particularly in Unit 1 and Unit 4. If you write regularly throughout the course, it will make a real difference to your ability to write well in both your coursework and the written aspects of the examinations, including the written element of Unit 2. The quality of your written communication has to be taken into account, and this is not simply a case of being able to spell the drama words correctly, it is more than that, it is also about the way you express yourself on the page in the context of the material you are being asked to write. There are word limits in place for all of the coursework in this specification, in the same way as there are time limits for performance work. You really need to be aware of how important this could be to your eventual marks, so it is a good idea to switch on to this now. By recognising the need to write clearly and concisely and by being able to structure responses to practical drama that are evaluative and analytical, you are setting yourself an approach to written communication that will enable you to access the demands of all of the units, including Unit 4 at the end of the A2 year.

Okay, just to get you into our way of working, we are now going to give you an extension activity to have a look at. This activity is typical of the type of thing you will find throughout the textbook and it should challenge but not baffle you. Look at the photograph that follows and consider the extension activity that goes with it.

Figure 2.1 Students exploring the theme of witchcraft.
Source: Alan Perks and Jacqueline Porteous

Extension Activity

Written response to an image

Consider Figure 2.1 and write three sentences that summarise the characters in situation as presented here. Your response must be detailed. Who are these characters and what do you think is happening based on the information in the picture? In a final sentence, evaluate the use of levels to indicate status in the photograph.

For each of the units, you will need a notebook that you can use as a working diary to record activities, your feelings about them and the learning experience you have been involved in.

You should get used to writing about what you do, what other people do, reflecting on your own work and that of others in the class and at the theatre. The reflection on the experience is important, developing your critical faculties in ways that will help you to access the higher level of marks for your written communication. It is not enough at this level of study to ‘tell us about’, you need to develop the capacity to ‘tell us about and reflect upon’, offering critical evaluation of your work and that of others. Part of this process is also about considering what else you could have seen or done; in other words, some alternatives, as there are always other ways of approaching things in the theatre.

Have a look at the sample diary extract that follows. This is one way of presenting the information. You may have a way that yo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: GETTING STARTED
• PART II: UNIT 1 – EXPLORATION OF DRAMA AND THEATRE
• PART III: UNIT 2 – THEATRE TEXT IN PERFORMANCE
• PART IV: MOVING ON
• Glossary of useful words and phrases
• Further reading, viewing and useful websites