Theatre Glossary (Mike Green)

All visual elements of production (scenery, properties, lighting, costumes, makeup, physical movement, dance).

A free, direct, immediate response to an experience.

The process of improvisationally making an informal play based on a story. Young children are often guided by a leader who tells or reads a story while the children take on all the roles, working in their own spaces. Older children generally assume specific roles and collaborate to dramatize a story, often interchanging roles and experimenting with ideas.

This form of theatre combines the art of storytelling with improvisational acting. Using stories from the oral tradition (folk and fairy tales, myths, and legends), story theatre allows the characters to narrate in the third person, speak the dialogue in the first person, and carry out physical actions called forth in the story.

The characteristic manner of speaking, writing, designing, performing, or directing, Style is a relative term that encompasses literary movements (e.g., romanticism, realism, naturalism), the method of individual playwrights, or anything that displays unique, definable properties in construction or execution. Stylized usually means anything which deviates from whatever is considered realistic at a given time. It is possible to have a dramatic style (provided by the playwright) and a theatrical style (provided by the director and collaborators).

The unspoken meaning or intention behind the actions and dialogue of a text or performance which is implied largely by nonverbal behavior and subtleties in vocal qualities.

A technique used by the drama leader during the playing of a scene in which the leader enacts a role with the students in order to heighten or advance the playing.

The aspects of theatre involved in the creation of spectacle (scenery, properties, lighting, sound, costumes, and makeup).

The basis of dramatic activity and performanceText can be a written script or an agreed-upon structure and content (as in improvisational work or a theatrical piece which uses planned, set, disparate components)

refers to the study of art form through performance-centered activities involving an audience. As an academic discipline, theatre traditionally includes the study of acting techniques, scene study, dramatic literature, theatre history, technical design and stagecraft, playwriting, play production, theatre attendance, aesthetics and criticism.