Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Theatre Arts
MS 117.212 LII - Creative Expression: performance

In this unit, students will explore nonverbal communication: first, through body language and gesture, and then through the specific art of pantomime. Students will learn hand position, tension, follow-through, and action/reaction/interaction with objects through warm-up games and exercises. The unit culminates in a two-person pantomime performance.

This unit focuses specifically on the technical aspects of vocal production. By understanding how voice is created, students will be more aware of how to improve their vocal production. Students will explore posture and breathing exercises, as well as how to use the diaphragm, projection, and articulation. The final project will test students’ ability to properly project and articulate a joke across a large space.

This unit on Ancient Greek theatre focuses on the function of the chorus, the choral ode, and the details of the theatre space. It touches on plays and playwrights of the era, culminating in a final project of a modern version of Medea that includes a choral ode.

Students will discover, analyze, and explore the history, characters, and style of commedia dell’arte. Commedia dell’arte is a theatre history unit mixed with improvisation, physicalization, and exploring specific characters. In this unit, we’re going to focus on three main aspects: 1. Causes and Effects of Commedia (History) 2. Stock Characters 3. Commedia Performance Practices

How do you introduce students to Shakespeare? This unit introduces the Bard through life in Elizabethan England and the playwrights, players, and playhouses. It also explores how to approach unfamiliar words and context clues in Shakespeare’s texts.

This unit will enable students to identify, compare, and contrast three different styles of Japanese theatre: Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki. There are three proposed projects in this unit: a research assignment where groups delve into further detail about one of the three styles; a performance project where students utilize what they’ve learned by enacting a scene from a Kyogen (comedic) play; and a Bunraku puppet play.

The final project will incorporate multiple areas that students have studied over the course of the year/semester: playwriting, acting, scenic design, and marketing. They are putting everything they’ve learned into a final package, including writing, rehearsing, and performing.

In this Mock Audition Unit, students will start by discussing the audition process. They will make connections between their personal views and the process. Students will then apply the steps of auditioning from putting together a resume, to choosing a piece based on provided information, to audition etiquette, to the actual audition itself. A final reflection and rubric are provided for use at the end of this unit. A short play is included that can be used as the source material. You can also choose your own play for this process.

In this unit, students will be introduced to a key element of performance: the voice. Students will explore how to thoughtfully communicate character, story, and emotion vocally. Students will begin by exploring articulation so that they understand the importance of clearly communicating their words onstage. They will further build on this with the following lesson on the different vocal varieties of pitch, tone, rate, and volume. The final lesson helps students explore vocal characterization as well as the details and layers that can bring that character to life vocally. This unit study of the voice culminates in a final puppet show where students are asked to bring a story and character to life by using vocal variety, articulation, and characterization.

WARNING: This unit is ABSURD. However, instructor Lea Marshall decided to do something really ABSURD with the unit, which was make it a bit more predictable. First, the unit takes two lessons to go over the Historical and Philosophical background of Theatre of the Absurd. It starts with just a visual exercise to really bring students into the emotional bleakness of the landscape and then group work to look at some of the other foundational elements that will drive the Absurdist movement into the Theatres. Next, students break down absurd scripts into some “recognizable” elements of language, plot structure, acting choices, and storyline. With each lesson that introduces an Absurdist Element, there is an opportunity for students to “play” with the element. Then, students explore the element through an Absurdist text. This will help familiarize the students with the 4 Absurdist scripts used in the unit. These bite sized forays into the scripts will help students to choose a script to fully immerse themselves in for the final project. As a final project, students will choose one script to work with, and choose the format of their project (performance, costume or set design, or playwright).

Help… It’s all Greek to me! Join Angel Borths in this unit that uses a modern adaptation of the Ancient Greek play Antigone to introduce Middle School students to Ancient Greek Theatre. Have your students read Percy Jackson and want to find out more about Ancient Greece? Then, this unit is for you. This unit is designed for middle and high school students and will take you through the basics of classical Greek theatre and pairs it with a modern adaptation of the story of Antigone called Agatha Rex by Lindsay Price. Students will learn vocabulary, design, and basic theory surrounding classical Greek theatre. Students will also enjoy the mask-building component of this unit, as they learn to disappear into the character of a mask, like the first actors did on a Greek stage thousands of years ago. The unit culminates in a scene performance with masks.

In this unit by Anna Porter, students are introduced to the works of Shakespeare and explore how to bring a character to life in a monologue performance. Students are also introduced to the tools to help them unlock meaning in Shakespeare’s text. Through this eleven lesson series, students will participate in class discussions, activities and performance. Assessment tools include informal assessment, submission of textual analysis work and a final performance.

Shakespeare’s text holds valuable tools that students can use to unlock and understand meaning. In this unit by Anna Porter, students explore how to use the tools of research, context, textual analysis, imagery and punctuation to help them unlock meaning in Shakespeare’s text. This unit is created for an Intermediate to Advanced drama class with a basic background in plot structure and acting technique. Through this five lesson series, students will use journals, participate in class discussions, activities and performance to explore the tools used to unlock a text. Assessment tools include informal assessment as well as a final group presentation and performance.

Understanding basic improvisation skills will help musical theatre performers understand that musical theatre is more than just singing and dancing. It’s about using all the tools (voice, body, and mind) an actor has at their disposal to create a character. This unit focuses more on the improv aspect rather than the musical theatre aspects - in fact students need no prior musical theatre knowledge. Annie Dragoo, creator of the unit, uses this material as her first unit in her musical theatre class. It’s a great introduction and will get your students in the right frame of mind to approach musical theatre. The lessons explore a variety of improv skills such as vocal responses, movement, character study, sensory awareness and culminate in an improv scene and unit essay.

In this unit, students will learn, practice and apply three important rules of improv: accepting and building on offers, quick thinking, and strong offers. For each step, they will work with the Improvisation Rubric by both giving and receiving feedback. Students will also start to practice techniques to improve their vocal clarity. The unit culminates in a performance assessment in which students will play an improv game in front of an audience.

Students will understand the basic building blocks of a scene: The Who (characters/ relationship), the Where (setting), and the What (conflict – objectives/tactics). They will learn how to use both verbal and nonverbal (pantomime) clues to communicate these scene details to an audience. They will continue to work on voice clarity, while also learning to open their body to an audience. The unit culminates in a performance assessment in which students work in pairs to improvise a scene.

Students will be introduced to the most basic of scripts: the contentless/open scene script. They will use their knowledge of character/relationships, setting, objective, and tactics to add content to a contentless scene. Students will also learn the basics of set design and blocking, and will begin using voice expression to communicate clearer characters. The unit culminates in a performance assessment in which students will work in pairs to add content to and perform a contentless scene.

In this unit, students will explore nonverbal communication. First through body language and gesture, and then through the specific art of pantomime. Students will learn hand position, tension, follow-through, and action/reaction/interaction with objects through warm-up games and exercises. The unit culminates in a one-person pantomime performance.

This unit focuses specifically on the technical aspects of vocal production. By understanding how voice is created, students will be more aware of how to improve their vocal production. Students will explore posture and breathing exercises, as well as how to use the diaphragm, projection, and articulation. The final project will test students’ abilities to properly project and articulate a joke at a distance from a microphone

We included this unit in our Distance Learning Curriculum because if any group of students would understand how the world turned upside down and then apply it to theatre, it would be the students dealing with a global pandemic. First, we take two lessons to go over the historical and philosophical background of Theatre of the Absurd. We start with a visual exercise to bring students into the emotional bleakness of the landscape and then group work to look at some of the other foundational elements that will drive the absurdist movement into the theatres. Next, we break down absurd scripts into some “recognizable” elements of language, plot structure, acting choices, and storyline. In each lesson that introduces an absurdist element, there is an opportunity for students to “play” with the element.

In this Mock Audition Unit, students will discuss the audition process and make connections between their personal views and the process. Students will apply the steps of auditioning from putting together a resume to choosing a piece based on provided information to audition etiquette to the actual audition itself. A final reflection and rubrics are provided for use at the end of this unit. A short play is included that can be used as the source material for your audition. You can also choose your own play for this process.

The purpose of this unit is to acquaint students with the Alexander Technique. In doing so, and in practicing many of its principles, students will make discoveries about some of their habitual patterns of movement. Students will be able to demonstrate and explain how to use Alexander Technique principles in an activity of their choice.

This unit focuses on character creation: How do you create a character from the ground up? Use this unit as a precursor to a playwriting unit, to a devising unit, or to a class production. Using the archetypes of the superhero, the sidekick, and the supervillain, students work on exercises to help them create unique characters through physical and vocal qualities, character profiles, and theatrical writing. Because many of the exercises have an individual focus, this unit works in a distance learning environment or for your no-technology students.

Perspective taking is the ability to understand a situation from another person’s perspective or point of view: What are they thinking? What are they feeling? How does their background influence their perspective? Perspective taking allows students to develop self-awareness, to recognize differences, to understand an opposing point of view, to assess nonverbal language, and more. In this unit, students will practice perspective taking as they: • Assess their own perspective. • Demonstrate understanding of the perspective of others in specific situations. • Analyze characters in a text.

Students will demonstrate an understanding of the foundations of acting. At the end of the unit, students will be able to understand the value of making rich acting choices on stage. This unit gives students an opportunity to explore and develop acting skills on a more advanced level, regardless of experience. They will explore skills, including voice, movement, emotional recall, memory, playing objectives, and character development culminating in a final scene.

In this unit, students will create and perform an abstract theatre scene. Abstract is a genre that does not rely on realism and deliberately breaks the rules of a given form. In the case of theatre, this refers to the commonly presented rules of performance, acting, and the relationship with the audience. Movement is often stylized and symbolic. Ideas and themes are expressed visually and aurally with little dialogue using music, lights, costumes, and props.

In the study of theatre history, when we discuss the origins of theatre, most start with the Ancient Greeks. Unit 1 of this curriculum will look at the theatre of Ancient Egypt, Sanskrit drama, and Indigenous storytelling.

For Ancient Greece, we will examine the ritual origins of tragedy and the Festival of Dionysus. We will explore the theatre conventions of the day including the amphitheatre, the use of masks, costumes, and other theatrical devices. Finally, we will introduce the main playwrights and their key plays. Then we will take a short look at Roman theatre with their wholesale appropriation of Greek culture.

We journey from the Dark Ages to the emergence of Medieval drama. The liturgical or religious drama appeared in the churches as a means of religious instruction. Along the way, production moved from being written in Latin to the local vernacular and then outgrew the churches. The guilds then took over the production responsibilities. The plays came in four types: mystery, miracle, morality, and mummers plays. These can be remembered as the four Ms of Medieval drama.

We take a side trip to Italy to discover a secular comedic form: Commedia Dell’arte. Students will be introduced to the form, explore the characters and themes, and put their knowledge to practical application by creating a commedia character.

It’s important to step outside of Western Eurocentric Theatre. In this unit, we are going to focus on the Asian theatre forms that developed in China and Japan. Note: We acknowledge that a unit on Asian theatre that only covers the theatre origins of two countries does not represent Asia. To go beyond what is offered here please see the Diversity Document.

In this unit, we return to Western theatre and to Italy, where we will witness the birth of the Renaissance and the discovery of linear perspective. Then we travel on to the Golden Age of Spanish theatre. We will pass by the Elizabethan Golden age (we’ll cover it in the next unit) and end the Renaissance journey by discovering French neoclassicism and the Rules of Drama.

We continue our look at the Renaissance era with the Elizabethan Golden Age. This golden age of theatre started when James Burbage built the first permanent playhouse in England, called The Theatre. Of the more than 80 playwrights in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, the three most significant were Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare. This age came to an abrupt end when the Puritans executed King Charles I, abolished the crown, and closed all the theatres.

We will travel through two time periods in this unit. First, we will explore Restoration Comedy in late 17th century England. When the Puritan-led Commonwealth failed and King Charles II was restored to the throne, theatre was also restored. The Comedy of Manners mocked the behaviour and loose morals of the upper class. The lack of theatrical works in the 18th century comes down to three things: playwrights tended to write for opera rather than theatre, censorship and control of theatrical content, and, more than anything, society of the day valued conformity over originality. In France and England, fearing attacks and mockery, the crown and the government passed laws that strictly censored theatre.

Romanticism broke away from the strictures of the neoclassical era preferring instead the Medieval/Gothic periods. The Romantic notion of finding beauty and humanity in the ugly is epitomized by Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The movement rejected Enlightenment, scientific rationalism, and the Industrial Revolution; rather, it embraced intuition and emotion over reason. On one hand, the tail end of neoclassicism led to the well-made play. On the other hand, the emphasis on emotion led to melodrama and an artificial declamatory acting style.

The goal of this culminating assignment is to give students the opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of a variety of theatre history eras; connect, compare, and contrast between the eras; and, lastly, to connect, compare, and contrast what has happened in the past to what is happening in the present.

In this unit, students will learn about Antonin Artaud and how his ideas influenced avant-garde theatre in the 20th and 21st centuries. They will also learn how Jerzy Grotowski took Artaud’s theories into new directions. This is done through direct instruction. A culminating presentation will ask students to take common stories and reimagine them using some of these ideas. They will present a “pitch” of an avant-garde version of their story. In the second lesson, students learn about some of the ideas of Augusto Boal and try a session of Forum Theatre.

This is an in-depth unit with instruction and activities about the Stanislavski acting method. It is followed by scene work in which students learn how to score a scene, do a comprehensive character analysis, and use what they have learned in rehearsals in a performance. Students will also watch their own work and evaluate their process after the performance. The purpose of this unit is to give students an introduction and understanding of Stanislavski’s method and to put it into use as they prepare scenes for performance. After seeing their work, and spending time reflecting on how they used the principles of the method, students should take away a concrete understanding of how to prepare a role for performance.

The unit has been adapted for a virtual environment. This is an in-depth unit with instruction and activities about the Stanislavski acting method. It is followed by scene work in which students learn how to score a scene, do a comprehensive character analysis, and use what they have learned in rehearsals in a performance. Students will also watch their own work and evaluate their process after the performance. The purpose of this unit is to give students an introduction and understanding of Stanislavski’s method and to put it into use as they prepare scenes for performance. After seeing their work, and spending time reflecting on how they used the principles of the method, students should take away a concrete understanding of how to prepare a role for performance.

This unit looks at the origins of realism and naturalism. The Realism/Naturalism movements in Europe came about as a response to the artificiality of the Romantic Movement. Realism/Naturalism strove for real-life characters and situations. This unit looks at early realist playwrights and their plays as well as the Independent Theatre Movement, which provided venues for the new forms when established theatres refused to produce these plays. In America, this became the Little Theatre Movement, where groups experimented with theatre away from the strictures of the syndicated houses. In the meantime, professional theatre was developing on Broadway, including early Black performers. Realism finally came to the American stage with the plays of Eugene O’Neill.

In most units that cover the Theatre of the Absurd, the number of playwrights addressed are few and the time period is limited. While it is certainly true that the era identified as “The Theatre of the Absurd” was a reaction to the distorted reality of life after World War II, there are many environments that create distorted realities and many playwrights who use those realities as catalysts for absurdist plays. In this unit, we will start with a traditional look at the Theatre of the Absurd and then expand our exploration beyond its origins.

In this unit, students will create a performance of a spoken word poem designed to engage, entertain, and affect an audience. They will also write a poet’s statement in which they describe the purpose(s) or inspiration(s) of their poetry. This is not a technical writing unit and is geared more toward students self-expression and engaging an audience. If your students are not skilled poets, this unit is still accessible.

Shakespeare is sometimes avoided in the drama classroom because not only do the students not want to take on the language difficulties but neither do the teachers. Monologue and scenework becomes more challenging and a lot of times, students falter in their blocking action and character development because they are so challenged. How do we give students the opportunity to rehearse and present Shakespearean text as they would modern text? In this play study unit, students will read a Shakespeare play while learning specific tools and techniques in order to stage text from that play. And more often than not, these techniques are ones that they have already used with other plays. It’s all about reframing Shakespeare so that students enjoy the experience of bringing the characters and stories to life.