Unit 5

Unit 5: Acting (Duets)

Vocabulary

Aesthetic Preferences: Artistic choices which give meaning and clarity to a production.
Beat: Small section of a scene, divided where a shift in emotion or topic occurs.
Cold Reading: Auditioning with a script that you have not had the opportunity to read before the audition.
Cross: To move from one place onstage to another
Focus: The intended point of interest onstage.
Master Gesture: A characteristic gesture.
Open: To keep your face and the front of your body visible to the audience as much as possible.
Subtext: Information that is implied but not stated by a character; thoughts or actions of a character that may not express the same meaning as the spoken words.
Upstage: To stand upstage of another actor on a proscenium stage, forcing the downstage actor to turn away from the audience to communicate with the upstage actor; stealing the focus of a scene.
Theatrical Style: The use of a specific set of characteristic or distinctive techniques such as realism, expressionism, epic theatre, documentary theatre, or classical drama; style may also refer to the unique artistic choices of a particular playwright, director, or actor.
Theme: The central idea or main subject in a play or story.
Backstory: Part of the given circumstances and used by actors for motivation for their characters.
Setting: The locale, period, time in which the action of a play takes place.
Exposition: Background information given about a character or situation.
Inciting Incident: The event that begins the conflict of the play and builds to the climax.
Rising Action: Complications and discoveries which create conflict (the middle portion of a play).
Climax: The turning point in the plot when everything comes to an emotional crest and the rising action becomes the falling action.
Falling Action: Series of events following the climax.
Denouement: The final resolution of the conflict in a plot.