About poster 3
Introduction
This poster focuses on using conventions as a way of structuring drama work. The images show students and performers using a variety of dramatic conventions in a process drama and in performances for an audience. Both sets of images are grouped around the photograph of a late-nineteenth-century miner’s wedding: the Hawthorne Wedding, Pūponga (in Golden Bay).
The image of the miner’s wedding provides the pretext for the process drama images grouped immediately around it. The conventions illustrated (captioned in white on poster 3) are:
- reading and writing in role (image 2)
- freeze frame (image 4)
- hot seating (image 6)
- speaking thoughts aloud (image 8)
- conscience alley (image 10).
The key information section includes a commentary by teacher Sarah Marino on how she used these conventions in a process drama based on the miner’s wedding and on why she chose them.
The outermost images show the same or similar conventions in performance contexts. These conventions (captioned in green on poster 3) are:
- reading in role (image 1)
- monologue (image 3)
- freeze frame (image 7)
- chorus (image 9)
- speaking thoughts aloud (image 11).
More detailed notes on using these conventions in the context of devised drama follow in the section key information.
Note: All references to poster images are to the images on this poster unless otherwise indicated.
List of images on poster 3
Title sequence (child dressing up)
- Student rehearsing as Lady Macbeth, Wellington High School.
- Carol Smith in Oleanna, Downstage Theatre.
- The Miner’s Wedding: The Pretext: Hawthorne Wedding, Pūponga, reproduced courtesy of Nelson Provincial Museum from the Tyree Studio Collection.
- Noa Campbell in Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School’s Go Solo 2003.
- The Young Shakespeare Company 2004.
- Ngaio Marsh production of Macbeth, 1947.
Photos 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10: process drama, The Miner’s Wedding, Otari School.
For copyright details for these images, see the acknowledgments on the foot of each poster.