Share: drama that promotes shared understandings of the human experience

In Unit 1, drama is treated as storytelling: a way for a group of people to hold up an experience so that others can recognise it, question it or share in it. Storytelling is a process as well as a product. A story is gathered (from memory, interview, family history, a written record or a stimulus), shaped (selected, ordered and given a point of view), performed for an audience, and then received and reinterpreted by that audience.

Every stage involves choices about whose voice is heard, whose is left out, and why.

The unit starts from Australian voices, including Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and/or cultures of the Asia-Pacific. Many of these cultures hold storytelling practices that are far older than European theatre and that connect story with Country, song, dance, law and responsibility. Some stories are public and may be shared; others belong to particular people, places or ceremonies and are not available for general retelling.

A respectful drama student learns about these traditions through published and approved sources, invited community members and teachers, and never invents or borrows cultural stories, symbols or ceremonies. When a class works with First Nations content, the starting point is permission, consultation and acknowledgement of the people who hold the knowledge.

The unit names four purposes. Drama can document (record events or testimony so they are not lost), celebrate (honour people, identity, achievement or community), empower (give voice and agency to people whose stories have been ignored) and inform (help an audience understand an issue or experience). One work often serves several purposes, but you should be able to say which purpose dominates and how the dramatic languages achieve it.

These purposes run from inherited traditions, such as the chorus of Greek theatre commenting on the action with a collective voice or the narration of Epic theatre that keeps an audience thinking, to contemporary practice such as documentary drama built from interviews.

Critique draws on several critical literacies: oral (what is said and how), aural (sound and silence), visual (image, space, colour), kinaesthetic (movement and the body), digital (projection and film), drama (using the dramatic languages to communicate and interpret meaning as artist and audience) and written (script, program notes, annotation).