Drama patterns

Abstract

The knowledge of drama building is somehow an inherent part of us. Albeit, it tends to be suppressed and forgotten. This is leveraged by a common, director or instructor supervised approach, which favors learning lines to produce them without making a mistake. But the essence of drama is in archetypal situations that tend to repeat over and over without ever being the same. These are known as patterns. The notion of a pattern itself indicates an intrinsic tendency of patterns to develop and compose into a greater whole. We need a way of recalling these patterns to build live and immersive drama plays. These patterns set frames within which the actors act, but they also give them a freedom to develop their roles in a natural and unaffected way in accordance with Stanislavski's approach. In this paper, we present the idea of drama patterns and report on its genesis and the experience we had with it so far. We bring a set of four drama patterns (plus one fundamental property) and their composition coming out of a real drama play. We also provide a glimpse of a more than a dozen of other drama patterns with examples of their occurrence. Drama patterns are aimed at the broadest audience without age or background limitations. Directors can use them to build their drama plays, actors can use them to self-organize, acting teachers can use them to teach acting (assuming it's being done through drama building), drama scholars might use them as a way of looking on drama plays and texts, and drama authors can use them to write dramas.

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