DRAMAby: Ronald Allan ChiongloWhat is DRAMA?Drama comes from Greek words meaning "to do" or "to act." A play is a story acted out. It shows people going through some eventful period in their lives, seriously or humorously. The speech and action of a play recreate the flow of human life. A play comes fully to life only on the stage. On the stage it combines many arts those of the author, director, actor, designer, and others. Dramatic performance involves an intricate process of rehearsal based upon imagery inherent in the dramatic text. A playwright first invents a drama out of mental imagery. The dramatic text presents the drama as a range of verbal imagery. The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely theatrical and ritualistic manner; and on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life. A dramatic monologue is a type of lyrical poem or narrative piece that has a person speaking to a select listener and revealing his character in a dramatic situation.Back to Top

Classification of Dramatic PlaysIn a strict sense, plays are classified as being either tragedies or comedies. The broad difference between the two is in the ending. Comedies end happily. Tragedies end on an unhappy note. The tragedy acts as a purge. It arouses our pity for the stricken one and our terror that we ourselves may be struck down. As the play closes we are washed clean of these emotions and we feel better for the experience. A classical tragedy tells of a high and noble person who falls because of a "tragic flaw," a weakness in his own character. A domestic tragedy concerns the lives of ordinary people brought low by circumstances beyond their control. Domestic tragedy may be realistic seemingly true to life or naturalistic realistic and on the seamy side of life. A romantic comedy is a love story. The main characters are lovers; the secondary characters are comic. In the end the lovers are always united. Farce is comedy at its broadest. Much fun and horseplay enliven the action. The comedy of manners, or artificial comedy, is subtle, witty, and often mocking. Sentimental comedy mixes sentimental emotion with its humor. Melodrama has a plot filled with pathos and menacing threats by a villain, but it does include comic relief and has a happy ending. It depends upon physical action rather than upon character probing. Tragic or comic, the action of the play comes from conflict of characters how the stage people react to each other. These reactions make the play.Previous TopicBack to Top

How to write a Play?"Plays are not written, they are re-written" is a myth. Once you've written your dialogue, 80% of any help we might have given is eliminated. The major choices, about story and character, have been made and a commitment made. The earlier a play is brought to the table, the more help can be effectively applied. With this sort of pre-dialogue work our aim is: get it right the first time.Structure - a play's story and the way of placing it onstage - is the key element in determining effective character and dialogue.Characters are known not by what they say, but rather, by what they do. Dialogue is most effective as a reflection of intent, in communicating dramatic movement. Primary attention to structure, therefore, insures a proper perspective on developing a play's other elements.Previous TopicBack to Top

Characters and StoryIn a dramatic story or play, the dynamic characters draw in an audience because they promise to take a story's audience on a journey to experience a story's fulfillment. The key issue to understand is that it is because characters in stories act out to resolution issues of human need that they engage the attention of an audience. When introducing a story's characters, then, writers need to suggest in some way that their characters are "ripe." This means that a character has issues that arise from a story's dramatic purpose and the story's events compel them to resolve it. For example, if courage is the main issue in a story, the storyteller can set a character into an environment designed to compel them to act. That's how a story's dramatic purpose is made visible. It establishes both why characters act and why a story's audience should care. Viewers want to care, to believe in the possibility of what a story's characters can accomplish. In that way they experience that belief in themselves. That's why a storyteller often arranges a story's elements to deliberately beat down and place characters in great danger, so the story's readers can more powerfully experience their rising up unconquered. Just as we secretly imagine ourselves, standing in their shoes, doing as well. Once the storyteller understands the role their characters serve for an audience, they can better perceive why such characters should be introduced in a particular manner: In a way an audience can understand and identify with a particular character and their goals. In a way that the audience is led to care about the outcome of a character's

goals and issues while also perceiving how they advance the story toward its resolution and fulfillment. That's why it's important a storyteller introduce characters in a way that allows an audience the time to take in who the characters are and what issues they have to resolve. Often limiting the number of characters introduced in a scene can do this simply. Many popular movies, for example, have only one or two main characters in a scene. Large group scenes are the exception, not the rule. The purpose of this is so the audience can clearly identify with an understand a character's issues. Second, the actions of a story's characters should advance a story toward its resolution and fulfillment along its story and plot lines in a discernible way. If characters serve no dramatic purpose in a scene -- if their actions don't serve to advance the story -- save their introduction for a later time. Characters in a story should be designed by the storyteller to have emotions that suggest how they will react to a story's events. As an example, a story about courage, characters might confront their feelings about lacking courage. That's the internal side of the equation. The storyteller then puts them into an environment that compels them to react. By how they react, they set out the story's dramatic purpose and give voice to their feelings and concerns as the action of the story exerts pressure on them. By resolving questions based on the inner conflicts of characters, a story has meaning to those in the audience with similar feelings and issues. Story events that have no real effect on a character's inner feelings -- a character's sense of mattering -- serve no purpose in a story. Worse, they can confuse an audience. They see characters with certain issues reacting to events that don't clearly elicit those responses. Or that elicit responses that seem out of sync with what they know about a character. Or a character's issues have been kept hidden in a way the audience has no way to feel engaged over how or why characters are responding to a story's events. The deeper issue here is that the storyteller have a sense of how the types of characters that populate a story arise from a story's dramatic purpose. That their emotions arise from setting out that purpose. That the events of the story clearly compel those characters to respond based on a sense of who they are. That all of these are blended together to recreate a story's journey along its story line from its introduction to its fulfillment. Well-told stories populated with dynamic, dramatic characters with larger than life passions and needs act out issues those in the audience might struggle with. Such characters battling with other determined characters to shape a story's course and outcome bring a story's dramatic purpose to life in a fulfilling way. Creating such characters is another art in the craft of storytelling.Previous TopicBack to Top

How to make a story more dramatic?To understand writing "in the dramatic moment," one should start with an understanding of the dramatic purpose of a story. A story, through its use of words, images and sounds creates for its audience the effect of a quality of movement toward resolution/fulfillment of a story's issues and events. To make a story's world feel/ring "true," every element in a story -- words, images, characters, events, ideas, environment -- must have a purpose that connects it with a story's overall dramatic purpose. Starting with an understanding of a story's overall dramatic purpose, writers can begin to see down into the interior of their stories, into the particular words and images that best bring them to life. To understand the individual words and images that compose a story and make it deeply felt, then, one can follow a series of steps. First, start with understanding the larger context of what a story's about. To understand a story's overall dramatic purpose, start with its premise. A premise identifies a story's core dramatic issue, its movement toward resolution, and what type of fulfillment that resolution sets up for the story's audience. A story is then populated with characters who feel the pull of a story's core dramatic issue, and the issues and events that arise from this issue being acted out. A story's events are those that best act out a story's dramatic movement from introduction to resolution/fulfillment. A story's physical terrain arises from what dramatizes a story's action. A story's emotional terrain arises from the emotions a story's events and issues elicit from its characters. To engage an audience, a story's events and the goals of its characters are set up as a story and scene questions suggesting a dramatic need for action/resolution. As characters act and react to a story's events and environment, the story's audience is led to internalize a story's movement to experience its resolution/fulfillment. To write deeply "in the dramatic moment," one must see a story not as a series of happenings enlivened for an audience by how they are described and recreated, but a series of events that each have an interconnected dramatic purpose that arises from a particular role in acting out a story dramatically. To understand how to write "in the dramatic moment," then, one must understand the dramatic purpose of each step/event/moment in a story, and write in a way that heightens the dramatic effect of that moment as it relates to all the "moments" in the story, and the overall sense of how that communicates a story's dramatic purpose. For example, writing about courage "in the moment" isn't trying to set up a step/event/happening to propel characters toward a story's resolution of courage. It's setting up for the audience an experience of courage in the moment of its happening through the outcome of a dramatic situation that is given meaning by its relationship to the story's dramatic purpose. To create this heightened dramatic effect, one must trim away all that has no dramatic purpose in the scene. In a novel, this means that one doesn't describe a situation to make it "real," i.e., a recreation of what a room "looks" like. One describes a room according to the dramatic purpose of a scene. Therefore, if very little information about an environment (a particular room) is important to the dramatic purpose of a scene, one doesn't expend too many words describing it. To understand which words to use to describe the scene, again start with an understanding of the dramatic purpose of the story itself, and the relationship of the

scene to the story as a whole. Because the point is, again, not to make an environment, or character, or event "real" in life-like terms, but to make it dramatically "true" to the story's audience. For the screenwriter, an understanding of the scene would guide them to focus on the dialogue that heightens the drama of the moment. For the playwright, understanding the dramatic purpose of a scene is to have a tool to gauge what kind of dialogue these characters would have to bring this scene to life. The writer who starts with the question, what's the dramatic purpose of this scene? And how can it best be brought to life, can begin to write scenes from the inside out. That is, they can have characters speak directly to the dramatic issues at stake in a scene, in relationship to what's at stake in the story itself. Writers caught up in the notion that stories revolve around resolution or recreating "reality" write to make statements about a character's motives, why they respond as they do to a story's events, what they say about a story's events. Or, they describe events or places in a story as if it was the weight of description will make them ring "true" for an audience. But an environment can only be made to ring "true" to an audience to the degree that they are set up to experience its dramatic purpose. An environment without a dramatic purpose is simply dead weight, inert. Again, it's because it's not the purpose of a story to recreate life, but to recreate a dramatic experience for a story's audience.Previous TopicBack to Top

What makes a Drama a Drama? A dramatist should start with characters. The characters must be full, rich, interesting, and different enough

from each other so that in one way or another they conflict. From this conflict comes the story Put the characters into dramatic situations with strongly plotted conclusions The plot should be able to tell what happens and why The beginning, should tell the audience or reader what took place before the story leads into the present

action. The middle carries the action forward, amid trouble and complications. In the end, the conflict is resolved, and the story comes to a satisfactory, but not necessarily a happy conclusion.

It should be filled with characters whom real people admire and envy. The plots must be filled with action. It should penetrate both the heart and mind and shows man as he is, in all his misery and glory

www.litera1no4.tripod.com/drama.html…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

What is Drama? Drama is a unique tool to explore and express human feeling.

Drama is an essential form of behaviour in all cultures, it is a fundamental human activity.

In this site we are investigating the benefits Drama can have on child development when applied functionally within a primary classroom. Drama has the potential, as a diverse medium, to enhance cognitive, affective and motor development.

A high degree of thinking, feeling and moving is involved and subsequently aids in the development of skills for all other learning within and outside of schools (transfer of learning).

Drama is a discrete skill in itself (acting, theatre, refined skill), and therefore it is offered as a 'subject' in secondary school. However Drama is also a tool which is flexible, versatile and applicable among all areas of the

curriculum. Through its application as a tool in the primary classroom, Drama can be experienced by all children.

Drama assists in the development of :

the use of imagination powers of creative self expression decision making and problem solving skills and understanding of self and the world self confidence, asense of worth and respect and consideration for

others.

The SACSA Framework defines Drama as:

'the enactment of real and imagined events through role-play, play making and performances, enabling individuals and groups to explore, shape and represent ideas, feelings and their consequences in symbolic or dramatic form.'

 

 

Types of DramaThere are many forms of Drama. Here is a non-exhaustive list with a simple explanation of each:

Improvisation / Let's Pretend

A scene is set, either by the teacher or the children, and then with little or no time to prepare a script the students perform before the class.

Role Plays

Students are given a particular role in a scripted play. After rehearsal the play is performed for the class, school or parents.

Mime

Children use only facial expressions and body language to pass on a message tcript to the rest of the class.

Masked Drama

The main props are masks. Children then feel less inhibited to perform and overact while participating in this form of drama.

Children are given specific parts to play with a formal script. Using only their voices they must create the full picture for the rest of the class. Interpreting content and expressing it using only the voice.

Puppet Plays

Children use puppets to say and do thngs that they may feel too inhibited to say or do themselves.

Performance Poetry

While reciting a poem the children are encourage to act out the story from the poem.

Radio Drama

Similar to script reading with the addition of other sound affects, The painting of the mental picture is important

http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/DLiT/2001/drama/whatdram.htm

DRAMA

Drama is a literary composition involving conflict, action crisis and atmosphere designed to be acted by players on a stage before an audience. This definition may be applied to motion picture drama as well as to the traditional stage.

Apply these questions to a recent movie you have seen or a radio or television drama,

Conflict

1. What did the leading character want? 2. What stood in his way? (People - environment- personality, etc,) 3. What was the high point of tension or the crisis? (This is where the

leading character must make a crucial decision that will effect the outcome of the play.)

Character analysis

1. Are the characters true to life or are they types or caricatures?2. How is the character revealed?3. What is the driving force of each leading character?4. If a character changes, are the causes convincing and true to life?

Setting

1. Are the sets appropriate?2. Are they attractive? 3. Are they authentic?

Critical standards useful for drama, novel, motion pictures:

1. What is the chief emphasis (ideas, character, atmosphere)?2. What was the purpose? (entertainment, humor, excitement)?3. Is it realistic or romantic?4. Does it show life as it really is or distort life?5. Does it present any problem of human relationship?6. Does it glamorize life and present an artificial happy ending?

Types of Drama:

1. Tragedy -- In general, tragedy involves the ruin of the leading characters. To the Greeks, it meant the destruction of some noble person through fate, To the Elizabethans, it meant in the first place death and in the second place the destruction of some noble person through a flaw in his character. Today it may not involve death so much as a dismal life, Modern tragedy often shows the tragedy not of the strong and noble but of the weak and mean,

2. Comedy -- is lighter drama in which the leading characters overcome the difficulties which temporarily beset them

3. Problem Play -- Drama of social criticism discusses social, economic, or political problems by means of a play.

4. Farce -- When comedy involves ridiculous or hilarious complications without regard for human values, it becomes farce.

5. Comedy of Manners -- Comedy which wittily portrays fashionable life.

6. Fantasy -- A play sometimes, but not always, in comic spirit in which the author gives free reign to his fantasy, allowing things to happen without regard to reality.

7. Melodrama -- Like farce, melodrama pays almost no attention to human values, but its object is to give a thrill instead of a laugh. Often good entertainment, never any literary value.

Types of Drama of Historical Interest:

1. Medieval mystery plays -- dealt with Bible stories and allegorical mysteries.

2. Chronicle plays -- dealt directly with historical scenes and characters.

3. Masques -- were slight plays involving much singing and dancing and costuming. They were usually allegorical.

Drama is the most dependent of art forms -- director, actors, scene and costume designers must interpret before the audience does.

The Place of the Actor

1. The player should respect his play, his part, his fellow players, and his audience.

2. He should have imagination enough to create character for us instead of merely exploiting his own personality.

3. He should have a technical equipment in his 'voice, facial expression, bodily poise, gesture, and by-play that enables him to project the character as he conceives it.

 

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More Literary Terms

(Drama)

1. Allusion - an indirect reference by casually mentioning something that is generally familiar (In literature we find many allusions to mythology, the Bible, history, etc.)

2. Aside - Lines whispered to the audience or to another character on stage (not meant to be heard by all the characters on stage)

3. Catastrophe - the final event in a drama (a death in a tragedy or a marriage in a comedy)

4. Comedy - A light play with a happy ending

5. Comic Relief - A bit of humor injected into a serious play to relieve the heavy tension of tragic events

6. Crisis or Climax - the turning point in the plot (This occurs when events develop either for or against the main character and a crucial decision must be made.)

7. Dramatic Irony - occurs when the audience knows something that the character on stage is not aware.

8. Foreshadow - Lines that give a hint or clue to future events (It doesn't tell the future but hints at it.)

9. Irony -

A method of expression in which the ordinary meaning of the word is opposite to the thought in the speaker's mind

Events contrary to what would be naturally expected

10. Metaphor - an implied comparison between two different things; identifying a person or object as the thing to which it is being compared. Example: 'It is the East and Juliet is the sun.' - 'tossed on the sea of life'

11. Metonymy - a figure of speech whereby the name of a thing is substituted for the attribute which it suggests. Example: The pen (power of literature or the written word) is mightier than the sword (force).

12. Nemesis - agent of retribution (the person who punishes)

13. Personification - giving the quality of life to inanimate things

14. Poetic Justice - The operation of justice in a play with fair distribution of rewards for good deeds and punishment for wrong doing

15. Simile - an expressed comparison between two different things using 'like' or 'as' - Example: 'eyes twinkle like stars' - 'as loud as the roaring sea'

16. Soliloquy - A single character on stage thinking out loud (a way of letting the audience know what is in the character's mind)

17. Tragedy - A serious play having an unhappy ending

18. Tragic Flaw - A character trait that leads one to his/her own downfall or destruction

http://drb.lifestreamcenter.net/Lessons/Drama.htm#top

Ashfaq Ahmed’s Drama Collection

By admin on April 25, 2011

It has remained my effort to gather in this website some great dramas, which have remained very popular

Ashfaq Ahmed Sahib

among the masses due to their wonderful story lines, fabulous scripts, superb acting and memorable directions.Ashfaq Ahmed- a golden name in our literary history, have some dramas which have been dramatised and been broadcasted on the PTV. As my humble contribution, and as a tribute to this great legend, I have collected here some of these PTV dramas, which have been made on the dramas’ written by the Great Ashfaq Sahib.

I hope that you’ll enjoy these dramas, as they are full of lessons and advices. I’ll try to add here some more dramas by Ashfaq Sahib, as and when I find them. So stay tuned!

Chor-(Ashfaq Ahmed Teleplay)-HQSuragh e Zindagi – Ashfaq AhmedNEELI CHIRRIA- Play From PTV Classic Drama Series “HAIRAT KADAH”Sona Mila Na Pee Milay- Play From PTV Classic Drama Series “HAIRAT KADAH”Paghame Zabani Aur Hai-Tv Play PTV Classic Drama Series “HAIRAT KADAH”HEERA MANN-Tv Play From PTV Classic Drama Series”HAIRAT KADAH”BHOOT NIKALA- Tv Play from PTV Classic Series “HAIRAT KADAH”Lazawal Mohabbat Lazawal Afsaney – Aadam ZadCinderala Aur Sakina- Ashfaq AhmedTota Kahani – Ashfaq AhmedChabi Aur Chabian- Aik Muhabbat Sou AfsaaneQurat-ul-Ain-Aik Muhabbat Sou AfsaaneBarzakh Aik Mohabbat sau AfsaneyMaai aor Kamai – AshfaQ Ahmad-Aik Muhabbat Sau AfsaneMaah-e-KunaaN- Ashfaq Ahmad – Aik muhabbat sou afsane

http://www.pakistani-drama.com/2011/04/25/ashfaq-ahmed-collection/