6 Awesome VCE Drama Infographics

This post contains six free infographics that cover different aspects of the VCE Drama course. Technically, these resources are relevant to local readers of The Drama Teacher who are either studying or have students undertaking Year 11 or Year 12 Drama in the Victorian Certificate of Education (Australia). However, if this is not you, I’d be surprised if you didn’t find one or more of these infographics relevant to your Drama or Theatre Arts curriculum in other locations of Australia, in the UK, the U.S, or elsewhere because most of the terminology is universal.

I created these infographics for my senior Drama class to prepare them for their upcoming written exam in Year 12 Drama. Each of the infographics covers a “family” of terminology students need to know in order to apply their understanding to stimulus material in their written examination. Visual learners, in particular, love the succinct terms and examples, the simple graphics, and the organised format of the posters. At the end of this post, you can download all five infographics for free in high resolution for sharing with your students or printing them to A4 or A3 to post on the classroom wall.

1. Play-Making Techniques

The VCE Drama course prescribes seven “play-making techniques”. As the term implies, these techniques belong in the creation and construction/development phase of student drama work. As the VCE Drama course focuses on mainly student-improvised material, these techniques are:

While there is no particular order for undertaking these phases in creating a student-devised drama piece, the above order is somewhat logical as it represents an approximate guide to the likely order of activities, which can occur over several lessons or weeks. The infographic below contains a number of examples of what could occur in each phase. For example, hot-seating usually happens in the improvisation stage, scripting could include collaborative scriptwriting with classmates, while editing may involve trimming dialogue.

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2. Production Areas

Production areas, often called stagecraft in other curricula, involve prominent areas of theatre such as costume, lighting and sound. However, specific state or national curriculum bodies worldwide usually prescribe a specific list of production areas for study. In the VCE Drama course, production areas enhance student-devised drama but are generally not the focus and include:

This infographic lists all production areas studied in the VCE Drama course and includes valuable examples in each category, such as period or contemporary costume, underscores or effects in sound design, specialty or hand props, plus flats, platforms and risers for set pieces.

3. Expressive Skills

The four expressive skills in VCE Drama course are common to many drama education courses around the world and include:

The infographic below contains specific subdomains of voice in acting, such as pitch, accent, tone, and timbre. It displays various types of movement, such as stylised, mechanical, symbolic, ritualistic, or fluid. For facial expressions, it contains examples such as controlled, sarcastic, positive, and confused. For gestures, the infographic includes examples such as functional, dismissive, emphatic, and pained, to name a few.

4. Dramatic Elements

The “dramatic elements” in the VCE Drama course are often referred to as “elements of drama” in curricula elsewhere. The specific list of ‘elements’ varies widely across Australia and the rest of the globe, as you can see in this post covering thirty-seven different elements of drama, which is an attempt to define a combined list of elements from different curricula. The VCE Drama course includes the following “elements”:

These elements are essential when a student devises a solo or ensemble drama piece. Most drama work comprises a number of these elements. I liken them to ingredients in a recipe and find students have no trouble understanding this simple concept.

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5. Drama Conventions

In the VCE Drama course, four drama conventions are prescribed for two major student-devised performance tasks in the final year of high school (Units 3 and 4 Drama). These relate to an internal, teacher-assessed ensemble performance and an external examiner-assessed solo performance. The conventions are:

Students must go beyond a realistic portrayal of characters and events by applying these four conventions in their major assessment pieces. Each student must transform into one or more characters before the audience, along with non-chronological scenes that transform time, such as flashbacks and flashforwards. Inherent in this structure will almost certainly be a number of transformations of place in the drama. In addition to this, the student must apply symbol in some form in their performance assessment.

Added to this, students are prescribed (by their teacher in the ensemble performance and by the curriculum authority in the case of the solo performance) conventions from a range of performance styles such as Epic Theatre and Absurdism, but also film styles such as Silent Film and Film Noir, which you can see examples of in the link above in the 2024 solo performance exam.

This infographic includes numerous ways students can apply each of the four conventions of transformation of time, transformation of character, transformation of place, and application of symbol.

6. Performance Skills

In the VCE Drama course, a small group of terms live apart from the four expressive skills of voice, movement, facial expression, and gesture. These are known as “performance skills” and include:

In many ways, these performance skills can be seen as cousins of the four expressive skills. Every actor requires a strong focus, controlled timing (which can vary widely depending on the demands of the piece), suitable energy, and a keen understanding of the relationship they have with the audience. The actor-audience relationship, alone, can differ at certain moments within a single piece or vary between pieces of different performance styles. For example, the intimate actor-audience relationship of an Immersive Theatre theatre performance should be vastly different from the relationship needed for a play performed in the style of Epic Theatre.