This Key Knowledge point (Unit 4 AOS 3) consolidates the understanding of performance styles and conventions as they apply specifically to the student’s own devised solo performance. It requires students to identify, describe, analyse and evaluate the performance styles and conventions that shaped their solo work.
A performance style is a system; a convention is an element within that system. Every convention belongs to a style tradition, even if it has been borrowed and hybridised into another context. Understanding this relationship allows students to:
- Justify their convention choices with reference to the style they come from.
- Identify when a convention is being used within its native style vs when it is being hybridised.
- Analyse how the style’s conventions shaped the overall aesthetic of the solo performance.
Students sometimes struggle to identify the performance style(s) of their own work because:
- The style was selected for them (by the prescribed structure), and they applied it without deep understanding.
- The style is hybrid, making it harder to name.
- The student confuses style with genre or subject matter.
To identify the style of your solo work, ask:
- What conventions did I apply? Which style traditions do those conventions come from?
- What is the dominant aesthetic of the work — how does it look? How does the performer relate to the audience? What is the structure?
- Which practitioner’s work does my solo performance most resemble in its theatrical approach?
In AOS 3, students analyse and evaluate how conventions were applied. For each convention, the analysis should demonstrate:
- Understanding of the convention’s function within its home style tradition.
- Understanding of why this convention was applied in this specific performance.
- Evaluation of how effectively the convention served the performance’s intentions.
Convention analysis template:
“The [convention name] — a convention associated with [performance style] — was applied in [specific moment or throughout the performance]. In this context, it functioned to [explain purpose: create meaning, shape audience relationship, structure the narrative, etc.]. The effect was [what the audience experienced]. In evaluation, [was it effective? why?].”
A strong solo performance does not apply conventions randomly. The conventions should cohere within the style logic — they should reinforce each other and collectively constitute the aesthetic identity of the work. If conventions from multiple styles are applied, the hybrid must be coherent and purposeful, not arbitrary.
EXAM TIP: When writing about performance styles and conventions in the analytical task, demonstrate that you understand each convention as part of a theatrical tradition, not just as a technique. Show that your choices were informed by genuine knowledge of the style and its theatrical philosophy. The difference between “I used direct address” and “I used direct address, a Brechtian convention that positions the audience as critical observers rather than emotional participants — a choice that served my intention to implicate the audience in the character’s complicity” is the difference between description and analysis.
In the Unit 4 analytical context, the question is not just which style was applied, but why — and whether the style was genuinely integral to the work’s identity, or applied as a form of compliance with the prescribed structure’s requirements.
The strongest solo performances are those in which the style choice feels inevitable — where the conventions of the chosen style are the only natural theatrical language for this particular character and story. When you watch a physical theatre performance about fragmentation of identity, the physical theatre conventions feel not like a choice but like a necessity: this story can only be told this way.
When a style feels imposed — like a costume worn over a performance that would exist without it — the work loses theatrical integrity. The analytical task asks students to reflect honestly on whether their style choice achieved this sense of inevitability, and if not, why.
Students who encounter the style requirements of the prescribed structure and find they have limited exposure to that style should research it actively:
- Watch recordings of professional work in the style (company websites, YouTube, Vimeo, digital archives).
- Read about the style’s practitioners, history and philosophy.
- Attend live performances in the style if possible.
- Practice the style’s signature exercises and warm-ups (Lecoq neutral mask, Brechtian gestus exercises, etc.).
The depth of understanding you bring to a performance style is directly visible in the quality of the style’s application in your solo work.
REMEMBER: Style is not a surface quality — it is a philosophical orientation toward how theatre communicates meaning. Working within a style is not mimicry; it is adopting that style’s fundamental beliefs about what theatre is for and how it works.
