IBDP Literature and Performance SL
IB Diploma Programme Literature and Performance SL is a unique interdisciplinary course that sits at the creative intersection of literary study and theatrical practice. Unlike standard Language A courses, it asks students to engage with literary texts not only as readers and critics but also as performers and devisers — exploring how meaning shifts when words move from the page to the stage.Students study at least three literary works spanning poetry, prose fiction, and drama, drawn from diverse cultural and historical contexts. Through close reading and literary analysis, they develop sophisticated understanding of how authors use form, structure, voice, and language to construct meaning and engage readers. Simultaneously, they explore the conventions of theatrical performance — voice, body, space, design, and practitioner approaches such as Stanislavski's system and Brecht's Epic Theatre — learning to read literary texts as performance scores rich with theatrical possibility.A central strand of the course is the Collaborative Project, in which students work together to devise an original performance piece inspired by their literary studies. This process-driven component develops skills in creative collaboration, dramaturgical thinking, reflective practice, and artistic risk-taking. Students document their devising journey through rehearsal logs and reflective journals, building metacognitive awareness of their own creative processes.For external assessment, students complete an Individual Oral — a 15-minute commentary on a literary passage that connects to a global issue and integrates a brief performance moment — and a Written Assignment consisting of a transformative creative piece with a reflective statement. These components reward students who can move fluidly between literary analysis and performance insight.This AccelaStudy course provides structured preparation across all assessment components, with adaptive practice in close reading, performance analysis, devising strategies, oral commentary technique, and transformative writing. Whether you are building your literary toolkit, developing your performance vocabulary, or preparing for your Individual Oral, this course meets you where you are and guides you toward confident, nuanced, and creative engagement with literature and performance.
210
Minutes
3
Questions
4/7
Passing Score
$173
Exam Cost
Who Should Take This
This course is designed for IB Diploma students enrolled in Literature and Performance SL who want structured, adaptive support across all aspects of the course. It is ideal for students who love both reading and performing, who are working on their Collaborative Project and need help with the devising process, or who want to sharpen their Individual Oral and Written Assignment skills. It also suits students who find the bridge between literary analysis and theatrical interpretation challenging and want clear, step-by-step guidance. No prior formal theatre training is required — curiosity about how stories come alive on stage is enough to begin.
What's Covered
1Study of at least three literary works across at least two literary forms (poetry, prose fiction, drama); analysis of literary conventions, narrative technique, dramatic structure, and poetic form; exploration of global issues embedded in literary texts; intertextuality and adaptation
2Core elements of theatrical performance (space, voice, body, design); performance traditions and practitioner approaches (Stanislavski, Brecht, physical theatre); text-to-performance interpretation; the actor-audience relationship
3Devised performance piece drawing on studied literary texts; collaborative devising process including research, improvisation, and rehearsal; process documentation (rehearsal logs, reflective journals); final performance presentation
415-minute oral commentary on a passage from a studied literary text; connection to a global issue; integration of a brief performance moment; teacher-assessed and externally moderated
5Creative transformative piece responding to a studied literary text; reflective statement explaining creative choices; demonstrates understanding of literary and performance conventions
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
13 Activity Formats
Course Outline
1Unit 1: Literary Forms, Conventions, and Contexts 4 topics
Poetry: Form, Voice, and Meaning
- Define key poetic conventions including metre, rhyme scheme, stanza form, enjambment, caesura, and free verse, and identify how each shapes the rhythm and tone of a poem.
- Explain how a poet's use of imagery, figurative language, and sound devices such as alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia constructs layers of meaning and emotional effect in a studied poem.
- Analyse how the construction of a poetic speaker or persona — including shifts in voice, address, and point of view — positions the reader and shapes interpretation of a studied poem.
- Evaluate how a poem's historical, cultural, or biographical context shapes its themes and the choices available to a performer seeking to stage or adapt it for an audience.
Prose Fiction: Narrative Structure and Technique
- Identify and describe key narrative techniques in prose fiction including point of view, narrative voice, focalization, chronology, and narrative distance, with reference to a studied text.
- Explain how an author's choices of characterization, dialogue, and setting construct meaning and contribute to the thematic concerns of a studied prose fiction work.
- Analyse how structural choices such as non-linear chronology, embedded narratives, or chapter organization create suspense, irony, or thematic resonance in a studied prose fiction work.
- Evaluate the challenges and opportunities of adapting a prose fiction text for performance, considering what is gained or lost when narrative voice is translated into embodied theatrical action.
Drama: Dramatic Conventions and Theatrical Potential
- Identify and describe the conventions of dramatic writing including stage directions, dialogue, soliloquy, aside, dramatic irony, act and scene structure, and the role of the implied audience.
- Explain how a playwright uses conflict, tension, and dramatic arc to structure a play and engage an audience, with close reference to a studied dramatic text.
- Analyse how a dramatic text encodes performance possibilities through subtext, silence, and stage space, and how these choices shape the relationship between character, actor, and audience.
- Evaluate how different theatrical traditions — including realism, expressionism, Brechtian epic theatre, and physical theatre — offer distinct interpretive frameworks for staging a studied dramatic text.
Intertextuality, Adaptation, and Transformation
- Define intertextuality and describe how literary texts reference, echo, or transform earlier works, genres, or cultural narratives, providing examples from studied texts.
- Explain how the process of adaptation — transforming a source text into a new form, genre, or medium — involves deliberate interpretive choices that reveal the adapter's perspective and context.
- Evaluate the extent to which a performance adaptation of a literary text remains faithful to the source text's meaning versus creating new meaning through theatrical transformation.
2Unit 2: Performance Theory and Theatrical Elements 3 topics
Elements of Performance and Stagecraft
- Identify and describe the core elements of theatrical performance including space, time, body, voice, gesture, movement, costume, lighting, and sound as tools for creating meaning on stage.
- Explain how the choice of performance space — proscenium arch, thrust stage, in-the-round, site-specific — affects the actor-audience relationship and the communication of a literary text's themes.
- Analyse how vocal qualities — pitch, pace, pause, volume, tone, and accent — can be used by a performer to interpret a literary text and communicate character, emotion, and subtext to an audience.
- Analyse how physical performance choices — including proxemics, gesture, stillness, and rhythm of movement — embody and extend the meaning of a literary text in performance.
Performance Traditions and Practitioner Approaches
- Describe the key principles of Stanislavski's system of acting — including given circumstances, objectives, actions, and emotional memory — and explain their relevance to performing literary texts.
- Explain Brecht's concept of Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) and describe how Epic Theatre techniques such as direct address, placards, and gestus can be applied to the performance of a literary text.
- Analyse how a chosen performance tradition or practitioner's approach shapes the interpretation of a specific literary text, justifying the suitability of that approach for the text's themes and form.
- Evaluate the strengths and limitations of applying a single performance tradition to a literary text, considering how alternative approaches might yield different but equally valid interpretations.
Text-to-Performance: Interpretation and Meaning-Making
- Explain the distinction between a literary text as a written artifact and as a performance score, describing how the same text can generate multiple valid and distinct theatrical realizations.
- Analyse how a director's or performer's interpretive choices — including casting, design concept, and staging — communicate a specific reading of a literary text's themes and global issues.
- Evaluate how the audience's cultural background, expectations, and prior knowledge of a literary text influence the reception and meaning of a performance, with reference to a specific example.
3Unit 3: Global Issues, Identity, and Representation 2 topics
Global Issues as Lenses for Literary and Performance Analysis
- Define the concept of a global issue in the context of IB Literature and Performance, and identify how global issues such as power, identity, culture, displacement, and gender are embedded in literary texts.
- Explain how a specific global issue is constructed and communicated through an author's literary choices in a studied text, connecting textual evidence to broader social and cultural contexts.
- Analyse how performance choices can amplify, challenge, or reframe the global issue embedded in a literary text, making it more immediate and resonant for a contemporary audience.
- Evaluate the ethical responsibilities of performers and directors when staging literary texts that engage with sensitive global issues such as racial injustice, colonial violence, or gender oppression.
Identity, Culture, and Representation in Literature and Performance
- Describe how literary texts represent cultural identity, including the ways in which language, setting, and character reflect or challenge dominant cultural narratives and power structures.
- Explain how the representation of gender, race, class, or sexuality in a studied literary text reflects the ideological context of its production and invites critical reading by contemporary audiences.
- Evaluate how a performance can contest or reinforce the representations of identity found in a source literary text, and what this reveals about the politics of staging and casting decisions.
4Unit 4: The Collaborative Project — Devising and Process 3 topics
Devising Process and Collaborative Practice
- Describe the stages of a devising process — stimulus exploration, research, improvisation, selection, structuring, and refinement — and explain how each stage contributes to the development of a collaborative performance.
- Explain how a group of performers can use a literary text as a stimulus for devising, identifying specific textual elements — theme, image, character, language — that can be transformed into performance material.
- Analyse how collaborative decision-making during the devising process — including negotiation of artistic vision, role allocation, and dramaturgical choices — shapes the final performance outcome.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your group's devising process, identifying moments of productive creative tension and explaining how challenges were resolved to serve the performance's artistic intentions.
Research, Documentation, and Reflection
- Describe the purpose and content of a rehearsal log or process journal, explaining how documenting creative decisions, experiments, and reflections supports the development of a collaborative performance.
- Explain how research into the cultural, historical, and literary context of a source text informs and enriches the devising process, with specific reference to your collaborative project.
- Analyse how your reflective documentation reveals the evolution of your artistic intentions from initial stimulus to final performance, identifying key turning points in the creative process.
Performance Realization and Artistic Intention
- Explain how specific theatrical choices made in the collaborative project — including staging, design elements, and performance style — communicate the group's interpretation of the source literary text.
- Evaluate the degree to which the final collaborative performance successfully realized the group's stated artistic intentions, identifying specific moments of success and areas for further development.
- Evaluate how your individual contribution to the collaborative project — as performer, deviser, and reflective practitioner — developed your understanding of the relationship between literary text and performance.
5Unit 5: Assessment Component — Individual Oral 2 topics
Preparing and Structuring the Individual Oral
- Describe the format and requirements of the IB Literature and Performance Individual Oral, including the passage selection, the global issue focus, the performance element, and the duration and assessment criteria.
- Explain how to select a passage from a studied literary text that is rich enough to support sustained analysis of both literary technique and performance potential in relation to a chosen global issue.
- Explain how to structure an Individual Oral to move coherently from close literary analysis of the passage to a discussion of performance possibilities and their relationship to the chosen global issue.
- Analyse how the integration of a brief performance moment within the Individual Oral can demonstrate understanding of how literary meaning is transformed and embodied through theatrical interpretation.
Delivering and Evaluating the Individual Oral
- Explain the assessment criteria for the Individual Oral — knowledge and understanding, analysis and evaluation, focus and organization, and language — and describe what distinguishes a high-scoring response from a mediocre one.
- Evaluate a sample Individual Oral response against the published assessment criteria, identifying specific strengths in literary analysis, performance insight, and global issue connection, and suggesting targeted improvements.
- Evaluate your own Individual Oral preparation and delivery, identifying the most effective moments of literary-performance integration and reflecting on how you would refine your approach in a subsequent attempt.
6Unit 6: Assessment Component — Written Assignment (Transformative Writing) 2 topics
Understanding and Planning the Written Assignment
- Describe the format and requirements of the IB Literature and Performance Written Assignment, including the transformative creative piece, the reflective statement, word counts, and assessment criteria.
- Explain what constitutes effective transformative writing — a creative piece that reimagines, extends, or responds to a studied literary text — and how it demonstrates understanding of the source text's literary and performance dimensions.
- Explain how to write an effective reflective statement that articulates the creative choices made in the transformative piece, connecting those choices explicitly to the literary and performance conventions of the source text.
Crafting and Evaluating Transformative Writing
- Analyse how a transformative creative piece can use the conventions of a new literary form — such as transforming a poem into a dramatic monologue or a prose passage into a performance script — to generate fresh meaning from the source text.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of a sample transformative piece against the Written Assignment criteria, assessing the quality of creative transformation, the depth of literary understanding demonstrated, and the clarity of the reflective statement.
- Evaluate your own transformative writing piece, identifying how successfully your creative choices demonstrate understanding of the source text's literary and performance potential and what revisions would strengthen the work.
7Unit 7: Close Reading and Textual Analysis Skills 2 topics
Analytical Reading Strategies
- Identify and describe a range of literary devices — including metaphor, simile, symbolism, irony, allusion, and paradox — and explain their function in constructing meaning within a specific passage.
- Explain how diction, syntax, and sentence structure contribute to the tone, mood, and meaning of a literary passage, supporting your analysis with precise textual evidence and quotation.
- Analyse how a passage functions within the larger structure of a literary work, explaining how its themes, images, and language connect to the work's overall meaning and the author's broader concerns.
- Analyse a literary passage for its performance potential, identifying specific textual features — rhythm, imagery, dialogue, silence — that invite theatrical interpretation and explaining how each could be realized on stage.
Comparative and Contextual Analysis
- Explain how the historical and cultural context of a literary text's production shapes its language, form, and thematic concerns, and how awareness of context enriches both literary analysis and performance interpretation.
- Analyse how two passages from different literary forms or cultural contexts treat a shared theme or global issue differently, explaining what each text's formal choices reveal about its perspective.
- Evaluate how a reader's or audience member's positionality — including their cultural background, gender, and historical moment — shapes their interpretation of a literary text or its performance, with reference to specific examples.
8Unit 8: Language, Style, and the Construction of Meaning 2 topics
Style, Register, and Authorial Voice
- Define authorial style and describe how elements such as register, tone, diction, and syntax combine to create a distinctive literary voice that is recognizable across a writer's body of work.
- Explain how shifts in register, tone, or style within a single literary text signal changes in character, power dynamics, or thematic emphasis, with close reference to specific textual evidence.
- Analyse how a performer can use vocal and physical choices to embody and communicate an author's distinctive style, translating textual register and tone into embodied theatrical presence.
Genre, Form, and Reader Expectation
- Describe the conventions of major literary genres — tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, short story, novel — and explain how genre shapes reader expectations and the interpretive framework brought to a text.
- Explain how a literary text can subvert or play with genre conventions to create irony, surprise, or critical commentary, and how a performance can heighten or undercut these generic signals for an audience.
- Evaluate how the generic hybridity of a studied literary text — its blending of multiple forms or genres — creates interpretive complexity and opens multiple possibilities for theatrical realization.
Scope
Included Topics
- Two core components: Literary Forms and Contexts (study of literary texts across poetry, prose fiction, and drama) and Collaborative Project (devised performance work drawing on studied literary texts)
- Study of at least three literary works from the prescribed reading list, spanning at least two literary forms and representing diverse cultural and historical contexts
- Exploration of the relationship between literary text and theatrical performance, including how meaning is created through both page and stage
- Performance conventions, theatrical elements, and staging techniques as tools for interpreting and transforming literary texts
- Narrative, poetic, and dramatic conventions and how they shape reader and audience response
- Collaborative devising process: research, development, rehearsal, and reflection on a performance piece derived from literary sources
- Individual oral commentary on a passage from one of the studied literary works, connecting text to a global issue
- Written assignment (transformative writing): a creative piece with a reflective statement demonstrating understanding of how literary choices create meaning
- Assessment objectives: AO1 (knowledge and understanding of literary and performance conventions), AO2 (analysis and application of literary and theatrical techniques), AO3 (synthesis and evaluation of the relationship between text and performance), AO4 (creative and collaborative skills in devising and presenting performance)
- Global issues as lenses for literary and performance analysis, including identity, culture, power, and representation
- Intertextuality and the transformation of source texts through adaptation and performance
- Reflective and process-based documentation of the collaborative project
Not Covered
- Full IB Language A: Literature SL or HL syllabus content not shared with Literature and Performance (e.g., Paper 1 unseen commentary, Paper 2 comparative essay on four works)
- IB Language A: Language and Literature content (language in cultural context, mass communication, language and identity units)
- IB Theatre SL/HL content beyond the intersection with literary text study (e.g., Theatre in the Making, Theatre in the World as standalone units)
- Advanced dramaturgy or directing theory beyond the scope of the collaborative project
- Detailed technical theatre training (lighting design, sound engineering, set construction) beyond conceptual understanding
- Formal study of screenwriting or film as primary text types
- Quantitative or statistical methods
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