I was able to get beamerarticle to work by:

• specifying the beamer writer
• specifying the beamerarticle variable
• forcing the documentclass to article
• forcing the template to the default latex template (since otherwise we get things like setbeamertemplate that aren't defined)

This needs, at least, better documentation (see #7874), and probably something should be done to make these things happen automatically.

pandoc test/s5.native -Vbeamerarticle -Vdocumentclass=article -o s5.pdf -t beamer --template data/templates/default.latex

Originally posted by @jgm in 2a6268d

Beamer manual says:

"The article mode of a presentation is created by specifying article or book or some other class as the document class instead of beamer and by then loading the package beamerarticle.
The package beamerarticle defines virtually all of beamer’s commands in a way that is sensible for the article mode. Also, overlay specifications can be given to commands like \textbf or \item once beamerarticle has been loaded. Note that, except for \item, these overlay specifications also work: by writing \section{Name} you will suppress this section command in the article version. For the exact effects overlay specifications have in article mode, please see the descriptions of the commands to which you wish to apply them."

So, when you use beamerarticle (a) the documentclass should be article, not beamer, and (b) you should still have the code emitted by the beamer writer, e.g. \begin{frame}....