Introduction to Theater Making is a working laboratory, which gives students hands-on experience with theater's fundamental building blocks — writing, design, acting, directing, and producing. Throughout the semester, students read, watch and discuss five different plays, music theater pieces and ensemble theater works.
We will explore the foundations of black performance theory, drawing from the fields of performance studies, theater, dance, and black studies. Using methods of ethnography, archival studies, and black theatrical and dance paradigms, we will learn how scholars and artists imagine, complicate, and manifest various forms of blackness across time and space. In particular, we will focus on blackness as both lived experience and as a mode of theoretical inquiry.
This course develops skills needed to successfully approach all acting styles and centers the actor as a lead creative artist. We will concentrate on how the voice, body, and imagination can build a performance.
This is a workshop in the fundamentals of writing plays. Through writing prompts, exercises, study and reflection, students will be guided in the creation of original dramatic material. Attention will be given to character, structure, dramatic action, monologue, dialogue, language and behavior.
This workshop course rehearses the compositional, producorial, and performance skills necessary to create (and present) an original, self-contained work of solo performance. Students will develop their own original 8-12 minute solo performance piece, and the class as a cohort will work collaboratively to co-produce a "Pop Up Performance" mini-festival at semester's end.
Movement permeates every aspect of life, whether within our bodies, minds, or the world around us. In this studio course open to everyone, we use tools from Laban Movement Analysis to develop ways to dance, improvise, make performance, and fully inhabit our lives. We dive into the roles of dancer, choreographer, audience member, and critic in relation to aesthetic questions, politics, identity, religion, and complex views of the human body. Students can apply our work together to dance in any style as well as to daily experiences like moving into an interview confidently and finding embodied practices for transforming stress.
In this course we will learn about the history of singing and the workings of the human voice. Through discussion, research, and performance, we will examine existing works from both classical and non-classical traditions and use them as a starting point to create new works using both conventional and extended vocal techniques. We will work both alone and collaboratively, performing and composing music for solo voice as well as ensemble. We will be joined by guests-performers and composers—with insights to share. The course is open to singers, composers, and actors interested in deepening their knowledge of the voice and exploring new ideas.
Intro to Theatrical Design is an interactive course where students will explore the world through a design lens to develop visual literacy and investigate how visual cues shape our understanding of the world. This studio course will explore scenic, costume, lighting and sound design. Students will take on the role of designer across disciplines, developing analytic, research and collaborative skills, and exploring and questioning power structures in the process. This hands-on course will emphasize communication and collaboration within creative and production teams in support of bringing design visions to life.
This seminar offers an intensive introduction to the principles and practices of dramaturgical and performance analysis of stage plays as written works, as blueprints for theatrical performance, and as exercises in world making. This seminar also rehearses how the techniques of dramaturgical and performance analysis might be applied to modes of embodied enactment—whether historical or contemporary, whether in art or everyday life—beyond the theatrical frame. In Spring 2025, the course will focus on the life, work, and legacy of the pathbreaking Cuban-American playwright, director, designer, and teacher María Irene Fornés (1930-2018).
A continuation of work begun in Introductory Playwriting, in this class, students will complete either one full-length play or two long one-acts (40-60 pages) to the end of gaining a firmer understanding of characterization, dialogue, structure, and the playwriting process. In addition to questions of craft, an emphasis will be placed on the formation of healthy creative habits and the sharpening of critical and analytical skills through reading and responding to work of both fellow students and contemporary playwrights of note.
The new play development process has become a critical aspect of the professional theater landscape, but is often confounding to artists. This is a practical course that will introduce the basic processes of developing new plays for the stage, offering theater makers an understanding of their unique role in the critical moments of a new play's early life. The class is for actors eager to hone the skills of originating a role; for directors eager to explore working with a living writer; and for playwrights eager to gain experience navigating the development process, from table readings to workshops to staged readings.
This course allows students, working at their own experience level, to analyze, rehearse and perform songs from the canon of dramatic musical theater.
How do you tell a story about climate change that dynamically engages its audiences without overwhelming or boring them? We will explore this question and others through readings and discussions, and we will make an original work of theater. Employing the methods of investigative theater, the class will create a script or performance text by pursuing a creative inquiry into some aspect of climate change.
This course will introduce you to the art and craft of scenic design. It will be an exploratory and hands-on course in the use of physical scenery as a way to tell a story, introducing you to the processes and tools of scenic design as a way of gaining greater understanding of theatrical texts.
"Revenge my foul and most unnatural murder!" A ghost compels his conflicted son, Hamlet, to address something rotten in the state of Denmark with these words in Shakespeare's great tragedy. Whether or not you have read Hamlet, or have seen it performed, you probably know the story. This course aims to recontextualize Hamlet in early modern English theater history. Through study of other "revenge tragedy" plays from this period, seminar participants will gain new perspective on Hamlet's embeddedness in a culture and an art form probing the ethics of seeking justice through violence.
This course introduces students to physical acting techniques, which unleash playfulness and expand expressive potential in performance. Games, improvisation, acting exercises and theater masks cultivate freedom, joy, courage, and stage presence. An exploration of the rules of story through movement analysis, along with embodied approaches to text and practical methods to creating characters, prepare for work on monologues and scenes.
Why do people love Broadway musicals? How do audiences engage with musicals and their stars? How have fan practices changed since the 1950s alongside economic and artistic changes in New York and on Broadway? In what ways does "fan of" constitute a social identity? How do fans perform their devotion to a show, to particular performers, and to each other? This class examines the social forms co-created by performers and audiences, both during a performance and in the wider culture. Students will practice research methods including archival research, ethnographic observation, in-depth interviewing, and textual and performance analysis.
This intensive workshop explores performance as a site for an evolving, transdisciplinarity that is in mindful relationship with artistic movements, cultural continua, contemporary resonances, and individual agency. Rather than fetishize the urgent development of a legible, "authentic", or (impossibly) unique artistic identity, we will instead strive toward a practice of radical honesty, fluid curiosity, fierce courage, intentional consumption, and rigorous reflection. To that end, students will regularly create, perform, and document original solo & group work that syncretizes multiple disciplines.
How do you apply your creative skills and artistry to different educational settings? Using the example of prisons, specialized schools and community-based organizations, lecturer and veteran teaching artist Chesney Snow will guide students through studying and practicing the craft of teaching artistry. Students will understand the history of teaching artistry and how it fits into the structures of today's educational systems and society as well as understanding best practices in the development of teaching artist pedagogy and classroom management.
Students from across fields who are interested in slowing down the art-making process to explore the nature of devising, developing, revising, and performing are invited to join this studio course. We'll make an expansive artist residency together and delve into the often-intermingled roles of creator, performer, designer, and audience member. We'll use embodied tools to generate material and hone collaborative processes. We'll question why and how and in what contexts we create. We'll look at forms like the lecture-performance, the happening, concert dance, and one-person shows. Culminates in student-created performances at the end of term.
Plays produced in the United States from the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter Movement of the 2010s, we will identify and analyze various themes, approaches, and concerns within feminist plays. Employing script and dramaturgical analyses and performance techniques, students will learn how to contextualize plays from the race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics of the playwright and contextualize plays within their larger historical, social, and cultural milieus. In doing so, students will learn about the different lineages, politics, and aesthetics of feminist theatre.
This course is designed for students to engage in the process of creating new work for performance. Rather than starting with a written play or a pre-conceived movement vocabulary, the students will work together to develop a show from scratch, using a range of improvisation, experimentation, and writing techniques to generate ideas, shape the content, and structure the performance. This course will take inspiration from Raja Feather Kelly's company `the feath3r theory's' model for devised danced theatre called "The Approach". The final work will be performed at an end-of-semester showing.
In this course, students will develop and implement a personal philosophy of music ensemble direction. Students will connect practice-based learning with broader theories of art-making, exploring questions about why, how, and with whom people make music. For those who dream of directing a vocal group, conducting an orchestra, music directing a musical, or even inventing a new ensemble, this process-driven course will create an environment for experimentation, risk-taking, and musical and personal growth. A background playing an instrument, singing, conducting, or composing music is required.
This course is an acting intensive offering students the opportunity to engage in a rigorous rehearsal process with a professional theater director. The course emphasizes exploration and embodiment of character, and culminates in a staged production with simple technical elements, the focus on the ensemble. This semester, the topic of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" will be explored through an immersive production staged in the Drapkin Studio in April. This production will explore the dynamics of queer identity using the complex backdrop of a contemporary Texas nightclub scene. The course is inclusive for every identity and ability.
Rooted in Professor of Creative Writing Patricia Smith's monumental book of poetry, Blood Dazzler, three award-winning artists (Patricia Smith, Davalois Fearon, and Paloma McGregor) will lead students in a collaborative creative process for building performance through poetry, dance, music, and visual art. Blood Dazzler centered on Hurricane Katrina, a deadly category 5 storm. Twenty years later, students will research the storm and its ongoing aftermath, including watching documentaries, conducting interviews, attending events, reading, and writing. Students will be given assignments based on the day's activity and discussion and develop performance works for presentation to the Princeton community on April 24, 2025.
The Year That Never Was is a course taught by composer/librettists Michael R. Jackson and Rachel J. Peters that invites students of all levels and abilities into the earliest stages of the creation of a new musical theater piece written in the style of television musical variety shows and holiday specials of the 1970s and 80s. As Jackson and Peters resume a collaboration they began as graduate students, students will assist in thinking through the development of their piece by studying & discussing relevant source materials, working collaboratively to create material for their own variety shows that celebrate an obscure or invented holiday.