How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
Introduction to Theater Making is a working laboratory, which gives students hands-on experience with theatre's fundamental building blocks — writing, design, acting, directing, and producing.
An introduction to the craft of acting through scene study monologues and, finally, a longer scene drawn from a play, to develop a method of working on a script. Emphasis will be placed on honesty, spontaneity, and establishing a personal connection with the scene's substance.
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.
Modern queer writers have long written about the rich and complicated relationship straight cis women have had with queer men. And yet, outside of queer literary circles, little attention has been paid to how these relationships challenge or replicate traditional family structures, and form a community outside of the status quo. We will examine the stories male writers constructed and analyze women writers who held a mirror up to those straight and queer men who were drawn to lesbian culture. By examining photography and painting, we will further look at the artist's relationship to and identification with queerness, or straight female power.
Telling stories through performance is human nature, but how can we use technology to enhance, frame, or reveal new perspectives on stories told?
Telling stories through performance is human nature, but how can we use technology to enhance, frame, or reveal new perspectives on stories told?
L'Avant-Scène will offer students the opportunity to put their language skills in motion by discovering French theater in general and by acting in French, in particular.
In this studio course open to all, we’ll ramble in the unknown searching for embodied philosophy, thinking art-making, and clarity that’s open for revision.
This course develops basic acting technique which focuses on the pursuit of objectives, given circumstances, conflict, public solitude and living truthfully under imagined circumstances. Practical skills are established through scenes performed for classroom analysis.
In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities within stillness? In this studio course open to all, we'll dance, sit, question, and create substantial final projects. We'll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We'll look at stillness as protest and power. We'll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read widely within religions, philosophy, performance, disability studies, social justice, visual art, sound (and silence).
In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America.
The first half of Shakespeare's career, with a focus on the great comedies and histories of the 1590s, culminating in a study of Hamlet.
This course offers an intensive survey of how Latina/o/x performers, characters, cultures, narratives and musical styles have always been a constitutive feature of the "American musical" — as performance genre, practice and tradition — on both stage and screen.
This course will survey plays written by Black playwrights in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore dramatic works of writers from Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics.
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of "real" life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative, and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
The course will explore the creation, production, and management of pioneering international festivals from France's main historic festivals, such as Festival d'Avignon and Festival d'Automne, to more recent and emerging ones worldwide.
This course is designed to endow students with the conceptual and practical skills that will enable them to design for productions in the theater program.
The purpose of this course will be to explore the dynamics of spectacle and performance (artistic, political, sexual, anthropological) in representative plays by major Italian authors of the 20th century.
This junior methods seminar will prepare you to effectively choose, create and co-produce a theatrical project for senior year independent work and beyond.
Performance studies offers creative interdisciplinary methods to American Studies. This capstone seminar uses foundational and recent performance studies scholarship in American, Asian American, and Latinx Studies as models for archival, oral history, and ethnographic research and analysis.
Beginning with Sophocles' Antigone, this course will examine different versions of this seminal Greek tragedy — from different countries and across the centuries.
Directing assignments will be created for each student, who will work with the actors in the class and whose work will be analyzed by the instructor and other members of the workshop.
This course provides students with a rigorous and challenging experience of creating theater under near-professional circumstances. A faculty or visiting professional director will lead the process. This involves an extensive rehearsal and technical rehearsal period, requiring more time than a typical student production. Students cast in the show or taking on major production roles such as stage manager or designer will receive course credit.
Director and choreographer Will Davis will collaborate with projection designer and filmmaker Alex Koch to create a new work prioritizing the story we see when we turn the volume down on spoken language, and up on the myriad other languages we speak on stage.
With Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly and Video Artist Laura Snow students will create a devised dance-theatre production using the approach developed by Kelly's dance-theatre and media company the feath3r theory.
Re:Staging the Greeks with Michael Cadden in Athens, Greece, June 10-July 22. Learn more