Courses

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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.

In this studio course open to anyone with a body, we will explore power, structure, and human bodies through personal, political, anatomical, kinesthetic, and aesthetic lenses. We will delve into these issues as artists do: by reading, thinking, talking, moving, and making performances, actions, sense, and change.

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.

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.

A continuation of THR 201: Guide students in ways to develop a role and to explore important texts and characters in an imaginative and honest manner.

This seminar examines the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, from page to stage. Focusing on a different musical each week from Gypsy (1959) to Road Show (2009), we will ask, how do musical theatre's elements of music, lyrics, script, dance, and design cohere in Sondheim's musicals? We will explore influences on his art, both personal and cultural, his collaborators, and the historical and theatrical milieu. We'll study the musicals themselves by reading libretti, listening to music, seeing taped and live performances, researching production histories, and analyzing popular, critical, and scholarly reception.

This seminar explores how iconic pieces of theatre can be re-explored for modern audiences. The course will examine various aspects of how an artist can think out-of-the-box and the mechanisms the artist can use to do so.

At this moment, theater has an opportunity to redefine how stories can be told and how audiences might be invited into the telling. Young audiences have been weaned on choice-based, participatory and socially networked artwork and entertainment. Through scholarship, creative work, and play testing, this course will explore the emerging fields of participatory theater, interactive performance, social gaming, and system-based story telling. We will study the basics of game design, the fundamentals of physical and social gaming, ritual, and the history of interactivity as a theatrical device.

This course explores models of production and collaboration in the professional theater, with an emphasis on the relationship between reading and producing plays. Students will examine a wide variety of classic and contemporary plays and musicals as literature written for production with a detailed appreciation for what production entails. Students will develop an understanding of the aesthetic, dramaturgical, and values-based choices involved in producing theater.

This course will approach questions of gender, sexuality, and power in popular media, from early cinema's appeals to middle-class female audiences at the turn of the last century, to the contemporary use of social media by feminist activists of color. Gender, sexuality, and identity will be viewed at the intersections of other biological and social categories, including race, class, orientation, ability, and ethnicity. We will examine the ways in which different media forms can be used to complicate, reinforce, exploit, or challenge those hierarchies.

This course is a survey of classical and modern drama from Africa, China, India, Japan, and Latin America.

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 offers an intensive introduction to the particular tools, methods and interpretations employed in developing original historical research and writing about race and ethnicity in twentieth century popular performance (film, television, theater).

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. Students will be aided in their preparations by the instructor; they will also study script analysis and formulation of a director's point of view, staging and visual storytelling, the musicality of language, collaboration and rehearsal techniques, productive methods of critique, and the spectrum of responsibilities and forms of research involved in directing plays of different styles.

This course provides students with a rigorous and challenging experience of creating theater under near-professional circumstances. A professional director, an extensive rehearsal period, a concentrated week of technical rehearsals and multiple performances are key components. Students cast in the show or taking on major production roles can receive course credit.