In this seminar students of all backgrounds are invited to participate in visiting some of the pioneers and innovators of Afrofuturist thought and literature and performance as well as becoming familiar with emerging technology like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).
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.
A working laboratory that gives students hands-on experience with theatre’s fundamental building blocks — writing, design, acting, directing, and producing. Over the semester, students read, watch and discuss several approaches to theater, including plays, devising, autobiography and site-specific work. Addressing both the live art, and the emerging realm of virtual performance, we analyze how theater is created now, as well as the social and political implications of different ways of working. Students spend class time collaborating on virtual artistic responses to each approach, and a culminating project that integrates theater’s essential elements.
In this transformative time, when national politics seems frayed at best, local government meetings remain sites of direct democracy and creative protest. Is Politics a Performance? looks at how we perform in these meetings, and who gets to play which roles. Drawing on the tools of sociology, philosophy, civics and theater, we will analyze meetings in Princeton and Trenton, as well as other US cities. With many government functions now taking place online, the course also reckons with our emerging, digital commons. Through a layered, practical and fun approach to decision-making, citizenship and dramaturgy, this class is ideal for students considering work in public policy, education, social sciences and performing arts.
An introduction to the craft of acting through character work, monologue work and script analysis. By engaging in both collaborative efforts and independent explorations, we will experiment with various acting traditions and techniques to develop methods of approaching performance. Emphasis will be placed on honesty, spontaneity, and establishing a personal/empathetic connection with assigned as well as devised material.
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.
The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With school as we know it upended, we have a unique opportunity to develop daily habits that contribute to lifelong independent learning and creating. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, paying special attention to the ways we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we'll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.
Telling stories through performance is human nature, but how can we use technology to enhance, frame, or reveal new perspectives on stories told? Students will learn about tools and techniques from design professionals, and will engage directly and collaboratively with technology to design experiences focused around live performance. Areas covered may include projections and multimedia, lighting, sound, interactivity/wearable tech, and programming for creative applications, as well as other digital+analog techniques. This class aims to bring together students with arts and STEM backgrounds, and does not require prior experience.
Telling stories through performance is human nature, but how can we use technology to enhance, frame, or reveal new perspectives on stories told? Students will learn about tools and techniques from design professionals, and will engage directly and collaboratively with technology to design experiences focused around live performance. Areas covered may include projections and multimedia, lighting, sound, interactivity/wearable tech, and programming for creative applications, as well as other digital+analog techniques. This class aims to bring together students with arts and STEM backgrounds, and does not require prior experience.
FRE/THR 211 will offer students the opportunity to put their language skills in motion by exploring French theater and acting in French. The course will introduce students to acting techniques while allowing them to discover the richness of the French dramatic canon.
In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the unique aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities while school as we know it is on pause? We’ll dance, sit, question, and create practices and 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. We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.
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, management and future 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 exploration of visual storytelling, combined with a grounding in the practical, communicative, collaborative and anti-racist skills necessary to create physical environments for live theater making, whether in person or virtually. Students are mentored as designers, directors or creators (often in teams) on realized projects for the theater program season. Individualized class plans allow students to explore supporting online productions, to imagine physical environments for un-realized productions, or to explore exciting contemporary visualization techniques, depending on their area of interest and skill level.
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 research, create and co-produce theatrical projects for your senior year independent work and beyond. We will address the development of theatrical literacy, individual creative process, and collaborative and leadership skills. We will incorporate practical exercises, virtual theater going, visitors and discussion. The seminar will offer a space for reflecting on art-making, individually and as a member of a collaborative cohort of advanced theater students, and will support you in developing an anti-racist theater practice. The class will culminate in a draft of an exciting theater season.
Beginning with Sophocles' Antigone, this course will examine different versions of this seminal Greek tragedy — from different countries and across the centuries.
This course will be an investigative performance-driven process that will attempt to joyously uplift lives that have ended, using theater, song and dance. Led by a visiting professional theater director and working with professional collaborators, students will create theatrical work in large groups, small groups and alone. During an ongoing global pandemic, this living archive of the dead will offer up space for proposals, reflections, indictments, celebrations and imagined alternatives to a world numbed by an ambush of death. The class will culminate in student micro-projects that can be viewed in any order, at any time, from anywhere.
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.