Music Theater Courses

Music Theater

Introduction to Art Making

LCA 101 · Fall 2020

C01 · Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

Instructors: Colleen Asper · Mark Doten · Ruth Ochs · Shariffa Ali · Stacy Wolf · Olivier Tarpaga · Tess James

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.

Practice

DAN 206 / MTD 206 / THR 206 · Fall 2020

U01 · Tuesdays + Thursdays, 1:30 - 2:50 PM

Instructors: Aynsley Vandenbroucke

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.

Opera Performance

MPP 219 / MTD 219 · Fall 2020

C01 · TBA

Instructors: Michael Pratt

Vocal and instrumental students will rehearse and perform Francesco Cavalli's opera Calisto in Richardson Auditorium with full orchestra. Students are admitted by audition only.

Sondheim’s Musicals and the Making of America

AMS 317 / MTD 321 / ENG 249 / THR 322 · Fall 2020

S01 · Tuesdays, 1:30 - 4:20 PM

Instructors: Stacy Wolf

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.

Latinx Musicals on Stage and Screen

MTD 333 / GSS 228 / LAO 321 / THR 333 · Fall 2020

L01 · Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

Instructors: Brian Herrera

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.

Theater Making Studio

THR 402 / MTD 402 · Fall 2020

C01 · Mondays, 1:30 - 4:20 PM

Instructors: Jane Cox · John Doyle · Shariffa Ali

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.

Theater Rehearsal and Performance

THR 451 / MTD 451 · Fall 2020

Multiple sections offered

Instructors: Sam Pinkleton · Tess James

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.