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.
Music Theater Courses
Music Theater
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.
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.
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 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.
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.