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 theater's fundamental building blocks — writing, design, acting, directing, and producing. Throughout the semester, students read, watch and discuss five different plays, music theater pieces and ensemble theater works.
After more than 100 years running, the Miss America Pageant (1921- ) stands among the most enduring - and enduringly controversial - popular performance traditions of American life and culture. This course offers an intensive, method-based historical overview of how "Miss America" as both idea and event documents the shifting ways gender, sexuality, race and embodiment been comprehended in the United States, even as it also examines the disparate ways the "beauty pageant" as a performance genre has been adopted and adapted by/for communities excluded by the rules of Miss America.
Using the musical story-work "Tularosa: An American Dreamtime" as a springboard, students will explore the mythology of the American West and musical storytelling through a multidisciplinary lens. Students will then use a variety of creative methods including songwriting, theatrical performance, experimental movement and dance, video, dramaturgy, archival and site-specific research, and artifact- and symbol-making to create unique multidisciplinary storytelling projects from their own points of view.
This course is a performance lab that examines speech as an aspect of fine art through the exploration of the literary canons of iconic American writer Toni Morrison and English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Research assignments will explore writings found in the Princeton University Toni Morrison archive and Princeton University's copy of Shakespeare's first folio.
Students from across fields who are interested in slowing down the art-making process to explore the nature of devising, developing, revising, and performing are invited to join. We'll delve into the often-intermingled roles of creator, performer, designer, technician, and audience member. This studio course culminates in student-created performances in the Roberts Theater at the end of the term.
This course offers an exploration of visual storytelling, research and dramaturgy, combined with a grounding in the practical, collaborative and inclusive skills necessary to create physical environments for live theater making. Students are mentored as designers, directors or project creators on realized projects in our theaters, or on advanced paper projects. Individualized class plans allow students to imagine physical environments for realized and un-realized productions, depending on their area of interest, experience and skill level.
A practical course focusing on approaches to classical and contemporary acting styles. Primarily a scene lab investigating the actor/director relationship; performance as a collaborative experience: the exploration of a wide variety of techniques including movement, voice, comedy and musical theatre. Texts will come from a range of playwrights, classical and modern.
This course is designed to encourage the development of directors for theater and musical theater, covering techniques and practices from both areas. The course will look at the practices of a small list of key figures in world theatre and how their work has influenced how directors approach the rehearsal room today. The course will incorporate a strong practical element, giving student directors the opportunity to explore and hone their own practices, developing useful and appropriate style and language as they move forward in their work as young directors.
This course will be a focused rehearsal process, led by a faculty director, culminating in two weekends of public performances of The Winter's Tale, conceived by Lear deBessonet with musical adaptation by Todd Almond. This Public Works project features a large cast of actors, singers, musicians and dancers, and plenty of offstage and backstage roles.