Global Arc

Some of the best movies ever made focus on the how and why of theatermaking. This course will focus on five classics of Global Cinema that deploy filmic means to explore how theaters around the world have wrestled with artistic, existential, moral, cultural, and professional issues equally central to any serious consideration of moviemaking. These films prompt questions about the nature of each medium, their interrelationship, and our apparent need for both. Along the way, they also offer compelling snapshots of theater and film history.

A progressive journey through the art of devised theater. Students learn improvisation techniques and creation tools, which they apply while making their own pieces, both individually and in collaboration with others. This course transforms the classroom into a playful space of exploration, with the performer - their body and imagination - as a hub for theatrical innovation.

A special topics course designed to build upon and/or enhance existing program courses, taking into consideration the strengths and interests of program concentrators and the availability of appropriate instructors. Topics, prerequisites, and formats will vary from year to year.

Designed to provide students with an opportunity to study theater and/or dance from a historical or theoretical perspective. Topics, prerequisites, and formats will vary from year to year.

Theater artists routinely bend, twist and break all kinds of rules to create the imaginary worlds they bring to life on stage. Why, then, has the American theater so struggled to meaningfully address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion? In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical overview of agitation and advocacy by theater artist-activists aiming to transform American theatre-making as both industry and creative practice, as we connect those histories with the practices, structures and events determining the ways diversity is (and is not) a guiding principle of contemporary American theater.

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. There will be discussions, theatre visits, possible access to theatre practitioners and assignments which will encourage the participant to explore their own imaginative approach to storytelling. The course is designed for performers, directors, designers but would also be of interest to dancers, writers and those interested in how theatre can be challenging and relevant.

This hands-on seminar will explore contemporary theories and practices of community-based performance, investigating contemporary theatre, dance, and music groups that use these methods. The course will also interrogate the sometimes fraught politics of community-based performance, including questions of authorship, authority, authenticity, and artistry. Offered in partnership with the Community-Based Learning Initiative, this course will offer hands-on experience in the process of creating community-based performance projects, and facilitate opportunities to build artistic relationships with local community organizations.

This course examines one of the most popular of all theatrical genres -- the comedy of mistaken identity. We'll begin with Plautus, who provided the template for the mayhem to follow - a heritage of long-lost children (and their parents), twins (of the same or opposite sexes), disguise, crossdressing, and love and/or sex at first sight. Central to our project will be the question of how and why writers use these and other conventions to explore and explode the mysteries of identity and why the theater is the best venue for their explorations and explosions.

Casting - the process whereby actors are assigned to particular roles - has largely eluded scholarly investigation. This course enacts just such an inquiry through a survey of the history, theory and practice of casting within U.S. entertainment industries since the later nineteenth century. Course participants will trace the emergence of "casting" and the "audition" as discrete modes of performance-making practice through review of dramatic literature, "how to" guides and documentary films, as well as relevant scholarly and popular literatures.

Every life delivers a story (or three) worth telling well. This workshop course rehearses the writing and performance skills necessary to remake the raw material drawn from lived experience into compelling autobiographical storytelling. Course participants will work in an array of storytelling modes (including stand-up comedy, testimonio, first-person media, slam poetics, etcetera) and will draw from those techniques to devise, document and perform an original work of autobiographical storytelling at semester's end.