Global Arc

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.

2016 marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. In conjunction with an exhibition at the University Art Museum, this course will largely focus on Shakespeare's "afterlives" since WWII. Although his reputation rests on his work, Shakespeare was invented in the 18th century as something beyond a "mere" playwright. We'll take a brief look at the start of this phenomenon with the 1623 Folio and David Garrick's Stratford Jubilee in 1769, then study some recent manifestations in theater, film, fiction, dance, television, comic books, actor autobiographies, and Shakespearean institutions and festivals from many nations and cultures.

What happens when there is a dead body on stage? Why do corpses star in so many movies? Reverence for the dead is one of the markers of humanity, bound up with the development of societies and cultures. But we also play with dead bodies, spinning stories around them that can be austere or grotesque, tragic or farcical, haunting or hilarious. Dramas and films use dead bodies to explore fear, sex, greed, guilt, innocence and grief. In this course, we contemplate corpses from Antigone to Alfred Hitchcock and from Shakespeare's tragedies to Stand By Me and Weekend at Bernie's and bring the dead to life.

The dramaturg of a Theater is at the center of the theater-making process. The dramaturg reads and assesses new scripts; prepares classic plays for production; acts as an historical and literary resource for playwrights, directors, actors and designers; advises on artistic policy; writes program notes; and works with the education and publicity departments on the theater's "public face."

This course offers a practice-based overview of theater-making in the twenty-first century through an intensive study of contemporary Latinx dramatists, companies, and movements in the United States. Through weekly readings, discussions and independent research/writing exercises, the seminar will investigate the cultural, artistic, social and political interventions of twenty-first century US Latinx drama.

The South African Anti-Apartheid movement saw mass resistance against the government's racial segregationist policies. Students will learn about the conditions that gave rise to Apartheid and the Anti-Apartheid movement, taking a look at the instrumental role that the performing arts and protest theatre played in dismantling the unjust system. Participants will develop performance work of their own based in South African protest theatre, encouraging a rejection of excess and on seeing obstacles as opportunities. Students will craft original protest theatre works that address sociopolitical concerns of their choosing.

Since he burst onto the theatre scene with The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996, Martin McDonagh has produced some of the most vivid, but also some of the most controversial work in contemporary drama and cinema. His plays and films are violent, lurid, transgressive and often grotesque, yet they also lend themselves to performances of great subtlety and sensitivity, like Frances McDormand's in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. We explore McDonagh's extreme imagination, its roots in Irish Gothic, Grand Guignol, the Grimm Brothers, Antonin Artaud and the theatre of the absurd and its uncomfortable use of race and disability.