Theater and Performance Studies

TAPS/UT represents the collaborative efforts of students, staff, and faculty committed to performance at the University of Chicago whose mission is to balance creative opportunity with professional experience by involving approximately 500 students annually in theatrical productions as actors, designers, directors and production staff. The TAPS/UT collaboration is a symbioses of practical and theoretical coursework with student-driven work; while creatively supporting the artistic contribution of The Dean's Men (Shakespeare) and Off Off Campus (Sketch and Improv) in their thirty plus productions each school year. Since its founding in 1898, TAPS/UT has been a place where intellectual discourse leads to theatrical experimentation.  

Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) offers a rigorous academic program requiring students to acquire facility in the practice of two media (including but not limited to theater, film, video, dance, music, and creative writing) while gaining a fluency in specific methods of critical analysis. Students receive training in both performance practice and analysis, acquiring the fundamental tools necessary for artistic creation while at the same time developing a vocabulary with which to analyze creativity.

In this way, the program aims to contest the separation of academic theory and artistic practice (or, for that matter, theorists and practitioners). The program is designed to be flexible (in order to afford its majors as much latitude as possible in pursuing their particular interests) and exacting (in order to guarantee the development of comparative practical skills and rigorous analytic capacities). 

Can academics engage performance?