Seth Bockley

This course introduces students to a range of theatrical concepts and techniques, including script analysis and its application to staging, design and acting. Throughout, we investigate how theater – as a collaborative art form – tells stories. Students will act, direct, and design. In doing so, they will gain an understanding of a variety of processes by which scripts are realized in the theater, with an emphasis on the text’s role in production rather than as literature.

What is it like to be a bat? A tree? A slime mold? Art that attempts to represent non-human experience helps to orient environmentalism around radical and highly personal moments of inter-species empathy. Portraying non-human perspectives, we escape the abstraction of environmental data, and instead approach ecological entanglement on the level of individual imagination. Giving voice and human embodiment to nature is a theme in much 19th, 20th and 21st century creative writing (fiction/nonfiction) and performance work (theater, dance, puppetry). Accordingly, this class offers a broad survey of non-human representation in these arts with special attention to first-person narratives and embodiment of flora and fauna. The course draws on philosophers of mind (i.e. Shaviro's 'Discognition') and nature-science writing, plus contemporary performance projects and digital works by art/technology companies who deploy virtual reality and electronic media to explore the points of view of natural beings and systems. Reading about anthropomorphization and the problem of the subject in nature writing from Erasmus Darwin to the present will allow students to adopt a critical as well as appreciative eye toward this field of study and expression. Creative writing assignments will ask students to write (and perform) monologues from nonhuman perspectives.