2024-2025

This course explores how theater as a form interrogates the theatricality, character, story and community of sports. It will also investigate the theater of sporting events. We will read plays about sports, attend plays and sporting events, and definitely get on our feet and play. We will ask the questions: How can theater convincingly embody the world of sports? How do sports use theatricality to connect with their audience?

This course will explore ways in which the ephemeral elements of sound, light, and projected image can function in traditional and non-traditional spaces. Assigned readings and conversations with guest artists will expand students' relationships with cinema and performance. We will examine layered approaches to storytelling structures including applications in installations, shadow-play, live video mixing, and dance. Using a variety of tools we will apply concepts that cover the augmentation of the aural and visual dimension to create performative work. Final projects will culminate in an evening of work presented in a site-specific format.

This course gives students the unique opportunity to create a collaborative, site-based work that culminates in a final performance at UChicago’s Smart Museum of Art. Using embodied research methods that respond to site through moving, sensing, and listening, we’ll explore the relationship between the ephemerality of movement and the materiality of bodies and place, and consider how the site-based contexts for dance shift how it is perceived, experienced, and valued. Our quarter-long creation process will begin with a tour of the Smart Museum, guided by curators and members of the Public Practice team, that will provide context to the museum’s exhibitions, programming, and its relationship to geography and community. Assigned readings, viewings, and conversations with guest artists will delve into the relationship between dance and the sites where it happens, including museums—from the material relationship between bodies, objects, and architecture to the digital flows of choreography online.

This is a “maker’s” course that takes full advantage of working in a design lab to create a portfolio of short solo performance that could be stand-alone pieces, or further developed into longer works or possibly a TAPS BA thesis. Through the quarter we will examine varied approaches that include personal narrative, adaptation, object work, and projections while investigating the unique performer-to-audience dynamic. Benefiting from a historical approach that originates in the performance art work of the 1970’s through contemporary approaches to stand-up, students will research and present on artists including Marina Abramović, Spalding Gray, Anna Deavere Smith, Taylor Mac, Hannah Gadsby, Tig Notaro, Lynn Needle, Heidi Schrek, César Cadabes, and Debra Ann Byrd. Students will generate new works through in-class and take-home assignments and this quarter will culminate in a final showing of selected work for an invited audience. Prior experience is not required.

This class explores the potential of the podcast as a form of ethical artistic and social practice. Through the lens of oral history and its associated values—including prioritizing voices that are not often heard, reciprocity, complicating narratives, and the archive—we will explore ways to tell stories of people and communities in sound. Students will develop a grounding in oral history practices and ethics, as well as the skills to produce compelling oral narratives, including audio editing, recording scenes and ambient sound, and using music. During the quarter, students will have several opportunities to practice interviewing and will design their own oral history project. This class is appropriate for students with no audio experience, as well as students who have taken TAPS 28320 The Mind as Stage: Podcasting.

This course traces the creative, political, and scholarly legacies of Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), exploring the immeasurable impact of her career as a dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, activist, and creator of the Dunham Technique. Students will merge embodied practice with in-class discussions of theoretical texts, questioning the role of Black dance traditions of the 20th century in helping shape transnational and Black diaspora studies. In keeping with the geographic scope of Dunham’s practice and research, we will engage Black dance and social movements of the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, and beyond. Central concepts of performance ethnography, Caribbean studies, and Black feminisms will anchor an investigation of dance as an intellectual process and as social action. We will contemplate the methods of artist-activists and artist-scholars in traversing disciplines and foregrounding new fields of thought. This course will balance training in Dunham Technique with field studies, archival research, and short choreographic experiments while taking advantage of concurrent city-wide events celebrating Dunham’s legacy. No previous dance experience is required, and students should be prepared to engage through the body as well as intellectually in each class.

This course addresses techniques and modes of observation and their application to scene study. Observation study is used to strengthen acting choices, build the physical world of the play, and create original, vital characterizations. It also serves to deepen awareness of group dynamics; integrate symbolic, psychological, and physical meaning in a character's behavior; and guide the process of breaking down a scene. Students will perform observation exercises and apply their discoveries to scene work.

Though we often imagine a divide between the physical practice of dance training and the intellectual practice of dance history and theorization, in reality they overlap: movement training is embodied research and a form of intellectual labor, while dance theorization and scholarship is deeply connected to the physicality of thought. This course offers an introduction to dance with an integrated approach to thinking and doing. Students will explore a range of embodied research methodologies that draw from improvisational forms, codified techniques, and social and cultural dance practices. No prior dance experience is required for this hybrid seminar/ studio course.

This studio-based course with a seminar component offers an overview of the formal practices and contemporary trends that shape dance as an art form. The class is designed for students who seek to gain a working knowledge of dance and deepen their physical skills. A range of contemporary dance forms and practices will be covered. Topics may include modern dance, hip hop, partnering techniques, social dance forms, improvisation, somatic practices, dance composition, and more. Lectures, viewings, and discussion will support experiential practice components. No previous experience with dance or performance is required. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

This course offers an introduction to a number of significant dramatic works and seminal figures in the theorization of theater and performance. But the course's aspirations go much further: we will be concentrating upon the intersection of interpretation and enactment, asking how these pieces appear on stage and why. This will not be merely descriptive work, but crucially it will be interpretive and physical work. Students will prepare and present applied interpretations-that is, interpretations that enable conceptual insights to take artistic form. Throughout, we will be searching for that elusive combination of philological rigor, theoretical sophistication, and creative inspiration-probing the theoretical stakes of creativity and testing the creative implications of analytic insights.