Winter

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.

This course will engage with historical and recent examples of "Performing the Other," beginning with blackface minstrelsy and moving through representations of racialized Others on the operatic stage and the Hollywood screen. We will also consider cross-cultural performances that go "Beyond Appropriation.” What does it mean to take ownership of a culturally-specific art form in an increasingly global age where access to cultural resources is continually expanding? What are the ethics, politics, and problematics of cross-cultural engagement? Our goal will be to discuss the history of cultural appropriation in music and theater as well as to complicate contemporary applications of a term that has perhaps lost some of its nuance in the process of its adoption by mainstream media and pop culture, as well as within academia. This syllabus stages a dialogue between performance studies and (ethno)musicology, exploring music as a vehicle for the performance of racial and cultural identity.

In this seminar we examine and disentangle the triangulated historical and cultural spaces that form through the complex interaction of the three larger subject areas: music, colonialism, and nationalism. Colonial encounter because audible to the extreme when sound is unleashed as the language of control and resistance by the colonizer and colonized alike. Music, as the amalgam of sonic difference, opens the metaphorical and material spaces in which the struggle for power is also articulated as the aesthetic expression of sovereignty. Song sounds linguistic and geographic borderlands, transforming them into the contested boundaries of nations both in ascendancy and in decline. In the course of the seminar, we seek the ways in which music and sound articulate the counterpoint between colonialism and nationalism, yielding one of the most forceful narratives for understanding the history of the present.

The process of triangulation that gives shape to the different weekly sessions affords the opportunity to think about approaches to colonialism and nationalism from a variety of perspectives. On one hand, we confront rather than avoid the extensive influence of post-Enlightenment eurocentrism on the history of nationalism. We shall critique the degree to which that eurocentrism enabled colonialism and continues to leave its mark on globalization. We shall examine colonialism in its distinctively separate forms, while also seeking the common motivations that connect colonial settlers through racism and the drive to extract labor and land from the marginalized who have no nation of their own. As our reading takes us to different nationalist movements, we shall ask questions about the seemingly irreconcilable differences between their positive and negative impacts on society.

We shall draw upon diverse resources and approaches throughout the seminar. We shall devote attention to specific repertories and genres that have the power to represent the colonial and national interests. How does the nation’s history take shape in the national epics that passed from oral to written tradition in the nineteenth century? How did the rise of recording technology and other media capable of capturing sound transform colonial templates into national voices? Why do so many genres and individual pieces of national music, national anthems, for instance, sound similar? Or do they? In addition to reading critically important works on colonialism and nationalism, we shall also listen widely and to different types of sound material, ethnographic and commercial, classical and popular, in literature and in film. It will be our goal to bear witness to the shape of the music-colonialism-triangle in as many shapes as possible.

Students from many departments and centers are welcome in this seminar. Extensive analytical work with music is not required.

This seminar offers a critical introduction to performance theory and its applications to theatre and other practices. We will discuss three key conceptual clusters:
a) action, acting, and forms of production or play, from classical (Aristotle) through modern (Hegel, Brecht, Artaud), to contemporary (Richard Schechner, Philip Zarilli, others); b) affect, and its intersections with emotion and feeling: in addition to contemporary theories, we will read earlier texts that anticipate recent debates (Diderot, Freud) and their current interpreters (Joseph Roach, Erin Hurley, others), as well as writing about the absence of affect and the performance of failure (Sara Bailes etc); c) archives and related institutions and theories, including audience formation (Susan Bennett) and challenges of recording ephemeral acts: theorists of memory (Pierre Nora) and remains (Rebecca Schneider), theatre historians (Daphne Brookes, Tracy Davis and others) as well as current theorists on the tensions between the archive and the repertoire (Diana Taylor).

Requires active and complete participation; two oral presentations and final paper.
Final paper could be a review article (ca 5000 words) using two recent books in your field to examine key concepts that define the field and controversies they may engender.

This course examines key texts from antiquity through the 18th century related to music and sound. “Literature” is construed broadly to include the many genres in which music or sound play a principle part: philosophical and scientific essays; anecdotes, biographies, and tales; poems and informal essays; songbooks, formularies, and scores; encyclopedias and manuals. The course will be organized historically and thematically. Some of the issues we hope to investigate: the role of music in ritual and governance; theories of the voice and sound production; the translation of sound into words, and what is lost and gained; the pictorial representation of sound and listening; the relation between music and emotion; the social roles of musicians and entertainers; and the cultural significance of musical instruments.

This course investigates the ways that digital and networked media have changed contemporary aesthetics, forms, storytelling practices, and cultures. Along the way, we will analyze electronic literature, Twine games, interactive dramas, video games, transmedia narratives, and more. Formally, we will explore concepts such as multilinear narrative, immersive and navigable worlds, network aesthetics, interactive difficulty, aleatory poetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the quarter, our analysis of computational media aesthetics will be haunted by matters of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other ghosts in the machine. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in new media cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. 

The history of the American musical in the 20th century is paradoxical. While the genre is often denigrated as staging lyrical utopias of romance and adventure allowing audiences to escape depressing quotidian realities, many musicals did seek to engage some of the most pressing social issues of their day. In this course, we will look—and listen—closely to four differing musicals from the 20th century, studying their creative origins, while also analyzing their complex social meanings revealed through the story, music, lyrics, staging, and dance.

Beckett is conventionally typed as the playwright of minimalist scenes of unremitting bleaksness but his theatre echoes the irreverent play of popular culture (vaudeville on stage and screen eg Chaplin and Keaton) as well as experimental theatre and modern philosophy, even when there are no direct lines of influence. This course will juxtapose these points of reference with Beckett’s plays and those of his contemporaries (Ionesco, Genet and others in French, Pinter in English). It will then explore more recent plays that suggest the influence of Beckett--by Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane in English, possibly Michel Vinaver in French, and possibly a recent American response to Beckett, depending on availability. We will also consider the relevance of theorists and philosophers include Barthes, Wittgenstein, and critics writing on specific plays.

This course is an exploration of select texts for performance written by performance artists primarily but not entirely operating within the context of art. Via historical context and literary technique, students read, discuss, and analyze texts by various authors spanning the history of performance art: Hugo Ball, John Cage, Richard Foreman, Carolee Schneeman, Joseph Beuys, Karen Finley, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, John Leguizamo, and create and perform their own writing. Field trips and attendance at first class are required.

The goal of this playwriting workshop is for each student to end the quarter with a first draft of a full-length play. In addition to generating new material on a weekly basis, students will be expected to attend two Chicago-based productions for in-class discussion and criticism.