Spring

This course spans three quarters of attendance and is open to all students from all areas of the University. Dance technique classes meet weekly for 90 minutes. For each quarter you may choose one of three technique tracks: classical dance (primarily ballet), modern/contemporary, or Afro-diasporic forms (hip-hop, jazz, West African). Classes are taught by some of Chicago's most recognized dance professionals and are open to all levels of experience. For 100 units of credit, you must attend eight of the ten classes offered per quarter for three consecutive quarters. Students enroll on a Pass/Fail basis. There is no option to enroll for a quality grade. For more information and for consent to enroll, please contact Julia Rhoads, Director of Dance: jrhoads1@uchicago.edu.

“We are scavengers,” reports the anonymous narrator of a 1990 manuscript written by theater maker Rachel Rosenthal. “The land doesn’t nourish us because the deserts are everywhere.” Environmental dread has loomed large over the past few decades, and practitioners working in a range of media have increasingly foregrounded the ecological as a primary aesthetic concern. This course will investigate how recent performances have sought to understand, address, and redress climate catastrophe. We will look to a range of material—possibly including work by Rosenthal, performance collective The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, playwrights Marie Clements and Yvette Nolan, choreographers Jerome Bel, Radouan Mriziga, and Lara Kramer, artists Rebecca Belmore and Olafur Elliason, and many others—in order to examine what tactics performance offers for reckoning with environmental collapse.

The creation of a TV Pilot is a unique, exciting, and demanding task for a writer. In addition to the responsibility of telling a compelling story, writers are also charged with setting up a “world” and establishing characters and plotlines that will sustain the show over multiple episodes and seasons. In this class, we will delve into the processes required to succeed in this challenging endeavor. This includes creation of pitch materials, plot and character development, outlining, creation of a show bible, and ultimately, writing the pilot episode of an original TV series.

The classroom will function as part development workshop and part informal TV writer’s room. Through weekly reading and writing assignments we will dissect successful entries into the TV space and tap into our artistic inspirations to evolve our show concepts. From there, we would collaborate as a class by actively brainstorming and workshopping our scripts and series. By the end of the quarter, each student will complete a draft of an original pilot script, as well as a short “Series Bible” detailing the broader scope of the show.

Never in the history of western theater has brevity gotten so much attention. Festivals around the world are devoted to plays five minutes in length or less; perhaps the most revered playwright of the 20th century, Samuel Beckett, guided his career towards the writing of smaller and smaller works; Chicago’s Neofuturists have profitably run their show of “thirty plays in sixty minutes” for over thirty years; Twitter accounts disseminate multiple two to three line scripts daily; and sketch comedy continues to evolve and thrive.

This course will give an overview of the development of the very short play over the last one hundred and twenty years, but will primarily focus on the writing and development of same, asking students to complete — through workshop prompts — 20 to 30 scripts by end of quarter. A particular effort will be made to bring “traditional” elements of standard-length plays — character, arc, anagnorisis, pathos, backstory, etc — to these miniatures, to test and expand their assumed limitations.

This course is a hands-on introduction to Neo-Futurism: a method of transforming your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences into creative, task-oriented, audience-participatory, non-illusory, unique theatrical events. Students are encouraged to find their own voice as fully rounded theater artists by writing, directing, and performing their own short performances using their own lives as source material. By pursuing the goal of absolute truth on stage, we focus on an alternative to narrative Realism by embracing such elements as deconstruction, found-text, collage, abstraction, sythesis, and chaos. Classes consist of original group exercises as well as presentations of weekly performance assignments.

Performance exists in repetition. Theater is a space where we continue to bring the past to the present, making new moments while maintaining old memories. In this class, we will explore the relationship between performance and repetition by looking at how classical performance in East Asia continue/discontinue on modern stages. From Royal Shakespeare Company’s translation and adaptation of Yuan drama to avant-garde Japanese theatre’ artists recycling of classical performance training techniques, from museum performances that breathe life into the collected theatrical objects to underground variety theater that revives Edo-kabuki––all the materials in the class center on the ways in which modern East Asia negotiates with the disruption of traditions as well as social and personal dislocations that modernity has brought about. By closely looking at a variety of cases, we will consider: How does performance provide us alternative lens to probe into the changing cultural values, historical backgrounds, and social identities in East Asia? What are some ways that we can rethink the premodern/modern divide in East Asian Studies? How can the studies of East Asian performance, both classical and modern, enrich our understandings of the interplay between theater, history, and memory?

This is a highly participatory, exploratory class designed for students to study, write and perform dramatic texts. We will read the short stories and major plays of Anton Chekhov and identify signature elements of Chekhovian structure, style and themes. We will read plays that reinterpret, reimagine or recontextualize his work, including works by Thomas Bradshaw, Haruki Murakami, Tanya Saracho, Zach Galifianakis, Claude Miller and Regina Taylor. Working in small groups, we will devise our own short performances in response to Chekhov and how they relate to ourselves, other cultures, and other eras. We will use Chekhov's precise, compassionate yet unsentimental writing as a launchpad to explore theatre, short story and acting in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

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.