Spring

This course is designed to introduce students to foundational concepts and critical skills relevant to the production process in theater. Students will track a play’s journey from text to stage, working to understand each phase of the production process as well as the various players who create this collaborative art form, including but not limited to, designers and technicians. Additionally, students will attend live performances, tour Chicago-area theaters, meet with guest artists and technicians, and construct their own production guide. Students will engage with a variety of areas of expertise, theater spaces, and approaches to the field of theater and performance production. The course is open to all undergraduate students.

This course is an advanced, project-oriented writing workshop with an emphasis on dramatic structure, storytelling through music, and the exploration of character as practical matters. Each student will propose a new, full-length musical and will work towards the creation of a first draft over the course of the quarter. In addition to presenting and workshopping new scene or song material weekly, students will study, discuss, and draw inspiration from standout examples of the genre. Students will present excerpted readings from their musicals at the end of the course. Some experience in writing for musical theater is expected.

Instinctively we know what a classic is and does in our culture. From Coca Cola to Air Jordans, a classic is a material artifact that resonates across time, class, race, creed and nationality. A classic has staying power, whether it evolves, remains fresh, or re-invents itself in new contexts. In drama, a classic is a more fraught concept. The tradition of a classic canon has been rightly and thoroughly critiqued as racist, misogynist, and exclusionary. In spite of this, the idea of a classic still abides and holds sway in the cultural imaginary. Taught by Associate Artistic Director Gabrielle Randle-Bent, this course takes as its point of departure that Court Theatre is "The Center for Classic Theatre." We begin with the question: What are the practical, critical, and dramaturgical implications for an institution committing to the production of classic work? We will read literary and dramatic criticism to better understand the idea of classic text, we will study the structure of modern regional theatre to interrogate the economic necessity for the production of classic work on contemporary stages, and finally we will read canonical, a-canonical, and new works of theatre to begin to articulate a dramaturgy of Classic Theatre on our own terms.

This course will explore how an actor uses movement as a tool to communicate character, psychological perspective and style. The foundation of our movement work will center on the skills of balance, coordination, strength, flexibility, breath control and focus. Building on the skills of the actor both in terms of naturalistic character work and stylized theatrical text. Students will put the work into practice utilizing scene work and abstract gesture sequences through studying the techniques of Michael Chekov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anne Bogart, Complicite and Frantic Assembly.

Beginning with O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey into Night' through the American avant-garde to the most recent production on Broadway, this course focuses on American contemporary playwrights who have made a significant impact with regard to dramatic form in context to specific decade as well as cumulatively through the twentieth century. Textual analysis is consistently oriented towards production possibilities, both historically and hypothetically. ATTENDANCE AT FIRST CLASS SESSION IS MANDATORY.

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.

Approaching theatrical design as a visual art, we will achieve a basic understanding of the theory, methodology and artistic expression fundamental to each area of design for the stage: scenic, costume, lighting, sound, and projections. We will learn how each discipline approaches and executes visual (aural in the case of sound) communication involved in the design process. Students will learn the professional design process, from contracting through production. Projects for this course will be completed using a combination of mediums and materials. Creativity in the execution of visual communication will be of great importance. Students will learn to show collaborators ideas instead of talking about them.

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.

This course introduces fundamental concepts of performance in the theater with emphasis on the development of creative faculties and techniques of observation, as well as vocal and physical interpretation. Concepts are introduced through directed reading, improvisation, and scene study.

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.