Graduate

In this class, dance and the archive are addressed through three relationships: documenting dance for the archive, researching dance in the archive, and dancing as an archive of past events. The course unveils major topics in dance history and practice, such as alternative ideas about historical narratives and categories, the ephemerality of live performance, and how bodies hold knowledge and lived experience, with an emphasis on how racial structures shape archives. In course assignments, students will conduct research using archival sources and build archives that document and consist of their own moving bodies.

This course gives students the opportunity to learn repertory and new works by professional guest choreographers and faculty, culminating in a weekend of performances at Logan Center for the Arts. Within an immersive quarter-long production schedule, students will be exposed to a wide array of movement vocabularies, choreographic methods and performance aesthetics, while also gaining practical skills within the many facets of professional production work. Readings, viewings, and weekly journals will supplement studio and production work, connecting each student's experience to broader conversations within dance and performance studies. With a range of performance and production opportunities, this course will accommodate and challenge both trained dancers and movement-curious beginners.

This studio course introduces students to a wide range of methods for creating choreography, while considering the complex relationship between bodies, form, aesthetics, cultural contexts, technology platforms, and performance objectives. Grounded by interdisciplinary inquiry and ethical collaboration practices, the course will provide students with a robust toolkit for experimentation and play within dance and movement-based work, including compositional structures, improvised scoring, and choreographic prompts that are inspired by students’ unique thematic interests. The course also invites students to consider how choreographic methods can be activated as a problem-solving tool across disciplines. Supplementary readings and viewings will highlight contemporary choreographic practices from around the globe, driving discussion and analysis while giving students a broad understanding of how choreography engages current social and political issues.

This course will introduce students to the burgeoning field of immersive puzzle design. Students will develop, implement, and playtest puzzles that are suited for a range of experiences: from the tabletop to the immersive, from online puzzle hunts to broad-scoped alternate reality games (ARG). Students in this course will work directly with master puzzler Sandor Weisz, the commissioner of The Mystery League.

This workshop will explore the underlying mechanics that have made plays tick for the last 2,500-odd years, from Euripides to Shakespeare to Büchner to Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Annie Baker, etc. Students will be asked to shamelessly steal those playwrights' tricks and techniques (if they're found useful), and employ them in the creation of their own pieces. Designed for playwrights at any level (beginning or advanced), the workshop's primary goals will be to develop a personal sense of what "works" on stage within the context of what's worked in the past, and to generate a one-act play, start to finish.

In this course we will explore the relations between dreaming and waking life using a broad interdisciplinary approach. Our point of departure will be psychological, cultural, and religious understandings of dreams. On the basis of the readings and the skills and backgrounds of participants, the class will develop a "performance installation" around the liminal spaces of dream and wakefulness. Readings will include literary texts by Apuleius, Calderon, Shakespeare, ;Schnitzler, and Neil Gaiman, and theoretical texts by Freud, Jung, Klein, and Winnicott

This advanced acting course builds upon fundamental acting training and develops advanced skills for the performer. The focus will be on acting methods that are useful for multiple types of material; best practices in monologue, scene study, and ensemble work; and multiple approaches toward rehearsal processes. In preparation for weekly in-class performance work, students will be required to collaborate with scene partners outside of class and to dedicate themselves to a disciplined practice of self-study. For enrollment in this course, please submit a Statement of Intent at this link: https://forms.gle/KduDPpafN58XcRnw8. Questions? Email vwalden@uchicago.edu.

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.