History & Theory

Games are one of the most prominent and influential media of our time. This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "alternate reality" or "transmedia" gaming. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. These games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of video games, and the team dynamics of sports. Beyond the subject matter, students will design modules of an Alternate Reality Game in small groups. Students need not have a background in media or technology, but a wide-ranging imagination, interest in new media culture, or arts practice will make for a more exciting quarter.
PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing through online form: https://forms.gle/QvRCKN6MjBtcteWy5; see course description. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Questions: mb31@uchicago.edu

From 2000-2018, the graphic novelist Jason Lutes published Berlin, a sprawling, formally inventive, & idiosyncratic account of life in the German capital city during the years just prior to National Socialism. Court Theatre, the Tony award winning professional theater on the UChicago campus, has commissioned the playwright Mickle Maher to prepare an adaptation of Lutes’ novel for Court’s 2024-25 season; David Levin is the collaborating dramaturg. This interdisciplinary team-taught seminar invites students into the process of adaptation, exploring a range of practical, conceptual & artistic challenges. The course will take place in two locations: at Court Theatre (where we will attend rehearsals for the world premiere production) and in a theater lab on campus, where we will consider a range of critical and creative materials – e.g., Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home or Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film “Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis” – to establish a dialogue between Lutes’ novel, its progenitors, and the work in Court’s rehearsal room. An additional & significant component of our work will involve creative exercises. Students will prepare adaptations of their own – first, of Lutes’ novel, then of works of their own choosing. Artists from Court’s production will join us for workshop sessions. The seminar aims to serve as a creative and critical forum, exploring the challenges of adaptation while generating diverse forms of practice.

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 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.

Italian culture has been continuously enriched by oral artistic practices that transcend the written page through the bodies and voices of performers. The content of this course will analyze various oral traditions from the Italian context, ranging from courtly lyric poetry of the Middle Ages to the vibrant contemporary performance poetry scene. Additionally, the course will examine the interplay between oral traditions and marginalized communities, with a particular focus on the exploration of female voices—from Renaissance mystical performances to feminist oral history practices in the 1970s—while also considering the polyvocal influence of immigration and the use of regional dialects. The course will integrate artistic content with theoretical material on the topic of voice (Agamben, Bologna, Cavarero, Frasca), as well as insights from media studies, feminist and queer studies, critical race studies, and performance theory. By the conclusion of this course, students will be able to deconstruct the traditional dichotomy between written text
and oral practices by recognizing the mutual exchange between the two and incorporate Italian
oral traditions into the traditional literary canon.

Reading knowledge of Italian required. Class will be conducted in English with a separate
discussion section available for students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor. Readings will
be in Italian and in English.

This team-taught course explores the challenges of staging Richard Wagner’s sprawling 19th-century tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung in the 21st century. The course will offer an introduction to The Ring, including its complicated place in history (including its reception and production history), and how it has been thought about in recent musicology and critical theory. But first and foremost, we will be exploring how the piece is being staged today. To that end, we will explore four productions of the tetralogy that are currently being prepared at leading opera houses around the world – in Munich, London, Berlin, and Oslo – speaking, via Zoom, with artistic directors and the production teams about their ideas and ambitions. What are the interpretive challenges and opportunities in staging this mammoth work? How do these productions seek to engage the tetralogy’s exceedingly complicated aesthetic ambitions, political baggage, and production history? And how do specific geographical, cultural, and historical conditions affect the artistic project of each production? Our discussions will encompass a range of fields, approaches, and topics. Among the themes we plan to examine are the aspiration to aesthetic totalization, the politics of community, the relationship between canonicity and critique, the notion of distress or emergency (the German term is Not), and some astonishingly lurid fantasies of family life—mostly of family dissolution. Moreover, we will approach the question of the relevance of The Ring and of opera (including Wagner’s ambitions to create “the artwork of the future”) in our time. Insofar as Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno stand at the origins of critical Wagner studies, their work will inform ours. But we will also consider more recent work, including writings by Carolyn Abbate, Alain Badiou, Nicholas Ridout, and Slavoj Zizek. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and beginning MA & PhD students. A knowledge of German and/or music history is welcome but not required. An active interest in – and a willingness to think critically and creatively about – the practices of interpretation on stage is essential.

Racine’s tragedies are often considered the culminating achievement of French classicism. Most famous for his powerful re-imaginings of Greek myth (Phèdre, Andromaque), his tragic universe nevertheless ranged considerably wider, from ancient Jewish queens to a contemporary Ottoman harem. We will consider the roots (from Euripides to Corneille) of his theatrical practice as well as its immense influence on future writers (from Voltaire to Proust, Beckett and Genet)

This course explores the relationship between dance and history. Rather than investigating the history of dance, we will focus on how incorporating dance can alter the practice of historical research and representation (including public history), and on how history has informed classical and contemporary concert dance since the late 19th century. Through our weekly studio practice we also hope to develop new ways of representing and embodying history through dance. The course will examine the traditional, historical language of storytelling in certain disciplines of dance, and will seek to create a refreshed, relevant language of gesture and intention in the studio that might effectively convey narrative. Our focus will be European and American classical, modern, and contemporary concert dance since the 19th century, but students are welcome to explore other genres, cultural contexts, and moments in their research and in discussion.

Assignments will include readings as well as viewing existing choreographic works on video; discussion of these texts and videos; engaging in conversation with contemporary choreographers, writing analyses of dances informed by the readings; attending relevant performances in Chicago, and participating each week in a studio-based class session in which we explore, through movement, the themes under consideration that week. You do not need to have any dance experience to take this course, but you must be willing to move.