History & Theory

This course will explore the evolving relationship between moving bodies and video technologies. From early filmmakers using dancers as test subjects, to movie musicals and contemporary dance for the camera festivals, mediatization of the body continues to challenge the ephemerality of live dance performance. This course focuses on the growing field of screendance, videodance, or dance-on-camera, working to define this hybrid genre and to understand the collaborative roles of choreographer, director, dancer, cameraman, and video editor. This course is both a practical and scholarly approach to the genre of screendance, each component essential to a full understanding and mastery of the other. Course work will be divided between the studio and the classroom. For the studio component, students will learn basic video editing and filming techniques. For the classroom component, students will be asked to watch screendance and read a cross-section of criticism. Assignments will be both technological and choreographic (making screendance) and scholarly (written reflections and a seminar paper).

Taught by Daniéle Wilmouth

What makes a performance unforgettable? How do fleeting acts—onstage, online, or in the streets—spark curiosity, provoke debate, or ripple through memes and memories? In this course, we’ll immerse ourselves in the bold, hybrid world of performance as a tool for upending expectations and crafting the unexpected.

With hands-on projects, critical reflection, and collaborative exploration, we will investigate performance in its many forms, from physical spaces where people move, connect, and gather, to digital platforms where swipes, clicks, and streams define interaction. Together, we’ll uncover how performers outwit algorithms, engineer surprise, and amplify their work in resourceful and unpredictable ways. Visiting artists from theater, media art, and tactical performance will join the course throughout the quarter, bringing unique practices and perspectives into the mix.

This course is a deep investigation into the possibility of dramaturgy as intrepid and curious storytelling and the role of the dramaturg in building worlds with playwrights, inhabiting worlds with productions, and cultivating worlds with audiences and institutions. We will think across discipline about the methodologies that make dramaturgy a heuristic knowledge practice. We will think critically about existing genealogies, best practices, and innovations in the theatre industry. Most importantly, we will engage in our own civic-minded dramaturgical practice and how engaged, thoughtful storytelling might have impacts beyond the walls of the classroom and the theatre.

This course introduces students to a range of dance and performance practices from the region of South Asia and its related diaspora. Throughout, we will explore critical examinations of South Asian dance and performing arts to consider history, identity, politics, and creativity. This course combines both theoretical study and movement practice and will investigate a range of research approaches and movement styles. No prior dance or performance experience is required.

This hybrid seminar focuses on American contemporary playwrights who have made a significant and commercial impact with regard to dramatic form in the past 20 years. Playwrights will include, Tracy Letts, Annie Baker, Lynn Nottage, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Ayad Akhtar, and Amy Herzog. Textual analysis is consistently oriented towards staging, design, and cultural relevancies. Work for the course will include research papers, presentations, and scene work.

This course will examine what happens to the American Family Drama on stage when the 'family' is queer. Working in dialogue with a current production at Court Theatre, we will move beyond describing surface representations into an exploration of how queering the family implicates narrative, plot, character, formal conventions, aesthetics and production conditions (e.g. casting, venues, audiences, marketing and critical reception). Texts will include theatrical plays and musicals, recorded and live productions, and queer performance theory. This course will be a combined seminar and studio, inviting students to investigate through readings, discussion, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or artistic project.

“Love and Song: Underexamined Affairs” will take some less traveled paths on the otherwise well-traveled ground whereon song has long been married to love. We will begin with the courtly Provencal love song cultivated by Petrarchans in late medieval and early modern Europe as foundational to amorous tropes for suffering lyrically. From there we will quickly move to lyric in the age of capitalism, technology, and contemporary geopolitics, considering (among others): Nancy J. Vickers’s writings on Petrarch in the video decade, James Baldwin’s theory of love, music, and “the beat”; Martin Stokes’s work on intimate Turkish publics; Dafni Tragaki’s writings on atmospheres and the postpolitical in Greek popular song and rebetiko; Kara Keeling’s theories about love, errantry, and the refrain; and my own work on the unsentimental, together with other writings that tie love song to citizenship, abjection, madness, and histrionics. In addition to the writers named above, we will read from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant, John Freccero, Josh Kun, Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou, Fred Moten, Elizabeth Povinelli, David Hesmondhalgh, and Eric Lott. We will also build our own collective shared archive of love songs complementing our readings and listenings.

This seminar is open to graduate students from all disciplines. Students will write final seminar papers of circa 15-20 pp., drawing on their own skills and interests relevant to the seminar.

This course aims to introduce students to various musical and performance traditions in South Asia and their evolution within regimes of institutional, legal and media censorship. The course aims to understand how media environments and cultures of censorship are in some ways fundamental to shaping performance cultures in South Asia in the twentieth century. How do traditions of musical performance entrenched in the politics of caste, communalism, religion, sexuality and gender interact with regimes of censorship and new media? How do the latter remake and unmake said traditions? Be it the mid-century ban on film music by All India Radio to reflect the aspirations of a newly-emerging nation or the appropriation and urbanization of 'folk' musical practices within the recording studios in Nepal by upper-caste, upper-class male performers- censorship and media infrastructures have been integral to the current ontologies of diverse musical genres in South Asia. Through the analysis of a variety of primary and secondary texts on performance and musical aesthetics, media and music ethnographies, reception and production histories as well as critical listening/viewing exercises, this course seeks to complicate mainstream Euro-American narratives that tend to posit media-modernities as global and uniform. We will seek to understand how South Asian musical cultures and sound practices enter into a creative interplay with musical discourses and media-materialities emerging in the West.

In this course, we will delve into the world of contemporary Francophone theater, focusing on the genre of solo performances, or "seules en scène''. We will examine the lineage, history, and practice of this genre, with a special emphasis on feminist playwrights and performers, such as Typhaine D, Jalila Baccar, Fanny Cabon, and Florence Foresti.

We will study the underlying components of solo performances and learn how to integrate them into different modes, including storytelling, one-woman or one-man shows, and standup. The selected plays will illustrate how the art of the solo voice can empower under-represented communities and minorities to share powerful narratives and create a new space for visibility and listening.

The class will combine history, practice, and creative writing, and will afford students the opportunity to apply this knowledge in a series of live performances that will allow them to creatively connect to the issues raised in the readings and draw from their own experiences, inspirations, and questions.

Students will develop creative and critical tools to fully explore the solo voice as a form of artistic expression, honing their talents in writing, devising, composing, producing, and creating work. Performance recordings will be obtained and shared with the class to further enhance the learning experience. One of the unique opportunities of this course is the opportunity to work with texts obtained directly from the playwrights.

Class will be conducted in English with a separate discussion section available for students seeking credit for the major/minor. Readings will be in French and in English.