TAPS

Audio storytelling insinuates itself into the day-to-day unlike other narrative forms. People listen to podcasts while they do the dishes, drive to work, or walk the dog. In this hands-on course, we will learn to produce a podcast from idea to final sound mix, and explore the unique opportunities that the podcast form affords the storyteller. Students will complete several short audio exercises, and one larger podcast project. The class will be held remotely, with an emphasis on remote recording techniques and what it means to document this moment using tools of non-fiction, fiction, and oral history.

Explore how physical model making can be a tool for artists to envision, test, and manifest built environments. Students will create scale models using industry-standard scenic design tools, materials, and hands-on techniques as well as experiment with more environmentally responsible alternatives. Projects will be designed and built in response to theatrical texts and to changes we would like to see in our own homes and communities. Conversations and readings will highlight the role of artists in climate change discourse, which includes storytelling to inspire awareness, optimism, and change, and conceiving an ecologically conscious reality that can sustain future generations. The course will culminate in students presenting a complete physical scale model of an imagined space followed by peer critique.

Production in Chicago Theater offers an in-depth exploration of the many departments that collaborate to create a theatrical production. Combining hands-on experience with theoretical study, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the creative, technical, and organizational processes involved in live performance. Through practical assignments and expert-led discussions, students will engage with key areas such as set design, lighting, sound, costumes, props, stage management, and production management. We will examine the history, theories, and practices behind each department while providing opportunities for real-world production experience, fostering collaboration, problem-solving, and project management. By the end of the course, students will have a well-rounded perspective on the complexities of theatrical production and an appreciation for the collective effort required to bring a performance to life.

This course explores the relationship between dancing bodies and gender identity in locations such as the stage, nightclubs, on social media, in film, and on the streets. Anchored in intersectional perspectives, the course examines dance as a site of personal and cultural history, resistance, and protest, while also considering its connections to nation and race. The aim of this course is to explore how ideas about gender and sexuality have shaped formal and aesthetic approaches to dance, even as dance serves as a space for contesting normative ideologies. This discussion-based seminar includes film screenings, guest artist sessions, and a final creative project. No previous dance experience required.

This studio course delves into the principles and practice of contemporary modern dance. Students will learn a series of movement sequences that progress from floor work to standing combinations and traveling phrases, building the skills to move with efficiency, gravity, and dynamics within the body and in space. Explorations of modern dance lineages will also include somatic techniques, improvisation, and the cultivation of an individual movement voice. Readings, viewings, and journal responses will supplement a bi-weekly studio practice, connecting student’s embodied experiences to the historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to modern and contemporary dance practices. Prior dance or movement experience is encouraged for this course.

Students will write short plays or one longer play that experiment(s) with queer form. We will consider linear and non-linear structures, disrupting expectations, subverting conventions, and shifting between the fictional world of the play and the real-time presence of the audience. We will focus on how form is integral to queer content. Students are welcome to bring in projects in progress or the germ of an idea, including original stories, adaptations or autobiographical material. Designers interested in ‘writing’ from a designer perspective are also welcome. Our work will be in dialogue with the new musical Out Here at Court Theatre, for which instructor Leslie Buxbaum is the book writer & co-lyricist. Students will meet production collaborators and be invited to production activities that fall within winter quarter.

"What is storytelling? It can be said that it is the oldest form of observing, synthesizing, and communicating feelings thoughts and information."—Temujin the Storyteller. Every day we use stories to communicate. This course provides students with an overview of the art and practice of storytelling. Chicago is a storytelling town from the Moth to Second Story and from Story Slams to traditional storytelling; performance artists give voice to a wide range of expression. Throughout this learning experience, students will be encouraged to explore the world of storytelling and to nurture their creative voices. Students will create and adapt tales focusing on personal experience, folklore, history, and ethnography. We will learn through participation and observation. The creative experiences in this course will enable students to further their skills in: oral presentation, story construction, performance, artistic critique, and analysis. Students will develop and perform stories from at least three distinct areas of experience. The course provides a creative space for learning and exploration.

This course invites students to engage with feminism—and its many intersections—not just as a question of representation but as a method for theatrical composition and presentation. We will ask why a performance might be deemed "feminist" and will analyze the specific dramaturgical strategies used to stage feminist questions and provocations, including erasure, saturation, fabulation, distortion, and others we will discover together. Students will learn to recognize and interpret feminist dramaturgy, and will adopt this disposition in practice. Drawing from feminist theory, trans studies, critical race studies and queer theory, we will examine how these frameworks inform the work of playwrights, performance artists, devised theater makers, and choreographers.

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 and sound. 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. If students are away from campus, there will be discussions of what materials may suit each student best based on available resources. Creativity in execution of visual communication will be of great importance. Students will learn to show collaborators ideas instead of talking about them.