TAPS

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.

This class explores the potential of the podcast as a form of ethical artistic and social practice. Through the lens of oral history and its associated values—including prioritizing voices that are not often heard, reciprocity, complicating narratives, and the archive—we will explore ways to tell stories of people and communities in sound. Students will develop a grounding in oral history practices and ethics, as well as the skills to produce compelling oral narratives, including audio editing, recording scenes and ambient sound, and using music. During the quarter, students will have several opportunities to practice interviewing and will design their own oral history project. This class is appropriate for students with no audio experience, as well as students who have taken TAPS 28320 The Mind as Stage: Podcasting.

In film, sound design is expressive, immersive, and dense, but once complete it’s fixed in time forever. This course will explore ways to translate the technical and narrative approaches of cinematic sound design to the dynamic context of live performance (dance, theater, puppetry, etc.). Using a variety of tools and practices from Ableton Live to field recording, students will learn how to create cinematic sonic experiences that are responsive to and imbued with liveness. Final projects will culminate in an evening of live sound-based performances.

In contemporary performing arts, projection design is more integral than ever, enhancing immersive experiences and challenging traditional staging conventions. This course explores the projection designer’s process on projects including drama, opera, dance, musical theater, and themed entertainment. Students investigate, discuss, and prepare for the design challenges found in each unique production environment. We will emphasize integrating imagery and video in a theatrical context as well as installation work. Students will become familiar with the most common varieties of projection design equipment and software–including Adobe Suite as well as playback software for theater including Qlab and Isadora, and will learn standard procedures and practices for a projection designer. Final projects will culminate with a live projection mapping presentation.

Students will be given a unique opportunity to create a collaborative, site-based work that culminates in a final performance at UChicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. Using embodied research methods that respond to site through moving, sensing, and listening, we’ll explore the relationship between the ephemerality of movement and the materiality of bodies and place, and consider how the site-based contexts for dance shift how it is perceived, experienced, and valued. Our quarter-long creation process will begin with a tour of the Logan Center that will provide context to the building’s departments, exhibitions, programming, and its relationship to geography and community. Assigned readings, viewings, and conversations with guest artists will delve into the relationship between embodied performance and the sites where it happens—including multidisciplinary community-oriented spaces such as the Logan Center—and will consider the material relationship between bodies, objects, and architecture as well as the digital flows of choreography projected on buildings and exchanged online.

The creation of a TV Pilot is a unique, exciting, and demanding task for a writer. In addition to the responsibility of telling a compelling story, writers are also charged with setting up a "world" and establishing characters and plotlines that will sustain the show over multiple episodes and seasons. In this class, we will delve into the processes required to succeed in this challenging endeavor. This includes creation of pitch materials, plot and character development, outlining, creation of a show bible, and ultimately, writing the pilot episode of an original TV series.

The classroom will function as part development workshop and part informal TV writer’s room. Through weekly reading and writing assignments we will dissect successful entries into the TV space and tap into our artistic inspirations to evolve our show concepts. From there, we would collaborate as a class by actively brainstorming and workshopping our scripts and series. By the end of the quarter, each student will complete a draft of an original pilot script, as well as a short "Series Bible" detailing the broader scope of the show.

Students who are participating in the TAPS autumn quarter Pro Show as either performers or design/production assistants may opt in for course credit after securing approval from the Director of Performance and completing additional assignments.

Never in the history of western theater has brevity gotten so much attention. Festivals around the world are devoted to plays five minutes in length or less; perhaps the most revered playwright of the 20th century, Samuel Beckett, guided his career towards the writing of smaller and smaller works; Chicago’s Neofuturists have profitably run their show of "thirty plays in sixty minutes" for over thirty years; Twitter accounts disseminate multiple two to three line scripts daily; and sketch comedy continues to evolve and thrive.

This course will give an overview of the development of the very short play over the last one hundred and twenty years, but will primarily focus on the writing and development of same, asking students to complete — through workshop prompts — 20 to 30 scripts by end of quarter. A particular effort will be made to bring "traditional" elements of standard-length plays — character, arc, anagnorisis, pathos, backstory, etc — to these miniatures, to test and expand their assumed limitations.