TAPS

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 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 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 creates the first stage in a site-specific devised work process by engaging with a topic and texts and using the ensemble itself to generate work that is then considered critically. As a theme for the quarter, we will explore the interplay between horror, terror, and pleasure through in-class discussions of theoretical works and the possibilities of practical creative application. The paradox of the attraction to repulsion will be considered as well as the values of shock, suspense, and subtlety. Texts will include classic and contemporary drama, cult fiction, ghost stories, games, films, and theoretic source material. As a part of this foundation, we will question the intricacies of staging through in-class discussions of theoretical works (Aristotle, Brecht, Artaud, Stanislavski, and Bogart) and the possibilities of practical creative application. Working 4-dimensionally in outdoor on-campus locations, we will examine how theorized stagings can evoke suspense. This course will constantly question how analysis itself can be a performative practice and how performance can serve as a critical endeavor.

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.l endeavor.

This studio-based course with a seminar component offers an overview of the formal practices and contemporary trends that shape dance as an art form. The class is designed for students who seek to gain a working knowledge of dance and deepen their physical skills. A range of contemporary dance forms and practices will be covered. Topics may include modern dance, hip hop, partnering techniques, social dance forms, improvisation, somatic practices, dance composition, and more. Lectures, viewings, and discussion will support experiential practice components. No previous experience with dance or performance is required. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

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.

This course is a hands-on introduction to Neo-Futurism: a method of transforming your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences into creative, task-oriented, audience-participatory, non-illusory, unique theatrical events. Students are encouraged to find their own voice as fully rounded theater artists by writing, directing, and performing their own short performances using their own lives as source material. By pursuing the goal of absolute truth on stage, we focus on an alternative to narrative Realism by embracing such elements as deconstruction, found-text, collage, abstraction, sythesis, and chaos. Classes consist of original group exercises as well as presentations of weekly performance assignments.

In this seminar we explore a global range of genres that combine music and the intimate stage through the theoretical formulation of the cabaretesque. The performance practices we examine combine music and theater in ways that are historically and culturally diverse, ranging from medieval and early modern European genres such as mystery plays or Purimspiele to commedia dell’arte and operetta to modern musicals and cabaret itself. We also search for similar forms of intimate musical theater in cross-cultural Asian performance, such as Persian siah-bazi, South Indian kathakali, Korean p’ansori, and Japanese chindon-ya. The genres of music on the intimate stage that underlie the history of cinema (e.g., the first synchronized sound films, The Jazz Singer and Der blaue Engel) will be a consistent focus throughout the seminar. To understand the cabaretesque in opera performance we shall look especially closely at the transformation of Berlin’s Komische Oper in the twenty-first-century, applying close readings to several recent productions.

Together, we seek to develop the theory of cabaretesque as an approach to understanding complex social and political relations across the fault lines between self and other. Taking Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque as a point of departure, we shall read widely in modern writing on the cabaret as a performance practice that turns the world on its head and history inside-out. Final projects will wed theory and performance as students contribute from their own strengths to the creation of new works for the intimate musical stage.

Students from across the graduate divisions will be welcome in the seminar. Creative talents from Music, Theater, Creative Writing, Cinema, and ritual studies from the University’s area-studies centers will all bring distinctive ways of approaching the cabaretesque.

This interdisciplinary course examines key topics, trajectories and analytical methods in the study of gender and sexuality, approaching them in the Global South context of modern and contemporary Indian society. As a postcolonial nation that recently decriminalized homosexuality (in 2018), yet where caste- and communally-motivated sexual violence is on the rise, the contemporary Indian context pushes us to reflect on how questions of gender and sexuality are animated, constituted and represented, especially within non-Euro/American frameworks. What theoretical concepts have universal purchase, and what is only ever legible in a local register? How do the forces of global capital and imperial power intervene in these processes? We will address these questions through the lens of performance, drawing on ethnographic, textual, visual and filmic sources from various Indian regions, communities and languages (in translation). We will journey through a range of sites and scenes, including courtesan cultures, queer nightlife, drag performances, classical arts, dramatic texts, political protests, and more. Through our eclectic readings and creative assignments, we will collectively question and expand our received notions of gendered and sexualized identities and difference. This is an introductory course, and no prior knowledge of Indian/South Asian cultures and languages is required.