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.

“We are scavengers,” reports the anonymous narrator of a 1990 manuscript written by theater maker Rachel Rosenthal. “The land doesn’t nourish us because the deserts are everywhere.” Environmental dread has loomed large over the past few decades, and practitioners working in a range of media have increasingly foregrounded the ecological as a primary aesthetic concern. This course will investigate how recent performances have sought to understand, address, and redress climate catastrophe. We will look to a range of material—possibly including work by Rosenthal, performance collective The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, playwrights Marie Clements and Yvette Nolan, choreographers Jerome Bel, Radouan Mriziga, and Lara Kramer, artists Rebecca Belmore and Olafur Elliason, and many others—in order to examine what tactics performance offers for reckoning with environmental collapse.

This course introduces students to the works of early modern female playwrights from England--including Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish--and from Continental Europe (in translation)--including the French Marguerite de Navarre (Comedy of Mont-de-Marsan), the Italian Margherita Costa (The Buffoons), the Spanish Ana Caro (The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs) and the Mexican Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Narcissus), among others. In this course, we will read and think through the complex plays and lives of those brilliant authors through various critical lenses such as intersectional feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies.

This seminar explores the interplay of history, fantasy, and theatricality in one of the masterpieces of early Qing chuanqi drama, Changsheng dian 长生殿 (Palace of Lasting Life, 1688), Hong Sheng's 洪昇dramatization of the famous tragic romance between the Tang Emperor Xuanzong and his most favored concubine Lady Yang Yuhan. The play alternates between a restaging of the An Lushan rebellion based on the playwright’s research into historical sources and the creation of a parallel fantastical universe in the forms of purgatory and paradise. These seemingly contradictory trends—the increased concern with historical accuracy in drama and the fascination with spectacular, supernatural worlds—are fundamental to many seventeenth-century chuanqi plays. To understand the play’s genealogy, we will read influential earlier treatments of the Xuanzong/ Lady Yang romance, but we will also examine the play in light of its relationship to contemporary events, particularly the fall of the Ming, and to contemporary debates on historical drama and the role of the playwright in the publication and production of theatrical works. The course will include consideration of the “afterlife” of the play by screening some dvds of important live performances

Prerequisites: Good command of classical Chinese.

This is a reading and research course for independent study.

This two-quarter sequence is open only to fourth-year students who are majoring and/or minoring in theater and performance studies.

Arguably the most debated political theorist of all time due to The Prince, Machiavelli genuinely aspired to be remembered for his creative prowess. He explored various literary genres, such as short stories, dialogues, satirical poetry, letter writing, and, notably, theater, where he demonstrated mastery with The Mandrake, an exemplary Renaissance comedy. This course aims to reintegrate these two aspects of Machiavelli: the serious politician and the facetious performer, a Janus-faced figure who serves as a precursor of both Hobbes and Montaigne. We will revive the image of this “Renaissance man,” and, through him, shed light on his era and fellow humanists by restoring their intellectual unity of prescription and laughter. Indeed, we will discover that Machiavelli encourages us not to take things, including him and ourselves, too seriously!

Augusto Boal argues that theatre is “rehearsal for the revolution.” Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed provides key strategies for collaboratively crafting dramatic narrative. These strategies challenge the conventional Aristotelian structure that privileges a single protagonist and subordinates other stories. Instead, Boal structures a poetics in which the “spect-actor” contributes their voice. Students will engage in devising and embodiment exercises in Image Theatre, Newspaper Theatre, Forum Theatre, and more, by interpreting texts (e.g., religious texts, constitutional documents, or political manifestos), interrogating current events, exploring public narratives, and valuing diverse learning styles. Students will contextualize destinations for the course material according to the aesthetic and academic questions that they bring into the classroom. To consider ethical concerns surrounding participatory theatre, we will examine arts groups past and present that employ the techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed. Readings include Boal, Freire, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Michael Rohd, bell hooks, and Knight and Schwarzman.