2022-2023

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 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 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 will engage with historical and recent examples of "Performing the Other," beginning with blackface minstrelsy and moving through representations of racialized Others on the operatic stage and the Hollywood screen. We will also consider cross-cultural performances that go "Beyond Appropriation.” What does it mean to take ownership of a culturally-specific art form in an increasingly global age where access to cultural resources is continually expanding? What are the ethics, politics, and problematics of cross-cultural engagement? Our goal will be to discuss the history of cultural appropriation in music and theater as well as to complicate contemporary applications of a term that has perhaps lost some of its nuance in the process of its adoption by mainstream media and pop culture, as well as within academia. This syllabus stages a dialogue between performance studies and (ethno)musicology, exploring music as a vehicle for the performance of racial and cultural identity.

This course is an exploration of select texts for performance written by performance artists primarily but not entirely operating within the context of art. Via historical context and literary technique, students read, discuss, and analyze texts by various authors spanning the history of performance art: Hugo Ball, John Cage, Richard Foreman, Carolee Schneeman, Joseph Beuys, Karen Finley, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, John Leguizamo, and create and perform their own writing. Field trips and attendance at first class are required.

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.