Performance of Things (Graduate Seminar)
Performance of Things seeks to combine Thing Theory (and the overall academic cultural turn toward material things) with Performance Studies to examine the power and structure of objects that become things by exertion of their own performances. From the labour value of the commodity to the toxicity of lead to the performance of puppets, we will often focus on the ghosts, operations, and irrational souls (anima) that inhabit things. We will also examine how the anima of things animates the structures of our daily-life performances and inflect hierarchies of class, age, disability, health, race, gender, and sexuality.
Digital Performance: Making Theatre with Technology, Animation, and Projection
Syllabus (pdf)
Digital Theatre is a hands-on course that explores the history, theory, design, and practice of projection and media in theatrical spaces and performances. This course explores theatrical stage projection and performances of digital media through essays and critical theories as well as through implementation of interactive video and audio responsive systems built for live performance. Theories and methodologies focus around the field of media archeology, which seeks out forgotten technologies and deployments of technology in the trajectory of technological progress toward screened, projected, and responsive media. In addition to readings, students will be trained in the use of live interactive software to control video, audio, and animation systems that respond to live performers. No prior knowledge of interactive software applications, nor video, nor audio technologies is necessary for this course, although knowledge of these technologies will enhance the design potential for final projects.
Global Theatre Histories I & II
Global Histories I focuses on the global more than the historical. And particularly how the global resonates within theatre today. The readings and materials come from authors from around the world, offering perspectives on us: U.S. Theatre makers. Through varied international perspectives Global Theatre Histories will challenge the centrality of Western Theatre History to our growth as theatre makers.
Global Theatre Histories II examines theatre as modernity multiplies connections across the world. Technological connections such as the railroad, film, and telecommunication impact practices and definitions of theatre. Global connections through increased trade, war, and colonialism bring diverse cultural modes of making theatre into contact in 19th, 20th, and 21st century performance. Rather than try to read a global theatre history within some kind of linear time line, this course instead looks to various major global shifts within hierarchical structures of power and how theatre takes on the present through the past to address these historical changes that still resonate today. We will explore how theatre and performance respond to late colonialism and independence movements; communism and economic revolution; the art-isms of the West; expanding civil rights; post-colonial perspectives; neoliberalism and imperialism in the Americas; and historical disruptions caused by the pandemics of 1918, AIDS, and COVID-19.
This course understands contemporary plays as vehicles of history. In order to learn theatre history we will look at plays from our own time and research how they were written and staged through historical reference, narrative and symbolic evolutions, and re-enactments. Theater is an interdisciplinary art, and the movements we study cross media or are themselves intermedial. The course speaks to designers and technicians of theatre as much as actors, directors, and playwrights.
Script Analysis for Theatre and Design
This course focuses on analysis of theatrical scripts in order to extrapolate performance and production concepts for the staging of a script. Theatre is often called a mirror to the world but the blueprints for the mirror aren’t always evident. No matter our creative role in performance, all of us must dissect and analyze the script that forms the base for creating a collaborative performance; which is what theatre is. In addition to written plays that we can recognize throughout millennia, sometimes a script is based on interviews or half cues for improvisation or found material or an attempt to describe choreography. We will explore the tropes and rules of script formation and analysis and we will explore the artists that have worked to challenge the tropes and re-write the rules only to break the ones they established. We will mine the scripts for questions and search the world for answers. The wonderful thing about classes in the arts is that there are very few right and wrong answers. So don’t be shy. Art work is confusing. The only stupid question in theatre is the one not asked of a script.
Plays and Writing for Theatrical Performance
An intermediate course in the fundamentals of playwriting and storytelling for the theatre. Students learn the principles of writing for performance and the specifics of the theatre from writing exercises designed to stimulate imagination and reduce fears around writing and the pressure to be “creative”. We will study writing techniques which are designed to be put into practice; copied and challenged. Throughout the course students are guided through the various stages of the playwriting process culminating with in-class readings of the short plays they have completed. Plays take many forms. From documentary theatre to the well-made play, each produces a script in a different manner. In this course, we will explore various genres and styles of plays. In addition, we will explore various strategies to inspire our own creative writing and imbue it with the ingredients of the theatre.
Throughout the course we will continually study the nature of theatre in order to insure that our plays are scripts intended for the theatre not other performance forms such as television, radio, film, etc.. Each student will work on one premise throughout the semester. I write “premise” instead of “play” to emphasize that throughout the semester students will be challenged to write their play in a different style, genre, length, form, etc. By the end of the semester each students will complete a one act play according to their own wishes.
Power and Popular Culture
Download Syllabus (pdf)
Pop culture is all around us, influencing how we think, how we feel, how we vote, what we buy, and how we live our lives in countless ways. Popular culture is disseminated through media networks including phone apps, internet, television, film, theatre, publishing, music, etc.. Media is a mirror that we can use to understand ourselves and others. Media is also a dark mirror that obfuscates certain needs and desires we have in favor of other needs that promote more viewing and buying. The media is also a
reflection of economics and class structure (the rich and the poor) as well as the commodity of attention used by celebrity. Thus Media has a hand hold on a lot of the ways we value, use, and understand power. Through the application of an economic and theoretical analysis of advertising, film, and television, this course offers an active interdisciplinary approach to exploring the way power, race, ethnicity, gender, and class are portrayed in popular American culture. We will begin by learning the theoretical models and history of current economic systems that control not only money but how we think about such notions as “freedom of expression” and “liberty” and what constitutes the “private”. This course will use your own expertise as consumers of popular culture as a jumping off point for exploring the various roles played by popular culture in our lives.
Theatre Critique and Review
This course examines U.S. history and practice of theatre critique and review. We explore the artistic and the journalistic approach to critique and review, how reviews influence performance, plays, and artists in addition to audiences seeking recommendations. First and foremost this class is about theatre critique and putting that into a written review. In this course we explore the depths of the art of theatre as well as journalism in the pursuit of our own style and voice in writing our own reviews. Students will be pursuing the reviews and critiques of their own favorite shows–and write their own.
Race, Gender, and Performance
Syllabus (pdf)
Gender, Race, and Performance examines constructions of race and gender through dramatic literature, popular performance, essays, and critical writings. Texts are expanded and fleshed out through explorations of the strategies used by playwrights and theater artists and other artists to describe their experience of cultural and sexual difference in the U.S.. Through the politics of representation within performance we will investigate the intersections of race, class, nationality, culture, gender, and sexuality; intersections found both upon the stage and in the house (audience and/or home). This course continues to deepen students’ knowledge of drama and performance while also strengthening their understanding of the constructions of race and gender in our society. The course poses the following questions: How are race and gender performative constructs? How are race and gender constructed through performance? How do theater artists use the “between” of performance to engage issues of race and gender? How does society use race and gender to re-inscribe or delimit power? How can perceptions and depictions of race and gender be constructed and deconstructed? How can we approach difference through solidarity and in what ways can well intentions in solidarity re-inscribe social difference? How do we (wittingly or unwittingly) participate in these manipulations? How can we change our own practices and performances to challenge these manipulations?
Introduction to Theatre for Majors (Large Lecture)
Syllabus (pdf)
This course aims to prepare prospective theatre majors of all degree programs to begin their studies on the best footing. This course will introduce basic theatre vocabulary, professional divisions, research methods, critical writing as critical thinking, and techniques for communicating your knowledge effectively and persuasively.
Whatever theatre specialization(s) you may choose, gathering information and knowledge about every element of the theatrical process is of vital importance. Every venture in the theatre is unique; it is not possible to approach every play or production in the same way. Theatre artists must be learning new things all their lives, and the study of new techniques, ideas, and styles requires careful observation, an enthusiastic spirit, and sincere attention. The more skills an artist brings to production, the greater the flourishing of this collaborative art. Communication is equally as important as the gathering of knowledge due to the collaborative efforts of many people who must nonetheless produce a unified work of art.
By the end of the semester you should be able to: think about the theatre as an ever expanding art of dynamic collaboration and apply such thinking to the diversification of career growth and goals; display outstanding skills in creating and delivering oral presentations including the ability to organize researched information in a clear and cogent manner for a variety of audiences and situations; understand and apply basic information about the nature of studying and making theatre and various theatre specializations; understand the basic parameters of compiling and maintaining a professional level career portfolio for theatre; understand the principles and apply basic skills necessary for independent research in topics in theatre including correct form for scholarly essays; demonstrate foundation techniques of production and textual analysis that you will continue to build on during your course of study in the SOT.
Queer Theories of/& Performance
Syllabus (pdf)
Queer Theories of/& Performance examines sexuality through dramatic literature, popular performance, essays, and critical writings of queer theory. These materials aim to expand our thinking and actions regarding sexuality and sexual difference in the U.S. and how to approach such topics in the public sphere through theatre. Writings employ multiple theoretical lenses on sexuality in performance and performance of sexuality—social and discursive construction, identity formation, queer affects (shame/pride), conditions of knowledge (episteme), (de)limits of the body, perception, desire, and power/disempowerment.
This course continues to deepen students’ knowledge of drama and performance while also strengthening their understanding of the constructions of sexuality in our art practice and society. Beginning with an introduction to queer theory history and questions surrounding gender and sexuality in performance and aesthetics used in queer art, this course then moves into contemporary queer theories in order to examine works that use embodiment to pose questions about constructions of gender and sexuality onstage. Next we look at queer performance and move to questions about the application of queer theories and notions of sexuality across cultures. Examples of performance span from theatrical stages to everyday performance to pop stars to celebrity theorists, their interlocutors, and critics. Course work focuses on the deployment of critical queer theories in the analysis of performance and/or the explication of queer theories within performance studies.
Adaptation: Theatre and Media
Adaption: Theatre and Media is a theatre history course based upon famous inventions and the emergence of popular media; exploring how the traditional theatre stages new media and lends itself to technological developments. As the modern story goes: there was theatre, then came cinema, soon there will be real virtuality, yet theatre not only persists as a traditional art form, it continues to foster technological invention and to adapt emerging media. This course will also explore whether or not theatre itself adapts in a shifting media environment or if it merely persists in the role of tradition.
Media are composed of both the physical materials & the accepted concepts that in-form their name. The theatre will be included as a medium made of many materials and lots of contested concepts. The aim of this course is not only to examine adaptations across narrative from one major category of media to another (from stage to film, for example), but to challenge and explore the categories of various media as they relate to the theatre. In other words, although this course will explore some major categories of media (text and type & print, phonograph, film, television, and the digital) it will also challenge those categories as each distinguishes itself from theatre (as a concept), theatres (as the place and time of audience and performance), and the theatrical bodies of actors and spectators.