Summer Theatre Studies Courses

“AGITPROP: Past, Present and Future” is an undergraduate course exploring the origins, meanings and applications of political art. Beginning with an overview of some of the seminal political art across the last century - from Mayabovsky's Moscow to Brecht’s Berlin to Not An Alernative’s New York - the course shifts to an interview format, where guest speakers working in the field today share their own theories and practices with the class. The final component is a capstone proposal, completed by each student, for a piece of political art they feel the world needs now. Combining political theory, source-based research, performance studies and civic artistry, “AGITPROP” is designed to be a provocative and propelling academic experiment.

This class is designed to introduce students to skills and concepts that are fundamental to the art of stage directing. These skills and concepts include script analysis and production research (from given circumstances, dramatic action, character and “ideas” through to interpretation and production concept), theatrical composition (staging and visual story telling), crafting (how to go from analysis to concrete, active and specific stage reality), and communicating with actors. These skills and concepts are applicable to a wide range of production aesthetics. Students will create and/or show devised and scripted scene work in almost every class. Much, but not all, of the class work will be created inside a basic Stanislavskian framework of learning to clearly and dynamically physicalize the dramatic action in communicative stage language. Readings from Grotowski, Richards and Hodges on “action” will be studied and applied to scene work. Students will be introduced to fundamental aspects of Stanislavski’s Active Analysis. A close reading of Chekhov’s Three Sisters or The Seagull will be used to model a way of reading a play as a director, focusing on the relationship between given circumstances and the characters actions, intentions and emotional points of view and how those suggest themes and overall ideas in the play. Social theories of Erving Goffman will be studied and applied to the creation of original theater pieces in order to expand the students understanding of the potential communicative power of sub-textual behavior. In conjunction with learning how to use secondary research and critical essays to prepare production concepts, students will read theoretical writings of Bertolt Brecht and apply them to the creation of original work that introduces them to the use of multiple tracks inside a performance, the use of meta-theatrical “frames” and ways to embed dramaturgical concepts into the dramatic action. An analysis of The Bacchae by Euripides will used to provide examples how selecting and researching overriding ideas and themes in support of a theatrical concept can influence a director’s choices in design, character’s actions, emotional points of view and intentions. There will be two major writing assignments. These focus on play analysis, production concept and research. There will also be several one-page basic analysis assignments. Each class will begin with a physical warm up and improvisational movement exercises to help students anchor composition concepts in their bodies. These exercises are from many sources including aspects of Viewpoint theory primarily: Space, Shape, Time and Kinetics.

The study of Shakespeare on film offers an opportunity for observing actual historical artifacts (the films) in relation to the texts on which they were based (the plays). By engaging directly with realized versions of the scripts, it is possible to more fully consider how changing social, cultural, political and technological mores affect the performance and interpretation of seemingly fixed texts that are often the object of cultural reverence and a purist devotion to the “original.” By looking at a field that involves filmmakers from the silent era to the present and from both English and non-English speaking cinematic traditions, one confronts both the interpretive fluidity of the scripts themselves and the contingency of tastes and values as they relate to styles of acting, textual fidelity, technological polish, and identity issues such as race, sex and gender, class, and colonialism. That a quintessentially theatrical body of work has resulted in a rich and varied body of work in a different medium will lead to a discussion of dramatic adaptation and what it means to realize a “version” of a Shakespearean play.

This course is for students passionate about justice and interested in how theatre intersects with socio-political issues. We will study theatre and performance associated with various social movements to learn more about theatre’s participation in social change. Students will analyze case studies, dramatic literature, and social theory to see how these forces influence each other and society. We will read, work with and engage with readings, plays, and case studies to understand how theatre and the performing arts have functioned in times of social and political instability. Students will work individually and as teams to develop theatrical responses to the pressing social justice issues in their communities and the world.

Drama therapy is defined as the intentional use of dramatic processes in order to facilitate change, healing, and growth. In this course, we will learn what drama therapy is, from a theoretical and experiential point of view. Drama therapy is an active form of psychotherapy, experiential in essence, and therefore in order to understand drama therapy and how it can help others, we must experience it. In addition, each class will consist of a theoretical presentation on the drama therapy method that we experience.

Through the study of performance techniques, acting theory, and select dramatic texts from the Spanish-speaking world, we explore the actor's role — and, at the same time, advance skills in pronunciation, intonation, and expressive communication in Spanish. We engage key performance techniques from Latin America — including theater of the oppressed, collective creation and biodrama — as we study the foundational elements of the actor’s craft. The course is built around practical exercises that link linguistic elements with vocal and situational expression in the theatrical context, including physical and phonetic practice, theater games and exercises, staging fragments of plays, and improvisation. Latin American theater professionals will be invited to special class sessions, allowing students to explore real-world perspectives on the theater. Students will also develop a complete Spanish vocabulary about acting as a field and profession.

Taking on the conceptual concerns of queer theory, crip theory, and mad studies, this course will examine various performative manifestations of the "freak". We will engage with critical literature, a wide variety of performance artifacts, and our own performance practices to discover how "freaky" embodiment and aesthetics can disrupt normative social practices to generate, what Foucault once called, the "utopian body." From early 20th-century freak shows to contemporary transhumanist performance, we will explore ways in which individuals too weak, sick, out of control, deviant, and sexual for dominant powers have learned to speak/act/exist without authorization.

This course examines the relationship between modernist performance and the history of hysteria and other neurological impairments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the disciplines of neurology and psychology garnering significant attention in Europe and North America during this period, representations of hysteria and other “nervous” conditions could be found circulating across cultural spaces—from teaching hospitals to music halls. We will examine these representations and the discourse surrounding them for the important role they played in the construction of modernist culture. We will engage this topic through the study of performance scripts, production histories, photographs, and other primary sources, placing them in conversation with historical and theoretical scholarship from hysteria studies, as well as the fields of disability performance studies and the history of medicine.

A fascinating look at the history and design of museums and other shows: from medieval fairs to contemporary institutions. In particular, a focus on how museums and shows have presented displays using theatrical contentions as well as a how objects “perform” for an audience. Course work will cover the histories of museums, world’s fairs, circuses, zoos, and freak shows, as well as include field trips throughout New York City.

This course is a deep dive into camp sensibilities, an elusive quality that is instantly recognizable yet difficult to define. Rather than codify, we seek to unearth the “queer world making” that camp practices promise. In an effort to “talk about Camp,” this course will focus on drag and burlesque as performing arts and participatory cultures. We will study his/her/their stories of these performing arts across time, as well as read critical theory that helps illuminate the themes that emerge from these highly theatrical and transformational art forms. We will study contemporary artists and art practices, as well as the commodification of drag and burlesque in mainstream Western culture. Our context for this course will focus on the United States, though you will be encouraged to consider global practices.

The course is divided into units; each of these units intersect, as do all the topics and themes in this course. In Unit I, we are introduced to key concepts and terms. In Unit II, we turn to the unique yet intersecting herstories and sensibilities of camp, drag, and burlesque. In Unit III, we dive deep into drag and burlesque, focusing our discussions on the course texts and exploring contemporary art practices that demonstrate the main concepts. In Unit 4, we explore “Hot Topics”, such as recent legislative attempts to criminalize drag, and other current events that may emerge around camp, drag, and burlesque during the course, and develop the scope of final projects.

This class introduces students to fundamental directing tools: principles of stage composition and visual story telling, action based script analysis, basic directing theory, applied Viewpoints and theatrical conceptualization. Through weekly composition and scene exercises students learn to create communicative stage imagery, physicalize dramatic action and articulate sub-textual behavior. Class work includes written analysis and production concept papers. Readings include writings of Brecht, Erving Goffman, Stanislavski, Grotowski, Bogart and Francis Hodges.

This course will place Donna J. Haraway’s concept of natureculture in conversation with theories and practices in the field of adult puppetry and performing objects. Natureculture posits reality as a dynamic ongoing conversation between materiality, semiotics, and relationality. In placing her frameworks in conversation with puppetry, we will explore the theatrical and political potential of the uncanny, materiality, shared and/or blurred agencies, and disrupting an animate/inanimate dichotomy. Artists will include Janie Geiser, Dan Hurlin, Miwa Matreyek, Ty Defoe, Handspring, William Kentridge and others. The course will involve readings, papers, and collectively devised puppetry workshop performance.

Realism and Naturalism are foundations of contemporary theatre but where and how did these forms begin and take shape and how are they distinct from each other? This class explores the societal and theatrical pressures that gave rise to these genres around the start of the Industrial Revolution and how they continue to impact and shape theatre and audiences today. Plays by Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Shaw as well as critical and historical writings will be dissected along with consideration of movements from Romanticism to the birth of Avant-Garde movements like Symbolism , Futurism and Dada. The birth of the director, the craft of acting and the impact of new technologies on the stage and playwriting will also be placed into context.

This class will take a detailed look at Augusto Boal and the impact of his body of work, known collectively as the Theatre of the Oppressed: a collection of games, techniques, and exercises for using theatre as a vehicle for personal and social change. Boal, one of the most well-known theatre artists from Latin America, has influenced a wide number of areas in applied and political theatre. The class will begin by locating Boal autobiographically and through his work with actors and non-actors. We will then explore his idea of the facilitator or Joker and then investigate Boal in light of some of his central influences including Aristotle, Brecht, Freire, and others. We will continue with theoretical and hands-on investigations of the many stages of the Theatre of the Oppressed such as Image Theatre and Forum Theatre. In the later parts of the class, we will investigate a number of case studies where Boal’s techniques have been applied across different contexts. Throughout, Boal’s idea of the spect-actor, an activated audience member who co-creates the material, will guide us philosophically and pedagogically. This means that students are fully expected to co-create the class alongside the teacher.

While Omi & Winant (1994) describe the 1950s and '60s in the US as representing a "racial break," a transformation in the nation's understanding of race and ethnicity, Melamed (2011) expands this understanding of race and ethnicity in culture from the 1980s to the 2010s. Beginning from Melamed's periodization, this class takes up questions of race and ethnicity on and through the US stage from the Reagan era to the Obama years. Prioritizing playwrights of color, we will study plays and musical about Black and Indigenous people of color, whether those are people indigenous to what is now known as the US, or people who have been, or the descendents of people who have been displaced, kidnapped, enslaved, or who are otherwise diasporic. We'll place these works within their rich theatrical paratexts: the contextual artifacts that surround and distinguish these plays, including critics' reviews, billboards, playbills, marketing campaigns, newspaper articles, and televised debates. By grounding our understanding of the American theatre's representations of race and ethnicity in a Black Marxist historical materialism, we'll seek to understand the relationship between the message of a play and its impact on the world.

What makes a villain and who decides? In this course, we will track the evolution of the villain across the globe and through the ages, exploring representations of evil in mythology, literature, and art history, as well as on the stage and screen. We’ll identify the origins of iconic imagery, interrogate the scapegoating of characters and populations in popular narratives, and question our own perceptions of villainy in art and culture. Our material will include sacred text, global performance traditions, political documents, psychological studies, essential works of early cinema, and relevant works of today from Disney to Jordan Peele. Assignments will take the form of textual analysis and research as well as artistic responses in a variety of mediums, all seeking to understand new perspectives on those we label “villain.”