Dramatic Arts

The Directing Actors course explores the well-known research fields of performance, gender, and star studies, in order to understand how a relationship between people, mediated by a camera, in different positions, is realized, adopting equally distinct procedures to achieve previously prepared results. Within this perspective, the aim is not to adopt a single method, sufficiently capable of encompassing countless possibilities, but to recognize the breadth of paths and tools available to direct people with significant, none, or insufficient professional experience.

This course explores intersections between theatre and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be introduced to a range of political performance forms and the debates that surround them, from the political theatre of George Bernard Shaw, to the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht, to the provocative performances of the Black Revolutionary Theatre Movement, to the feminist performances of women’s theatre groups in the 1970s, to the recent rise of documentary and verbatim theatre. In addition, students will consider the theatricality of political protests, from die-ins to zombie walks, as well as recent protest reenactments by artists, including Jeremy Deller’s miners’ strike reenactment, The Battle of Orgreave (2001). Moving chronologically through the semester, the class will focus each week on a particular performance form, engaging with a selection of performance texts and relevant scholarship. By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with a number of influential practitioners and theorists of political theatre and performance; you will be knowledgeable about the contributions of playwrights and theatre-makers to a range of political movements; and students will be able to engage in informed debate about how various theatre and performance forms act politically. 

This course is dedicated to the study of Dramaturgy of Romantic Drama, a genre that came to the forefront of French stages with the Romantic revolution of the 1830s. After the presentation of the major theoretical texts that founded Romantic Dramaturgy, it focuses on dramaturgical analysis of three major plays from the repertoire covering almost the entire 19th century, from the Golden Age of the 1830s with Hugo and Musset, to the late avatar represented by CYRANO DE BERGERAC in 1897. Theoretical knowledge is mobilized--the poetics of the genre, plot construction, the character system, the management of time and space--and applied to specific to specific works and themes. The transition from text to stage is also addressed with the help of video recordings of historical and modern stagings.

This course examines roles and skills needed for the management of productions, companies and other organizations in the performing-arts, specifically drama, but also dance, music and other performance art. Skills discussed include planning and creating schedules and budgets, procuring and managing resources, arts organization infrastructure and liaison, donor and benefactor development, social marketing and networking, crowdfunding, and outcome reporting.

This course explores contemporary theatre and performance in English, staged primarily in western contexts, including, Ireland, the UK, the U.S., and Europe. The course connects performance practices with their contemporaneous and historical contexts: political, aesthetic, theoretical, social, and cultural. By doing so, it acquaints students with historical trends in theatre and performance, paying particular attention to the ways in which aesthetics and politics have been investigated through diverse practices of theatre-making. Watching live and mediated performances, students conduct analyses of theatrical works and develop arguments about their meanings.

This course introduces the theory of performance, analyzing how an understanding of performance in everyday life, and in culture, gives a context for the study of performance in theater. Students learn basic tools of performance analysis, to develop the practice of analysis in practical sessions, and to discuss lecture materials in small group teaching. The course offers an introduction to ways of examining, reflecting on, and critically evaluating the phenomenon of performance in a highly technologized and globalized world.

A hands-on theater course taught by practicing theatre professionals, emphasizing practical and performance-based skills, which develops those competencies acquired by students in previous years. The course exposes participants to a variety of different theater styles and genres, using classic and modern texts while ensuring that these texts are interrogated in a practical way. The course includes a theatrical production of a play, carefully selected to ensure appropriate distribution of roles, including backstage responsibilities. 

This course allows you to become acquainted with basic practices of acting, moving and listening as well as with a framework of concepts that help you unpack and situate the notion of performance. Practically and theoretically introductions to how sound, movement and action are experienced, performed and conceptualized in the context of the performing arts. In particular, the course addresses the larger areas of sound, movement and action and accounts for their conceptual and empirical intersections. In order to do so, it considers methodological and philosophical approaches to rhythm, space, time, body, play, and affect, while stressing that when we perform, we learn how to organize (new forms of) attention and experience, which carries social and political implications. The course is organized in three cycles of five weeks each and is taught by four different teachers with intersecting areas of expertise. Every cycle is consisted of sessions that interchangeably focus on sound, movement and action in performance, in theory and in practice. The focus of the first cycle is on attending to performance, the focus of the second cycle is on performing and the focus of the third cycle is on reflecting. Students are required to visit approximately three professional productions that are proposed by the teachers. They are also expected to read and analyze the assigned texts, to fulfill practical preparatory tasks, to actively participate in the workshops and in class discussions, to give group presentations and to hand in a portfolio of small written assignments. No previous experience in the performing arts is required.

This course is an introduction to the fundamental principles of theatre and performance making as well as performance analysis. It examines how theatre is developed from a range of sources, and explores ways in which scripted text is transformed, interpreted and manipulated. Working with the body, voice and performance space as critical performance elements, a number of 20th century theatre-making methodologies will be explored and examined. These include the theories and practice of Konstantin Stanislavski and Bertolt Brecht. Where practice approaches are concerned, there will be a particular focus on Realist (Stanislavsky) and Epic (Brecht) dramaturgical and performance strategies. In addition, the course introduces two modes of performance analysis, semiotics and phenomenology, and other ways to 'de-code' performances.

This course examines the body as a concept, idea, and practice within the field of performance studies through the targeted lenses of gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, critical race theory, and disability studies. Students are introduced to historical and contemporary debates regarding the “body” in terms of artistic practices including but not limited to performance and also engage with how the “body” on individual and/or collective levels is created and controlled through law and public policy in diverse social, cultural, and political contexts.