Dramatic Arts

The course explores how drama, theatre, and performance reflect and effect social change. Students think about the relationship of the individual and the community in relation to wider social or institutional structures. The course brings together historical perspectives about drama, theatre, and performance and urgent issues in the present. Key skills students gain include working with theatre texts, historical understanding, and critical analysis about social and cultural change.

Students consider a range of Shakespeare's plays (comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, and romances) from different stages of his career, analyzing the playwright's stagecraft, his use of language and his reworking of traditional forms for the commercial stage. While students explore some recent adaptations for stage and screen, the course also focuses on the plays as produced in their original historical and cultural contexts. The course familiarizes students with Renaissance drama's negotiation of contested social and political issues at the turn of the 17th century. Students investigate the social processes of the theatre – notably the playhouses used by Shakespeare's company (the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars) – and focus on the interplay of Shakespearean texts and their performance in the production of meaning.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. 

At the end of the course, students will have acquired knowledge of the theoretical and critical reflections on the performing arts in Italy from the second half of the twentieth century to the first decade of the new millennium, with a particular focus on mise-en-scène and dance. Students will be capable of autonomously analyzing critical, theoretical, and poetic texts regarding the performing arts and will have acquired a series of tools for understanding pertinent iconographic and video documents.

What is performance? How is it related to its cultural and historical context? Which tools does its study provide to read the Italian contemporary culture? The course provides an answer to these questions in regard to the history of the Italian Performance Scene since the Sixties. After a methodological introduction on diverse concepts and theories of performance, the course focuses on the most relevant case studies of New Theatre with a focus on the most engaged forms of theatre, which allow for an introduction to the cultural, social, and political changes that shaped the Italian history in between the Sixties and Seventies. The course then focuses on relevant case studies in Applied and Social Theatre (theatre in prison, in health centers, and with vulnerable communities).