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).

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.