Dramatic Arts

This course focuses on the different forms of live performance and their relationship to socio-historical contexts to construct a definition of what a live performance is through the study of five plays and a ballet. Works studied include Pierre Corneille'S LE CID (1636), Molière's L'ECOLE DES FEMMES (1662), Victor Hugo's HERNANI (1830), and Igor Stravinsky's LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS (1913).

This course provides an introduction to Ibsen’s dramatic production, emphasizing its historical context. It analyzes the plays as part of and influenced by social, political, and cultural forces, and as part of changing aesthetic and artistic norms. The course examines selected works against the background of changing literary, theatrical, and cultural paradigms in Ibsen’s own time and pays special attention to Ibsen’s renewal of the dramatic tradition. It investigates his plays not only as dramatic texts but also through historical performances from Ibsen’s time.

This course provides foundation knowledge of the different aspects of, approaches and discursive contexts relating to the study and praxis of theater and performance. The course also introduces the various forms of classical and contemporary performance practices and their attendant modes of analyses: combining play analysis, theater history and theory. Using complementary content-centered lectures and practice laboratory, the course creates an environment where students simultaneously engage with content while investigating its relations to the creation of theater and performance. 

This course consists of an Italian theater workshop for international students which meets for two hours twice a week, and is taught by an Italian theater director. Activities include: basic theatrical training, co-creation of an Italian text, rehearsals, and a final performance at the end of the semester. The course is for students with little to no previous background in Italian language.

This course explores the many ways in which theater and film are distinct but closely inter-related mediums. The bulk of the course focuses on close analysis of texts that have been adapted from the stage to the screen, examining performativity within those texts and how the essential properties that define the stage and the screen contribute to and facilitate particular ways for performing such texts. Notions of theatricality and the cinema are interrogated, especially in relation to how cinema can be 'theatrical' and the theatre 'cinematic'. 

This course focuses on key figures and aspects of contemporary performance as a means of learning about innovative approaches to theatre practice. Taking the works of a significant dramatist, director, theorist or theatre/performance genre as their starting point, it investigates the resulting aesthetic and conceptual innovations, and explores their implications for current approaches to performance making more generally. As such, the course combines creative and critical practice, and features a variety of reflective, analytical and practical assessment tasks, including a group performance project.

The course analyzes key texts in the development of contemporary theater in Spain and Latin America. The course explores the history of contemporary Hispanic theatre through examination of key authors, texts and trends in Spain and Latin America since the beginning of the 20th century.

This practical introduction to the comprehensive range of concepts, principles and practices in marketing focuses on arts and culture-related products, services and industries. Besides drawing attention to vital distinctions in the marketing of for-profit versus not-for-profit organizations, the latter of which characterizes the majority of arts agencies in Singapore, the political, sociological and economic factors which influence those working in the arts will also be examined. This course covers arts administration and skills in the managerial aspects of the arts.

The course explores in theory and practice the interactions of theatre and performative practices with cognate art forms and/or new media. The course is taught by specialist Theatre and Performative Practices staff or visiting staff with appropriate expertise. The precise specialization may vary from year to year but examples of such interactions would include theater and music, theater and voice/vocality, theater and dance, theater and somatic practices, theater and new media, theater and visual arts, theater and performance, and live art.

The course identifies and discusses some of the major theoretical positions that have shaped 20th and 21st-century theatre practice.