Dramatic Arts

This course looks at how one's voice is made and how one uses and modulates it. The course provides understanding of the physiological processes that produce voice and the relationship between mind and body in vocal communication. This practical workshop uses techniques developed by actors and singers that improve the resonance and musicality of the speaking voice and also vocal strength and endurance. Using verse, prose and dramatic text, students work on vocal characteristics - pitch, intonation patterns, pace and pausing, placement to improve their oral delivery.

This course examines how artists create meaningful experiences in performance. It covers staging scripts, designing scenes, and devising actions.

This course examines the mythological origins of Māori performing arts, the form, style and performance of mōteatea (traditional song and poetry), waiata-ā-ringa (action songs), poi and haka, the renaissance of kapa haka and its place in Māori culture and society.

From religious rituals to personal identity, propaganda to public protests, media spectacles to interactive artworks, performance is a prevalent feature of contemporary societies. Performance Studies draws on anthropology, cultural studies and art theory to explore how these and related phenomena work, what effects they have, and how they relate to each other. This introductory course provides an overview of the key concepts behind a fast‐developing discipline, and uses them to interpret a range of social practices and performance events that can be found in Singapore and other highly globalized societies. The course combines fieldwork, critical thinking, and performance analysis.

This course takes as its starting point the idea sleep isn't a "dead time" or an obvious biological fact, but is rich with meanings that change from culture to culture. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding these historical and contemporary cultures of sleeping. In particular it focuses on the intersection between medicine and performance in constructing our ideas about how and why we sleep. Students trace the history of slumber by focusing on the intimate and sometimes unexpected relationships between sleep medicine, literature, and theater. Alongside exploring primary and archival materials from sleeping's past, students investigate themes and issues arising from the interdisciplinary study of the history of medicine (an approach sometimes referred to as the medical humanities).

This course focuses on the major theories of acting developed in the 20th century in the West, a period during which the theater underwent major transformations, particularly in terms of pedagogy. More specifically, it deals with the work carried out by French actors and directors such as Copeau, Decroux, Barrault, Marceau, and lecoq. The course also studies the two pillars of this pedagogical revolution, Constantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold, who, in Russia, were the first to emphasize the importance of systematic training for the actor based on the practice of exercises. It explores how their discoveries have changed the habits of the actor while opening the way to new research initiatives, including those of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba, whose proposals are analyzed during the course.