Dramatic Arts

In this course, students learn how to read play-texts in order to understand how they operate on stage and with a view to exploring them in performance. Students acquire skills in close textual reading, and examine the conventions of dramatic writing in which the play-text is located. They are introduced to the importance of understanding genre in approaching a play, including the need to be alert to a writer's deviations from relevant conventions of playmaking. In addition, they examine the particular theatrical milieu in which the playwright worked, as well as the theater practices (such as acting, directing, and scenography) prevalent at the time of writing. Students also learn the importance of exploring the broader social, cultural, and political environment which influenced the playwright and the audience of the play.

This course introduces students to avant-garde theater makers and performance artists of the 20th century whose interrogation of the function and possibilities of performance influenced many artists working in theater and performance today. Through case studies that present the works in performance of a number of significant theater artists and theorists across the 20th century, students are introduced to relevant theoretical discourses of performance analysis, and taught to examine and reflect critically on performances and productions of leading and influential practitioners, and consider in addition, how these performances operate within relevant artistic, aesthetic, and ideological contexts.

Feminist Theater explores key feminist theater makers from the Suffrage movement to the present, focusing on radical companies and writers of the 1970s and 1980s (Monstrous Regiment, Cunning Stunts, Pam Gems, Caryl Churchill). Combining seminars and practical workshops, it investigates what feminist historiography is and how you can engage creatively with archives. The course invites you to draw on a lineage of feminist ideas and methods to consider and challenge the continued under representation of women in theater (and beyond). Assessment will be part analytical and part creative or creative-critical work, with an option to create a performance.

Interventions examines the intersections between performance and activism. You will be introduced to work by a range of performance practitioners and theorists across live art, applied theater and site-specific performance. Throughout the course, you will explore how performance practices can provoke, argue, and advocate for social change. The course draws on international case studies, and you will undertake fieldwork rooted in the economic, historical and political contexts around our campus. Emphasis is also placed on developing your skills in communicating to audiences in, and beyond, the university.

This course merges theatrical theory with performance. Through a series of weekly exercises, students learn a variety of acting techniques that correspond to contemporary western theater practices. The course enhances the student's ability to gather real emotions from personal experiences and feelings, and to project this into a character. Due to the cultural differences in western theater and Ghanaian society, students learn varying ways of interpreting human behavior and interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication, and external ways of representing characters. Students complete a final performance where they showcase their characterization skills. Weekly attendance is essential and a daily journal recording individual development is required. This journal is reviewed and factored into the grading.

This 4th year honors course introduces students to a range of Shakespearean adaptations for the stage (including, for example, post-colonial, feminist, and queer adaptations). It explores the relationship between adaptation and source text(s) and between text and context, as well as considering the key critical and theoretical discourses surrounding Shakespearean appropriations and the practice of adaptation; although the focus is primarily on stage adaptations, students may have the opportunity to look at adaptations in other media too.

This course introduces students to choreographic strategies for working with movement for performance, from sourcing everyday movement material to arranging these building blocks in more complex ways, for instance involving theme and variation and refining that arrangement. It explores movement that supports theatrical productions (as in physical theater), as well as more dance-theater styles in which the movement is primary. Although student practice is at the core of this unit, the student also become familiarized with a range of contemporary practitioners and the strategies they use in staging bodies. No prior experience with choreography or dance is necessary.

This course takes the latest thinking about globalization and intercultural-ism and asks students to work through these debates via embodied workshop training and performance practice. Students receive the rare opportunity to experience extended training in Chinese Beijing Opera and Japanese Noh theater forms. What can students utilize from these experiences, and what are the ethical questions raised by drawing upon them in your own work? The course invites students to apply theatre studies to real world scenarios, not only in your own work as a practitioner, but also by exploring contemporary practitioners who have responded to similar questions and debates.

An introductory study of costume and make-up design for the theatre. The course will cover a panoramic view of historic costume; elements of design, fabric science, costume design and construction processes; make-up and accessories. Additionally, special focus will be given to African theatre costume and make-up for the performer in varied acts

How to perform Shakespeare has been one of the most enduring and ideologically fraught struggles in modern British theater production. This course provides a practical laboratory in which students explore modes of performance that illuminate the theatrical work in performance, while preserving its historical strangeness. Students practice performing text from Shakespeare's plays, drawing on the contemporary understanding of the conditions of English Renaissance production and experimental performance techniques of the 20th and 21st centuries. Students learn techniques of performing rhetorical gesture, improvisation, flirting and showing off, talking to the audience, audio feeds, part-scripts, textual muddles, obscenity, and cross-dressing. The emphasis of the course is on finding viable and intellectually rigorous modes of performance that challenge the dominant naturalistic modes that operate in most British theater production.