Dramatic Arts

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.

This course introduces a broad spectrum of performance practices that may be identified as local cultural expressions found in Singapore. Such practices occur in varied spaces and mediums, and include street opera, getai [song-stage], animal performances, theatre, film, religious festivals, national day parades, YouTube video performances and mobile gaming. The course explores the rich performative histories of these practices and studies concepts of performativity, liveness, and mediation. It also covers the ways in which technology and media play a crucial part in cultural expression and identity formation. 

Acting Theories surveys approaches to the art of acting, beginning with Stanislavski’s tools for the creation of psychological character. Approaches stemming from Meyerhold’s emphasis on physical expressivity are also explored, and the course continues to look at approaches which fall within two major categories of acting techniques: techniques for the creation of a psychologically truthful character and techniques for immediate expressivity or training an actor to physically respond to images. As each approach is introduced, in-class exercises demonstrate some of the techniques used by that particular acting teacher.

This course investigates the representation of illness and disability in performance. It focuses primarily on contemporary performance and live art practices by artists with illnesses or disability but is contextualized by the history of disability performance, e.g. in the Victorian freak shows. Students are introduced to ways of understanding discourses of disability and illness, and the ways in which they become manifest in performance. Students discuss issues of representation, lived experience, and agency as they relate to disabled and unwell bodies in performance.