Dramatic Arts

This course examines the theatrical and performative modes of writing, including writing delivered live by a performer or performers in a theater, encountered by a seated or mobile audience, or experienced through media such as headphones or hypertext.

Through the training of theatrical performances, the course cultivates sentiments and enhances artistic accomplishment. This course is an art practice class based on the curriculum offered at the Film Director Department, Shanghai Academy of Arts. Combined with the popular performance workshop training model of European and American drama teaching, this course aims to improve the performance and expression skills for students who are interested in performing arts. As a general education course, through the drama art, it provides a new enlightenment for the students' personal cultivation, emotional development, and social manners.

This course explores the political and artistic aims and effects of non-theatrical performance in the 20th century and contemporary urban environment. It explores how the city is sometimes conceived as a dystopian site of potentially enormous social oppression. And it examines everyday, artistic, and activist performative responses to this potential subjection, responses which imagine the city as, instead, a utopian site of personal and social liberation. Students contextualize and historicize our analysis through studying various theoretical analyses of urban experience (e.g. Baudelaire, Benjamin, Debord, Lefebvre) as well as a variety of artistic practices (e.g. everyday interventions, activism, public art). Throughout the course, students work to map the ideas and practices we encounter, many originally grounded in Paris, in our own experiences of London. The course concludes by imagining what performance might do next to contest the particular challenges of living in the city now and to explore and exploit its opportunities.