Dramatic Arts

This course introduces the works of William Shakespeare, both on the page and on the stage. The course studies at least three key primary texts – The Tempest, Measure for Measure, and Othello – and combines close reading with an introduction to some theoretical approaches and a strong sense of how the plays operate in contemporary culture. Special emphasis is placed on London, both as the city in which these plays first premiered and as the city it is today, and how that inflects and inspires modern stage productions.

This course explores how race is performed in theatre, art, and popular culture. Of particular interest are performances that trouble how we think or talk about race, especially as it intersects with other identity categories like gender, class, sexuality, and disability. Why are race and structural racism such difficult topics to discuss, especially in the context of performance? What does it mean to label a performance racist, and how can we as artists develop anti-racist performance practices? The topics this seminar covers could include histories of blackface minstrelsy, debates over "color-blind" casting, and the politics of cultural appropriation in pop culture.

This course examines celebrity and the performance of celebrity. It positions an array of celebrities (actors, politicians, musicians, sports-people, for example) within their individual political, social, historical and cultural contexts allowing them to be read as texts through which to think through and around issues of commodification, globalization, virtuosity, stardom, identity, and consumerism, for example. The course refracts these issues through a variety of theoretical and ideological lenses, encouraging an analysis of how celebrity constructions of race, gender, nation, sexuality, and power, for example, function in the public imagination. 

This course focuses on the origin and fundamentals of French theater: how it started and how it has become the theater we know today. It explores the following movements: The Fairground Theater, Pantomime before the Revolution, the Boulevard du Temple and pantomime after the Revolution, Melodrama, the evolution of performance halls and sets in the 18th and 19th centuries, Panorama and Diorama, and the circus.

This course examines dance, theater, performance, and visual arts practices that are located within a feminist re-imagining of the body. Through a series of case studies drawn across geographic, historical, and cultural contexts, students engage with the varied histories, techniques, and creative processes of a feminist praxis. The course puts diverse art forms that investigate activism, gender equality, and feminist politics in dynamic conversation. Students consider different cultures of feminism, modes of feminist practice, and what it means to be a feminist spectator. Students cover a wide range of cultural, textual, and performative genres including plays, dance, and physical theater performances, films, graphic novels, and music videos.