Dramatic Arts

The course develops a broad range of innovative, practical, creative, and collaborative musical skills. It promotes student initiative and creativity, while developing focused, critical, technical, and context sensitive perspectives on selected musical repertoires/traditions/genres. It seeks to explore, reflect upon, extend and/or challenge specific musical performance conventions. 

This is an internship opportunity through the Central European Studies Program that responds to a clear necessity among multicultural societies to educate young people abroad in a professional working environment. Apart from onsite work experience, the Internship Program has a strong and challenging academic component exposing students to the world of non-governmental organizations, education, and the social services sector in the Czech Republic and EU as well as developing personal, interpersonal, and intercultural competencies. Qualified students choose from several pre-screened internship positions with local, mostly non-governmental organizations, which may be involved in education, film, organization of international political conferences, local and global human rights issues, and library and administrative work in the field of economics.  International professional experiences are broadened through a series of guided discussions, a reflective journal, and presentations. Students explore major relevant topics, such as organization theory, and develop their intercultural skills through interactive workshops and reflection of their work experience in the host culture.

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.