Dramatic Arts

This course provides an introduction to instrument sound design using different forms of synthesis and signal processing with computers. Students develop skills in creating sounds they imagine. The course offers aural training in identifying synthesis types, filtering, and other common techniques used in instrument design as well as support in practical implementation of these techniques in software. Projects include designing a sample-based instrument and developing a sound library with different forms of synthesis. The course uses entry-level graphical synthesis environments. No experience with coding is required.

This course engages with theater texts, and relations between text, performance and the social world. From the naturalist stage of the late 19th century to contemporary verbatim performance, theater practitioners have frequently sought to represent social reality in order to critique it. This course explores the methods and implications of theater’s "reality-effects" and considers why it is that so many theater companies and practitioners in the 21st century have turned to documentary, tribunal, verbatim, and other forms of reality-based performance-making. The courses explores a contrasting range of plays and performance texts from around the world, and builds a strong awareness of the politics, possibilities and limitations of "staging the real."

This course equips students with skills for analyzing performance as distinct from written text. It facilitates students' critical and productive engagement with London and the vast cultural resources and history it has to offer and explores some of the current issues in cultural politics and critical ways of approaching them. The course involves fieldwork at various sites around London and attendance at performances and events, and it requires critical response to seminar-based discussion.

The course introduces students to the main currents of modern European drama and theatre by providing an in-depth analysis of twelve most representative plays by Henrik Ibsen, A. P. Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Witold Gombrowicz, Jean Genet, Max Frisch, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard. Students acquire knowledge of advanced methods of drama analysis and enhance their skills in drama and theatre analysis.