Dramatic Arts

The first half focuses on Western plays and the second half focuses on Chinese plays. Guided readings through Western cultivates the ability to analyze and appreciate the power of plays as well as how to analyze the structure, language, characters, etc of the different plays. The section on Chinese/Taiwanese plays goes over an introduction of drama and screenplay readings. The introduction of dramas covers the history, characteristics, and admiration of Chinese plays, providing knowledge and ability to read and understand Chinese plays.

Naturalism seems to be the theater that all fashionable modern theatre people love to hate. This course reconnects with the original dynamic energy of naturalist theater, and to trace a century-long fascination with the art of making it look and feel real. Students look  at new discoveries and explorations of 19th-century science, and at radical moves in painting and literature, as a way of framing our exploration of naturalist drama itself. Students find out why it was so offensive to see a version of their own living room on stage and how theater started to bring all the sordid realities of everyday life on stage. Seminars involve extensive study of naturalist plays, from Ibsen and Strindberg, via Franz Xavier Kroetz to Richard Maxwell, film screenings, and critical and historical texts that place the phenomenon of naturalism in historical and aesthetic context.

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course examines Greek and Roman theatre as a whole (places of performance, festivals and dramatic competitions, poets and preserved works; directors, chorus, players; relationship with public and institutions; the different dramatic genres and their history) and develops a critical attitude towards the main issues concerning the Greek and Roman theatre. Course contents include dramatic performances in the ancient world, with a special regard to Athenian tragedy and its importance for the modern theatre, and Euripides and Alcestis.

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.

The course offers a critical and historical perspectives of the Chilean theater in the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on the dramatic dimension. In particular, the course goes over the relationships between the production of drama in the region and the circumstances of cultural rearticulation in which this belongs to.

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."