Dramatic Arts

How and why are Shakespeare’s plays performed, filmed, read, and taught from China to Chile, from Singapore to South Africa? What makes Shakespeare a “global” force? Shakespeare's plays display the vast panoply of human desires and emotions: from passionate love to bewildering fear, from unswerving loyalty to basest envy, from the noblest instances of self-sacrifice to the desire to inflict unspeakable pain. His depictions of these emotions are often shocking in their vividness, yet always recognizable as fundamental facets of human experience. This course will look at Shakespeare’s afterlives in different parts of the world, and include hands-on workshops in which students try out different possible ways of interpreting “global” plays like Antony and Cleopatra.

The study of performance is central to our understanding of modern society. Introducing key issues, debates and possibilities, the course provides a broadly contextualized understanding of how local and global social and economic conditions inform specific performative practices and the performing arts. The curriculum unpacks and explores the significance of performing culture in terms of a distinctive set of key tensions or dualisms ­– including between the everyday and stage, restoration and novelty, authenticity and inauthenticity, the participatory versus the presentational, and dis-enchantment versus re-enchantment. Advancing enquiry in relation to spontaneity, improvisation, play, the embodied nature of performance and more besides, the course encourages and enables a reflexive understanding of what performing, performance, and performativity constitute in our own lives, and how we might learn to develop them in creative ways for the benefit of ourselves and our communities.

This course introduces students to performative events, dramatic representations, performance processes, and theater institutions in London. London has been a "dramatized society" as Raymond Williams once put it, a "society of the spectacle" as Guy Debord claimed in another capital context. But what might these general terms mean more specifically in London, now?  How does performance theory help us to read the behaviors and relationships of people that make up the city? What are the ways in which configurations of space, power, and movement determine what it is possible to think and feel in the city? This course uses ideas from performance, theater, and literary studies as a framework to think about our everyday experience as consumers, tourists, and citizens in the global city that is London.