Dramatic Arts

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. 

Shakespeare's plays have been known in many parts of Asia for about 100 years, and contemporary Asian theater practice shows at once a great diversity of approaches to them, and patterns of common interest in production and reception. This course takes recent productions from different theater cultures to compare how Shakespeare's texts are engaged through non-realist aesthetic principles, and how self-reflexive treatments of naturalism, as well as new scripts based on his plays, interact with the cultural values represented by Shakespeare in the East and Southeast Asian region. Assessment includes the option of a creative project. The course requires students to take prerequisites.