Dramatic Arts

This course develops students' physical skills as actors through the training practices of Beijing Opera. In China, the word for "theater" also means "sport’" revealing how performance has long been viewed as a mixture of drama, dance, circus-style street theatre, acrobatics, and even martial arts. This course provides students with an opportunity to participate in basic training, but the aim is not to turn students into a Beijing Opera performer. Rather, the course explores how students utilize and conserve energy as actors, and how, in a virtually empty space, students can use their bodies to describe complex narratives. Students learn how to complete basic circus "tricks" and how to stage a fight with sticks. 

In this course, students explore a range of contemporary performance practices and develop their own original devised performance material. Students experiment with a range of approaches that might include working with: text-based improvisation, movement-based performance, creative technologies, adaptation, and found or verbatim texts. The course advances students' knowledge of a range of contemporary theatre and performance makers who are producing devised theatre and performance. Through this exploration of a range of approaches to devising, students build a toolkit for making original theatre/performance and identify techniques and approaches that are of particular interest to students as practitioners. 

This course furthers the critical study of social, cultural, and historical aspects of performance, through analysis and practical exercises. Students explore plays alongside texts which have shaped approaches to acting and performance, and combine these in practical exercises (e.g. scene studies) and analytic discussion. Drawing from plays both ancient and modern, and stemming from various parts of the globe (e.g. East Asia, India, Ancient Greece, Russia), students explore the purpose and impact of theatre in a wide range of cultural contexts. Why have people gathered to watch drama at various points in time? How have radically different forms of behavior have been understand as ‘natural’ in differing contexts? How has theatre’s relation to democracy or community been understood? 

This course investigates adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays for cinema in theory and practice. Students examine approaches to screening Shakespeare considering the playwright’s iconic status and changing cultural and social contexts around the globe. Students also watch versions of different dramas representing a full range of the adaptation/appropriation spectrum and a variety of film genres. Drawing on these explorations, students work on filming short versions of Shakespeare adaptations, focusing on acting, camera work, and original interpretation of the dramatic script. 

Asylum seekers and refugees activate some of today’s most urgent and fraught issues relating to citizenship and national identity, human rights, immigration and border security, economic crisis, xenophobia and Islamophobia. This advanced research seminar  introduces students to some of the ways in which contemporary theatre makers, filmmakers and artist-activists are responding to the predicaments and experiences associated with asylum and migration, as well as to the ways that asylum seekers and refugees have found ways to tell their own stories. Course content draws from performance practices, media representation, policy frameworks, as well as critical and philosophical writing in Europe (the UK, Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece) and Australia. Students study theatre and performance, feature film, documentary film and live art produced over the past two decades. They are also required to seek out and study new work in London or further afield. Theatre, film and activism offer rich and mutually-informative points of entry into this complex and controversial topic, helping students to perceive how relationships between asylum seekers and their would-be hosts are being negotiated in the 21st century. 
 

Students begin their practical element of their program with a wide range of skills and experience. This course gives all students a clear point of entry into practical skills in drama and theatre. It focuses on student’s skills in creating their own work with an emphasis on creating original pieces of performance through writing, devising, and physical theatre.    

In this course, students develop their analytical and research skills, learning to work with physical and digital archives, objects, and performance ephemera and how to examine less tangible impacts of performance on history. Students develop more critical awareness of both the material and cultural traces of performance and their significance in both social and theatrical terms. In addition to the core learning objectives, this course develops historical awareness through case studies spanning three centuries of British theatre history; advance research skills by introducing students to a range of primary texts, material objects and secondary sources; and develop collaborative working skills.

Art museums are increasingly programming performance and live art events. At the same time, visual artists are looking to the theatre for aesthetics and forms to incorporate into their work. This seminar uncovers points of connection between performance and the visual arts, looking at key moments in the history of relations between these forms and giving particular attention to the current rise of theatrical aesthetics in contemporary arts practice. Through the Department’s three-year partnership with Tate Exchange, students have the opportunity to work in Tate Modern and to explore performance in the context of the art gallery. Students respond to the work of a range of contemporary artists – indicatively Pablo Bronstein, Boris Charmatz, Tacita Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Tim Etchells, Tino Sehgal and others. Working through creative examples, this course raises big questions about performance, theatricality, curation, participation, and museum practice. 

This course engages with practical and theoretical questions of theater and performance as social practices. By focusing on various theatrical outputs and their reception, paying particular attention to history, politics, national identity, justice and collective memory, this course showcases the importance played by theater practitioners, performers and playwrights in Latin America in terms of validating stories from subaltern groups, including indigenous communities, in relation to power.

2 years of university-level Spanish (or B1 level) is required in order to take this course.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This advanced course provides students with the ability to: acquire basic critical and methodological tools for the study of works and authors linked in an interdisciplinary sense to the philosophies of theatre and to the theories of representation, in an intercultural context; acquire advanced knowledge of the main historiographic, critical, and aesthetic perspectives of theatre studies in the contemporary international scene, also thanks to the analysis and collective discussion of works that are paradigmatically susceptible to a philosophical reading; arrive at a complete overview of the aesthetics and theories of theatre whose area of application includes both past theatre works and contemporary performances. In terms of skills, this knowledge provides the student with analytical and philosophical-aesthetic tools that enable him/her to inscribe past and present performances in a wide and conscious framework of meaning, within a polyphonic history of scenic culture marked by systemic continuities and paradigm shifts.

The course begins with a reflection on some fundamental philosophical ideas within the symbolic grammar of the theatrical event, namely space, time, body, and voice. These concepts are connected to corresponding theatrical experiences—not as mere illustrations or examples, but as scenic moments inherently full of meaning—belonging to different historical and cultural periods. In the second part of the course, the focus shifts to the actor and the complex relationship between person and character. To explore this relationship, attention is given to mimesis as both a process of identification and imitation. To ground these theoretical considerations in specific practices, Diderot’s Paradox of the Actor is read and analyzed, situating this work within the context of 18th-century French theatre. The final lessons of the module are devoted to experimenting with individual and collective critical-philosophical writing exercises. These exercises are related to performances that students will have attended during the course period, either live or via video.