THEA105 Production Laboratory

This course focuses on the technical aspects of stage and costume craft: scenery and prop building, lighting execution, and costume building. It offers a hands-on experience where students participate in making theater productions happen. All sections will participate in the backstage work of the Theater Department's productions. Forty to 60 hours (to be determined) of production crew participation outside of the regular class meetings are required. While this course is required of theater majors, it is also recommended for students wishing to explore an aspect of theatrical production and is excellent preparation for theater design courses.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA110 Drafting for Theatrical Design

This course is intended to provide students with a basic knowledge of computer drafting, for theatrical design and other performative arts. Students will learn the language of the line, the drafting standards for theater, as codified by the United States Industry of Theatre Technology (USITT), and the means to create accurate, measured drawings. We will cover topics including, geometry, line weights, scale, theatrical drafting conventions and symbols, ground plan drawings, elevation drawings, section drawings, dimensioning, page layout, and printing.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA114 Incarcerated Stories: Documenting In/Justice

Students in "Incarcerated Stories: Documenting In/Justice" will collaborate with formerly incarcerated individuals and their families to create performances of theater and music based on interviews, trial transcripts, prison memoirs, and other texts related to mass incarceration. Students will learn how to apply their skills as writers, performers, or musicians to community service and activism as they learn about the United States' criminal justice system and its position at the heart of systemic racism in America. The class will be taught remotely and the performances generated by the students and their formerly incarcerated collaborators will be disseminated as widely as possible, with the objective of amplifying marginalized voices to raise awareness of mass incarceration's social impact and the need for carceral reform. Due to the collaborative nature of this course, and its dependence on interaction with formerly incarcerated individuals and their family members who will be visiting the class remotely via Zoom, weekly online attendance is required.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA114Z Incarcerated Stories: Documenting In/Justice

Students in "Incarcerated Stories: Documenting In/Justice" will collaborate with formerly incarcerated individuals and their families to create performances of theater and music based on interviews, trial transcripts, prison memoirs, and other texts related to mass incarceration. Students will learn how to apply their skills as writers, performers, or musicians to community service and activism as they learn about the United States' criminal justice system and its position at the heart of systemic racism in America. The class will be taught remotely and the performances generated by the students and their formerly incarcerated collaborators will be disseminated as widely as possible, with the objective of amplifying marginalized voices to raise awareness of mass incarceration's social impact and the need for carceral reform. Due to the collaborative nature of this course, and its dependence on interaction with formerly incarcerated individuals and their family members who will be visiting the class remotely via Zoom, weekly online attendance is required.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA115 America in Prison: Theater Behind Bars

This course will give students the opportunity to study theater as a tool for social activism and to apply that knowledge to practical work in institutions that are part of the American criminal justice system. No previous experience in theater is necessary. Students will be encouraged to use their own skills in music, art, and drama as they devise ways to use the arts as catalysts for individual and social transformation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA118F Off-Broadway: Contemporary American Playwriting (FYS)

This writing course focuses on plays by contemporary American writers from 1995 to the present and asks students to begin thinking deeply about how plays work. How are they constructed? How can story, plot, character, dialogue, spectacle, and theme work together to create magic onstage? What are plays trying to do? Focusing on work by women, queer artists, and writers of color, we will respond to plays that have appeared Off-Broadway in recent years. Playwrights we consider will include Suzan-Lori Parks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Kristoffer Diaz, Lucy Thurber, Adam Bock, Hansol Jung, Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, Jaclyn Backhaus, Thomas Bradshaw, and Diana Son.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT118F
Prereq: None

THEA125F Performing Contemporary Playwrights (FYS)

This course will explore performance/close readings of classic and contemporary writers, specifically BIPOC artists. Plays by Migdalia Cruz, Dominique Morisseau, Luis Alfaro, Chay Yew, Sarah Ruhl, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Lynn Nottage, Lorca, the Greeks, and Shakespeare, are currently under consideration. No performance experience is required.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

THEA135F Documentary Performance: Theater and Social Justice (FYS)

This course will introduce students to theater as a medium for exploring issues related to social justice and political activism. We will examine techniques used by documentary theater artists such as Emily Mann, Doug Wright, Moises Kaufman, Anna Deavere Smith, and Jessica Blank, who create plays based on interviews, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other documents related to controversial social issues. The course will begin with an investigation of the issue of mass incarceration and will include visits from formerly incarcerated individuals who have agreed to recount their experiences in prison. These prison stories will be the primary sources for the course's initial writing assignments, which will consist of short performance scripts and analytical papers. Subsequent weekly assignments will include performance scripts and analytical papers based on issues that will range from gay rights and racism to sexual violence and the stereotyping of Muslim women.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA143 Gospel, Rap, and Social Justice

Students in this course will collaborate with formerly incarcerated individuals on the creation of theater and music performances inspired by their collective reading of Dante's Divine Comedy, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, Anna Deveare Smith's Notes From the Field, and a variety of texts documenting the impact of mass incarceration on communities of color. Our work will consider the ways in which current and formerly incarcerated activists have used gospel, rap, spirituals, and other forms of music and art to survive, heal, and advocate for change in the criminal justice system. The performances generated by the class will call attention to the relevance of Dante's poem to contemporary issues of social justice with the objective of amplifying marginalized voices and raising awareness of the injustices embedded in the carceral state.



No previous performance experience is necessary to participate in the class, but students with vocal and instrumental musical skills are welcome.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA145F Clash of the Titans: Classical vs. Contemporary Voices in Theater and Film

This course will explore how classic texts have informed and inspired contemporary writers of theater and film, and how seemingly disparate parts of the canon enrich and illuminate one another. We will dive into close readings of plays, exploration of scenes from an actor's point of view, supplemental viewings and reflections/critical analyses of films and plays, and an original adaptation. Plays by Euripides, Luis Alfaro, James Ijames, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Lucas Hnath are currently under consideration. Film viewings include Black Orpheus and Hamlet.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA150 Introduction to Performance Studies

What is performance? Is it an event or an action? Is it what happens on a stage or in your living room? Furthermore, what does performance have to do with our understanding of how race, gender, sexuality or community function both historically and in the present? This course approaches theater and performance as both a critical lens for viewing social and cultural life, and as a creative practice of worldmaking. Students will be introduced to the theoretical, critical, and creative field of performance studies. Pulling from anthropology, theater, dance, queer studies, critical race theory, and linguistics, we will look at performances ranging from the play "Fairview" by Jackie Sibblies Drury, to "Fires in the Mirror" by Anna Deveare Smith, to the punk performance work of Sister Spit, and the story weaving work Spiderwoman Theater. In this writing-intensive course we will pay particular attention to queer artists and artists of color.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA150F Introduction to Performance Studies (FYS)

What is performance? Is it an event or an action? Is it what happens on a stage or in your living room? Furthermore, what does performance have to do with our understanding of how race, gender, sexuality or community function both historically and in the present? This course approaches theater and performance as both a critical lens for viewing social and cultural life, and as a creative practice of worldmaking. Students will be introduced to the theoretical, critical, and creative field of performance studies. Pulling from anthropology, theater, dance, queer studies, critical race theory, and linguistics, we will look at performances ranging from the play Fairview by Jackie Siblies Drury, to "Fires in the Mirror" by Anna Deveare Smith, and the story weaving work Spiderwoman Theater. In this writing-intensive course we will pay particular attention to queer artists and artists of color. In this class we will explore writing as process, writing as personal and political, writing as a social and rhetorical activity, writing as cognitively complex work, and writing as thinking. At the end of this course you should have an understanding of key debates in performance studies and be familiar with a range of contemporary performance practices.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA172F Staging America: Modern American Drama (FYS)

Can modern American drama--as cultural analysis--teach us to reread how America ticks? Together we will explore this question as we read and discuss some of the most provocative classic and uncanonized plays written between the 1910s and the present. Plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Mike Gold, workers theater troupes, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka, Arthur Kopit, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Ayad Akhtar, and others will help us think about what's at stake in staging America and equip us as cultural analysts, critical thinkers, close readers of literature, and imaginative historians of culture and theater. This seminar will introduce first-year students to the kind of critical thinking developed in majors such as English; American Studies; African American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; College of Letters; Theater Studies; and the Social and Cultural Theory Certificate.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL175F, AMST125F, AFAM152F, FGSS175F
Prereq: None

THEA175F August Wilson (FYS)

During his lifetime, the world-renowned African American playwright August Wilson graced stages with award-winning plays from his "Century Cycle." This course examines the cycle's 10 plays in the order in which the playwright wrote them, from JITNEY (1982) to RADIO GOLF (2005). In all cases, we pay special attention to the playwright's presentation of language, history, memory, religion, visual art, and music within his oeuvre.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL176F, AFAM177F
Prereq: None

THEA180 Reading Plays for Production: Conceiving for Performance

Propose, read, and discuss plays in consideration for production for Theater Department Mainstage. Reading a script is different than reading a novel: in this class, we will examine how to read a text for performance. Over the course of the semester, we will consider a range of plays and approaches to performance--from classics to contemporary plays to devised work. In the course, students will explore plays and performance ideas recommended by the community with an emphasis on examining how they might operate as productions within the Theater Department's Mainstage. Students will lead discussions, gain skills in text analysis, dramaturgy, and creative and practical thinking as they consider what type of work the Theater Department might produce. This class will result in a slate of scripts and performance ideas that will be offered to the Theater Department faculty for consideration for one of the Mainstage productions. This course counts towards the Theater Arts category for the THEA major. This course may count (one time only) towards the Performance Practice credit requirement for the THEA major.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA183 The Actor's Experience

The Actor's Experience is an introduction to the practices of acting in rehearsal with a director. It is held in conjunction with THEA281- Intro to Directing; students will be working directly with the student directors in that class. Basic aspects of staging, collaboration, script, and character analysis will be covered. Commitment to attending scheduled rehearsals is vital. Each actor will have the opportunity to perform in both a short-form scene (mid-term) and long-form scene (final), performed in front of the class and invited guests.



This class is a chance to be in community with other students interested in theater, and practice collaboration and care. Together students will consider why theater matters, and how theater-makers can offer more care to themselves, each other, and our audience. Students will participate in in-class staging exercises, outside rehearsals with peers, reading discussions, and viewing plays.



The Actor's Experience is a half-credit class intended for majors and non-majors at varying levels of experience and is held in conjunction with the Intro to Directing class.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA185 Text & Visual Imagination: Introduction to Eco Design for Performance

Eco-scenography is an introduction to design for performance. In this course, students will learn the core principles of design for performance while exploring sustainability and environmental practices with an emphasis on understanding of materials, such as production cycle and manufacturing process, as well as integrating environmental justice paradigms by analyzing specific case studies. Through three specific project-based assignments--1. object design, 2. garment design, and 3. environmental design--students will train their visual imagination, as well as develop an aesthetic literacy and knowledge of performance design concepts and practice within eco-sustainable practices.



This course counts towards the Theater Arts category for the THEA major.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: IDEA186
Prereq: None

THEA199 Introduction to Playwriting

This course provides an introduction to the art and craft of writing for theater. In the course of the semester, students will create plot and characters, as well as compose, organize, and revise a one-act play for the final stage reading. The course will help students develop an artistic voice by completing additional playwriting exercises, as well as reading and discussing classic and contemporary plays. The instructor and students' peers will provide oral and written feedback in workshop sessions.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: ENGL269
Prereq: None

THEA202 Greek Drama: Theater and Social Justice, Ancient and Modern

This course introduces students to Greek drama as produced in its original setting in ancient Athens and then adapted in modern times. The majority of our readings will be drawn from classical material: tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, comedies by Aristophanes, and selections from Aristotle's Poetics and Plato's Republic. We will look at production practices, acting and audience experience, and the role of theater in shaping cultural values. Questions will include: How does theater as art reflect the personal, social, and political life of the Athenians? What is the connection between the development of Greek drama and the growth of the first democracy? What are the emotions of tragedy ¿ for its mythic characters and for its real audience? And why have we been talking about catharsis for centuries? What is the relationship between emotions, drama, and social justice? For the last part of the semester, we will turn to adaptations of Greek tragedy in the 20th and 21st centuries by Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Sarah Kane, and Yael Farber. We will discuss how the dilemmas and emotions of tragedy are replayed in response to World War II, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, PTSD, and consumer culture, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: CLST202
Prereq: None

THEA203 Playing in the Theater Archive: An Introduction to Performance Studies

This class will serve as an introduction to theatricality, performance studies, and aesthetic theories. We will analyze plays and performances as we examine classical and contemporary conceptions of the theatrical. Given the complex and varied roles theater has played throughout history, we will begin by placing pressure on the terms "theater" and "history." We will pay particular attention to the intersections between theater history, dramatic literature, cultural performance, and the role of the theater archive as we explore key moments in theatrical development. Readings will be organized geographically and diachronically, giving us a mobile and flexible account of theater, theory, and practice across a variety of cultures. At the end of this course, students will be familiar with touchstones in theater history; be able to write a critical and descriptive performance paper; demonstrate a knowledge of critical performance and aesthetic theories; and use performance as research methodology.



This counts as a Theater Methods course for the theater major.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA204 A Nation and its Theater: Cultural and National Identity in Performance

In the wake of Black Lives Matter, the insurrection in January 2021 on our nation's capital, a global pandemic, and the Trump presidency, the very notion of what "America" is, has been, or ever was is being grappled with on a global scale. The nation is fractured in its sense of national and cultural identities and is struggling to imagine a collective future. This course examines the concept/model of a "national theater" and interrogates the cultural, historical, and political role these institutions play within their countries. It examines what role the theater can, should, or should not play within the formation, reinforcement or dismantling of national and cultural identities.



Through an examination of models such as the Teatro Nacional de Venezuela, the National Theater Company of China, the Uganda National Cultural Center, Ireland's Abbey Theater, and France's Comédie-Française, this course looks at: (1) how politics, history, and culture give rise to/craft the shape of national theater agendas; (2) the role of national theaters in building/challenging/reinforcing national and cultural identities; (3) how government agendas and public funding can affect the role that national theaters play; and (4) how the colonial legacy of a European national theater model has influenced non-Western models.



Students will engage with theoretical and non-western notions of "nation," and debate the role/responsibility of a "national theater" to provide representation and inclusive/pluralist notions of cultural identity. Students will then look at historic attempts in the United States to create national theater concepts such as the Federal Theater Project, the Living Newspaper, and the American National Theater and Academy. For their final project, students will be asked to imagine/craft a proposal for a "National Theater" for the United States.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA210 Shakespeare

This lecture course is designed to introduce students to the often-demanding texts of Shakespeare's plays, their major genres (comedy, history, tragedy, and romance or tragicomedy), and the contexts in which they were produced. Shakespeare's career spanned a period of remarkable social, political, religious, and economic change, including the Protestant Reformation, the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism, early colonialism, global trade, and the rise of the first purpose-built, commercial theaters. Innovations in dramatic form and genre, which Shakespeare helped craft, sought to make sense of these momentous shifts for a diverse public theater. The lectures assume no prior knowledge of Shakespeare or his times and are designed to illuminate the texts of the plays by examining their cultural contexts.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL205
Prereq: None

THEA211 Pitch It: Persuading Diverse Audiences to Support Original Theater Projects

You have a script, some songs, and a production design...but you need support to make your project happen. Inspiring people to support original ideas requires research, skill, and craft. This course will offer students the insight, skills, and judgment needed to pitch their projects to writers, producers, donors, designers, and audiences. We will examine a range of creative projects launched in New York City and smaller arts communities to answer the questions: Where did these start? What made them captivating? And who brought them to life? We will then discuss best practices for communicating future projects orally and in writing.



Ideally, students should come to the first class with several ideas for arts projects that they would like to pitch. These can be students' own creations or others' work that students believe should be seen by a wider audience. The first half of the semester will focus on successfully-launched theater projects. In the second half of the semester, students will conceptualize and develop an arts idea they are passionate about. They will learn what makes arts proposals competitive, and will practice pitching to classmates and others. Students will have the opportunity to revise and expand their ideas and work. Students will be graded on a written portfolio and an end-of-semester pitch to the class.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT213
Prereq: None

THEA213 Performing Arts Videography

This course provides an introduction to shooting and editing video and sound with a particular focus on the documentation of dance, music, and theater performance. Additional consideration will be given to the integration of videographic elements into such performances. Students will work in teams to document on-campus performances occurring concurrently. Related issues in ethnographic and documentary film will be explored through viewing and discussion of works such as Wim Wenders's Pina, Elliot Caplan's Cage/Cunningham, John Cohen's The High Lonesome Sound, and Peter Greenaway's Four American Composers.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC231, DANC231
Prereq: None

THEA215 Latinx Theater in the U.S.: Analysis & Performance

This Latinx theater study and performance class will examine American-born playwrights of the Latinx Diaspora. Playwrights who are of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent are just a few of the many Latinx identities in the United States. The goal will be to examine the specific cultural identities within the United States, their origins, experiences, and stories in this country. We will analyze and explore the universal resonance of these plays as well as their current relevance to contemporary American culture, both politically and socially. Students will be required to do monologue work and scene study for the performance portion of this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA216 Performance Curation as Relational Praxis

When we hear the word "curator" we might think of the iconic fictional character of Bette Porter--someone who works in a museum or gallery with a vision for how paintings, sculptures, and wall texts are put together for a show. In this class we will expand on this idea of the curator to explore what happens when we add performance to the task of curation. Or, put differently, we will ask what happens when we remove performance from the more theatrical tradition to add it into the gallery and museum space. Thinking between performance studies, visual art, and museum studies, this course explores the role of the performance curator. Connecting performance curation to community engagement, social practice, and transformative justice, we will explore the ways in which performance might address questions of racial inequality, gender variance, class access, and dis/ability. We will ask: How does performance live in art institutions? How do you compensate a performer for a fleeting piece of work? How does performance help us reimagine the space of the art institution itself? Does performance curation make possible new genres of performance? Can, and how, might we apply its practices back to more traditional theater contexts at the university, in the art world, and beyond?



In this class students will explore theories of performance curation as a practice of not only selecting and choosing, but of building relationships. We will look at museum shows, arts organizations, and performance scholars to eventually build individual proposals for our own performance events. Artists and scholars to be discussed include Nivald Acosta, Mariana Valencia, Justin Allen, Morgan Bassichis, Jamie Shearn Coan, Ralph Lemon, Thomas Lax, Adrienne Edwards, Tourmaline, Carolyn Lazard, The Poetry Project, Center for Experimental Lectures, Wendy's Subway, Adult Contemporary, and more.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: FGSS226
Prereq: None

THEA217 Performing Democracy: Theater, Activism, and Community Engagement

This course will give students the opportunity to use theater as a tool for community engagement and social activism. No theater experience is required, but students will be asked to make informal presentations of texts related to issues of social justice, climate change, health care, and economic equality in a variety of community settings that may include senior citizen homes, public schools, or political campaign rallies. During election years these presentations may involve re-enactments of presidential debates and political speeches by figures from Greta Thunberg, Chief Joseph, James Baldwin, and Barack Obama to Richard Nixon, William F. Buckley, Emma Goldman, and Donald Trump. These presentations will be designed to elicit discussion and debate from community audiences and encourage those community members to vote and participate in the democratic process as advocates for the principles they believe in most strongly. Students will collaborate with their community partners in creating new performances that give voice to their experience and concerns.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA220 Performing Indonesia

This course will examine the theater, dance, and puppetry of Indonesia in the context of its cultural significance in Indonesia and in the West. Students will read a variety of texts related to Indonesian history, myth, and religion. Students will also read books and essays by anthropologists Hildred Geertz, Clifford Geertz, and Margaret Mead to understand how the arts are integrated into the overall life of the island archipelago. Artifacts of physical culture will also be examined, including the palm-leaf manuscripts that are quoted in many performances; the paintings that depict the relationship between humans, nature, and the spirit world that are the subject of many plays; and the masks and puppets that often serve as a medium for contacting the invisible world of the gods and ancestors. Translations of Indonesian texts will be analyzed and adapted for performance. The direct and indirect influence of Indonesian performance and history on the West will be discussed by examining the work of theater artists such as Robert Wilson, Arianne Mnouchkine, Lee Breur, and Julie Taymour, who have all collaborated with Balinese performers.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: CEAS229, DANC220
Prereq: None

THEA221 Rescripting America for the Stage

This is a writing course for students interested in the study and practice of adapting texts for performance from a variety of source materials related to all forms of American culture from the revolution to hip hop. Initially our primary source material for adaptation will be Herman Melville's "Confidence Man." We will examine a range of performance texts adapted from nontheatrical sources, including Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" and Dario Fo's subversive rewrite of Columbus' voyages, "Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas." Ancient Greek drama will also be studied for its dramatic structure and for its significance as a source for American adaptations such as Lee Breuer's "Gospel at Colonus." This course counts as a workshop and techniques course for the Writing Certificate.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA222 Re-imagining Dante's Inferno: Social Justice and the Arts

Sentenced to death for crimes he did not commit, Dante Alighieri wrote his epic poem about a journey from hell to heaven in an impoverished state of exile. Drawing on innovative techniques of music, dance, painting, and theater Dante denounced political corruption and social injustice in a story that has inspired artists throughout the world to create new work about the search for freedom, including the Russian dissident poet Osip Mandelstam, Black revolutionary playwright Amiri Baraka, the Chinese artist/activist Wei Wei, and 17th century prisoners of the Inquisition. Students will read selected cantos from Dante's "Commedia," consider contemporary news accounts of modern equivalents to medieval injustices, examine previous adaptations of the poem, and devise their own responses to Dante in the art-form of their choice (theater, dance, poetry, playwriting, rap, music, spoken-word, visual arts).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA222Z Neo-Futurist Radio: Experiments in Audio

This course will immerse students in the unique form of performance-making called Neo-Futurism as well as teach them how to create their own Neo-Futuristic work for radio. The four key principles of Neo-Futurism are (1) you are who you are, (2) you are doing what you're doing, (3) you are where you are, and (4) the time is now. These guiding principles shape honest, personal, timely, relatable stories that are crafted with compelling framing and presented in audio or on stage.



During the intensive, students will learn how to express their voice through the Neo-Futurist lens in writing exercises, study of specific works, and visits from members of the New York, Chicago, and San Francisco Neo-Futurist ensembles. Students will also be introduced to techniques of sound recording and editing (working primarily with the software Adobe Audition), in addition to expansive and experimental methods of developing sonic perspectives for their work. The course will culminate with students writing, performing, recording, and designing a small collection of Neo-Futurist audio plays to be featured in a special episode of the show "Hit Play" along with pieces from students at Oberlin College. These pieces will be developed throughout the course by methods of group critique, generative feedback, and sound designing sessions. Online Course. Special Schedule: 10 a.m.-12 p.m. + 1 p.m.-3 p.m. (1/10-1/11, 1/13, 1/16, 1/18, 1/20); 1 p.m.-5 p.m. (1/12, 1/17, 1/19, 1/23)
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA223 Femme Fashion and Culture in America: 18th to 21st century

In this course, students will explore through a hands-on design approach the history of women's fashion and clothing in America and Europe. This history is long and diverse, with dress styles changing rapidly as the world and its expectations of women adapted and developed. In this course, you will study how social and economic change affected women's fashion in America--from the societal distinctions and separations of classes in the 18th century to the ready-to-wear era through the 21st century and the way it has shaped the female experience. We will analyze this through plays from each period, visual research, costume renderings, and materials research.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA231 Classic Spanish Plays: Love, Violence, and (Poetic) Justice on the Early Modern Stage

From 1580 to 1690, Spanish and Latin American playwrights created one of the great dramatic repertoires of world literature, as inventive, varied, and influential as the classical Greek and Elizabethan-Jacobean English traditions. A distinguishing feature of this theatrical tradition is the unusual prominence it lent to actresses (and roles written for them), as well as to women in the paying audiences. This profit-driven popular entertainment of its day appealed to the learned and illiterate, to women and men, and to rich and poor alike. And the plays correspondingly mixed high and low characters, language, genres, and sources, with results regularly attacked by moralists. Vital, surprising, and ingenious, they exposed the creative tension between art and profit on a new scale, a tension that remains alive for us. We will examine five of the greatest of these plays by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (in Mexico or "New Spain") in a variety of genres and modes (history, epic, romantic comedy, tragedy, Islamic borderland, metatheater, parody, siege play, philosophical and theological drama), with their deft character portraits (the original Don Juan by Tirso; Calderón's "Spanish Hamlet" Segismundo; Lope's spitfire diva Diana, the Countess of Belflor; and Sor Juana's cross-dressing comic virtuosi) and their spirited dialogue, inventive plots, and dazzling metrical variety. We will look at the social conditions that enabled the Spanish stage to serve as a kind of civic forum, where conflicts between freedom and authority or desire and conformism could be acted out and the fears, hopes, dangers, and pleasures generated by conquest, urbanization, trade, shifting gender roles, social mobility, religious reform, regulation of matrimony and violence, and clashing intellectual and political ideals could be aired. We pay particular attention to the shaping influence of women on the professional stage (in contrast to England) and to performance spaces and traditions. Organized around the careful reading of five key play-texts in Spanish, together with historical, critical, and theoretical readings, this course assumes no familiarity with the texts, with Spanish history, or with literary analysis. However, an interest in engaging these wonderful plays closely, imaginatively, and historically is essential. There will be opportunities to pursue performance, adaptation, and translation.



This counts as a Theater Method course for the Theater Major.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN231, COL313
Prereq: None

THEA232 Instrument-Body

The ancient Greek word organon meant both instrument and sense organ, hence the development of a shared word in English for organ (as in a Hammond B3 organ) and organ (as in a kidney). This etymological overlap opens onto a set of generative questions into the nature of instruments: Are they inside or outside the body? Is the body an instrument? If the body is an instrument, who plays it? If an instrument is outside the body, what kind of object is it--a fetish? a prosthetic? an enhancement? an extension? a tool? a commodity? a technology?--and what does it do to the player? Can experimenting with new body-instrument relations become a pathway towards re-organ-izing the body and its relations? Instrument-Body is both a seminar and a studio course that takes these questions as a point of departure for creative and critical experimentation. We will read widely across the fields of musicology, art history, performance studies, queer studies, and critical race studies to investigate questions of instrumentality, embodiment, and technology. In addition, we will create performances across three units: "make an instrument," "break an instrument," and "make yourself an instrument." Students who already play instruments are encouraged to enroll, as are students that have no preexisting relationship to musical instruments.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC232
Prereq: None

THEA233 All Ah We: Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Drama & Performance

What are the dramatic utterances of Afro-Caribbean artists? How do Afro-Caribbean playwrights and other narrative-based performance artists present "Caribbean" and/or "West Indian" subjectivities in ways that are shared, yet critically different? In what ways are Afro-Caribbean dramas and performance pieces repositories for the practical, the theoretical, the sociological, the political, the imagined, and the lost? In answering these questions and more, we examine these textual and embodied expressions from the complicated crossroads of class, creolization, diaspora, ethnicity, folklore, gender, history, indentured servitude, isolation, language, race, religion, and slavery. At all times, this course revels in the polyphony that is Afro-Caribbean drama and performance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL233, AFAM233, CHUM233
Prereq: None

THEA235 Writing on and as Performance

This course focuses on developing descriptive critical and creative writing skills in relation to both witnessing and staging live performance. Through close readings of texts by authors including José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer Doyle, Eileen Myles, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, Lidia Yuknavitch, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Glenn Ligon, Eve Sedgwick, Fred Moten, and Billy Ray Belcourt, this course will challenge students to craft ideas and arguments by enhancing critical and creative writing skills. We will experiment with style and form from academic arguments, to performance lectures, artist interviews, and free-form creative prose essays. Students will complete in-class writing assignments and exercises in response to written, recorded, and live performances by a range of contemporary artists. Students will also be asked to complete hybrid creative writing assignments in response to prompts that imagine writing as always in conversation with performance. More specifically, students will write pieces about embodiment, sound, and the visual. This class is particularly interested in ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are shaped by language, and how language as a performative tool can be a site for "insurrection" (Moten) and "listening in detail" (Vazquez).



This course encourages students to experiment with their writing practices. Over the course of the semester students will be asked to write four separate creative/critical pieces, all of which will be workshopped in the space of the classroom.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: ENGL278, FGSS235
Prereq: None

THEA235Z Writing On and As Performance

This course focuses on developing descriptive critical and creative writing skills in relation to both witnessing and doing live performance. Through close readings of texts by authors including José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer Doyle, Eileen Myles, Lydia Davis, Hilton Als, Glenn Ligon, Claudia Rankine, Eve Sedgwick, Fred Moten, and Ann Pellegrini, this course will challenge students to craft ideas and arguments by enhancing critical reading skills, creative thinking, and clear writing. We will experiment with style and form from academic essays to performative writing, performance lectures, artist interviews, and free-form prose. Students will complete in-class writing assignments and exercises in response to written, recorded, and live performances by a range of contemporary artists. This class is particularly interested in ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are shaped by language, and how language as a performative tool can be a site for "insurrection" (Moten), "gaps, overlaps, dissonances" (Sedgwick), and "listening in detail" (Vazquez). Online course. Special schedule: 11am - 4pm (EST) January 10-13, 16-19.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: ENGL278Z
Prereq: None

THEA236Z Writing the Body

How does the body write? Do we trace our words with fingers and toes, with a pen and paper, with flour or glitter or dust or the soles of our feet? Can the written word remind us that we are more than our eyes or our heads? Writing the body is an attempt to link the worlds of the written and the somatic through the act of writing. This class is both a generative creative writing course and a theoretical exploration of the ways in which the body has been rendered in literature, poetry, and philosophy. Putting queer studies, disability studies, Black studies, and Indigenous studies into conversation with prose, plays, and poetry, students will explore different strategies of embodied writing. Looking to the work of Maggie Nelson, Jean-Luc Nancy, Eileen Myles, Christina Sharpe, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Hortense Spillers, Eve Tuck, Billy Ray Belcourt, Torrey Peters, Wendy Ortiz, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jordy Rosenberg, Gabrielle Civil, Ursula Le Guin, adrienne maree brown, and Frank O'Hara students will produce a written work that moves promiscuously between theory and creative nonfiction.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: FGSS233Z, ENGL255Z
Prereq: None

THEA237 Performance Art

This course can be understood as an ephemeral, time-based art, typically centered on an action or artistic gesture that has a beginning and an end, carried out or created by an artist. It also contains the elements of space, time, and body. This hands-on course explores the history and aesthetics of performance art and how it relates to the performing arts (dance and theater). In a project-based format, students conduct performance assignments and conceptual research within the gaps that exist between performative art forms. The course focuses on analyzing and studying artists who used the concepts of chance, failure, or appropriation in their work.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: DANC237
Prereq: None

THEA238 The Intercultural Stage: Migration and the Performing Arts in the Hispanic World

Hybridity, heterogeneity, transnationalism, and interculturalism are just a few of the terms that have proliferated within the marketplace of ideas over the past several years as reflections, from within the field of critical theory, of one of the contemporary world's dominant social realities: the massive displacement of peoples across borders and the creation of constricted multicultural zones of interaction and conflict within the confines of single nations. The Spanish-speaking world has been affected by this phenomenon in particular ways, in both Spain and North America. In this course, we will study how Spanish, Mexican, and Chicano playwrights and stage artists working in various genres have responded to this reality, how and why they have chosen to craft the collective experience of the border as performance, and how they have addressed the cultural and political tensions that are associated with this experience. The framework for our study will be comparative in both content and format. We will focus on two borders--the Strait of Gibraltar and the Río Grande (Río Bravo)--and on the two corresponding migratory experiences: from North and sub-Saharan Africa into Spain, and from Latin America into the U.S. This course will be taught simultaneously at Wesleyan and at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, Spain. When possible, classes will be linked through videoconferencing. Wesleyan students will collaborate with their counterparts in Spain on various projects and presentations. In general, this course is designed to help students develop skills of critical analysis while increasing their Spanish language proficiency and intercultural awareness.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN258, LAST259
Prereq: None

THEA239 Songwriting Workshop

In this course, students will learn the basics of songwriting including form, lyric writing, chord progression, rhythm, storytelling, etc. We will focus first on "traditional" song form and its component parts (verse, chorus, bridge), and then branch out to less traditional and freer forms. We will discuss lyrics in depth and analyze lyric-writing techniques in various genres such as pop, rock, rap, musical theater, and others. As time, interest, and abilities allow, we will also delve into the world of music theory with an emphasis on function and structure. Students will be guided through practical matters such as transcription, recording, and publishing on social media platforms, so that they can apply the principles and guidelines discussed in class under real world circumstances.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA243 Chinese Theater and Drama

This seminar examines Chinese theater and drama from their beginnings to the late 20th-century. We engage dramatic texts as well as performance practices; thus, the course draws on material from theater history, performance and acting conventions, and the literary history of drama. Readings and discussions span major genres of dramatic writing and their different modes of performance, including the dramatic genres of zaju, chuanqi, and modern/contemporary spoken drama, and performance styles of Beijing opera, Kun opera (Kunqu), and huaju (spoken drama). Play topics range from ghost stories to romances, historical/political dramas to comedy. We explore the legacies of specific actors, including the famous Mei Lanfang; consider experiments in modern Chinese drama; and compare Chinese and "Western" ideas of theater (such as those put forth by Stanislavsky and Brecht). To the greatest extent possible, we will engage materially and physically with Chinese theater and drama history through archive visits and performance workshops.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CEAS
Identical With: CEAS243, WLIT222
Prereq: None

THEA245 Acting I

This studio course will explore the fundamentals of acting and how they are applicable to all areas of life, regardless of vocation. A wide range of exercises will be used to develop relaxation, concentration, and the imagination, and to free the body and voice of tension. Students will examine the creative process practically and theoretically, through exercises including games, improvisation, monologues, and scene work. Emphasis will be placed on building confidence, cultivating each artist's individual voice, and approaching the work with a deep sense of curiosity, generosity, joy, and serious play.



For more information on Acting I, please visit: https://youtu.be/lKS7g1DMD58



This counts as a theater arts course for the theater major.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA248 Ethical Design for Stage and Fashion

Now more than ever we must look at the way we as consumers and large businesses are impacting our planet as well as the future of our planet. It has been estimated that 85 percent of our clothing ends up burned or in landfills each year and that the average American throws away about 81 pounds of clothing every year, and that's just America! In this class students will tackle a variety of hands-on projects that will explore clothing, wig, hat and accessory construction using unconventional materials. Students will explore their personal habits as a consumer of "fast fashion" and the implications fast fashion has on our economy and planet, as well as inspecting the fashion, theater and film industry participation in fashion waste. Students will also explore ways in which society can embrace sustainability and become more eco-friendly. By the end of the semester students will have a new or broader understanding of ethical and sustainable fashion and how to apply it to their everyday lives moving forward as well as a range of projects to demonstrate these learned skills. Some of the questions we will explore in this class: What does sustainable fashion mean? What is ethical fashion? Do we need ethical fashion? What are small and large ways we as individuals and large businesses can lesson our fashion waste?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA254 The World of Federico García Lorca: Tradition and Modernity in the Spanish Avant-Garde

This course focuses on one of the most charismatic authors of the 20th century. Known primarily as a poet, playwright, and public intellectual, Federico García Lorca cultivated a literary language whose allure has proven to be timeless. By exploring the reasons for this, we will heighten our sensitivity not only to the magical power of Lorca's writing but to the potentially transformative power of language and literature in general.



Lorca's writing (1919-1936) spans a pivotal historical crossroads, when avant-garde artists sought to forge a new, revolutionary style representative of the profound social and political changes sweeping the world. Lorca, like so many others of his day, did so fully cognizant of the national traditions within which he worked, and with a keen desire to modernize those traditions. We aim to develop a deep understanding of how Lorca's verse, plays, and high-profile initiatives intersect with his context in these terms.



Please visit the course web site at http://span254.site.wesleyan.edu/ to review in detail the materials, objectives, and modes of assessment for this course.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN254
Prereq: None

THEA259 Face the Blank Page

A 13-week course for the beginning playwright. Students will read 12 plays and write essays on each one, in which they will explore the creation of the play. The why of it. Who is the main character, what do they want, what's stopping them from getting it, and finally, what is the point of no return? Students will look at the time and society in which the play is placed. What obstacles were part of their world; what did they have to overcome, and what did they have to accept? Every play will also serve as a prompt for a writing exercise that students will be responsible for. Students will take a character or situation from the play and make it their own. Also, as a group, the class will write an original play. Each student will be assigned a scene, and week by week the play will come together. This collective creation will be inspired by a song; everyone will have the same song, and each student will continue the play based on the scene that preceded it. Each student will be a part of building the structure of the play and will be able to put their own stamp on it.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA261 Sites of Resistance & Memory: Theater, Performance & Political Consciousness in Contemporary Spain

Compared to other literary genres, and given its essentially social (public) format, theater is an especially vulnerable mode of cultural expression and, therefore, can easily fall victim to both overt (institutionalized) and covert (social) systems of censorship. The tendency for authoritarian regimes to scrutinize stage practices is exemplified by the state censorship that prevailed under Franco (1939-1975) and that prompted Spanish playwrights to develop subtle strategies for resisting authority and for addressing the crucial social and political concerns of the day. The parliamentary regime born in the aftermath of the dictator's death in 1975 ushered in an era of experimentation unprecedented in recent Spanish cultural history. During these years, playwrights have increasingly embraced the struggle against more covert (social, market-driven) forms of censorship in attempting to craft a new social order for a new political context: a democratic mindset that will serve to solidify the foundations of the young democratic state. Our goal in this course is to trace these trends through a close reading of key works by the major Spanish playwrights active since 1950. We will focus on context, on how theater, society, and politics are intertwined, by evaluating both works of dramatic literature themselves and the place and meaning of the public, commercial, and alternative theater circuits where many of these plays were premiered. Our aim, broadly, is to understand the extent to which collective memory and national identity, as staged over the past three-quarters of a century, have become a battleground where Spaniards either seek or resist reconciliation with legacies of repression.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN261
Prereq: None

THEA263 Mythic & Modern: Reappropriating Classical Themes in Contemporary Drama and Performance

What does it mean to defy the authority of the patriarch, of family, or of government? How do these structures of authority intersect in contemporary society? How do we, today, understand "destiny"? How do we challenge it, and what are the consequences for doing so? How do we break the patterns of shame and disenfranchisement inherited from the shared past? These are just some of the social, political, and ethical concerns transmitted over time by playwrights, stage and performance artists, and film directors who treat classical myths as valuable constructs for interrogating our contemporary world and society. In this collaborative, project-based course we explore how classical myths have been appropriated within the modern Italian and Italophone cultural context. Just as important as our study and discussion of modern adaptations of classical models are the staged readings of key scenes incorporated strategically throughout the semester that help us develop an organic understanding of the material from the inside. Our overarching aims include: 1) exposing what persists in modern adaptations of classical myths, 2) tracking the kernels of change that the adaptations present, and 3) understanding why performers over time, working in disparate cultural milieus, continue to seek and derive inspiration from classical myths. The mythic figures we examine may include any of the following: Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Oedipus and Medea, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, as well as figures from the Oresteia and from such epics as Homer's "Iliad" and Virgil's "Aeneid." This course is taught in conjunction with ITAL263 and FREN263. The final collaborative performance, scheduled during the final exams period, will involve students from across the Romance Languages and offers the unique opportunity for cohort building among students of French, Italian, and Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL263
Prereq: ITAL221

THEA265 Acting for the Camera: Film, Theater, and Television in the "Post"-Pandemic World

This studio course will explore the fundamentals of acting for the camera. A wide range of exercises and techniques will be used to cultivate a sense of ease and freedom and to develop the imagination, relaxation, concentration, focus and technical skills required to create life in front of the camera. The course will explore both film and television, and include auditioning and current industry film/tv practices, as well as how to navigate Zoom and other online platforms in professional readings, workshops, livestreams, and auditions. By the end of the course, students will have honed techniques enabling them to bring their full selves to the camera with confidence and a lack of self-consciousness, and be familiar with self-tapes, auditioning, and current industry practices and protocols in the film/TV/theater industry.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA265Z Acting for the Camera: Film, Theater and Television in the Age of Zoom

This studio course will explore the fundamentals of acting for the camera. A wide range of exercises and techniques will be used to cultivate a sense of ease and freedom and to develop the imagination, relaxation, concentration, focus and technical skills required to create life in front of the camera. The course will explore both film and television, and include auditioning and current industry film/tv practices, as well as how to navigate ZOOM and other online platforms in professional readings, workshops, livestreams, and auditions. By the end of the course, students will have honed techniques enabling them to bring their full selves to the camera with confidence and a lack of self-consciousness, and be familiar with self-tapes, auditioning, and current industry practices and protocols in the film/tv/theater industry.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA266 Black Performance Theory

What does it mean to perform identity, to perform race, to perform blackness? How is blackness defined as both a radical aesthetic and an identity? In this course, we will focus on theater and performance as a resource for thinking about black history, identity, and radical politics in excess of the written word. Following recent work in Black Studies and Performance Studies, this class will pay particular attention to the doing of blackness, the visible, sonic, and haptic performances that give over to a radical way of seeing, feeling, and being in an anti-black world. Plays, films, and texts might include works by Fred Moten, Alexander Weheilye, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Suzan Lori-Parks, Danai Gurira, Shane Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Dee Rees, Celiné Sciamma, Saidiya Hartman, Huey P. Copeland, Darby English, Lorraine Hansberry, Hilton Als, Spike Lee, Isaac Julien, Martine Syms, Tavia Nyong'o, and Daphne Brooks.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: AFAM266, ENGL263, FGSS276
Prereq: None

THEA267 Revolution Girl-Style Now: Queer Performance Strategies

Looking to the rich cultural history of queer and feminist performance in the U.S, this course examines performances of gender, sexuality, obscenity, and refusal. In this class, we will ask how the terms "feminist" and "queer" come to determine a specific piece of theater or performance art. Is it the author's own political affiliation that establishes the work as feminist? Is it the audience's reading that gathers a work of art under a queer rubric? Furthermore, where does feminist performance meet queer performance? Topics will include feminist body art, AIDS activism, queer nightlife, installation and performance art, video art, and memoir. Focusing in on strategies for engaging the many meanings of the words "queer," we will pair theoretical readings with theatrical sites.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: FGSS267
Prereq: None

THEA269 Introduction to Performance Studies

Performance Studies is an interdisciplinary field (brushing up against anthropology, theater studies, and linguistics, critical race studies, psychoanalysis & queer theory) that orbits around conceptions of the live. This course will introduce students to the history of performance studies by looking at key texts that have defined the field. We will use the "performance" as a concept and lens to discuss art, theater, dance, music, everyday performances, and presentations of the self. Through close reading of theoretical texts, visual art works, and live performances will explore the social and cultural importance of performance and performativity, especially as they come to bear upon queer and minoritarian lives and dreams.



This counts as an Expanded Field of Theater course for the Theater Major.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA273 BlaQueer Sounds: Queer Negotiations in African American Music

The term "BlaQueer," first coined by Tabais Wilson, is an invention of the intersectionality era; an acknowledgment of the unique and multifaceted experiences/identities formed at the nexus of racial, gendered, and sexual marginalization. In creating the portmanteau BlaQueer, Wilson underscores that, for people who are both Black and queer, these identities are inseparable, immutable, and irreducible. While the term BlaQueer, and by extension the concept it represents, is fairly new, there are long histories of Black queer people navigating and negotiating identity, revolutionizing and contributing to discourses on race, class, and gender. This course offers an exploration of the BlaQueer expressions, movements, and (most importantly) people that transformed American culture through music. While this course follows a historical arc, the primary aim of this course is to engage BlaQueer musical lineages through a critical interdisciplinary academic lens; accordingly, this course incorporates gender/women's studies, African American studies, performance studies, queer studies, and musicology.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM273, MUSC273
Prereq: None

THEA276 Body, Voice, Text: Theater and the Transmission of Experience

Theater can and does exist as a written text, but we all know that its existence on the page is meant as a precursor to its live performance out in the world. In this course, our approach to a series of Latin American plays will be informed by competing notions of the theater as both a field of academic inquiry (built on reading, study, research, and interpretation) and also as an art form (built on reading, rehearsal, repetition, direction, and interpretation). We will combine traditional academic study of the written dramatic text with theater workshop exercises meant to train actors for the delivery of the staged performance text. Students will thus gain an understanding of how academic study and and workshop rehearsal take different approaches to what is essentially the same goal/problem: how to interpret the text written by the dramatist, whether for meaning or performance. This course will be taught in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN276, LAST276
Prereq: None

THEA279 Music Theater Workshop

This class will be a collaborative, hands-on workshop for playwrights and composers who will work together throughout the semester, simulating the real-world process of writing a piece of musical theater. Students will explore standard works in the musical theater canon as well as less traditional pieces, concentrating on dramaturgical elements specific to the form (opening numbers, "I Want/I Am" songs, extended musical sequences, act one finales, 11 o'clock numbers, etc.). Students will then apply this knowledge to their own work as they generate scenes, songs, and outlines for libretti. Students will leave the class with a grasp of the classic components of this art form, hopefully inspired to follow or bend the "rules" to suit their own creative instincts.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: MUSC230
Prereq: THEA199 OR MUSC103 OR MUSC201

THEA280 Award-Winning Playwrights

With textual analysis and intellectual criticism at its core, this course examines the dramatic work of award-winning playwrights through theoretical, performative, and aesthetic frames. The first half of our investigation explores companion texts written by premier playwrights. In the latter end of the course, we examine singular texts written by acclaimed newcomers. A select range of reviews and popular press publications help to supplement our discussions. In all cases, we are interested in surveying the ways in which these playwrights work within varying modes of dramatic expression and focus their plays on such topics as class, ethnicity, era, disability, gender, locale, nationality, race, and/or sexuality.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL281, AFAM279
Prereq: None

THEA281 Introduction to Directing

Intro to Directing provides an entryway into the mechanics and ethos of directing. Basic aspects of staging, script analysis, and planning the rehearsal process will be covered, as well as leading a room, working with actors, and developing the director's voice and vision. This class is also a chance to deeply consider together the role of theater in the context of our current social, political, and environmental realities. Why take this class, NOW? Why choose to direct theater, NOW? How does theater as an industry need to change, and how can theater-makers offer more care to themselves, each other, our audiences? As a director, what role do we have to play in righting wrongs, providing alternate realities, creating new futures? This course is part of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice course cluster, and we will look at these questions in part through a sustainability lens, using Adrienne Maree Brown's Emergent Strategy as our guide.



D1 is taught in conjunction with The Actor's Experience. Majors and non-majors welcome. The class is not open to first years.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA245

THEA284 Dressing the Imagination: From Page to Stage

What does it mean to create a character in an imaginary world? How do your favorite fictional characters go from imagination and concept to the costume you see on the screen or the stage? And how does the collaborative process impact a costume designer's vision, as well as the costume maker's execution? In this course we will answer all of these questions. Throughout the semester we will look at a variety of scenes and characters from plays and musicals. Students will then apply research and design to create half-scale costumes. Working in a collaborative design environment students will have the opportunity to explore their ideas in a safe space, gain confidence in leadership, oral communication, presentation, self-management, and costume creation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA285 Acting II: It's All Greek to Me

This studio course will explore performance and adaptation of classical text. A wide range of exercises and techniques will be used to cultivate a sense of ease and freedom, and to develop the imagination, relaxation, concentration, focus, and technical skills required for heightened language and text. We will be utilizing Greek myths and characters as archetypes. The course will also include a devising portion, whereby the students will offer up an original contemporary take on their chosen archetype/myth via any style of performance, including song, poetry, monologue, scene, and film. Independent writing and attendance at Hadestown in Hartford is also required, and the course will end on March 8, 2023.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA245

THEA286 Solo Performance

This course will provide students with acting and playwriting skills that will enable them to research, write and perform a solo performance piece based on a subject of their choice. The work of Anna Deveare Smith, Roger Guenvere Smith, Dario Fo and Franca Rame among others, will be studied as models for the creation of solo performance pieces that combine artistic virtuosity with a concern for social justice.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA290 Staging Race in Early Modern England

This course analyzes the dramatic representation of race in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We will examine the historical emergence of race as a cultural construct in relation to related conceptions of complexion, the humoral body, gender, sexuality, and religious, ethnic, and national identity. Readings focus on three racialized groups: Moors, Jews, and Native American "Indians." After reading the play-texts in relation to the historical moment in which they were first produced (using both primary and secondary sources) we will then consider their post-Renaissance performance histories, including literary, theatrical, and film adaptations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL280, FGSS320, CHUM289
Prereq: None

THEA291 French and Francophone Theater in Performance

This course introduces students to the richness of the French and Francophone dramatic repertories, on the one hand, and, on the other, invites them to discover acting techniques (such as movement, physicalization, memorization, mise en scène, and so forth). Students will thus put their language skills into motion, and the course will culminate in a public performance at the end of the semester. (Special accommodations will be made for students who do not wish to perform publicly). Taught exclusively in French, the course will place particular emphasis on the improvement of students' oral skills through pronunciation and diction exercises, all the while polishing their written expression and enhancing their aural comprehension.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.25
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN281
Prereq: None

THEA292 Spectacles of Violence in Early Modern French Tragedy

The French Kingdom endured decades of socio-political unrest and religious wars during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The tragedies that emerged from these bloody conflicts--many of which staged physical violence--not only reflected but also actively participated in the debates surrounding the 'troubles civils.' In this advanced seminar, we will study such tragedies in order to examine the uses, functions, and ethics of spectacular violence, in plays that adapt mythological stories (e.g., Medea), religious narratives (e.g. David and Goliath, Saint Cecilia), and current events (e.g., executions, assassinations, and regicides) for the stage. We will read the plays alongside and against the competing theoretical frameworks of violence found in various poetic treatises of the time period, yet we will also keep in mind the practical constraints and conditions of performance in early modern France. Finally, we will reflect on why we should read these plays today and how they inform our contemporary moment. Readings, written assignments, and discussion will be in French.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN306, COL306
Prereq: None

THEA297 Latin American Theater and Performance

This course will focus on the history, theory, and practice of theater and performance in Latin America in the 20th century. We will be particularly interested in the intercultural aspects of Latin American theater and performance that have reinvented and reinvigorated European dramatic forms through their constant interaction with non-Western cultural expressions in the Americas. We will examine a wide variety of performance practices, including avant-garde theater, community theater, street performance and agitprop, solo, and collective theater. The syllabus is loosely organized in a chronological fashion, structured more importantly around critical themes in Latin American history, culture, and society in the 20th century. We will take as our primary source material both readings and video recordings, when available, that will be supplemented by a wide variety of historical, critical, and theoretical background readings, including texts written by theater practitioners, theorists, and critics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN279, LAST266
Prereq: None

THEA301 Immersive Theater: Experimental Design, Material Culture and Audience-Centered Performance

This course offers a comprehensive exploration of Third Rail Projects' approach to crafting and performing in immersive performance formats. Students will work closely alongside Co-Artistic Director Tom Pearson to explore Third Rail's toolbox of techniques, including:



- Developing presence and clarity around audience engagement

- Remaining spontaneous and responsive to the changing landscape of an active audience

- Generating game play for crafting immersive scenes

- Understanding ritual, narrative, and audience initiation through the study of a scene from one of our immersive productions
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: DANC311
Prereq: None

THEA302 Contemporary Theater: Theories and Aesthetics

This class will serve as an introduction to Theater & Performance Studies, interdisciplinary fields that brush against anthropology, linguistics, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and art history. We will approach "performance" as a practice and a lens. Students will explore close reading strategies for both textual and live performance events and examine live art, theater, everyday performances, and presentations of the self. This course will pay particular attention to the social and cultural importance of performance and performativity, especially as they come to bear upon queer, black, Latinx, and indigenous lives and dreams.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: CHUM344
Prereq: THEA105 OR THEA150 OR THEA245 OR [THEA199 or ENGL269] OR THEA185

THEA305 Lighting Design for the Theater

This course will introduce students to the history, basic principles, and practical application of lighting design through lecture, discussion, demonstration, and practical application. Students will develop a deeper understanding of the methodology and applications of light in storytelling, which will help them communicate with collaborators.



This course counts towards the Theater Arts category for the THEA major.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: IDEA305
Prereq: THEA105 OR DANC105

THEA306 Techniques of the Liar: Performance, Artifice, Fraud

This seminar is a cultural and intellectual history of fraudulence, fiction, and faking it. We will explore both specific performance practices as well as theorizations of artifice, fraud, and authenticity. Topics will include illusion, ventriloquism, and sleight of hand; mimetic acting and the manufacture of "emotion"; dance technique and the concealment of effort; and musical improvisation and the politics of invention. We will also consider the complexities of drag, camp, and minstrelsy and historicize their surrounding discourses, centering the contributions of feminist, queer, and critical race studies. Looking at a range of (predominantly U.S.-based) practices from the mid-19th century to the present, we will consider how artifice and theatricality have been historically reviled as qualities inherent to femininity and queerness, respectively; how "authenticity" is both gendered and racialized; and how hiding, fabulation, exaggeration, and duplicity have also offered means of freedom or resistance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM306, FGSS305
Prereq: None

THEA308 Composition in the Arts

Composition, the manner in which elements are combined or related to form a whole in space and time, is a basic practice in all the arts. This course brings together practitioners from diverse art forms and traditions to address the basic issue of composition.



In this seminar, we will explore the compositional process through assignments that address the interacting concepts of site and information. By "site," we mean a semantic field extending through corporeal, environmental, and social dimensions. By "information," we mean representations abstracted from sites, "meaningless" when independent of any specific semantic interpretation. Participants will compose individual and collaborative interventions in a wide range of sites--public, private, physical, and electronic--in response to the problems posed.



This course is permission-of-instructor, and is intended for upper-level majors in Art, Dance, Film, Music, and Theatre, and others with sustained compositional practices suitable to the course.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC308, ARST308
Prereq: None

THEA310 Shakespeare's Macbeth: From Saga to Screen

A close reading of Shakespeare's play that will position the play in terms of its historical and political contexts and its relation to early modern discourses on the feminine, witchcraft, and the divinity of kings. We will begin with a consideration of the historical legends that constitute Shakespeare's "sources," then read the play slowly and closely, coupling our discussions with readings from the period, exploring how Shakespeare's contemporaries thought of the political and cultural issues raised in the play. We will then compare how our contemporaries have recast these concerns by comparing scenes from films of MACBETH from 1948 to the present.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL305
Prereq: None

THEA311 Queer and Trans Aesthetics

This seminar will consider contemporary trans and queer theory foregrounding race, class, disability, migration, diaspora, indigeneity, and colonization alongside the work of BIPOC queer and trans artists in particular. The course's animating (and unfixable!) questions include: How do artists produce and intervene in understandings of gender and/or sexuality through their work? What does it mean for an artist or viewer to describe an image, object, or performance as "queer" or "trans"? What constitutes a "queer" or "trans" reading of visual culture? How might various formulations of "queer" and "trans" relate to, put pressure on, and/or resist "aesthetics"? What is the relationship between an artist's self-identification and/or their resistance to categorization (e.g., in terms of race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, nationality) on the one hand, and audiences' efforts to engage and interpret their art on the other? Put another way: What, if anything, does an artist's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with their art? And what does a viewer's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with how they approach and interpret visual culture? Several artist talks and/or class visits (all virtual) are being organized in conjunction with the seminar.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS331, SOC300, AFAM331, AMST326
Prereq: None

THEA315 Stage Management

This course is intended to provide students with a basic knowledge of stage managing for theater. Students will learn the core essentials to theater collaboration: interpersonal relationships, time and self-management, industry standards, union practices, leadership roles, effective communication and observation. The role of the stage manager is foundational to every theater production. This role has the potential to lift up any collaborative work or hinder it.



Specific topics covered will include working with a director and actors, dramaturgy, managing auditions and rehearsals, props, effective communication tools across many types of theater making, stage management paperwork, technical rehearsals, and running/calling a show.



Potential projects include: Creation of a prompt book, and templates to use while stage managing, calling a pre-produced theatrical piece, and interviewing a professional working Stage Manager
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA316 Advanced Topics in Performance Studies

What does "theory" have to do with "performance"? Furthermore, what is the relationship between thinking and doing ("theory" and "praxis")? If performance studies shifts the frame from an emphasis on being to one of doing, then what does it mean to "do" theory? In this class we will engage works that orbit "the live." We will use performance as a lens to explore questions of liveness, presence, the body, and affect. We will look to both live/recorded performances and recent work in the field of performance studies to explore the cultural significance of performance in our current moment and location. This version of Advanced Topics in Performance Studies is particularly interested in intersectional work between performance and queer of color critique, Indigenous studies, black studies, environmental justice, and transformative justice. In class students will read new work in the field of performance studies, and should be prepared to engage with the activist potential of performance.



While we will engage performance in a number of creative and experimental ways, student projects will take the shape of semester-long critical research papers. Come with or without an idea you want to work on, and we will spend the semester workshopping that idea into a developed paper. This class is especially recommended for anyone interested in doing an honors thesis in theater.



Readings and viewings will include: José Muñoz, Ashon T Crawley, Tavia Nyong'o, Sandra Ruiz, Lou Cornum, Vick Quezada, Judit Butler, Ivan Ramos, Eve Sedgwick, Emily Johnson, The Forge Project, Walter D. Mignolo, Billy Ray Belcourt, Marquis Bey, Christina Sharpe, Morgan Bassichis, Jeremy O. Harris, Miranda Haymon, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA319 Advanced Acting: Shakespeare/Shakespeare Deconstructed

How can acting classical text fuel and feed contemporary performance? Through embodied exploration and physical and vocal exercises, student actors will engage both with Shakespeare's plays and with texts that re-imagine, draw inspiration from, and deconstruct Shakespeare in response to today's world.



Scene study may include: Twelfth Night; Hamlet; Winter's Tale; Othello; Fat Ham; The American Moor; Thrive, Or What You Will; 16 Winters and other possibilities
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA245

THEA322Z Sounding Stories: Developing Contemporary Radio Drama

This course will examine the almost-150-year-old form of the radio drama and ask what its future might sound like. In the 20th century, radio dramas held a place of great influence in entertainment, politics, and revolutionary action. Streaming media of the 21st century has transformed the modern listening landscape, and with it, revitalized the prominence of audio storytelling while opening access to its development. Over the summer session, we will listen to modern approaches to radio drama production, explore their themes and inspirations, and create our own new works of audio theater.



Students will be introduced to sound recording and editing, the specificities of narrative development for audio, as well as experimental applications in the medium. Students will learn to use software (Adobe Audition) and the university's foley/sound studio to craft their projects. Throughout the session, guest practitioners (WNYC, Audible, Spotify, Oral History Association) will visit the class to discuss their unique perspectives on the craft.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA323 Staging Blackness: African American Theater

This course surveys the dynamism and scope of African American dramatic and performance traditions. We begin with a deep historical examination of 19th century blackface minstrelsy that then progresses into a long-view of how black American dramatists and theater-makers have self-fashioned black dramatic narratives, black aesthetics, and black representations into the twenty-first century. In all cases, we are interested in surveying the ways in which these artists work within varying modes of dramatic expression and focus their plays and performances on such topics as class, ethnicity, era, fragmentation, gender, history, region, revolution, nationality, race, sexuality, and spectatorship.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL385, AFAM323, FGSS323
Prereq: None

THEA327 Dangerous Acts: Theater, Transgression, and Social Justice, Ancient and Modern

The first plays in the history of theater feature transgressive acts: murder, illicit sex, violence, and torture. Action-packed, gory, and heart-wrenching, these spectacles of mass entertainment were also staged specifically to "train" citizens to be thoughtful legislators, jurists, and policy makers. They were deliberately crafted to make audiences grapple with demanding questions--legal, ethical, and moral: the "laws" of war; discrimination (based on gender, class, ethnic background); privacy and political participation; confession, guilt, and punishment; anger and sympathy in decision-making, and much more.



In this course, we will read a selection of Greek plays, ancient and modern critical works, and modern adaptations to consider the role of theater in politics, aesthetics, and social and emotional engineering.



Readings from antiquity will include plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes and readings from Plato and Aristotle. Modern works will include plays and writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Sarah Kane, Yael Farber, and movie adaptations.



This course will fall under the Poetry & Performance and History/Social Justice tracks.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: CLST327
Prereq: None

THEA328 Breaking New Ground Residency: The Masses Are Asses Radio Play

As the inaugural recipient of the Breaking New Grounds Development Residency, WesTheater Alum Miranda Haymon '16 will workshop and direct a radio play version of Pedro Pietri's 1984 play "The Masses Are Asses." As part of this course, students will have the opportunity to work with Miranda Haymon and further explore the work of Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri. For their production team, Haymon is looking for one assistant director, two actors, one dramaturg, and one stage manager.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA329 Technical Practice A

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of Theater Department produced works each semester. Students will work under the tutelage of a faculty member, learning skills and techniques through a hands-on, project-based production process.



Student stage managers will have the opportunity to lead or assist the rehearsal process. Student technical directors and master carpenters will assist in bringing the production from the idea and scenic design phase into reality and construction. Student scenic charges will be responsible for the painting of sets. Student master electricians will execute the lighting design of a production. Student prop managers will acquire, build, and source properties for a production. Student assistant costume shop supervisors will assist the costume shop manager with the daily running and operations. Student lead wardrobe and lead run crew positions will supervise the wardrobe and run crews of productions. Student crew members will work on the run crew for projects, such as light board operations, scenic run crew and fly persons, wardrobe, and sound board operations. Student house managers will work with the stage manager and ticket sales to run the front of house for productions. Student program designers will build and maintain digital programs for productions.



The students interested in enrolling in this class should apply for team positions in the production such as stage manager, technical director, master electrician, or crew.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.25
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA105

THEA331 Technical Practice B

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of Theater Department produced works each semester. Students will work under the tutelage of a faculty member, learning skills and techniques through a hands-on, project-based production process.



Student stage managers will have the opportunity to lead or assist the rehearsal process. Student technical directors and master carpenters will assist in bringing the production from the idea and scenic design phase into reality and construction. Student scenic charges will be responsible for the painting of sets. Student master electricians will execute the lighting design of a production. Student prop managers will acquire, build, and source properties for a production. Student assistant costume shop supervisors will assist the costume shop manager with the daily running and operations. Student lead wardrobe and lead run crew positions will supervise the wardrobe and run crews of productions. Student crew members will work on the run crew for projects, such as light board operations, scenic run crew and fly persons, wardrobe, and sound board operations. Student house managers will work with the stage manager and ticket sales to run the front of house for productions. Student program designers will build and maintain digital programs for productions.



The students interested in enrolling in this class should apply for team positions in the production such as stage manager, technical director, master electrician, or crew.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA105

THEA335 Technical Practice C

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of Theater Department produced works each semester. Students will work under the tutelage of a faculty member, learning skills and techniques through a hands-on, project-based production process.



Student stage managers will have the opportunity to lead or assist the rehearsal process. Student technical directors and master carpenters will assist in bringing the production from the idea and scenic design phase into reality and construction. Student scenic charges will be responsible for the painting of sets. Student master electricians will execute the lighting design of a production. Student prop managers will acquire, build, and source properties for a production. Student assistant costume shop supervisors will assist the costume shop manager with the daily running and operations. Student lead wardrobe and lead run crew positions will supervise the wardrobe and run crews of productions. Student crew members will work on the run crew for projects, such as light board operations, scenic run crew and fly persons, wardrobe, and sound board operations. Student house managers will work with the stage manager and ticket sales to run the front of house for productions. Student program designers will build and maintain digital programs for productions.



The students interested in enrolling in this class should apply for team positions in the production such as stage manager, technical director, master electrician, or crew.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA105

THEA337 Insubstantial Pageants: Late Shakespeare

This seminar examines the Center for the Humanities' Spring 2020 theme of "Ephemera" through the lens of four late plays by Shakespeare ("Hamlet," "King Lear," "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest") and their preoccupation with the time, temporality, belatedness, and the ephemerality of theater (and the world-as-stage).



In addition to considering the mutability of the play-texts themselves (several of which exist in multiple versions), we will consider how they refashion their sources, and how they are themselves refashioned in later productions and adaptations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM337, ENGL321
Prereq: None

THEA341 Social Media for Theater Marketing

The use of social media in today's arts industry is ubiquitous and ever-changing. The study of this communication medium through this course will involve current trend research, content creation, assessment of impact and application of lessons learned. Students will research relevant topics for weekly discussion and apply findings to content creation, which will be subject to critical analysis through quantitative and qualitive assessments. Through this study and field work at events and interviews, students will gain basic working knowledge of this interactive arts marketing and its effectiveness. In addition to regular class meetings (schedule to be determined), the majority of the work for this course will be through field work, including researching and attending events, interviewing faculty and students, photo/video editing, and collaborating with graphic design team members. Students will work in Canva or Adobe Design Suite.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA345 Advanced Scene Study: Modern Times and the Old School World

This studio course will explore how classic texts and traditional acting methodology can inform and illuminate our contemporary work. We will dive into this conversation via scene work and creating a piece based on a classical play. We will specifically be focused on contemporary BIPOC artists and their adaptations.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA346 Shakespeare's Islands

How did England's insularity and expansionist ambitions on the world's stage shape Shakespearean dramaturgy in his many plays with island settings? This course, taught in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities' spring 2022 theme of "Islands as Metaphor and Method" considers how Shakespeare's island locales (e.g., in ancient and medieval Britain, the Mediterranean, and the Americas) transformed the Globe theater into a physical and conceptual site for imagining the utopian and dystopian potential of early English nation-building and colonial expansion, and for exploring the poetics of relation and alterity, peripherality and centrality, archaism and futurity. In addition to studying the play-texts themselves, we will consider how their island settings are explored in subsequent theatrical and film productions and adaptations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM364, ENGL377
Prereq: None

THEA347 Plague and Care-Work in Shakespeare's England

Plague exerted an enormous influence on the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and indeed on theater as a commercial enterprise. Pandemic theater closures and quarantines were frequent throughout his career, and it is likely that his son Hamnet died of plague. This seminar examines four Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter's Tale) and their preoccupations with time, temporality, belatedness, mortality and ephemerality (of theater and the world-as-stage) and with an ethics and recognition of the work of care, as these are shaped by the recurrence of plague-a perspective that will allow us to draw connections and discern differences between Shakespeare's time and our own.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM348, ENGL345
Prereq: None

THEA348 Music and Theater of Indonesia

Since the early history of Indonesia, the Indonesian people have continually been in contact with a number of foreign cultures. Particularly, Hinduism, Islam, and the West have had significant impact on the development of Indonesian culture. This course is designed as an introduction to the rich performing arts and culture of Indonesia. A portion of the course is devoted to demonstrations and workshops, including instruction of an Islamic frame drum ensemble, singing, and Gamelan (percussion ensemble of Java and Bali).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: MUSC111
Prereq: None

THEA350 Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing: Arts Journalism

Arts Journalism will give students the opportunity to write about the arts in a variety of short forms that put performance in context for general readers. Students will work in pairs, serving in alternate weeks as either writers or editors. The writing assignments will include live performance reviews, book reviews, program notes, op-eds, feature articles, artist profiles, interviews and grant proposals.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA351 Melodrama Since 1700

Although today melodrama calls up ideas related to film, the term has musical origins: it originally indicated a work in which melos (music) and spoken drama were united in one multimedia format. Eighteenth-century melodrama admitted of many manifestations, encompassing everything from comic operas (like Mozart's Magic Flute, which alternated singing with spoken dialogue) to experimental symphonic works (in which a narrator's declaimed monologue was emotionally painted by the accompanying orchestra). Melodrama in this musical sense persisted through to the twentieth century, and included notable works such as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. But slowly melodrama as a term began to take on connotations relating to one of comic opera's central conceits: hyperbole and exaggeration. Melodrama became synonymous with comic excesses of emotional portrayal. Eventually, during the twentieth century, this meaning fastened onto a constellation of generic implications within the domain of film (think, for example, of Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce). In its afterlife during the twenty-first century, melodrama has sometimes been used pejoratively: it can be employed as an epithet to disqualify the performance of emotion as inappropriately intense, or to designate emotion connected to an ostensibly inappropriate subject. But even in this new sense, melodrama retains an element of its early history insofar as it can be appropriated within subcultures in order to comically mock the traditions of mass culture. This course examines the long history of melodramatic art forms from the eighteenth century through to the present day. Together we will perform close readings of the objects within this rich tradition, supplemented by readings in queer theory, critical theory, and performance studies.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: CHUM351
Prereq: MUSC201 OR MUSC202

THEA352 Following Fornés: Creativity, Intimacy, and Imagination

This course undertakes an investigation and application of the creative process of visionary iconoclast Maria Irene Fornés: a queer, Latinx playwright whose wildly idiosyncratic plays defied both convention and categorization. Fornés' legendary workshops shaped a generation of playwrights, including Nilo Cruz, Caridad Svich, and Sarah Ruhl.



Students will engage with Fornés' own creative process via her ephemera: in this case, the spoken fragments, outtakes, and audio marginalia left behind from the filming of her documentary collaboration with director Michelle Memran, "The Rest I Make Up." As I work to compile and cohere this material into a book, the class will be applying it, directly, to the conception and creation of their own performance works.



Students who are interested in writing/directing/devising live works of performance are best suited to this class. No former experience necessary, but a willingness to create and share live work and writing on a weekly basis is required. Our work will be contextualized by assigned research and writing into Fornés as a key figure of the American theater, and will culminate in the presentation of our creative projects.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM352
Prereq: None

THEA353 Destroying the Audience: Limits of Performance and Representation in the Theater of (Non) Being

Young Jean Lee's Theatre Company, active between 2003 and 2016, is most known for a series of "racial-identity plays," written and directed by Lee, which adopt an experimental approach to the critique of racial politics, driven by the motto "destroy the audience." On the one hand, this course will explore literary and artistic works that express an ambivalent, if not antagonistic, relationship to the presence of an audience. On the other hand, this course will consider the role and function of the audience as a social category by considering how the concept of audience (broadly understood) contributes to cultural production about race and gender as a potentially active element in the creative process. Students can expect to read and/or view drama, visual art, performance, film, and self-writing (autobiography and memoir) which, explicitly or implicitly, address the presence of the audience as a way of tackling larger social and cultural problems related to race and ethnicity. The goal will be to foster an understanding of the politics of gender, sexuality, ability, language, and class that determine how these issues are conceptualized and articulated. This course will employ an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of primary and secondary texts, engaging audience studies, performance studies, ethnic studies, and disability studies, in addition to queer/trans of color, postcolonial, and legal theory, to historically contextualize and theoretically ground a cultural understanding of the relation between audience and racial performance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS353, AMST354, ENGL364
Prereq: None

THEA354 Improvisation: Diasporic Modalities

Freestyle, groove, jam: Improvisation has always been a key tool in the creation and evolution of dances of the African Diaspora. This movement-based course will deepen the inquiry of the Africanist aesthetic in dance through an improvisatory experiential framework. What movement conversations are created through a deep listening to self and our impulses to engage with sound/music, the environment, and our community? How do we honor the self in collective experiences? Students will embody explorations of the improvisatory concepts, sequences, and modalities that are rooted in the dances of: West African, Afro-Beats, Afro-Brazilian, Jamaican Dancehall, Capoeira, Jazz, African American Social Dances, House, and Bomba. We will use the foundational improvisational principles of these dance forms through a balance of play, investigation, and rigor. Studio work will be supplemented with readings, video, and homework assignments geared toward creating new improvisational scores. The course will also include visits from guest artists.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC354
Prereq: None

THEA355 Voice & Movement for Actors: Embodying Imagery and Language into Acting Text

In this advanced acting course students will approach acting text through a physical theatre lens, engaging with voice and movement pedagogies involving abstract imaginative use of the voice and body. These techniques will be used to connect the voice and body to image and text, and to build a physical vocal practice as a tool for professional actors. Personal exploratory and imaginative work will be applied to poetry and to contemporary scene work.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA245

THEA357Z Space and Materiality: Performing Place

Scenography explores and shapes the material world in and through the performative event. In site-specific performances, it transforms place and time to create an alternative reality in which the materiality of the artistic design and the performer's body intervene in the architecture of a place and the spectator's reception of meaning. In this course, we will study site interventions through the lens of street performance, immersive theater, and the theatrical apparatus to build a theoretical and direct understanding of the material potential and limitations of the four key elements involved in the scenographic project -- artistic design, the actor's body, local architecture, and time.



This course is divided into three units: (1) site-specific; (2) street performance; and (3) immersive theater. Each unit includes scholarly readings, assignments in performance and scenography, and specific showings. There will be two written responses for the course (5-to-7-page papers) on two of the works experienced at the festival that demonstrate the student's cumulative grasp of site specificity, scenography, and materiality. There will also be a final media journal showing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC357Z
Prereq: None

THEA359 Space Design for Performance

In this course, students will study, construct, and deconstruct the performative space, whether in the theater or site-based, by analyzing the space as a context to be activated by the body of the performer and witnessed by an audience. Through practical assignments, the class will learn the aesthetic history of the theatrical event (considering plays, rituals, street parades, and digital performances, among others), while developing and discovering the student's own creative process (visual, kinetic, textual, etc.). Students will be guided through each step of the design process, including close reading, concept development, visual research, renderings or drawings, model making and drafting.



In this course, special emphasis is given to contemporary performance as a mode of understanding cultural processes as a relational system of engagement within our ecosystem, while looking at environmental and sustainable design, materials, and the environmental impacts of processing. Students will create and design performance spaces, while realizing scale models and drawings and integrating the notions of design and environmental principles and elements.



Students will have the opportunity to develop skills using 3D-drafting and 3D-modeling software.



This course counts towards the Theater Arts category for the THEA major.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: DANC359, ENVS359, IDEA359
Prereq: THEA105 OR THEA150 OR THEA185 OR ARST131 OR ARST190

THEA360 Media for Performance

This course examines the use of media and technology as it relates to dramaturgy and design for performance. Class time will be used for lecture, discussion, and experimentation, during which we will explore new technologies used in the industry, including projections, motion tracking, and software such as After Effects and Isadora. Throughout the semester, students will use the skills learned to create their own digital performances.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: DANC364, IDEA360
Prereq: None

THEA362 Visualizing Black Remains

This advanced seminar engages African Diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (visual art, performance, film, literature) that grapple with the appetite, effects, and stakes of representing Black remains. What does this visual reproduction make possible or obscure, and what is its relationship to violence? The class will also encourage students to think about the ethics of reparation/repatriation in relation to forms of loss and dispossession that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor visually evidenced (in conventional ways). In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, objecthood, violence, empathy, and reparation?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM362, AFAM363, ANTH362, ENGL363, FGSS362
Prereq: None

THEA363 (Un)Popular Performances/Performances (Im)Populaires

In 1607, a young Scotsman named William Drummond was studying law in Bourges, France, a popular "study-abroad destination" for Scottish students as well as an important stopover city on the routes of itinerant professional and amateur actors. While in Bourges, these actors performed a variety of different kinds of plays, including tragedies, comedies, tragicomedies, pastorals, and farces. Although these performances were often met with hostility from the city's religious authorities, Drummond attended several plays during his stay and, lucky for us, took rather detailed notes about them. His observations from the 1607 "season" are preserved in his personal papers in the National Library of Scotland. This course will use Drummond's notes as a guide to discover and examine other forms of evidence--both traditional and nontraditional--that help us understand what was at stake in theater, performance, and (un)popular culture in late 16th- and early 17th-century France. We will study the ways the past has been organized and cataloged, how traditional sources and research have shaped our view of the past, and how unconventional methodologies can help us locate new sites of knowledge and culture. Written assignments, class discussions, and (most) readings will be in French.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FREN363, COL363, MDST363
Prereq: None

THEA364 Friendship and Collaboration: In Theory, In Practice

How do we conceive of friendship, collaboration, love, and collectivity? In an interview, Michel Foucault stated that the relational task of the homosexual was to "invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure." This course considers theories and performances of relationality, queer belonging, and friendship with an emphasis on forms of belonging and recognition that exceed normative protocols. We will ask how queer practices, Black thought, and Indigenous epistemologies inform our own imaginings of collaborative projects. Beginning with philosophical determinations of friendship, we will branch out to imagine ways in which artists, lovers, friends, and/or co-habitators enact togetherness. This class will focus on theoretical readings and creative exercises and will culminate in a collaborative project.



This counts as an Expanded Field of Theater course for the Theater Major.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: ENGL362
Prereq: None

THEA365 Greek Tragedy: Euripides

Euripides is well known for being experimental and controversial, in his own time and beyond. Aristophanes famously accuses him of corrupting his audience by bringing too much of a democratic sentiment to his plays--women and slaves having way too much to say. Nietzsche much later will attribute to him the very death of tragedy. In this course, we will explore this legacy by reading one of his plays in the original along with diverse approaches to his work. The selection of the play will be determined by the composition of the student-group and previous exposure to Greek drama.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: GRK365
Prereq: None

THEA369 Performance Remains: Slavery in the Black Dramatic Imagination

As sociologist Orlando Patterson notes, "In the absence of historical records, one way to explore the inner lives of slaves is to exercise one's literary imagination" (Slavery and Social Death, 2018). Taking direction from Patterson, this course is interested in mining the literary imagination of contemporary Black playwrights who are interested in recovering, reconstructing, rewriting, repairing and, in some cases, revolting against the fragmented and muted histories of the African slave trade and the lost experiences of the Black lives therein. From Aimé Césaire's A Tempest (1969), a bold postcolonial adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest, to Winsome Pinnock's Rockets and Blue Lights (2020), an examination of British history inspired by two 19th-century paintings by the English romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, our plays originate from the Caribbean, England, and the United States. As African diasporic texts, these plays are exercises in the dramatic power of Sankofa, a principle derived from the Akan people of Ghana, meaning that the plays become the vessels through which audiences, readers, and characters return to the past in order to better understand and move forward in the present. We will engage in a thorough exploration of form, region, dialect, adaptation, and aesthetics, among other aspects, as we align lost and documented histories with dramatic conjuring.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL369, AFAM369
Prereq: None

THEA371 Sister Acts: Black Feminist/Womanist Theater of the African Diaspora

This course surveys the dynamism and scope of contemporary feminist/womanist drama written by black women playwrights of the African Diaspora. Reading select plays from Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, England, and the United States, alongside theory and criticism, we examine the impact of race, gender, identity, and sexuality politics on black feminist/womanist theater. Throughout our study of these dramatic texts, their performances, and their subsequent critiques, we are equally invested in the bridges and the gaps, the audibles and the silences, and the overlaps and the divides, as they are formed. Significantly, this analytic undertaking involves a simultaneous critique of the role of the playwright, the spectator, and the critic of black feminist/womanist theater. At all times, consideration is given to the ways in which these playwrights collectively use theater as a platform to explore black and female and diasporic subjectivities across regional, national, and, at times, linguistic differences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL371, FGSS371, AFAM371
Prereq: None

THEA372 Site-Specific Choreography

This course addresses the construction of contemporary performance in alternative, nontheatrical spaces. Students will create, design, and structure movement and image metaphors; design and realize scenic objects; and integrate technologies that enhance performance at large. Daily practice will focus on developing compositional tools to trigger events, to set off the performance space, and to create optimal conditions for audience and performer participation. Skills in movement observation, critical reading, and video analysis will inform the course's practical and historical frameworks.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC371
Prereq: None

THEA373 Afro-pessimism, Gender, and Performance

This class engages African and African diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (dance, visual art, performance art, installation, film) to think about colonial dispossession, objectification, and reparation. We will address topics such as the repatriation of artifacts and other ephemera taken from Europe's colonies that are housed in the archives of European cultural institutions. The objects in question have been described as either artwork, artifacts, or anthropological fetish objects (depending on which field one engages with). How can we rethink our understanding of objecthood as irreducible to "inanimate" things but as also signaling a regime of imperial domination and enslavement that violently turned African personality into a status of objecthood? What does it mean to think about the object (broadly defined) in relation to loss and the (im)possibilities of repatriation and reparation? How does the Black performer's body's disappearance/remains endow the Western art institution? The course will encourage students to think about repatriation as well as certain losses that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor evidenced in conventional ways. In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, as well as the promises and ends of reparation? The assigned readings offer ways to think about colonial archives not merely as neutral repositories of past events, but also as performances; as enactments of power, aesthetic value judgment, and hierarchical arrangements of knowledge production. The theoretical, art historical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and creative reading materials engage contemporary scholars', artists', and activists' response to both the recorded and ephemeral archives of Black dispossession. Students are encouraged to engage in events and workshops outside of the classroom, such as visiting library archives, attending performances, gallery exhibits, and film screenings.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM371, AFAM370, FGSS381
Prereq: None

THEA376 The Artist in the Community: Civic Engagement and Collaborative Dancemaking

Through both theoretical analysis and practical application, students will grow their understanding of community-based performance and collaborative art-making. Grounded in readings and seminar discussions about the practice and process of community-based art, students will apply their learning through community-engaged research. Through direct practice, students in the course will explore how collaborative performance can address local issues, spark community dialogue, and encourage civic participation--whether on a college campus, in a neighborhood, or across a city.



Class meetings will take place virtually during the semester. Student research and project development will be conducted in person. Note: This course includes required Spring Break travel to work on a Forklift Danceworks project. Travel expenses for the trip are paid by the University.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS376, DANC376
Prereq: None

THEA381 Directing II

This course, the continuation of THEA281, presents a further investigation of the elements of directing: script selection, research, production concept, orchestration of that concept, casting and coaching actors, and development of a ground plan. Elements of set, lights, costumes, props, music, etc. will be developed within a shared laboratory approach. This is an advanced directing course in studio format. Students will develop all work in a focused, workshop environment; additional research and written description of ideal design elements will accompany the studio project.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: (THEA245 AND THEA281)

THEA383 Introduction to Costume Design for Performance

This course is an exploration of costume design concepts for contemporary performance including theater and other genres. The class will include beginning elements of costume design, including character/script analysis, research, costume lists, action charts, visual design concepts and techniques, and collage and drawing skills.



This course counts towards the Theater Arts category for the THEA major.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: IDEA383
Prereq: THEA105 OR THEA185 OR ARST131 OR ARST445

THEA384 Advanced Costume Design & Construction

In this course students will work in a collaborative environment exploring costume construction and costume design. Students develop designs that emerge through a process of character analysis, based on the script and directorial concept. Period research, design, and rendering skills are fostered through practical exercises. Instruction in basic costume construction, including drafting and draping, provides tools for students to produce final projects.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA105 OR THEA383 OR ARST131

THEA385 The Working Theatermaker: Acting Beyond the University

This course is geared toward those students venturing into the earliest stages of an acting career. Emphasis will be placed on auditioning for film, television, and theater, finding opportunities in NYC, LA, and regional markets, cultivating a network, self-tapes, clarifying a mission statement, and logistics of the business (headshots, agents, casting directors, unions). The course will include talks with industry professionals, and students will leave the course with a tentative plan of action, including audition material and resources to facilitate the transition from the classroom into the professional world. If interested, please contact the instructor via email ASAP to set up individual conferences.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: (THEA245 AND THEA285) OR (THEA245 AND THEA309) OR (THEA245 AND THEA318) OR (THEA245 AND THEA319)

THEA385Z The Working Actor: Acting Beyond the University

Schedule: Monday through Friday; A mix of asynchronous and synchronous class time, to be determined based on student enrollment/time zones.



This course is geared toward those students venturing into the earliest stages of an acting career. Emphasis will be placed on auditioning for film, television, and theater, finding opportunities in NYC, LA, and regional markets, cultivating a network, self-tapes, clarifying a mission statement, and logistics of the business (headshots, agents, casting directors, unions). The course will include modules that address the industry shift to on-line, including voice-over, radio plays, ZOOM-specific plays, and auditioning via ZOOM/self-tapes.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA386 Musical Theater Performance

This studio course will explore the fundamentals of musical theater performance: how to analyze a script and song applying concepts such as given circumstances, actions, objectives, etc., based in Michael Chekhov and Stanislavski techniques; how to use dramaturgical research and original context to illuminate and create character; and how to prime the instrument for optimal performance. A wide range of vocal and physical exercises will be used to develop relaxation, concentration, and the imagination, and to free the body and voice of tension. We aim to expand the performer's potential for transformation and expression, so that they may enter into any genre, style, or period of musical theater with ease and confidence.



Emphasis will be placed on building confidence, cultivating each artist's individual voice, and approaching the work with a deep sense of curiosity, generosity, joy, and serious play. This course will include exploring, analyzing, and performing solo songs and duets, and a module on the current state of the industry--including talks with professional artists, casting directors, and musical theater collaborators--culminating in a showcase, with potential collaborations with original work by fellow students and guest artists.



Course will also require supplemental viewings, independent rehearsals, and attendance at two live performances TBD.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA390 Performance Ensemble

Since theater is an act of collaboration, this course will offer advanced acting, directing, design, and playwriting students an opportunity to practice collaborative creation in an ensemble environment. Using impactful American ensembles (Tectonic Theater, Rude Mechs, the Team, PearlDamour) as a guide, students will experiment with techniques of research, generation, storytelling, and performance. We will explore dynamic use of space, negotiate differences in communication, and create text, action, image, and object as we collaboratively develop a coherent theatrical event to be shared for an invited audience in a workshop setting.



This course will NOT fulfill an advanced directing requirement for students interested in pursuing senior theses in directing. This course provides an additional level of performance training beyond the core courses in acting, directing, and playwriting.



NOTE: Ensemble creation is rigorous play. Come prepared to be physical, take risks, step into the unknown, and make discoveries



This course counts towards the Theater Arts category for the THEA major.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA281 OR THEA199 OR THEA245

THEA391 The Live Event: Politics and Practice of Creating Site-Specific Performance

In this course students will consider the role of site in performance-making. We start the semester with the assumption that there is no site that is not specific: every place carries with it a political, social, and historical identity, as well as an aesthetic and an architecture. At the same time, we as artists and makers are driven by our own values and interests. How do we enter into a collaboration with a site to create a live event with meaning and impact, both for ourselves and for our audiences? From architect Maya Lin, whose interactive Vietnam War Memorial rewrote the function of a monument to be about personal encounter and shared reckoning, to artist Paul Ramirez Jonas, whose "Key to the City" project gave thousands of people access to private spaces across New York, to "Haircuts by Kids," a project of the Canadian theater company Mammalian Diving Reflex, in which third-graders are trained to offer haircuts to adults, artists across disciplines are devising diverse answers to this question.



This class combines seminar-style discussion with studio-style making. Students will engage with scholarship by Miwon Kwon, Paul Smith, Tania Bruguera, Claire Bishop, and Shannon Jackson among others, in order to contextualize the making of our own sited live event works that explore how space, place, and architecture play into questions of narrative, performance, and community. Short written responses to reading will be turned in throughout the semester. The class culminates in either a final paper or final, sited project (individual or collaborative) on campus or in Middletown.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA393 Afterparty: End Times, Pleasure, and Clean Up

What do we do in end times, or "after the party" as Joshua Chambers Letson would have it? Already exhausted, with streamers and confetti scattered on the ground, what happens after the party is over? How do we pick up the pieces and move on? Can narratives of perpetual end times create new beginnings and new horizons? Beginning at the end, this course will engage conversations in science fiction, Black studies, art and performance, Indigenous studies, queer of color critique, and environmental justice to explore the work of endings and beginnings, of hope and hopelessness, of destruction and desire. We will pay particular attention to questions of futurity and pleasure as they are manifest in the aesthetic. Writers and artists to be discussed will include N.K. Jemisin, Sylvia Winter, Ursula Le Guin, Katherine McKittrick, Ohan Breiding, Franny Choi, Saeed Jones, Calvin Warren, Joshua Chambers Letson, Dana Luciano, David Wojnarowicz, adrienne maree brown, Autumn Brown, José Esteban Muñoz, Nick Estes, Dionne Brand, Samuel Delany, Tourmaline, Allison Akootchook Warden (AKU MATU), Jordan Peele, and M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi. Students will be invited to craft both creative and theoretical responses to class assignments.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM393, FGSS395, AMST303
Prereq: None

THEA399 Advanced Playwriting: Long Form

This is an immersive workshop for students working at a rigorous, committed level of playwriting. We will focus on long form as students begin, develop, and rewrite full-length plays, challenging themselves to expand their technique as they articulate their creative vision.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: ENGL399
Prereq: [THEA199 or ENGL269]

THEA401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

THEA404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

THEA407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

THEA408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

THEA409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA419 Student Forum

This is a student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

THEA420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

THEA427 Theater Projects - Performance Practice

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in various theater projects each semester, fulfilling roles such as actors, assistant stage managers, assistant director, etc. This course is limited to the total work hours of a .25CR class.



Assigned work done under faculty supervision in theater projects. Students interested in enrolling in this class should audition for acting roles, or apply for stage management, dramaturge, or assistant directing positions.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 0.25
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA428 Theater Projects - Performance Practice

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of Theater Department produced works each semester, such as projects approved as part of our Senior Capstone program. This usually includes both single-semester senior projects, Honors Thesis productions, and guest artist collaborations.



Student performers will work under a project director, learning skills and techniques through a hands-on, project-based process. Student stage managers will have the opportunity to lead or assist the rehearsal process, with faculty advisement. Student assistant directors will hone their skills by close collaboration with the project directors. Student dramaturges will embark in a variety of deep-research tasks and close-reading of the production materials and/or text(s), as guided by the instructor. This is a recommended course for students that are considering pursuing their own capstone projects in theater.



Students interested in enrolling in this class should audition for acting roles, or apply for stage management, dramaturge, or assistant directing positions.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.25
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA430 Theater Projects - Performance Practice

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of Theater Department produced works each semester, such as projects approved as part of our Senior Capstone program. This usually includes both single-semester senior projects, Honors Thesis productions, and guest artist collaborations.



Student performers will work under a project director, learning skills and techniques through a hands-on, project-based process. Student stage managers will have the opportunity to lead or assist the rehearsal process, with faculty advisement. Student assistant directors will hone their skills by close collaboration with the project directors. Student dramaturges will embark in a variety of deep-research tasks and close-reading of the production materials and/or text(s), as guided by the instructor. This is a recommended course for students that are considering pursuing their own capstone projects in theater.



Students interested in enrolling in this class should audition for acting roles, or apply for stage management, dramaturge, or assistant directing positions.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA431 Mainstage Production - Performance Practice

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in the fully-produced Mainstage Theater production each semester. Student performers will work under a faculty director, learning skills and techniques through a hands-on, project-based rehearsal process. Student stage managers will have the opportunity to lead or assist the rehearsal process, with faculty mentoring. Student assistant directors will hone their skills by close collaboration with the Mainstage director, providing valuable preparation for their own senior projects or future directing endeavors. Student dramaturges will embark in a variety of deep-research tasks and close-reading of the production materials and/or text(s), as guided by the instructor.



Assigned work done under faculty supervision in the department production program working toward the creation of the Mainstage Production. Students interested in enrolling in this class should audition for acting roles, or apply for stage management, dramaturge, or assistant directing positions.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA432 Theater Projects - Performance Practice

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of Theater Department produced works each semester, such as projects approved as part of our Senior Capstone program. This usually includes both single-semester senior projects, Honors Thesis productions, and guest artist collaborations.



Student performers will work under a project director, learning skills and techniques through a hands-on, project-based process. Student stage managers will have the opportunity to lead or assist the rehearsal process, with faculty advisement. Student assistant directors will hone their skills by close collaboration with the project directors. Student dramaturges will embark on a variety of deep-research tasks and close-reading of the production materials and/or text(s), as guided by the instructor. This is a recommended course for students that are considering pursuing their own capstone projects in theater.



Students interested in enrolling in this class should audition for acting roles, or apply for stage management, dramaturge, or assistant directing positions.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA433 Mainstage Production - Performance Practice

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in the fully-produced Mainstage Theater production each semester. Student performers will work under a faculty director, learning skills and techniques through a hands-on, project-based rehearsal process. Student stage managers will have the opportunity to lead or assist the rehearsal process, with faculty mentoring. Student assistant directors will hone their skills by close collaboration with the Mainstage director, providing valuable preparation for their own senior projects or future directing endeavors. Student dramaturges will embark on a variety of deep-research tasks and close-reading of the production materials and/or text(s), as guided by the instructor.



Assigned work done under faculty supervision in the department production program working toward the creation of the Mainstage Production. Students interested in enrolling in this class should audition for acting roles, or apply for stage management, dramaturge, or assistant directing positions.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA434 Applied Scenography: From Idea to the Stage

This course may be repeated for credit. In this course, students will develop a specific design for the stage by doing close reading and analysis of the text for their specific projects. Students will be guided through each step of these processes in a formal approach: concept development, visual research, renderings or drawings, model-making, and/or drafting. The course will have a special emphasis on the collaborative process and on the designer's role to fulfill the needs for the actual construction of their projects. Students will create and design set, media, or costumes for their projects, integrating the notions of design principles and performance elements. This course counts toward the Theater Major as Performance Practice (in Design) only.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: THEA359 OR THEA383

THEA435 Performance Practice in Design A

Assigned advanced work in technical theater. Program A entails commitment of 60 hours of time.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA437 Performance Practice in Design B

Assigned advanced work in technical theater. Program B entails a commitment of 120 hours of time.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Prereq: None

THEA465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

THEA470 Independent Study, Undergradua

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

THEA491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

THEA502 Individual Tutorial, Graduate

Offering: Host
Grading: OPT