This course introduces students to processes of theatre creation including textual analysis, conceptual development, design, rehearsal, production, performance, audience engagement, and self-evaluation. Students develop original productions of influential works while paying close attention to the works' relevance and issues such as race, gender, and sustainability.
Prior experience in theatre-making is not required.
This workshop course introduces students to the creative processes of performance in a range of formal and informal settings. Emphasis is placed on the student's development as a performer.
THPERF 112Introduction to Black Arts, Culture, and Literature0.50 units
This course examines the evolution and development of Black Peoples' artistic, cultural, and literary experiences from a global perspective including art and design, theatre and performance, literature, music, spoken word, and other modes of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice. Coursework is designed to immerse students in analyzing Black art, culture, and literature through intersectional, feminist, and queer lenses. The course is designed for both thinkers and creators. Students will engage in the course material through readings, viewings, and field trips around film, comics, anime, popular culture events, plus the visual and performing arts.
THPERF 149Introduction to Critical Design Practices0.50 units
How does design help us think? This studio course introduces students to practice-based methods for generating knowledge. Topics may include prototyping, performance as research, material thinking, multi-modal representation, and experience design. Students will test and explore how we learn differently through creative practices.
THPERF 200Theatre and Performance in Context0.50 units
Students experience, analyze, and interpret a range of works of theatre and performance. Close attention is paid to the original circumstances in which these works were produced, the ways in which they have reflected and influenced the communities that produced them, and their relevance to current performance practice and research.
This workshop course in performance studies explores performance as a way of knowing. It investigates performance as artistic practice and as a means of understanding historical, social, and cultural practices, including drama/theatre texts, poetry, narratives, and texts of everyday life.
This course explores the genealogies and historical development of Black performance created in regions such as North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. Students will examine the influences of key artists and theorists. Students will be challenged to apply historical, political, and cultural contexts to the analysis of audio, text-based, and/or audio-visual materials. This course expands students' concepts of Black performance to include performative modes such as performance poetry, TV shows, music, and podcasts.
Students develop basic proficiency in the technical elements of intermedial performance and design, including carpentry, lighting, video, projection, sound, wardrobe, and properties. Students apply these concepts in a performance creation project.
Students develop intermediate proficiency in the technical elements of intermedial performance and design, including carpentry, lighting, video, projection, sound, wardrobe, and properties. Students apply these concepts in a performance creation project, normally a departmental production.
Students explore theories and practices of design for performance media including set/space, light, projection, video, sound, and/or costume. In this studio course, emphasis is placed on the ways in which media establish and disrupt performance conventions, changing our relationship to the media themselves and to the world around us.
THPERF 248Project Management in the Arts0.50 units
This course introduces students to principles of project management relevant in a broad range of contexts including theatre, dance, film, and digital media production. Students explore arts management concepts such as budgeting, communication, scheduling, leadership, problem-solving, and conflict resolution. Concepts are applied in case studies that accommodate individual student interests.
Students explore the development of material and digital technologies of performance and their significance in historical and current social contexts. Close attention is paid to the ways in which performance technologies shape and are shaped by communication practices and aesthetics in, for example, art, science, games, and public life.
This course explores how gender is performed on the stage and in the media. Key performances and performers are studied from the perspectives of critical feminist theory and performance studies. Students consider how performances can create, affirm, and disrupt how society understands and performs gender.
This course explores performance sites as resources for creation. Students explore theoretical and practical approaches to understanding place-making through the body, language, space, and technology.
THPERF 300Theories of Theatre and Performance0.50 units
Students study and critique a range of existing works of theatre and performance in the context of related commentary, paying close attention to concepts of knowledge, experience, and positionality.
Students study, apply, and critique a range of processes for making performance in a range of media, paying close attention to the relationship between the approach to creation and the significance of works in the communities where they are performed.
Students work at an intermediate level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to explore and increase proficiency in specific areas of performance creation. Areas include research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
Students work at an intermediate level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to explore and increase proficiency in specific areas of performance creation. Areas include research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
Students work at an intermediate level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to explore and increase proficiency through extensive contributions to specific areas of performance creation. Areas include research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
Students work at an intermediate level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to explore and increase proficiency through extensive contributions to specific areas of performance creation. Areas include research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
THPERF 364Shakespeare in Performance at the Stratford Festival0.50 units
A historical, theoretical, and analytical introduction to Shakespeare's plays in performance, both on stage and screen, this course focuses on specific problems and decisive issues of past productions and of those in the current Stratford Festival season.
The course is offered as part of a consortium with faculty from five universities.
Students are required to arrange their own transportation to Stratford.
THPERF 367Voice and Text at the Stratford Festival0.50 units
Taught by faculty and Stratford Festival coaches, this practical course invites students to explore acting techniques and exercises to develop their stage voice with a particular focus on Shakespeare's plays. This is a block course that meets in Stratford for two weeks in May, and may be taken with ENGL 364/THPERF 364, as the two courses are offered at complementary times.
The course is offered as part of a consortium with faculty from five universities.
Students are required to arrange their own transportation to Stratford.
This course explores significant case studies in performance history drawn from the earliest historical records of performance to recent performance events in a variety of social contexts. Close attention is paid to historiographical research methods and the ways they determine our understanding of the past.
Students explore the interchange between performance design and sustainability. Emphasis will be placed on ecological and systems thinking as students engage with theoretical and practical projects throughout the term.
This course offers a practical and applied examination of how various forms of performance may bring about an experience of political conscientization because creating a performance can be considered a process of political enlightenment and engagement.
This course explores the ways critical race and performance studies can help us understand English language-based performance in the 20th and 21st centuries. Close attention is paid to the primary historical, political, and cultural contexts that inform the creation, development, and presentation of performance works.
This course explores design for material-world experiences that incorporate virtual, augmented, and/or extended reality technologies. Emphasis is placed on the relationships among different modes of perception and how they affect our understanding of the real and the virtual.
A workshop that explores the history, dramatic literature, and performance of Black theatre artists. Students will explore the relationship of Black theatre to artistic and public life. Special attention may be given to specific issues, periods, locations, and genealogies of Black theatre. Students will create performance pieces.
Students explore, critique, and apply approaches to audience engagement in a range of public art, performance, and design contexts. Key issues include the roles of audiences in the making and interpretation of art and design; the economic, social, and political factors that shape existing approaches to engaging audiences; and the short and long-term impacts of audience engagement practices in local and global communities. Students develop a plan for audience engagement in a public art, performance, or design event.
THPERF 400Collaborative Performance Project1.50 units
Students work at an advanced, independent level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to create and reflect upon a major, collaborative performance project. As core members of the creative team, students engage in all areas of project creation, including research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
Students work at an advanced, independent level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to create and reflect upon a major, collaborative performance project. Students engage in all areas of project creation, including research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
Students work at an intermediate level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to explore and increase proficiency in specific areas of performance creation. Areas include research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
Students work at an advanced, independent level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to create and reflect upon a major, collaborative performance project. Through extensive contributions to production, students engage in all areas of project creation, including research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
Students work at an advanced, independent level with faculty, staff, and visiting artists to create and reflect upon a major, collaborative performance project. Through extensive contributions to production, students engage in all areas of project creation, including research, conception, writing, direction, design, performance, production, stage management, production management, publicity, dramaturgy, critique, and documentation.
THPERF 440Performative Inquiry and Practice0.50 units
This course explores how to create, perform, and analyze performance texts, here defined as including drama/theatre texts, poetry, narratives, and the texts of everyday life. Through readings and creative investigation, students will explore the links between the participant, the researcher, the site, and the impulse of inquiry.
This course is designed to give the student an opportunity to complete a comprehensive presentation in their major area of concentration. Second part of THPERF/COMMST 499A.