As a set of staged practices rich with social context, theater has sought to document, engage, and affect communities. This course introduces and explores theater from page to stage as a live performing art. Topics include the relationship between theater and society (historical and contemporary), dramatic structure, theatrical representation, and the crafts of theater artists such as directors, designers, playwrights, and actors. We will also engage with live performances and video archives of past performances.

This course will examine the Latinx stage and screen, focusing specifically on musicals that portray Latinx lives. We will focus on canonical works—including West Side Story, Zoot Suit, and Hamilton—in order to deepen our knowledge of their form, production history, historical reception, and contemporary place in American culture. We will take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing our reading assignments from the fields of Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Performance Studies, and Film and Media Studies, in order to analyze these productions as they traveled from stage to screen (and sometimes, back to the stage) and the representational and cultural politics involved in that shift. Finally, we will explore not only the musicals themselves, but also the historiography that has informed our understanding of them. Writing assignments will ask the students to reflect on the evolution of scholarly arguments regarding these canonical works.

A dramatic text is like a musical score. In order to understand a play, a theater artist must first learn to "read music." This course will focus on the tools that allow an artist to understand the dramatic "score" and ultimately to translate the playwright's words into action on stage. The playwright's tools: Style, Setting, Mood, Theme, Environment, Character, Language, Action, Objective, Obstacles, will be defined and discussed.  The reading list will include plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Katori Hall, William Shakespeare, Lynn Nottage, Caryl Churchill, and others. This course is relevant for all theater artists regardless of area of specialization.

This course explores the history of representing "madness" on the stage and across media with a special focus on evolving techniques for performing female mental distress. We will look at patterns in global depictions of hysteria and neuropathological diseases, as well as how dramatic and filmic techniques developed to convey the subjective experience of mania. A question central to this class is: how has madness been framed or performed differently across stage and screen genres—including horror, comedy, musicals and non-theatrical media—and newer digital platforms including XR? In what ways have national discourses or ideologies surrounding mental illness and disability found their way into live and mediated performances, and how have scholars and ethicists responded? We will engage with theories of disability, sexuality, race, psychoanalysis, and gesture as well as archival materials in our examination of the changing face of madness across media.

In this course, we will explore nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms of burlesque and related popular performance in the US and Western Europe to better understand the global neo-burlesque movement today. We will examine questions of race, gender, and disability in relation to dance, striptease, and body positivity. In addition to short writing assignments and a scaffolded historical research essay, students will collaborate on a burlesque showcase and a dramaturgical project inspired by the performers studied in the class.

This course provides insight into over a hundread and fifty years of American musical theatre style, practice, and tradition. Beginning with its roots in minstrelsy, European operetta, and vaudeville, we will examine the evolution of the American Musical form from its origins to contemporary commerical Broadway and other professional productions. This course provides an additional layer of sociopolitical context to our understanding of shows ranging from Show Boat to Hamilton and beyond. Considering how intersecting aspects of identity shape the form and content of the work we study, this course requires close reading and listening as we explore the aesthetics, history, and impact of American musical theatre in theatre and performance studies as a field.

Recognizing the intrinsic value of Black lives and Black storytelling across media platforms, this course will explore the staging of Black theatre texts in virtual reality (VR) and related XR technology.  Participants will explore VR technology at the intersection of Black cultural storytelling through the performance of monologues and scenes as well as design/tech, music and movement culminating into a pilot production of Marita Bonner's The Purple Flower (1928), a non-realistic, one-act play that pushes the boundaries of theatrical staging.

No prior experience required.

This course is designed for those interested in theatre and performance, African American studies, history, and culture. Students will study influences on the development of black theater and performance in the USA as well as processes for preserving, curating, and exhibiting culture in institutions, examining how museum concepts intersect and/or collide with representations of black history and culture. In collaboration with the Hattiloo Theatre in Memphis and the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, who are drafting plans for an institution devoted to black theatre practitioners, students will determine and develop content for an interactive venue. They will consider strategies for the use of technology and live exhibits, involving black communities in exhibits and curation, and providing access to diverse communities. Projects and findings will be shared with the institution's developers and will be considered in their ongoing plans. The course will include a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

This course explores representations of feminist and queer Africa in theatre, dance, and film. How do female-identified, nonbinary, and/or queer African artists use creative expression to navigate and challenge neocolonial, heteropatriarchal regimes and advance ideas of LGBTQIA rights and gender equality? Although several countries will be considered during the term, Kenya and Uganda receive a particular emphasis. All students are welcome; no prior knowledge of Africa and/or theories of gender and sexuality are needed.

This course provides an overview of women's dramatic writing and cultural expression from Latin America and considers how these texts intersect, reflect, disrupt or resist canonical literary movements in Latin America. Course content includes traditional dramatic forms as well as non-literary, visual and performative forms of expression.  By examining works of very diverse ranges, we will also challenge society's and the authors' conceptualizations of Latin American women as a way to critique underlying issues of race, class, gender, and other power structures.

This course follows the history of theatre in the Latinx Americas (encompassing a hemispheric approach) for social change. Students will learn about Theatre of the Oppressed, guerilla theatre in all its forms used throughout Latin America and Latinx communities, playwrights writing about social justice issues, and activist performance. We will focus on plays and performances that have as their central theme rebellion and the rebel as we question the nature of rebellion, its manifestations, and consequences. 

Performing Histories, Performing Us is an interactive course, taught by scholar artist, Dr. Monica White Ndounou, with a residency component with actor/writer/director Roger Guenveur Smith. The course utilizes performance as a tool to interrogate, examine and explore the concept of history, particularly at the intersection of culture and performance. This course uses traditional and nontraditional archives and multiple platforms to illuminate the possibilities for performing histories; performing us.

The course studies in translation selected works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca (tragedy), Aristophanes and Plautus (comedy), and some of their central themes and questions: law, community, revenge, passion, and justice. We will approach them both as texts and as scripts/librettos, considering their relationship to other types of performance (ritual, rhetoric, music, dance) and genres (history, philosophy) as well as to theatrical space. There will be practical workshop opportunities for those interested.

This course explores selected examples of world performance during the classical and medieval periods in Western Europe and eastern Asia.  Plays to be discussed might include those by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Seneca, Plautus, Terence, and Zeami. Through the reading and discussion of primary and secondary texts, we seek to situate selected performance texts within their sociopolitical and artistic contexts.

This course explores selected examples of world performance during the early modern period (fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries). Plays to be discussed might include those by Shakespeare, Calderón, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Molière, Racine, Marivaux, and Carlo Gozzi. Through the reading and discussion of primary and secondary texts, we seek to situate selected performance texts within their sociopolitical and artistic contexts.

What can theatre do for human rights, and human rights for theatre? How do playwrights translate violations of human rights to the stage? Through class discussion and creative exercises, we will explore selected plays from around the world that address human rights through various genres and dramatic forms, including theatre of testimony, documentary theatre, realism, allegory, and surrealism.

Students will explore the cultural, critical, and artistic works of contemporary Arab American, Asian American, Black, Latinx, and indigenous theater artists/performers. Our examination will consider the socio-historical and political contexts engaged through these artists' works. We will also consider the relationship between the construction of identity and strategies of performance used by playwrights/performers to describe race, gender, sexuality, class, subjectivity, and ideas of belonging. Texts examined will include works by Jacobs-Jenkins, Parks, Moraga, Yee, McCraney, Pamatmat, Hudes, and El Guindi.

This course will examine African American playwrights, drama, and theater from 1959 to the present. Further exploration will focus on the impact of civil rights, the Black Arts movement, and cultural aesthetics on the form, style, and content of African American plays. Readings will include plays of Hansberry, Baldwin, Baraka, Kennedy, Childress, Shange, Wolfe, Wilson, Parks and others. Open to all classes.

This course explores selected theatre and performance traditions of sub-Saharan Africa. How do African playwrights negotiate and transform the colonial legacy of Western drama, and how do they use theater to challenge neocolonial regimes and to advance ideas of democracy, human rights, and gender equality? Plays from Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda receive special emphasis. No prior knowledge of African studies or theater is necessary, just a willingness to expand critical and creative horizons.
 

This course studies the performance traditions of Asia, focusing on China, Japan, Indonesia and India. Classical forms studied include Noh, Bunraku, Beijing opera, Sanskrit drama, Balinese dance and Japanese puppet theater. Attention is paid to social, religious and aesthetic influences on these traditions, theories on which they are based, the history behind the theatrical practices, and training and dramatic techniques. Students gain an appreciation of the rich variety and scope of theatrical conventions of Asia. 

Offered only as a part of the Theater Foreign Study Program in London, this seminar integrates the study of theater with the experience of plays in performance. By providing intense, comparative experience of playgoing, the course intends to broaden students' knowledge of the dramatic repertoire, to heighten their awareness of production approaches and values, and to encourage them to develop considered critical response to theater. Students attend a number of required performances and in addition attend performances of their own choosing - normally a total of three plays per week. Productions will represent a variety of periods and styles of playwriting, and a similarly diverse range of production companies and approaches to performance.

Offered only as a part of the Theater Foreign Study Program in London. This program requires submission of an application and acceptance as a participant. This course is graded as credit/no credit.