The actors bring characters to life, through text, physicality and voice.  Using their own bodies, they transform the words from a play’s pages in order to become another live being onstage. This art requires not only technique, but more importantly, an original and personal interpretation of the text, its characters, and their actions.

(Offered as THDA 270 and ENGL 222) A workshop in writing for the stage. The semester will begin with exercises that lead to the making of short plays and, by the end of the term, longer plays--ten minutes and up in length. Writing will be done in and out of class; students’ work will be discussed in the workshop and in private conferences. At the end of the term, the student will submit a portfolio of revisions of all the exercises, including the revisions of all plays.

(Offered as THDA 255, ENGL 223, and MUSI 255) This studio course is designed as an interactive laboratory for dancers, composers, actors, writers/poets, vocalists, and sound artists to work together to create meaningful interactions between sound, movement, and text.

(Offered as THDA 250 and FAMS 226.)  This studio production class will focus on multiple ways of tracking, viewing, and capturing bodies in motion. The course will emphasize working with the camera as an extension of the body to explore radically different points of view and senses of focus. We will experiment with different techniques and different kinds of bodies (human, animal, and object) to bring a heightened awareness of kinesthetic involvement, animation and emotional immediacy to the bodies on screen and behind the camera.

In this course, we practice moving and being moved by each other.  We explore weight sharing, body-part manipulations, off-balance support, negative space, resistance, and various ways of harnessing forces of momentum.  We generate inventive dances using a toolbox of construction methods.  We discuss how our moving and making movement together illuminate and intertwine personal identities, cultural backgrounds, compositional habits, and aesthetic sensibilities.

Dance and History focuses on dance as an expression of cultural and global identities and introduces a variety of western and non-western dance forms and practices in their cultural, social, and political contexts. As such, our investigation will consider the aesthetic traditions, history, and practice of select western and non-western dance forms including African, Asian, and European theatrical, ritualistic, social, and/or vernacular movement practices.

In this second course in the craft of speaking, students learn to shape and speak text to powerful effect. Students build on prior work to extend vocal range and capacity while learning component principles of spoken expression. Articulation, inflection, methods of contrast and interpretation, tone, verbal imaging and aural structures of poetry and rhetoric are practiced in a studio setting. Emphasis is placed on personal engagement and presence to others while speaking. Assignments in text scoring and memorization support class work.

This class is designed to focus on the movement aspect of hip hop culture. Dance in the tradition of B-Boys and B-girls while learning a wide variety of hip hop movement. From the old school "bronx" style to commercial hip hop, learn a wide range of hip-hop vocabulary in a course emphasizing group choreography, floor work, and partner work.

Technical investigations of weight sharing, body-part manipulations, off-balance support, lifting and being lifted, negative space, resistance, and various ways of harnessing forces of momentum. How can we move with confidence, spatial awareness, and fearless agency when in close proximity and in contact with other bodies?  Duets, trios, and groups will be challenged to kinetically build set partner dances with repeated opportunities in the last part of class to perform, often with the added challenge of speeding up. 

This course will focus on case studies of selected works and artists of contemporary performance over the last century as a means of placing the creation and practice of theater and dance in context.  We will closely consider these case studies as reflective of important aesthetic traditions and experiments in contemporary performance.  In addition, we will seek connections between the different case study examples and the social, cultural and political environments that fostered them.  We will reflect on issues of race, gender, identity, political activism, individual e