Digital Narratives

Catalog description

This course combines options from the School of Drama in a unique configuration: through working collaboratively across disciplines, students will investigate innovative approaches to contemporary theater and new ways of storytelling. Contemporary techniques for ensemble creation, devising and media integration will be explored through exercises, readings, and viewing of other artist's work. This Fall the course will explore the wide variety of digitally mediated forms for online, remote and distanced work - techniques of collaboration, creation and experiencing of performance focused work. We will pursue multiple techniques for cross-platform storytelling, drawing from students' lived experiences to engage the current political and social milieu via multiple digital and mediated systems. Experimental and devised processes of theater making have long mined the complex relationship between the form and the content of an artwork - how can we do so in pursuit of a critical/political perspective? Students will become familiar with contemporary and historical companies who work this way and through small group in-class workshops create new narrative experiences and share them with the larger class. Through embracing these tools and forms, we utilize the theatrical conversation to engage in artistic discourse to discover new complexities of meaning. We invite students to come explore these possibilities in a spirit of experimentation and group exploration.