Directing: Site Specific

Catalog description

This class focuses on introducing students to methods for creating site-specific performance work. Students will examine the process of transforming an audience's relationship to live performance by presenting work outside the confines of the traditional theater space. We will investigate how architecture evokes narrative by devising site-specific performances informed by the found space of public and private urban environments. Over the course of the semester, all students will perform and direct. Directors will scout performance locations and collaboratively devise original works in groups and directing pairs. Performances will be birthed from visual art images, found text, historical research and original compositions inspired by the architecture discovered. Students will explore how a performance site can inform tone, actor/audience relationship, space, time, sound, composition, and scale as they move their work through various locations and make adjustments to changing environments. The class explores the inherent challenges of impermanence, chance encounter, shared public space, changing weather conditions/seasons, time of day, legality, permitting, foot traffic, population and accessibility. Directors provide feedback by using the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process and by creating a body of work together reflecting the aesthetic vocabulary generated by the group throughout the semester. In addition to their practical work, students will present research on a number of companies whose work lies within the tradition of site-specificity, spontaneous performance, political theater/direct action, guerilla performance and street theater of the 20th and 21st century. The class culminates in a final site-specific performance open to the public.