Spring Arts Intensive: Writing for Stage and Screen

Catalog description

The Spring Arts Intensive is a newly created course designed to expand students’ artistic practices and provide them with an immersive artistic experience. The course offers professional expertise from a guest Visiting Artist. This semester, the intensive will focus on writing for film, television, or theater with the goal of hearing and performing students’ work out loud in a table-read setting. Each student will write their own piece—comedy, drama, or something in between —and serve as a creative partner/director for a classmate's piece. Classmates will also serve as actors in each other’s work for the final table read. The class will be broken up into three sessions. In session 1, students will bring in three pitches for a short form, 10 minute or less, piece (short film, play, monologue/performance piece, episodic serial, internet short, etc.). Full-length excerpts are also accepted. In session 2, students will present outlines and work in their writer/director pairs to further develop their pieces. Session 3 will be an in-class reading, followed by brief feedback and editing window before a public reading. Students can expect to learn how to pitch and begin to develop a script in a collaborative theatrical setting. Readings will include excerpts from Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours; short plays such as Christopher Durang’s The Funeral Parlor and Elissa Huang’s Mirror, and short films including Cole Escola’s Pee Pee Manor and B.B. Araya’s Beato.