First Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Political Theatre and Performance

Catalog description

What makes theatre political? What hopes for changing the world does theatre dramatize? What does the study of theatre teach us about politics? How does the theatre become a productive site not only for representing, but also for enacting, political change? How can the practice of embodied performance intervene in politics? This course explores these questions by reading a wide range of plays and theorists working in different time periods, different geographical locations and within different theatrical traditions. The course will engage with a range of political issues with an emphasis on migration and borders. Likely playwrights we will study include: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ngugi wa Thiong'o & Ngugi wa Mirii, Anna Deveare Smith, Caryl Churchill, Clifford Odets, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.