Introduction to Theatre, Dance, and Performance

Catalog description

This course introduces students to contemporary Theatre, Dance, and Performance practice and theory through various modes of inquiry. Engaging theatre, dance, and performance as distinct fields in dynamic intersection, the course invites students to explore how practices in each field ask, explore, and answer questions. What can we learn from thinking across and between these practices? Drawing on Theatre studies, Dance studies, and Performance studies, the class will explore time, space, presence, context, distribution and relationships between performer and audience. Students will engage in questions that have been important to the theory and practice of each discipline at particular historical moments. Through readings, viewings, discussions, and practice-based exercises, we will think through choreography, improvisation, writing, staging, sound, and what it means/takes to perform; we will consider the distinct roles of actors, dancers, performers, directors, choreographers, artists, designers, playwrights, producers, spectators, and critics, as we interrogate the intersections and divergence in these vocabularies to expose students to interdisciplinary and integrated spaces of learning. Through this inquiry, students will develop toolkits for their emergent interpretive, analytic, and practice-based skills -- whether they come as performers, composers, writers, producers, designers, directors, audience members, scholars, or curious learners.