Courses

This course will provide an overview of the profession and how one begins to join the conversation it represents. Classes will concern such matters as general research methodologies as demonstrated in current publications; approaches to historiography; the procedure for getting papers accepted for conferences and the benefits of participating therein; and a number of issues related to teaching. A constant theme will be the preparation and writing of research papers, conference papers, and papers for publication. Examples and strategies will be drawn from scholarship on a broad range of geographical and historical material. Factors that affect grades include: demonstration that the assigned readings have been done, via informed participation in class discussion and on an in-class exam, written on the scheduled exam date; weekly written exercises; and several class presentations, most of them connected to a final term paper.

Offered during the fall semester

A study of selected dramatic texts from world drama, representing a wide range of traditions and forms, from ancient times to the present. Three or more plays, depending on length, will be analyzed each week, along with ancillary theoretical and historical materials. Plays studied will be placed in historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts and viewed in relation to other works of literature, art, and music. Special consideration will be given to the nature and history of genres, such as farce, tragicomedy, melodrama, history play; types, such as the political, including agit-prop, living newspaper, documentary, verbatim; movements, such as Sturm und Drang, naturalism, symbolism; modes, such as satire, pastoral, grotesque, sublime; devices and conventions, such as parable, allegory, ekphrasis; themes and topics (topoi), such as myth, social or natural environments (ecocriticism), war, exile; and cultural encounters, such as appropriation, adaptation, parody. Assignments include one short and one longer paper and a final examination.

Offered during the fall semester

This course has two objectives: to introduce students to theatrical theory and to examine other theories that have influenced contemporary theatre and cultural studies. The course will begin with a discussion of what constitutes theatrical theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, character and identity, genre, and audience response. A modular structure will allow us to follow and create ongoing dialogues about these concepts as they have evolved. The second objective of the course will be met through, again, a modular approach to the presentation and discussion of such influential critical/cultural theories as formalism and structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, feminism, and post-colonialism, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre studies. Assignments will include two written projects (either two annotated bibliographies or one annotated bibliography and a research paper) as well as in-class presentations and a final examination.

Offered during the spring semester

This course is designed to provide students who have passed their first examination with an in-depth study of the theoretical and historiographic methodologies that have proven most important for theatre and performance studies. The course aims to help students become fluent in these critical languages and prepare them to frame their dissertation topics, conduct original research, and select the theoretical models most useful for interpreting and elaborating on their research. The theoretical readings will cover a broad range, such as cultural materialism, sociology, and feminism, as well as the methods associated with postcolonial and performance studies. The historiographic readings will focus on questions of the reliability and value of evidence, contextualization, periodization, and the relation of theatre studies to other disciplines. The written assignments aim to help students formulate field statements and book lists for the second examination and prepare them to organize the kind of intervention required of a dissertation.

Offered during the spring semester

THEA70100 – Theatre Research (Core)
Thursday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Professor Erika Lin

This course will provide an overview of the profession and how one joins the many conversations taking place in it. Classes will concern such matters as general research methodologies as demonstrated in current publications; approaches to historiography; the procedure for getting papers accepted for conferences and the benefits of participating therein; and a number of issues related to teaching. A constant theme will be the preparation and writing of research papers, conference papers, and papers for publication. Examples and strategies will be drawn from scholarship on a broad range of geographical and historical material. We will attempt to plan a trip to one of the theatre archives in New York, and you will be responsible for conducting and writing up archival research. Factors that affect final course grades include: informed participation in class discussion; an in-class exam written on the scheduled exam date; frequent written exercises; and several class presentations, most of them connected to a final seminar paper based on archival research.

THEA71400 – Aesthetics of Film (Cross-listed from Film)
Thursday 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Professor Nicole Wallenbrock

Aesthetics of film is an essential course for graduate students of any field who wish to write with expertise about film and film matter. In this course students will learn the very specific vocabulary needed to communicate the way in which film generally, and a film specifically, functions—for this reason, Film Art by David Bordwell and Karen Thompson will be our primary text. We will screen films together that will serve as primary examples of one film element under discussion. Articles by film scholars and theorists in Dropbox will supplement our study, such as Robert Stam and Louise Spence, "Colonialism, racism and representation," and Linda Williams, “Mirrors without Memories.”

We will begin with a study of film narration (Carol Todd Haynes, 2016). We will next do a thorough study of how elements of film, such as lighting (Passing, Rebecca Hall, 2021) composition, camera movement (Power of the Dog, Jane Campion, 2021), set design/location (Opening Night, John Cassavetes, 1971), color, duration, editing, sound/music (Sorry to bother you, Boots Riley, 2019), and casting (Wanda, Barbara Loden, 1971) impact the narrative and alter our perception of characters and events. We will constantly question why (and when) a film is canonized and what might represent a disruption (for example the experimental shorts Meshes in the Afternoon Maya Deren, 1941 and Scorpio Rising Kenneth Anger, 1963). Class discussions may at times highlight depictions of race and gender, but also incorporate the effect streaming and small screens have on filmmaking styles and reception.

THEA80300 – (Seminar in Theatre Theory & Criticism) 
Translating (Contemporary) Theatre and Performance: Theories and Practices
Wednesday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Professor Jean Graham-Jones

This seminar takes a “translational” view of translating for the stage, expanding upon Walter Benjamin's acknowledgement of relationality in textual translation to consider not only the linguistic-cultural text—the play-script or so-called source and target texts—but also the many other challenges faced when translating, translocating, adapting a play or performance.  To do this, we will study theatre and performance translation’s multiple cultural constraints and constructs in relation to one another--translationally--as part of the translation process itself.  We will begin historically, considering general theories and practices of theatrical translation, as well as the roles of the translator in the theatre.  After this general introduction, we will examine the myriad challenges, limitations, and opportunities specific to translating for the contemporary stage.  These challenges include dramaturgical logic and theatrical genres; actor training, casting and rehearsal practices, and performance styles; choreography, gesture, and embodiment; surtitling and other in-performance translation practices; and performance aesthetics and reception.  Finally, we will look at contemporary performance translation as a political practice: the refusal to (self) translate, the translational potential of the decolonial gesture, and alternative approaches to translating performing bodies.  There will be a practical component to the seminar: students will work throughout the semester with a performance or text that they wish to consider translationally.  Possible projects might be individual in-progress translation work, but they can also involve a critical engagement with one or more extant translations or performances.  The final result of this semester-long project will be a 12-15-page seminar paper.  The course will be taught in English, but reading knowledge of at least one other language is encouraged.  Students will be evaluated on in-class participation and short writing assignments as well as the final seminar paper.

THEA80400 – Advanced Theatre Research (Core)
Tuesday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Professor David Saran

This core course is designed to provide students who have passed their first exam with an examination of the historiographic and theoretical methodologies that have proven most important for theatre and performance studies in recent years. Encouraging students to become fluent in these critical languages, the course aims to prepare them to frame their dissertation topics, conduct original research, and select the historiographic and theoretical models most useful for interpreting and elaborating on their research. Because this course is intended in part to provide an overview of recent work in theatre studies, we will examine new historical methods and attempt to pinpoint emerging areas of research. The course will develop students’ theoretical self-awareness by allowing them to experiment with a variety of approaches and to do research in one of their three second exam fields.  Assignments: Over the course of the semester, students will be expected to submit several written assignments (including a professional biography and statement of interests, a field statement, and an analysis of two CUNY dissertations) as well as lead a class based on the student’s field statement and reading list, stressing theoretical and methodological tools.

THEA85200 – (Seminar in Theatre History & Production) Puppets, Performing Objects, and Material Performance
Monday 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
Professor Claudia Orenstein

Puppetry, as both a field of scholarship and a performance practice, has expanded and diversified in recent years. Performing objects have a long history, globally, within ritual, in sophisticated traditions aimed at adult audiences, and as popular entertainment. Today, contemporary artists around the world are experimenting with innovative approaches to the art, challenging puppetry’s boundaries while creating new material performance models and mixed media events. While puppetry has always crossed paths with other theatrical and performative arenas, theatre’s growing theoretical engagement with object-oriented ontologies and the ubiquitous presence of performing objects on stage and screen – taking lead roles on Broadway, in avant-garde productions, and within technological media – has brought puppetry, a once marginalized field, squarely into the heart of theatre and performance studies. Puppetry, more expansively defined today with terms like “performing objects” or “material performance,” remains simultaneously a distinct aesthetic field and one deeply intertwined with other performance, media, and visual arts.

This course offers a critical, theoretical, and historical introduction to the field of puppetry, broadly defined, orienting students to this aesthetic realm: its histories and traditions, current manifestations, foundational texts, modes of analysis, and contemporary conversations. Through scholarly readings, viewings of both live and recorded performances, and simple practical workshops that offer an embodied understanding of material performance, the course gives students the necessary background for thinking and writing critically about puppetry and engaging productively with the growing field of puppetry scholarship. The course readings address puppetry from a variety of points including semiotics, phenomenology, feminist studies, cognition theory, anthropology of religion, comics theory, and robotics, among others, and include texts by Edward Gordon Craig, Heinrich Von Kleist, Jirí Veltruský, Jan Mrazek, Jane Bennett, John Bell, Kathy Foley, Matthew Cohen, Henryk Jurkowski, Scott McCloud, Jane Taylor, among many others. Some of the artists whose work is addressed in the course include William Kentridge, Ilka Schönbein, Duda Paiva, Julie Taymor, Robert Le Page, The Brothers Quay, Handspring Puppet Company, Oriza Hirata, Tadeusz Kantor, Royale de Luxe, Kara Walker, and Ping Chong, among others. Course Requirements: active class participation in discussion and any hands-on projects; short weekly response papers; possible short in-class presentation of one book or artist’s work; one performance review; choice of final paper or hybrid paper/performance project.

THEA85400 – (Seminar in Comparative Drama) Rethinking the Theatre History Syllabus
Tuesday 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
Professor Bertie Ferdman

As its title suggests, this course addresses the need to rethink how we teach “Theatre History” through the lens of 21st-century movements that counter patriarchal, heteronormative, racist and nationalist systems of thought. As future college professors, you will (most likely) be asked to teach a generalized survey course at the undergraduate level. Rising consciousness of Eurocentric narratives that privilege Western ideologies stemming from Enlightenment thinking warrants a recalibration of what shape such generalized survey courses should/could take. What to include? How to frame what is included and why? How to address exclusions? What geographical and cultural areas to prioritize and why? How to create a balance between temporal chronology, spatial geographies, cultural forms, and aesthetic movements? This course will look at different ways to engage with theatre’s varying histories with an emphasis on what we choose to teach and why. The goal of this course is thus a pragmatic one. We will critically engage with the content and methodology of possibilities for creating your very own Theatre Histories survey course. We will look at a variety of existing textbooks and pair these with critical readings around historiography, postcolonial theory, Black studies, performance studies, indigenous studies, and queer theory, by authors such as Sara Ahmed, Christopher B. Balme, Tracy C. Davis, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Simon Gikandi, David Graeber, Leo Cabranes-Grant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Fred Moten, Noémie Ndiaye, Rebecca Schneider, Diana Taylor, David Wiles, Patricia Ybarra, and Harvey Young.

Assignments will require students to do book reviews of textbooks, edited collections, and existing syllabi to critically engage with methodology. Students will then create their own Theatre Histories syllabus for an undergraduate course along with a teaching philosophy statement. Together, the students will co-author a group essay for publication on approaches to teaching survey theatre histories courses for undergraduates.
 

THEA70600: History of Theatrical Theory (Core Curriculum)

Professor David Savran
Tuesday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. Room 3310B

This course has two objectives: to introduce students to theatrical theory and to examine other theories that have influenced contemporary theatre and cultural studies. The course will begin with a discussion of what constitutes theatrical theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, character and identity, genre, and audience response. A modular structure will allow us to follow and create ongoing dialogues about these concepts as they have evolved. The second objective of the course will be met through, again, a modular approach to the presentation and discussion of such influential critical/cultural theories as formalism and structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, feminism, and post-colonialism, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre studies.  Assignments will include two written projects (either two annotated bibliographies or one annotated bibliography and a research paper) as well as in-class presentations and a final examination. 

THEA80400: Advanced Theatre Research (Core Curriculum)

Professor Jean Graham-Jones
Wednesday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. Room 3308

This core course is designed to provide Theatre and Performance students who have passed their First Examination with a survey of different models for the dissertation and the dissertation proposal, as well as historiographic and theoretical methodologies that have proven especially important for theatre and performance studies in recent years. Encouraging students to become fluent in these critical languages, the course aims to prepare them to define their fields of study, build reading lists, frame dissertation topics and proposals, conduct original research, and select the approaches most useful for interpreting and elaborating on their research. Because this course is intended in part to provide an overview of recent work in theatre studies, we will be attentive to new historical methods and attempt to pinpoint emerging areas of research. The course will develop students’ theoretical self-awareness by allowing them to experiment with a variety of approaches and to do research in one of their three Second Examination fields. Over the course of the semester, students will be expected to submit several written assignments (including a professional autobiography and statement of interests, a field statement, and an analysis of two CUNY dissertations) as well as lead a one-hour session based on the student’s field statement and/or reading list, stressing theoretical and methodological tools.

Evaluation for final grade: Your final grade will be calculated by averaging the grades for the written assignments, your class-led preparation and discussion, and your overall participation in the seminar.

THEA85200: Performing Arts in Asia: Focus on China and Japan **COURSE CANCELLED**

Professor Peter Eckersall
Tuesday 4:15 p.m. - 6:15 p.m.

This course will investigate theatre and performance in the regional context of East Asia, a place of dynamic change and rapid modernization.  The course will have a specific focus on theatre in Japan and China and will also explore other arts and artists from the region, including some examples from Singapore and Korea.  It will introduce students to major performance traditions including Noh, Kabuki and Chinese traditional theatre.  It will further consider the ways that theatre has responded to modernization and the development of contemporary culture through studies of theatre artists and contemporary forms of performance.  The course will study plays, documentation of performances and the historical and contemporary contexts for notable performance groups.  As such, a selection of plays will be examined in English alongside the work of theatre directors and performance makers including artists working to develop interdisciplinary and intercultural forms of expression. A focus of the course will be the consideration of theatre and performance as connected to contexts of nationhood, modernity, culture, politics and globalization.  Hence, we will consider a diverse range of theatre and performance events that show contestatory connections with political and cultural histories while also paying attention to the everyday lives of people wherein performance is a means of documenting and transforming personal experiences. 

THEA85400: The Grotesque in Theatre

Professor Annette Saddik
Monday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. Room 3212

The Theatre of the Grotesque, an anti-realistic dramatic movement that emerged in Italy during the 1910s and 1920s, highlighted the ironic cruelties and incongruities of life, often through macabre elements and tragic humor.  It sought to emphasize the sense of futility that accompanied World War I and its aftermath, and is often seen as a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd.  More generally, the notion of "the grotesque" in theatre rests on contradiction, ambiguity, and Victor Hugo's theories of incongruity, merging the ugly and the beautiful.

Along these lines, this course will begin the study of the grotesque in theatre with Luigi Chiarelli's introduction of the term, and examine the work of Enrico Cavacchioli, Luigi Antonelli, and Luigi Pirandello in Italy.  We will then move on to discuss the historical development of the grotesque in German expressionism and kabarett/cabaret, the work of Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Jean Genet and Grand Guignol in France, the late plays of Tennessee Williams and Adrienne Kennedy in the U.S., Argentinean and Uruguayan playwrights Jacobo Langsner, Roberto Cossa, Ricardo Moni, and Griselda Gambaro, Plínio Marcos in Brazil, and several grotesque plays of the Middle East, including those of Youssef Idriss in Egypt and Bahram Beyas'I in Iran.  Finally, the course will explore the "new" grotesque characterized by the work of Martin McDonough and Tracy Letts, and discuss the relationship of the grotesque to related forms, such as the Gothic, British Hammer Horror films, and Charles Ludlum's Theatre of the Ridiculous.  The theorists we will be covering include Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser, Julia Kristevea, Victor Hugo, and Vsevolod Meyerhold. 

Assignments will include two essays and an oral presentation.  Essay #1 (7-10 pages) will be worth 30 percent; Essay #2 (10-15 pages) will be worth 40 percent; and the in-class presentation of 20-30 minutes will be worth 30 percent.

THEA86000: Festive and Ritual Performance

Cross-listed with Global Early Modern Studies Certificate Program GEMS83100

Professor Erika Lin
Thursday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Room 3310B

This course will examine theories and practices of festive and ritual performance in a range of times and places and will explore their implications for theatre as both an aesthetic object and an efficacious performative enactment. Topics for discussion may include: religious ritual and popular devotion; dance, gesture, and movement; games and sports; roleplaying, especially in relation to race, gender, sexual identity, and class; icons and objects; magic, astrology, and witchcraft; birth and funeral rites; nonlinear temporalities; ritual space and place; holidays and calendar customs; animals and environment; food and drink; violence and combat; erotics and sexuality. Each class session will bring together disparate theatre and performance practices by centering on a particular theme. For instance, we might consider popular devotion in Carnival and Hindu processional drama; audience affect among seventeenth-century Caribbean black ritual healers and twentieth-century U.S. reinvented saint traditions; racial impersonation in relation to commedia’s legacy and Philadelphia mummers; performativity in Malaysian spirit possession and modern pagan witchcraft; and altars and other objects in feminist ritual acts. Culturally specific theatre and performance practices will be analyzed in relation to theoretical work by writers such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, Max Harris, Claire Sponsler, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Mikhail Bakhtin, Catherine Bell, Kay Turner, Marina Warner, Johan Huizinga, Brian Sutton-Smith, Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Ronald Hutton. Evaluation: active class participation, short weekly response papers, possible brief in-class presentation, research proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final paper.

THEA 70100: Theatre Research(Core Curriculum)

Professor Erika Lin 
Thursday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

This course will provide an overview of the profession and how one joins the many conversations taking place in it. Classes will concern such matters as general research methodologies as demonstrated in current publications; approaches to historiography; the procedure for getting papers accepted for conferences and the benefits of participating therein; and a number of issues related to teaching. A constant theme will be the preparation and writing of research papers, conference papers, and papers for publication. Examples and strategies will be drawn from scholarship on a broad range of geographical and historical material. We will attempt to plan a trip to one of the theatre archives in New York, and you will be responsible for conducting and writing up archival research. Factors that affect final course grades include: informed participation in class discussion; an in-class exam written on the scheduled exam date; frequent written exercises; and several class presentations, most of them connected to a final seminar paper based on archival research.

NOTE: All THEA courses are listed as hybrid given ongoing uncertainties about COVID-19; there may be unexpected changes in instructional mode.

THEA70300: Context and Intertextual Studies in Drama (Core Curriculum)

Professor Hilary Miller
Tuesday 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.

A study of selected dramatic texts from world drama, representing a wide range of traditions and forms, from ancient times to the present. Two or more plays, depending on length, will be analyzed each week, along with ancillary theoretical and historical materials. Plays studied will be placed in historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts and viewed in relation to other works of literature, art, and music. Special consideration will be given to the nature and history of genres, such as farce, tragicomedy, melodrama, burlesque; types, such as the liturgical or the political, including agit-prop, documentary, and verbatim; movements, such as neoclassicism, naturalism, symbolism; modes, such as satire, pastoral, grotesque, dystopian; devices and conventions, such as parable, allegory, narration; themes and topics, such as myth, nation, diaspora, ecocriticism, war, and exile; and cultural encounters, such as appropriation, adaptation, parody, and reception. Assignments may include a series of short papers and a final examination.

NOTE: All THEA courses are listed as hybrid given ongoing uncertainties about COVID-19; there may be unexpected changes in instructional mode.

THEA80300: Theatre, Performance and Time

Cross-listed with English, Art History and Critical Theory Certificate Program (exact course numbers will be posted shortly)

Professor Maurya Wickstrom
Monday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

This course is an exploration of contemporary thought on temporality, with a particular focus on theatre, performance, and theatre scholarship as important mediums for new temporal or alternative experience and thought. The class takes as a central point the problematic of linearity and modernist and teleological narratives of progress, with Walter Benjamin as a central provocation. We will also explore the relation between history and time, dominant modes of temporality in neoliberalism, and key philosophical interventions in time such as those by Giorgio Agamben. Importantly, the class will also consider our recent intense experience of Covid-time and Black uprising. Zoom productions like Richard Nelson’s new Apple family plays, or Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All, were early explorations of this pandemic temporality. The time of Black uprising has foregrounded how much Black people have generated, and lived in, temporalities alternative to Euro/North American linear capitalist times. This is articulated in an abundance of Black scholarship and practice on time that expresses the fullness of what the uprisings offer to living differently. Further, this time is marked by the publication of Race and Performance After Repetition (2020). The volume emerged from an ASTR José Esteban Muñoz Targeted Research Working Session and is the theme of the rescheduled ASTR conference in Fall 2021. It will be a central organizing structure for the course. The volume, grounded in Muñoz’s thought, directs itself to moving elsewhere from the fascination with the temporal signature of repetition that has often been dominate among performance scholars thinking about time. In so doing, it opens up especially into evocations of, for instance, Black futurity, afterlife, the wake etc. as significant and active experiential concepts for a livable life for those who have battled “racial time” for centuries

Performance work might include, for instance, An Octoroon (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins), The B-Side (Eric Berryman/Wooster Group), We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly known as South West Africa (abbreviated title - Jackie Sibblies Drury) in conjunction with The Refusal of Time and The Head and the Load (William Kentridge), Moneymaker (the Covid-time live durational performance by Holly Bass performed in the window of Live Arts), Architecting (The TEAM), and performances by Cassils, Andrew Schneider and M. Lamar. Theorists may include, in addition to those included in Race, Repetition and Performance, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, W.E.B. Dubois, Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye, Bruno Latour, Gary Wilder, Lisa Lowe, Saidiya V. Hartman, Alain Badiou, Giulia Palladini, Nicholas Ridout, Christina Sharpe, and Sarah Jane Cervenak.

Course Requirements: one short presentation, one short paper (5-8 pages), and one long paper (10-15 pages).

NOTE: All THEA courses are listed as hybrid given ongoing uncertainties about COVID-19; there may be unexpected changes in instructional mode.

THEA 85300: German Theatre/Performance

Professor David Savran
Tuesday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

During the winter and spring of 2020 when performing arts venues around the world were shuttered because of COVID, state-subsidized theatres in Germany and Austria livestreamed archival performances, some dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. This sudden availability of video recordings by many great directors enormously enriches our understanding of what has been arguably the most continually innovative theatre tradition in the West since the nineteenth century. This course will analyze some of the treasures that have become available, focusing on the most celebrated German directors and the playwrights and composers who have inspired them, including Aeschylus, Euripides, Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Wagner, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, and Weill. As this course will show, classic plays in German theatre are understood not as the museum pieces they sometimes become in Anglophone productions, but opportunities for directors and actors to make work that is urgently—and sometimes shockingly—contemporary. We will also be studying key theoretical and critical texts (in English) related to the plays we are reading and watching. Finally, the course will examine original work developed since 2010 by directors and theatre collectives in collaboration with composers and performers, some of it directly or indirectly responding to the Syrian refugee crisis and the rise of neo-fascism. 

Although most of the videos assigned for class will be recordings of classic plays (of which translations are readily available), very few have English titles. So unless you have a working knowledge of German, you will have to become adept at understanding the language of mise en scène. Evaluation: three short written reports, class participation, and a final paper.

NOTE: All THEA courses are listed as hybrid given ongoing uncertainties about COVID-19; there may be unexpected changes in instructional mode.

THEA86000: Contemporary Latin American Theatre and Performance

Cross-listed with LAILAC as SPAN86300

Professor Jean Graham-Jones
Wednesday, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

This course takes a “geochronological” approach to surveying contemporary Latin American theatre and performance. In other words, the course will be organized around the last six decades to examine theatre and performance practices of several countries within the context of each particular decade. Special attention will be paid to principal trends and movements of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Latin American theatre and the cultural terms in play during each decade. We will study how Latin American theatre practitioners have adopted, adapted, critiqued, and rejected extra-Latin American traditions, as well as created, transformed, and questioned specifically Latin American theoretical and aesthetic models.

Course requirements and expectations:
Three 500-word responses, one 500-750-word summary of a recommended book or 2-3 of the grouped recommended articles, and a final research paper (15-20 pages).

NOTE: All THEA courses are listed as hybrid given ongoing uncertainties about COVID-19; there may be unexpected changes in instructional mode.

THEA85700: Performing Research

Cross-listed with ART86040 (Art History owns this course)
Professor Claire Bishop
Thursday, 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

This is an experimental, practice-based class for students who want to think about alternative and public-facing means of dissemination for their research. The emphasis will be on New York City as a site, and classes will be held at a different outdoor location each week. Topics include lecture performances, audio-books, chapbooks, radio/podcasts, street vending, and delegated performance. It is open to students from all departments, but priority will be given to students from Art History and Theatre & Performance. The class meets on Thursday mornings from August to November, 9.30am–12.30pm. (NB there will be no classes after Thanksgiving because of the weather.)

THEA70600: History of Theatrical Theory (Core Curriculum)

Professor Peter Eckersall
Monday, 4:15 p.m. - 6:15 p.m.

This course has two objectives: to introduce students to theatrical theory and to examine other theories that have influenced contemporary theatre and cultural studies. The course will begin with a discussion of what constitutes theatrical theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, character and identity, genre, and audience response. A modular structure will allow us to follow and create ongoing dialogues about these concepts as they have evolved. The second objective of the course will be met through, again, a modular approach to the presentation and discussion of such influential critical/cultural theories as formalism and structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, feminism, and post-colonialism, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre studies.  Assignments will include two written projects (either two annotated bibliographies or one annotated bibliography and a research paper) as well as in-class presentations and a final examination.  

THEA 80300: The Urban/Rural Divide in Queer American Theatre and Performance

Professor Sean Edgecomb
Tuesday 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.

This seminar considers how urban and rural queer U.S. Americans have been represented in dramatic text, on the stage and in film, striving to develop a discourse that will deconstruct if not dismantle the false dichotomy between performed urbanity and rurality in the United States. This intersectional and interdisciplinary class focuses on queer/trans theory, feminist theory and critical race theory as applied to theatre history/performance studies, dramatic texts and theatrical/filmic performance and further considers how socio-economics, class, education, race, gender, aesthetics, ecology, regionalism and circumscribed narratologies have structured the boundaries of a national rural/urban divide.

In 2005 Jack Halberstam introduced the notion of “metronormativity” to question why most histories and critical inquiries of LGBTQ+ U.S. American society have been focused on the city as the only viable source for the national queer imaginary and its associated cultural practices. In contrast, the rural has been most often associated with queer persecution, absence or even death dealing. The false dichotomy set up by this model presents the city as the only safe, let alone productive, destination for LGBTQ+ U.S. Americans and the source of a codified “homonormativity.” After settling on working definition of “queer,” students will complete units on queer rurality/rusticity followed by queer urbanity/metronormativity and a final third unit that seeks to complicate and/or dissolve the boundary that separates them. 

Unit one focuses on the queer rural and includes readings by Halberstam, Scott Herring, Mary L. Gray, E. Cram, Brian J. Gilley, Matt Brim, Stina Soderling, Garret Nichols, Berit Brandith and Polly J. Smith and includes plays and performances such as Farm Boys, Our Town, The Laramie Project, The Prom, Queer Appalachia/Electric Dirt, Short Mountain, Bard Summerscape’s Peter Pan and Oklahoma! and films including Brokeback Mountain, Beneath the Harvest Sky, Monster, God’s Own Country and Boys Don’t Cry.

Unit two focuses on the queer urban and includes readings by D.L. Miller, Jose E. Muñoz, Michael Warner, Jill Dolan, Marion M. Bailey, Sara Warner, James F. Wilson, Donald Vining, Kate Davy, Stacy Wolf and David Savran and includes plays and performances such as The Captive, The Boys in the Band, Bent, The View Upstairs, Galas, Daddy, Gently Down the Stream, Stop Kiss and The Baltimore Waltz and films including Flesh, Moonlight, Tangerine and Carol.

The third and final unit invites students to think past the rural/urban divide in queer American performance and in addition to readings by Edgecomb, Shane Vogel, Alicia Arrizón, Kim Marra, Selby Wynn Schwartz, Niskapisuwin Neptune, additional articles will be sourced by the students over the course of the semester. Plays and performance texts include O, Earth, Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, A Ride on the Irish Cream, The Inheritance, Summer at Bluefish Cove, Love! Valour! Compassion! and A.J. and the Queen as well as the materials gathered by students as part of their research.

Evaluation: oral presentations, weekly “queer” theory journal entries, class participation, selected reading leadership and a final research paper.

In this class, students will continue to develop writing skills, knowledge of theory, theatre and performance across geographical and historical periods and the ability to analyze performance and theatre/film with originality and precision while effectively putting into practice a developing familiarity with relevant theory and methodology. This seminar will assist in working toward the completion of the following Department Learning Goals: 1, 3, 4 and 5.

THEA81500: Performing Blackness from Stage to Screen

Professor Racquel Gates
Tuesday, 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Given early cinema’s connection to stage performance, it should come as little surprise that many of the tropes and representational strategies that the cinema adopted to portray blackness bore, and continue to bear, close relation to minstrelsy and blackface. This seminar will examine the ways that “performing blackness” has played a crucial role in the evolution of cinema, whether from the perspective of Jewish artists trying to establish their racial identities in early Hollywood, or African American artists attempting to subvert dominant representational modes. While the course will focus heavily on Hollywood cinema and mainstream media, it will also incorporate discourses from performance studies, critical race studies, and gender studies. Screenings will cover a large range of genres and historical periods.

Course Goals:
-To critically engage with the history and theories of American minstrelsy and its impact on cinema and contemporary media.
-To develop an understanding of the ways that cinema represents race, particularly
categories of black and white.
-To apply theories of racial representation to a wide range of cinematic and media texts.
-To produce a research paper grounded in the scholarship and discourses of racial representation and cinema.

Required Texts:
Jake Austen and Yuval Taylor. Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 

Ashley Clark. Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. Raleigh, NC: The Critical Press, 2015. 

Arthur Knight. Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. 

Eric Lott. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Race and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Michael Rogin. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Nicholas Sammond. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015.

Linda Williams. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 

THEA85200: Advanced Theatre Research

Professor Erika Lin
Thursday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

This course will examine theories and practices of festive and ritual performance in a range of times and places and will explore their implications for theatre as both an aesthetic object and an efficacious performative enactment. Topics for discussion may include: religious ritual and popular devotion; dance, gesture, and movement; games and sports; roleplaying, especially in relation to race, gender, sexual identity, and class; icons and objects; magic, astrology, and witchcraft; birth and funeral rites; nonlinear temporalities; ritual space and place; holidays and calendar customs; animals and environment; food and drink; violence and combat; erotics and sexuality. Each class session will bring together disparate theatre and performance practices by centering on a particular theme. For instance, we might consider Mardi Gras and Carnival in relation to racial impersonation; movement and religious space in Christian and Hindu processional drama; audience participation and community formation in contemporary queer theatre; site-specific performance, ecocriticism, and the history of modern pagan witchcraft; poverty and charity in mumming and other holiday begging customs; mock combat, blood sports, and dramas of ritual sacrifice; and animal masks and puppetry in diverse dance traditions. Culturally specific theatre and performance practices will be analyzed in relation to theoretical work by writers such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, Max Harris, Claire Sponsler, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Mikhail Bakhtin, Catherine Bell, Kay Turner, Marina Warner, Johan Huizinga, Brian Sutton-Smith, Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Ronald Hutton. Evaluation: active class participation, short weekly response papers, possible brief in-class presentation, research proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final paper.

THEA85500: History of Scenic Design

Professor Marvin Carlson
Monday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

This course will cover the major trends and leading theorists and practitioners of theatrical stage design in the West from the Renaissance to the present. A wide selection of visual material from the program image collection will be shown in class, which will take place in a computer classroom. There will be approximately three classes devoted to design from the classic period through the 17th century, one on the 18th century, three on the 19th century and six on the 20th and 21st centuries. During the term each student will prepare biographical and artistic studies of two designers, one pre-twentieth century, and one from the twentieth and/or twenty-first centuries. There will be a final examination based on identification of images from the program collection.

THEA86000: Transatlantic Theatre and Performance: Golden Age Spain and Pre-Conquest/Colonial Latin America

Professor Jean Graham-Jones
Wednesday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

This course focuses on theatre and performance produced in Spain and Latin America during, primarily, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than treating Latin America as a colonial extension of the Spanish-speaking metropolis, we will respond to the "transatlantic turn" in Latin American and Peninsular studies and examine the two regions through their nearly constant (albeit often conflicted) dialogue with each other. To do this we will discuss, apply, and critique the sociocultural, political, linguistic, literary, theatrical, and performance theories of coloniality.

After a transatlantic introduction to the period, we will look at theatre / performance practices in place in both regions before the arrival of the Spanish to the Americas and then proceed to an examination of Spain’s “Golden Age” of theatre as well as colonial theatre and performance in Latin America. We will read autos sacramentales in addition to entremeses and comedias from both sides of the Atlantic; study accounts of Corpus Christi processions in Madrid and Cuzco in addition to reconstructions of pre-Hispanic performance-scripts in Meso-America and Canada; and seek out specific examples of cultural encounter, such as the translation of a Spanish evangelical drama into Nahuatl or a colonial loa intended for a madrileño audience. Among the authors whose texts we will study are Rojas, Lope de Rueda, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca, Cervantes, Ruiz de Alarcón, sor Marcela de San Félix, Ana Caro, and sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Special consideration will be given to the role of translation in our own study of theatre and performance.

Evaluation will be based on engaged, prepared participation, the posting of multiple short responses, an in-class contextualization of an individual theorist, and a final research paper (15-20 pages).

THEA70300 – Contextual and Intertextual Studies (Core)
Monday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Professor Annette Saddik

This course will survey dramatic texts representing a wide range of traditions and forms across multiple eras and geographic locations. Plays will be studied in relation to their historical, social, and cultural contexts; compared to other art forms; analyzed for their critical, historiographic, theoretical, and political significance; and located in relation to broader intellectual and aesthetic movements. Special attention may be given to issues of dramatic form, genre, mode, and type; staging conventions and practices; and metacritical matters such as canon formation, the construction of theatre history survey courses, and institutional and material conditions shaping how drama is defined and interpreted. Extensive, in-depth focus on primary playtexts will be supplemented with selected secondary readings. Assignments may include short written exercises or presentations, a longer final paper, and a final examination.

THEA70600 – History of Theatrical Theory (Core)
Wednesday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Professor Jean Graham-Jones 

This course has two objectives: to introduce students to theatrical theory and to examine other theories that have influenced contemporary theatre and cultural studies. The course will begin with a discussion of what constitutes theatrical theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, character and identity, genre, and audience response. A modular structure will allow us to follow and create ongoing dialogues about these concepts as they have evolved. The second objective of the course will be met through, again, a modular approach to the presentation and discussion of such influential critical/cultural theories as formalism and structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, feminism, and post-colonialism, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre studies.  Assignments will include two written projects (either two annotated bibliographies or one annotated bibliography and a research paper) as well as in-class presentations and a final examination.  

THEA80200 – (Seminar in Dramatic Genre) Avant-Gardist Theatre Since 1960
Tuesday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. 
Professor David Savran

The past sixty years have witnessed a radical expansion of theatrical possibilities and a flowering of new performance genres. Often, the makers of innovative work have been styled an avant-garde, a term first used in the 19th century by the French military to reference a reconnaissance group in advance of the main military force. By the end of the 19th century, it became associated with both politically and artistically radical insurgencies and by the post-World War II era, it had ironically become a tradition, or, in Charles Ludlam’s phrase, “le bourgeois avant-garde.” 

This course is committed to interrogating the history and historiography of the avant-garde, a term as indispensable as it is vague, by studying theatre that was deemed avant-gardist in its day. It will focus on the United States and Germany, two nations often regarded as hotbeds of theatrical and musical innovation, both of whose cultural landscapes were profoundly transformed during the 1960s. In the US, the theatrical avant-garde was as committed to staging new texts as to developing novel modes of performance, while the German avant-garde became centered on the work of visionary directors, many of whom devised innovative modes of music theatre. The course is designed not as a survey but to offer highly selective close-ups of different kinds and styles of theatre, with an emphasis on music theatre, with critical analyses of text, music, mise en scène, and reception.

Because the course will emphasize the theatrical event, some of the pieces will be accessible through good quality videos and sound recordings. Works to be studied include landmarks by US-American artists such as Adrienne Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Maria Irene Fornes, Cathy Berberian, Kiki and Herb, Mabou Mines, the Wooster Group, and Jackie Sibblies Drury. The Germans include Peter Handke, Heiner Müller, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Ulrich Rasche, Susanne Kennedy, Ersan Mondtag, Yael Ronen, and Herbert Fritsch. Final grades will be determined by participation in seminar, two written reports, and a final paper.

THEA81600 – (Seminar in Film Theory: Theories of the Cinema) Screendance: Movement and Media
Monday 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. 
Professor Edward Miller

Both dance and film focus upon articulated and expressive bodies in movement, yet a film is a recording, assembled from a selection of images, effects, and sound files whereas dance is perceived as “live” and often described as ephemeral. What becomes possible when these two ontologically differing expressive modes intertwine? Many scholars in the last 20 years have argued that a new mediated form is created in this encounter, called screendance. This course is an introduction to screendance studies; it draws upon film and performance theory and does not require students to have a background in dance. 

We begin by reframing key collaborations between filmmakers and choreographers, beginning with Louis Lumière and Loie Fuller in Danse Serpentine (1896). We also look at Maya Deren’s collaboration with Talley Beatty in A Study of Choreography for Camera (1945) as well as Lucinda Childs’s work with Sol LeWitt in Dance (1979), Trisha Brown’s work with Babette Mangolte in Water Motor (1978), and Merce Cunningham’s work with Charles Atlas in Exchange (1973, 2013). Through reading key texts on cinema and movement (Gilles Deleuze; Jordan Schonig) as well as texts specifically on film and dance by Noël Carrol, Douglas Rosenberg, Thomas DeFrantz, Harmony Bench, Erin Brannigan, as well as essays from The International Journal of Screendance, we determine how race, gender, and physique informed how tap dance was filmed in Hollywood musicals, how Balanchine’s non-narrative ballets were transformed by PBS’s Dance in America in the 1970s, and how Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater of gender and courtship was filmed by directors as different as Wim Wenders, Chantal Akerman, and Pedro Almodóvar. In the final third of the semester, we look at the strategies deployed by Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and William Forsythe in the late 20th century to incorporate digital imaging into their choreography. We conclude the course by looking at the aesthetics of new dance forms spread via social media platforms and videotelephony during the Pandemic, especially through TikTok dance challenges, Instagram dance classes, and Zoom dance parties. 

Students work on a portfolio that consists of a weekly response to the reading and the dance videos viewed in class. Weekly prompts are provided to enable students’ ability to write on dance and media critically and creatively and to identify a research area for students’ final projects. Although the focus of this course is primarily on American screendance, students are encouraged to research other traditions or occurrences for their final projects.

THEA85700 – (Seminar in Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique) Digital Historiography in Theatre and Performance: Theory, History and Practice
Tuesday 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. 
Professor Debra Caplan

This course will introduce students to the emerging field of digital humanities in theatre and performance studies, and will focus on the effects of emerging technologies on theatre and performance art, documentation, archives and theoretical scholarship. The field has changed significantly in recent years in response to technology and the rise of the digital humanities, while contemporary theatre, dance, and performance artists are increasingly incorporating digital media into their performances. This course presents an overview of the leading literature, methodologies, projects, and debates at the nexus of digital technologies, history, and performance. Topics covered include the history of digital approaches to theatre and performance, current debates in the field, encoding, analysis, visualization, network analysis, and spatial analysis. We will read digital humanities theories and debates alongside theatre-specific readings related to media theory, liveness, documentation, and ephemerality, while also studying examples of digital humanities projects in the field and laying the groundwork for students to develop their own scholarly projects. Students will emerge from this course with an understanding of the contours of this emerging subfield as well as a set of practical skills and techniques that will enable them to add digital dimensions to their scholarship. No specific technical skills are required for this course. Course Requirements: one short presentation, one short paper, one research paper or mock digital project proposal (student choice).

THEA86000 – (Theatre in Society) Late Medieval and Early Modern Theatre and Performance 
Thursday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. 
Professor Erika Lin

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to theatre and performance in England and Europe from the 1400s through 1600s. Combining dramatic analysis with varied historical and theoretical methods, we will examine a range of genres, including biblical theatre, saints plays, moralities, farces, interludes, masques, pageantry, jigs, commedia dell’arte scenarios, and playhouse drama. We will draw extensive connections between theatre and other embodied practices, such as music, dancing, sports, festivity, devotional ritual, and judicial punishment; and we will situate performance in relation to broader cultural discourses regarding gender, sexuality, class, and religion, among others. Particular attention will be paid to issues of spectacle, audience, and the body. In addition to historicist concerns, we will also address theoretical and methodological matters, including both practical strategies for dealing with primary sources from this period and analytical reflection on epistemological questions raised by their idiosyncratic forms. Discussion may encompass unfamiliar documentary conventions, gaps in evidence, intersections across media (performance, manuscript, print), and critical vocabulary related to early books and manuscripts. We will also engage in self-reflexive examination of the stakes of studying theatre and performance in this era, considering the portability of critical tools developed to grapple with fragmentary sources and the value of reassessing disciplinary paradigms taken for granted in contemporary theatre research. Primary readings will include both dramatic literature and other extant texts related to performance, such as property lists, ballads, and parish accounts. Secondary readings will be drawn from a variety of fields, including theatre studies, cultural history, literature, art history, and religious studies. Non-English material will be provided in translation. No experience with paleography is required. Evaluation: active class participation, short weekly response papers, possible brief in-class presentation, research proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final paper.

THEA82000 – (Special Topics in Theatre and Popular Entertainment) Alvin Ailey and Beyond
Thursday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. 
Professor Claire Bishop

Led by Claire Bishop (PhD Program in Art History) and Adrienne Edwards (Engell Speyer Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum

This seminar will focus on the life and work of African-American choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931–1989), who will be the topic of a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2024. Themes will include: Ailey’s hybridization of concert dance, theater, and social dance (Horton, Dunham, Halprin, Fosse); modes of creation and distribution (Hollywood and Broadway); the imaginary of the American South and Caribbean; queer aesthetics; and how to make an exhibition constellating the life and creativity of a choreographer. This will be an opportunity to workshop ideas and generate new research—not just into his career, but also its legacy in the work of contemporary performers and choreographers.

•    Assessment: weekly participation (10%), an abstract (30%), and an original research paper (60%). 
•    Time: Thursdays 2–4pm 
•    Location: Whitney Museum of American Art
•    Auditors by permission

THEA70100 – Theatre Research (Core)
Thursday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Professor Erika Lin

This course will provide an overview of the profession and how one joins the many conversations taking place in it. Classes will concern such matters as general research methodologies as demonstrated in current publications; approaches to historiography; the procedure for getting papers accepted for conferences and the benefits of participating therein; and a number of issues related to teaching. A constant theme will be the preparation and writing of research papers, conference papers, and papers for publication. Examples and strategies will be drawn from scholarship on a broad range of geographical and historical material. We will attempt to plan a trip to one of the theatre archives in New York, and you will be responsible for conducting and writing up archival research. Factors that affect final course grades include: informed participation in class discussion; an in-class exam written on the scheduled exam date; frequent written exercises; and several class presentations, most of them connected to a final seminar paper based on archival research.

THEA80400 –Advanced Theatre Research (Core)
Tuesday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Professor Peter Eckersall 

This core course is designed to provide students who have passed their first exam with an examination of the historiographic and theoretical methodologies that have proven most important for theatre and performance studies in recent years. Encouraging students to become fluent in these critical languages, the course aims to prepare them to frame their dissertation topics, conduct original research, and select the historiographic and theoretical models most useful for interpreting and elaborating on their research. Because this course is intended in part to provide an overview of recent work in theatre studies, we will examine new historical methods and attempt to pinpoint emerging areas of research. The course will develop students’ theoretical self-awareness by allowing them to experiment with a variety of approaches and to do research in one of their three second exam fields.  Assignments: Over the course of the semester, students will be expected to submit several written assignments (including a professional biography and statement of interests, a field statement, and an analysis of two CUNY dissertations) as well as lead a class based on the student’s field statement and reading list, stressing theoretical and methodological tools.

THEA81500 – (Seminar in Film Studies) Politics as Performance and Style: From Cable News to YouTube, from Right to Left
Tuesday 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. 
Professor Reece Peck

In the twenty-first century, the public’s interface with policies and elections has primarily happened through televisual/video representations. For better or for worse, media styles and consumer brands have become stronger sources of political identification than formal party activities as media corporations like Fox News and MSNBC have come to usurp many of the traditional roles that political parties once played. In this hyper-“mediatized” political culture, the success of a politician or movement often hinges on their ability to produce compelling television performances and viral moments. And yet too often aesthetic appeals have been treated as a superficial part of political identity. Therefore, this aspect of political communication has received marginal attention from mainstream political scientists. But to ignore performance style is to overlook a critical dimension of our political experience. 

This course combines political theory with cultural theory to explore the relationship between news aesthetics and ideology. Students will examine the indirect ways in which partisan media outlets speak to their audiences and zero in on the specific presentational techniques these outlets deploy to make political issues socially meaningful and emotionally compelling. Additionally, students will be asked to historically contextualize the hyper-partisan, click-bait-oriented media environment of today within broader histories of tabloid media and partisan journalism. Connecting the past to the present, the course also explores how increasing polarization in the political arena intersects with and is accelerated by the commercially driven algorithms of social media platforms and asks students to debate whether and to what extent these interlocking forces undermine journalistic standards and democracy itself. 

The course’s organizational structure — moving from CNN to Fox News to MSNBC, and finally to the “alt-right” and “alt-left” sectors of YouTube — is designed to accomplish the following learning objectives: (1) to understand the importance of aesthetics to journalism and political communication; (2) to reveal the stylistic linkages between older “legacy” media and newer “social media”; and (3) to explain how these stylistic affinities are incentivized by a similar commercial-economic logic. Finally, the course asks if there is any connection between particular presentation/performance strategies and particular ideologies and whether such connections are intentionally forged by political actors and media creators. In this course, students will read classic texts that have engaged the intersection of popular culture and political communication, such as Stuart Hall’s Hard Road to Renewal (1988) and Robert Hariman’s Political Style (1995). This course will also draw from more contemporary work on political media, such as Geoffrey Baym’s From Cronkite to Colbert (2009) and Benjamin Moffit’s The Rise of Global Populism (2016), and will use articles from the burgeoning literature on alternative online political media as well. Students will be graded by weekly response papers that address select questions, by assigned reading presentations in seminar, and by a final essay. 

THEA82000 – (Special Topics in Theatre and Popular Entertainment) Musical Theatre and Its Industry Since 1950
Monday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. 
Professor Elizabeth Wollman

As an American-born and globally embraced performing arts genre, the musical theater has long reflected the changing moods of its audience. In recent decades, the musical has undergone a number of significant economic, technological, sociocultural, political and aesthetic developments, all of which have exerted influence on its growth, development, reach, and relationship with spectators. Despite frequent insistences to the contrary, musical theater is never dead or close to dying—instead, it is constantly growing and transforming into a popular entertainment form that connects back to but has become very different than it was a century, half-century, or even a decade ago.

This course is designed for graduate students who seek a greater understanding of the ways various sociocultural shifts have exerted influence on the musical theater and its industry since the end of World War II. Sessions will be devoted to an examination of some of the more important developments that have affected the musical since the postwar era. Topics for discussion will include economics, advertising and marketing, technology, the relationship of theater to mass entertainment, the influence of branding and of globalization, and the musical’s reflection of race, class and gender over time.  Productions examined will include musicals representative of various sociocultural, political or economic trends (including rock musicals, Off Broadway musicals, megamusicals, Disney musicals, jukebox and bio musicals, large spectacles, immersive musicals and chamber musicals). Readings will draw from musical theater, history, and cultural studies, and will include works in musical theatre studies by scholars including Masi Asari, Goeffrey Block, Trevor Boffone, Jonathan Burston, Elizabeth Titrington Craft, Ryan Donovan, Christin Essin, LaDonna Forsgren, Donatella Galella, Liza Gennaro, Jake Johnson, Kelly Kessler, Bruce Kirle, Raymond Knapp, DA Miller, Andrea Most, David Savran, Jessica Sternfeld and Stacy Wolf.
    
Requirements: Weekly reading assignments; class participation; the occasional short writing assignment; one final research paper or project on a topic that has been approved by the instructor.

THEA86000 – (Theatre in Society) Theatre, Performance, and War 
Wednesday 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. 
Professor Sara Brady

Theatre and war are both ancient, uniquely human activities that, despite their evocations of difference, have always been interrelated. Through a performance studies lens, this course engages the concepts of “theatre” and “war” to critically examine how they overlap in actual and metaphorical contexts. In the early 1800s Carl von Clausewitz defined war as “the mere continuation of politics by other means.” In this seminar we will contemplate what it means when those means are theatre. “Theatre” has long been a tool used to narrate the outcomes of wars. “War” has often been theatrical with some battles being fought in front of spectators. “War theatre” defines the boundaries of the performance space of a conflict, but “war theatre” also refers to the genre of plays about war. Students will explore these relationships through a diverse set of examples both historical and contemporary across a wide geographical range, asking: How is theatre like war? How is war like theatre? How do they inform each other? Where is the theatre in war, and where is there war in theatre? We will begin with an investigation of how mimetic behavior can reenact conflict while offering a method of rehearsal (e.g., war dances such as Balinese baris dance and martial arts such as capoeira). From that foundation we will look at spectacle in the ancient and medieval worlds (e.g., Roman naval battle reenactments; gladiatorial contests; jousting) and explore the ways in which play, games, and sport relate to war and theatre. We will focus on classical drama about war (e.g. Greek drama [The Trojan Women, Lysistrata], noh plays [Atsumori], Shakespeare [Henry V and the History Plays], among others), as well as several historical examples of war as theatre (e.g., battles with audiences such as the Battle of Bull Run) and the theatricality of war (sets/battlefields, costumes/uniforms, choreography/formation, etc.). Pursuing historical examples will inform our work on contemporary sites of performance where war and theatre meet such as reinterpretation of classics by Theater of War Productions and the rigorous community work of the In Place of War network. We will look at modern responses to war in the theatre from Danton’s Death to Ruined, and consider how different theatrical genres (e.g., documentary theatre, devised theatre, puppet/object theatre, etc.) approach the representation of war. We will also look to performative constructions of war (e.g., false flags, the “cold” war, “total” war) and responses to war (e.g., antiwar protests, Winter Soldier, virtual PTSD treatment). When, we will ask, is theatre “the continuation of politics by other means”? 

Course requirements: Class will be conducted in seminar format with assigned readings and case study materials to read and/or view. Students will write short weekly response papers, prepare one in-class presentation, one research proposal (one page with bibliography), which will lead into a final research paper.
 

THEA86100 – (History of the American Theatre) Performance and Politics in the Long Civil Rights Era
Monday 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. 
Professor Hillary Miller

This course will investigate theatre and performance in the United States in the context of the “long Civil Rights era,” historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s term revising the traditional periodization of 1954-1968. We will explore this extension of the temporal boundaries of Black freedom struggles in theatre and look at performance practices between 1935 and 1968 with a focus on the crossing lines of affiliation among artists and organizations committed to varied political projects (anti-fascism, labor organizing, and gender, class, and sexual rights advocacy). Our inquiries will include interracial and intraracial community theatres; radical theatre in the New Deal era; Communism and anti-Communism on stage; political sociodramas. We will also consider the methods and strategies of playwrights and companies who responded directly to the threat of nuclear warfare; those who resisted the silencing effect of government surveillance; and individuals engaged in debates about integration in the theatre.

Playwrights may include James Baldwin, William Branch, Alice Childress, Edward Chodorov, Lonne Elder III, Howard Fast, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, Loften Mitchell, Seán O’Casey, Louis Peterson, and Theodore Ward. Our case studies will pay particular attention to the institutions that confronted varying forms of repression and/or censorship, including the American Negro Theatre, Stage for Action, New Playwrights, Inc., the Greenwich Mews, Camp Unity, and the Free Southern Theater. Our readings will emphasize recent scholarly engagement with this period, and may include works by Julie Burrell, Chrystyna Dail, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Julius B. Fleming Jr., Robin D.G. Kelley, Paige A. McGinley, Jonathan Shandell, Nikhil Pal Singh, Mary Helen Washington, and Victoria Wolcott. Evaluation will be based on prepared participation; an archival research report (7-10 pages); a theoretical engagement essay (7-10 pages); and a case study presentation.