Bard College Catalogue 2012-13
Theater and Performance
http://theater.bard.edu
Faculty
Gideon Lester (director), Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Annie Dorsen, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jack Ferver, Lynn Hawley, Chiori Miyagawa, Jonathan Rosenberg, Elizabeth Smith, Naomi Thornton, Jean Ruth Wagner
OverviewThe Theater and Performance Program aims to develop innovative thinkers and artists who use great theatrical ideas from the past and present to imagine and instigate the theater of the future. Theater and performance are intrisically collaborative art forms, and collaboration and devised theater making are at the heart of Bard’s program.The Theater and Performance Program trains well-rounded theater makers who study the history, theory, and contemporary practice of theater and performance; hone their technical abilities as writers, performers, and directors; and create their own productions and performances under the mentorship of master artists and teachers. Students are encouraged to be cross-disciplinary thinkers and makers who explore the intersection of theater and performance with dance, music, the visual arts, film, and literature, as well as with the sciences and humanities. Students work side by side with a faculty of leading professional theater and performance artists; in addition, a wide range of visiting artists from this country and abroad bring a global perspective of cutting-edge theater and performance to the Bard campus. Areas of StudyTheater and Performance offers courses in context, technique, and creative practice and research. Students who major in the program are expected to take classes in all three areas of study.
Context courses include the history of theater and performance, contemporary practice, theories of theater and performance, dramatic literature, and world theater. Technique courses include skills-based classes in playwriting, directing, acting, voice, movement, dramatic structure, performance, and composition. Creative practice and research comprises productions, performance laboratories, master classes, and specialized workshops.
RequirementsFor students entering the College in the fall of 2012, the Theater and Performance curriculum emphasizes courses in context and technique, ensuring that a strong foundation is built in the first two years of study. The following courses are required before Moderation: Theater 145, Introduction to Theater and Performance: Revolutions in Time and Space; Theater 201, Introduction to Acting: The Actor and the Moment; Theater 207, Introduction to Playwriting: The Theatrical Voice; Theater 244, Introduction to Theater Making; and a theoretical or historical course drawn from elsewhere in the Arts Division. In addition, students participate in the creation and performance of a group-devised Moderation project. After Moderation, students are required to take two courses from a menu of options in each of the three areas of study—context, technique, and creative practice and research (for a total of six courses). Students must also complete a Senior Project and a group-devised production or performance in combination with a written assignment, which carries the equivalent workload and credit of two courses. Facilities and PartnershipsThe Theater and Performance Program is located in Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry. Facilities include studios, workshops, and two theaters, including the flexible Theater Two, which seats up to 200.
CoursesProgram courses emphasize the truly inclusive nature of theater, which encompasses performance, literature, design, history, artistic community, and intellectual rigor. Students are expected to acquire a solid familiarity with dramatic literature and to develop the ability to research the historical context and dramaturgy of a play and to write about it.Acting for Nonmajors
Theater 101
This course introduces scene preparation and beginning scene technique, with an emphasis on relaxation, breathing, and concentration. The new actor learns to make choices and implement them using sense memory and to integrate this work with the text. Group and individual exercises and improvisations. Texts include poems, monologues, stories, and scenes. Acting Company
Theater 103-104
In this course, which corresponds with Theater 303-304 (Directing Seminar), actors work with student directors on scenes for in-class presentation. Open to first-year students. Movement for Actors
Theater 121-122
Basic training is provided in movement, analysis, rhythm, development of technique, and confidence in space. Voice for Majors
Theater 131
This course develops awareness of physical equipment, natural pitch, purity of vowels and consonants, tone, inflection, diction, agility, nuance, and vocal imagination. Voice for Nonmajors
Theater 132
This course concentrates on basic voice and speech work, in order to help students communicate with clarity and confidence. The demands of public speaking are also addressed. Introduction to Theater and Performance: Revolutions in Time and Space
Theater 145
Class discussions are based on primary and secondary texts and modes of performance from 2,500 years of theater, starting with Aristotle and the Greek tragic playwrights and approaching the cutting edge of contemporary practice. Students investigate how great artists from across the centuries have controlled the experience of theatrical time and space, and explore such topics as the representation of reality on stage, the relationship between performance and audience, and the constantly evolving interplay of theater and democracy. Introduction to Acting: The Actor and the Moment
Theater 201
This course analyzes how an actor brings truth to the smallest unit of performance. The richness of the moment is created by the imaginative, physical, psychological, intellectual, and emotional qualities that the actor brings to it. Students explore ways to gain access to richly layered authenticity through games, improvisations, individual creations, and exercises in given circumstances. Prerequisite: students must have taken, or be enrolled in, Theater 145. Introduction to Playwriting: The Theatrical Voice
Theater 207
cross-listed: written arts
Through writing exercises based on dreams, visual images, poetry, social issues, found text, and music, students are encouraged to find their unique language, style, and vision. The class learns elements of playwriting through writing a one-act play and through reading assignments and class discussions. Additionally, a group project explores the nature of collaborative work. Playwriting II
Theater 208
This course functions as a writers’ workshop. After writing a short play, students focus on developing a full-length play, with sections of the work-in-progress presented in class for discussion. Students grow as playwrights through exposure to diverse dramatic literature and by undertaking a short adaptation of either a class play or a short story. Prerequisite: Theater 207. Scene Study
Theater 209
This course, for students who have taken one semester of Introduction to Acting and would like to continue their study, moves from a games-oriented curriculum into work with theatrical texts and the processes of scene study. Writing Political Theater
Theater 212
cross-listed: human rights
This workshop explores political expression in this theatrical genre. Students read political plays by internationally known authors—including Ken Saro Wiwa, Yoji Sakate, Caryl Churchill, Emily Mann, Athol Fugard, and Ariel Dorfman—and write several short plays and one longer play on issues of their political interest. Physical Comedy
Theater 215, 216
By embracing the archetypes of childhood and reclaiming the “internal response” without the diminishing filter of socialization, actors start to lose the inhibitions that block them from being purely expressive. Beginning with exercises in broad physicality, balance, rhythm, discovery, physical mask, and surprise, the class explores what is unique and funny about each individual. Basic Vocal Technique
Theater 234
This course is designed to develop an awareness of the importance of physical relaxation, breath capacity and control, and resonance. Also emphasized is clarity of articulation and the use of vocal range and inflection. Intended for moderated and prospective theater majors. Dramaturgy
Theater 238
In this introductory course, students consider models of dramatic structure from Aristotle to Shakespeare, and analyze how that structure is useful to directors, playwrights, and actors. Also examined is the role of dramaturgy in historical practice. Weekly scene work and collaborative projects help students develop a coherent point of view. Prerequisite: one semester of theater history or permission of the instructor. Introduction to Theater Making
Theater 244
This course follows Introduction to Theater and Performance (Theater 145) as the second in a sequence of courses exploring the intellectual and creative methods of making theater. All students take turns working collaboratively as performers, directors, writers, dramaturgs, and designers. The work created in this class is presented at the end of the semester and serves as the Moderation project for students intending to major in the program. Speaking Shakespeare
Theater 245
This course is intended for theater majors who wish to explore Shakespeare’s words as actors and are interested in developing their voices to express his complex thoughts and images. Participants concentrate on investigating soliloquies and sonnets, with a view to bringing Shakespeare’s language to life. Enrollment by approval of the instructor. Great Theaters of the World: From Greece to the Enlightenment
Theater 246
This course investigates selected periods in world theater, beginning with the massive communal festivals of ancient Greece and culminating in the philosophical upheavals of the Enlightenment. The class pays close attention to connections between drama, stagecraft, and modes of spectatorship; looks at changing notions of classicism; and investigates how the theater has shored up political power and how the stage has served as a scale model for the known world. Directing Seminar
Theater 303-304
This class introduces students to fundamental practical and theoretical concepts in directing. The art and craft of the director involves the close analysis of texts, the conceptualizing of a production, the translation of the text into the language of the stage, and the work with collaborators, including actors and designers. The exploration in this class includes exercises examining the language of the stage, analytical and practical work on texts, and an examination of the work and writings of seminal directors. Advanced Acting
Theater 307
This is a studio acting class in which students explore scenes from challenging plays of varied styles. Extensive rehearsal time outside of class is required. Prerequisite: Theater 201 and 209, or permission of the instructor. Advanced Scene Study
Theater 308
Advanced individual exercises, scenes, and monologues—drawn from all dramatic literature. Prerequisite: Theater 201 or permission of the instructor. Survey of Drama
Theater 310
Survey of Drama courses, which study the major styles and periods in drama from a literary, stylistic, and performance perspective, are at the center of the Theater and Performance Program. They are practical courses, applying text to scene work.
Recent Survey of Drama courses have included African American Theater; American Melodrama, Minstrelsy, and Vaudeville; Beckett; Birth of Tragedy and the Death of Tragedy; Black Comedy; Büchner and Strindberg; Chekhov and HisPredecessors; Dangerous Theater; Dissent and Its Performance; Euripides and Nietzsche; Feminist Theater; French Neoclassicism; German Theater; The Greeks; Grotesque in Theater; Jacobean Theater; Japanese Theater; Musical Theater; New Works on Stage; Performance Art in Theory and Practice; Philosophies of Acting: Solo Performance; Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Grotowski; Shakespeare; Tennessee Williams; Theater of the Absurd; and Yiddish Theater. Visual Imagination for the Modern Stage
Theater 318
cross-listed: studio arts
As taught by leading theatrical designers and directors, this course examines the explosive prominence of visual ideas on the stage in the past 30 years, the emergence of a new form of collaboration between directors and designers, and the inclusion of new media on the stage. Devised Theater Lab
Theater 331
Through practical exercises, including improvisations, games, and ensemble techniques, students learn how to generate ideas and research, shape, organize, and create new works for the stage. The course also examines how several contemporary artists and ensembles generate new works. Assignments include experiential essays, a research paper, and active participation in collaborative creations. Voice in Performance
Theater 340
This course addresses demands on the voice that occur in performance, such as speaking over underscoring and sustaining dialogue in fights or dances. Technical exercises are used to promote coordination of speech and movement. Latino Theater and Performance
Theater 343B
cross-listed: art history, lais
This course explores the specific aesthetic strategies Latino theater and performance artists have found most useful when wrestling with issues such as immigration, territoriality, exile, human rights, and hybridity. The class culminates with a student-driven creative project that seeks a productive relationship between form and content. Contemporary Women Playwrights
Theater 343C
cross-listed: gss
Through readings and discussions of plays, criticism, historical texts, and contemporary theater and performance, students examine the roots of theater created by women, its practice today, and its relationship to feminism. Writers studied include Virginia Woolf, Caryl Churchill, Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, Suzan-Lori Parks, Elfriede Jelinek, and Young Jean Lee, as well as works by performance artists such as Laurie Anderson and Karen Finley, and the choreographer Pina Bausch. Avant-Garde Then / Avant-Garde Now
Theater 351
This course examines the most radical and innovative theater and performance artists of the last 15 years, and their relationship to the central experimenters of the American avant-garde. The class considers the legacies of experimental artists such as John Cage, the Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, and Reza Abdoh. Also addressed are pressing themes in American experimental performance, including questions of authenticity and amateurism, spectatorship and participation, and digital and viral performance, among others.
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