THEA 290 Topics in Performance
This topics course provides opportunities to work on performance outside of traditional naturalistic traditions. Topics change annually. First-year students may only take this course with permission of instructor. May be repeated once for credit when taken as a different topic. Note: Different topics may satisfy different Core requirements.
Tools for Creative Performance and Social Change
This advanced performance study course focuses on tools and methods for engagement and the creation of short, eight to ten minute solo and/or group devised performances made in partnership with local activists and/or campus social justice organizations, exploring how to leverage collaborative relationships to make work that is equally expressive of the artist's vision and idiosyncratic voice, as well as in support of a community and cause. Students will explore techniques for active listening, engaging community in meaningful and creative dialogue, and for devising work and generating text for performance. Students will examine and evaluate the work of previous, more established social justice theatre practitioners who have created work in relationship to non-theatrical social justice activists. Students will develop tools for how to examine race, ethnicity, gender, and other identities in the U.S. and explore the dynamics of diversity, equity in the context of structural inequalities in this country through engaged artistic practice. They will learn methods for the aesthetic expression of their perspective on and critique of how power and oppression in the U.S. have worked to normalize and naturalize those inequities. Additional Core Requirement Met: U.S. Diversity.
For the spring of 2027, this course will be taught by Wanlass Visiting Artist and award winning theater director Michael John Garces.
Prerequisite
THEA 110 or permission of instructor