New Classes for Fall 2011
TAPS 1280Y: Issues in Performance Studies
taught by Professor Eng-Beng Lim
MW @ 11:30-12:50pm - Lyman Hall, room 002
Explores myriad ways of thinking, doing and talking about performance using the values, theories and practices of performance studies as a field of study. Students will study a variety of actions and sites as performance, from everyday life, conversion spectacles, surgical procedures, museum installations, dance and tourist shows to ethnological displays, among others. There will be several opportunities for us to visit some of these sites as participant-observers, critics, artists and performers. The objective is not so much to pin down a genre or category of performance as it is to understand performance variously as an analytic and practice, a form of lived history and way of being, and a critical formulation or formation beyond traditional theater practice.
TAPS 0800B: Asian American Theatre and Performance
taught by Professor Eng-Beng Lim
MW @ 9-10:30am - Lyman Hall, Becker Library
Asian American Theater and Performance examines how performers inhabit and interrogate the space between “Asia” (including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia) and “America” within primarily the United States. Using both play analysis and historical studies, we will look at a spectrum of dramatic traditions, performance practices as well as U.S political and social realities that constitute Asian American theater and performance. How do we locate Asian America within the imperial, economic and cultural histories of U.S.A? Can those locations illuminate the transnational and intercultural aspects of its dramatic production and (mis)translations?
TAPS 1400: Advanced Performance
taught by Professor Spencer Golub
MW @ 1-2:50pm, TTh @ 1-2:20pm - Lyman Hall, room 002
This course seeks to encourage and develop abstract, aphoristic performative thinking, creative misdirection and displacement in performance and an interrogative relationship with reality and representation. To bridge the gap between performance in plays and performance art by working from alternative dramatic and non-dramatic sources that call into question stage conventions so that they may be subverted or else used more productively. To allow you to re-imagine yourself as a self-directed, thinking actor capable of telling stories of your own creation and re-creation.
Prerequisite: TAPS 0230.
TAPS 1100: Stage Management
taught by TAPS Production Manager B Reo
M @ 4-6:30pm - Lyman Hall, room 007
To introduce students to the principles and techniques of modern stage management from script selection to closing. Through the study of various models of stage management (both professional and academic), students will develop an appreciation of the role of the stage manager as the facilitator, mediator and organizer of the production process. Students will apply theory learned in the classroom by stage-managing or assistant stage-managing a TAPS production and/or observing other TAPS and Trinity Rep stage managers during the production process.
Enrollment limited to 12.
TAPS 1500E: Performance-Making in Community
taught by Megan Sandberg-Zakian
MW @ 4-6:20pm - Granoff Center, Studio 2
To bear witness. To practice resistance. To generate dialogue. To heal from traumatic events. To educate. To celebrate. This course will explore publicly and socially-engaged performance practices with a wide range of goals. Bi-weekly class meetings will be a combination of seminars for discussing readings/writings, and workshops by guest artists. The course includes two significant field work components: participation in a collaborative performance-making process with a community partner (Everett, a dance theatre company), and individually designed real-world projects intended to benefit local community-based youth arts organizations.
Enrollment limited to 17; instructor’s permission required and can be obtained at the first class meeting.
TAPS 2200: Wittgenstein, Writing, and Performance
taught by Professor Spencer Golub
M @ 3-5:20pm - Lyman Hall, room 211
Performance is the ideal forum in which to discuss Wittgenstein's philosophy, especially as the latter involves rigorous close reading of the physical and metaphysical identities of words, thought and action in the construction of discernible and livable roles and courses of action and understanding within the given circumstances of the mysterious world into which we are born. Wittgenstein's aphoristic writing, which creates a poetic structure, along with the necessary incompleteness of Wittgenstein's thought expression and the wide range of philosophical interpretations of his work by numerous artists and theorists underscore the liveliness of Wittgenstein's writing as creative texts in themselves.
Enrollment limited to 17 juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Instructor permission required.
TAPS 1500H: Advanced Writing for Performance
taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Marcus Gardley
T @ 12:30-2:50pm - Lyman Hall, room 005
Advanced Writing for Performance is an intense examination of the craft of writing scripts for the stage from germinal idea through production by analyzing students work in workshops, reading scripts and attending local performances. Students will learn proper script format, story outline and structure, characterization, plot and the nuts and bolts of the script writing business. Moreover, they will write a full-length play or a series of one-acts. Prerequisite: TAPS 0100 and 0200.
TAPS 1500I: Screenwriting
taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Marcus Gardley
T @ 4-6:20 - Lyman Hall, room 007
Screenwriting is a course designed to familiarize the neophyte screenwriter with the basic principles of writing for the silver-screen. By closely examining produced films, in-depth readings of both good and bad scripts, and through the writing of our own, we will gain an understanding of how screenplays are written, and written well. By the end of the semester we will have produced and polished a 10 page/minute manuscript.
TAPS 0080: Fashion and Performance
taught by Michelle Carriger
TTh @ 1-2:20pm - Lyman Hall, room 211
Clothing is a basic fact of human life; it surrounds us and conditions our experience of other people and the world, and yet interest in clothing has simultaneously been branded as superficial, frivolous, deceitful, and — above all — feminine. In this course we will examine fashion and clothing through the lens of performance theory, engaging with issues of identity, history, and ideology, and processing course materials through critical writing, as well as creative assignments including photography, blogging, and in-class presentation.
Major questions of this class will include the following: how does fashion function as performance? What are the stakes of considering fashion and performance in tandem? How does fashion condition identity? What are we to make of fashion as art and as entertainment? How do the complex relations between fashion, performance, and identity play out in popular culture today, “live,” online, on television, and in print?
New Classes for Spring 2011
***
TAPS 1420 - Global Queer Performance
What is queer performance from a global perspective? Within the U.S, this might refer to theater, visual and sonic practices, or styles of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender writ large. In the world outside the U.S, such an identitarian narrative has gained some traction through the discourse of global queering, which renders understanding of same-sex formations through Pride Parades, pink-dollar tourism, gay marriage and Western LGBT cultures. There is, however, much debate as to what queer means, and how it translates. This course uses queer performance to consider how we might understand sexual minorities in the U.S and the world.
Professor Eng-Beng Lim will teach Global Queer Performance on Thursdays from 4-6:20 in Lyman Hall, room 007.
New Classes for Fall 2010
***
TAPS 1500D - Prolepsis: History of Non-Traditional Writing for Performance
Visiting Professor Carl Hancock Rux will be teaching a new course this fall: Prolepsis: History of Non-Traditional Writing for Performance. This is a course in experimental theater history and performance theory from 1888-1968. It looks at experimental forms in writing and performance as a "flash forward" from the turn of the twentieth century to the Vietnam era. Students will read plays, poetry, fiction, essays, manifestos, letters, allowing an analytical approach to our understanding of abstract of avant-garde theater and film, their impact on race, sex, society and politics, as well as aesthetic and philosophical movements.
The class will be held in Lyman Hall, room 007, on Mondays from 4-6:50pm. Permission to enroll will be granted based on 10 page critical/creative writing sample. Please email course instructor by the first week of class. Enrollment limited to 17 juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Instructor permission required.
***
TAPS 1500E - Performance Making in Community
Performance Making in Community will be taught Wednesdays, 4-6:20 by Visiting Assistant Professor Megan Sandberg-Zakian. Community performance has been used to encourage dialogue, give voice, bear witness, practice resistance, heal from traumatic events, celebrate – among many other purposes and processes. This course will explore the theories, methods, and results of community-based performance techniques and programs through a combination of study and experience. Includes a weekly seminar for discussing readings/ writings, practicing the performance-making process, and exploring pedagogies, as well as a significant field work component: a collaborative performance project with a community partner, Everett Dance Theater/ The Carriage House School. Enrollment limited to 17; instructor’s permission required and can be obtained at the first class meeting.
***
TAPS 1270 - Performances in the Asias
New Assistant Professor Eng-Beng Lim will be teaching Performances in the Asias this Fall. Performances in the Asias introduces the rich performance cultures of Asia with a combination of national, comparative, circum-Pacific, and inter-Asian perspectives. We will study several significant forms of Asian theater, rituals and dance-drama, and historicize them through a variety of encounters: traditional, (post-)colonial, orientalist, and intercultural. How do differing approaches reconfigure Western assumptions about otherness (alterity)? How is an Asian imaginary in the West often tied to the "native," "non-Western," "primative," "exotic," and "queer"? We will encounter Asian performance broadly defined in both national and transnational contexts, such as the Asian diaspora, global arts festivals, museums, and tourism. Not open to first year students.
***
TAPS 0200 - Playwriting II
Notice: Prerequisites for Playwriting II have recently changed. A writing sample is no longer required. The only prerequisite is now TAPS 0100 (formerly LITR 0110C).
Playwriting II will be held Tuesdays from 4-6:00pm in Lyman Hall, room 005. There will be an emphasis is placed on dramatic conventions, such as monologues, dialogue, mise-en-scene and time. Writing includes frequent exercises in various theatrical approaches. This course is limited to undergraduate students.
New Classes for Spring 2010
Head of Playwriting Erik Ehn and Adjunct Lecturer Jamie Jewett will be co-teacing Exploring Contemplative Practice in Creative Process this Spring. This class will be an experimental dialogue between Buddhist and Catholic Contemplative Practices as a ground for creating performance works; an interdisciplinary/ interfaith/ inter-institutional exploration. Students from both Brown and RISD will be participating.
Instructor permission is required and will be granted on the basis of a) an interview with one of the teachers (which may be scheduled at the time of the first session), and b) a short statement of goals and intentions (reasons for taking the course) not to exceed one page, due to Erik_Ehn@brown.edu prior to the first session. Enrollment is limited to 12.
***
Visiting Assistant Professor Shayoni Mitra will be teaching Modern Asian Performance this Spring, Mondays and Wednesdays in Lyman 211 at 10:30.
This course studies contemporary Asian performance with a special focus on modernity. Students are encouraged to move beyond a Western historiography toward an understanding of alternative modernities. This course explores most nations in the Asian continent and covers wide theoretical and aesthetic ground; from performances of healing to revolutionary theatre to diasporic utterances. Essentialized and Orientalist notions are problematized. This course aims to familiarize students with different historical instances of Asian performances, while at the same time enabling critical thinking about the relation between theory and practice by paying close attention to the questions of gender, identity, aesthetics and politics.
***
Postdramatic Theatre (And Beyond) will be taught by Max Kade Visiting Professor Bettina Brandl-Risi. Professor Brandl-Risi teaches at the Institute for Theatre Studies at Berlin’s Free University where she is also a postdoctoral research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre “Kulturen des Performativen.” She received her Dr. phil. in German Literature at the University of Basel, Switzerland. During the 2008 spring term, she lectured at Yale University’s School of Drama.
This course offers a close look at avant-garde theatre practice in the German speaking countries since the 1990s and will introduce current tendencies in theorizing performance as that theory relates to the practice. Starting from the notion of "Postdramatic Theatre" (H.T. Lehmann), we will discuss the politics of (re-)presentation and spectatorship, analyzing as well as experimenting with their implications for performance, for writing for performance, and for writing about performance. TSDA 1281B
***
Visiting Lecturer Lisa Damour will be teaching Reality: A Playwriting Class this Spring. The class meets on Mondays in the Becker Library from 3:00-5:20.
This advanced playwriting class is designed to explore, critique and expand notions theatrical realism. The class will include research into the history of realism in visual art and theater, field trips in and around the Providence area to investigate and respond to the “realism” of daily life and practical work in site-specific theater. Coursework will include the creation of one short site-specific performance and one new play. This class will also incorporate discussions about reactions to realism as well as current “realistic” performance trends such as reality TV.
New Classes for Fall 2009
New Visiting Assistant Professor Shayoni Mitra will be teaching two classes this fall: Issues in Performance Studies and Traditional Indian Performance: Poetics and Practice.
***
PhD Candidate Elise Morrison will be teaching Surveillance, Performance, and Culture this Fall. You can email Elise directly for more information.
For more information on these and other classes, see the the Courses page.
