Results for TAPS

Preference to freshmen. The current state of the American theater and its artists. Conventional wisdom says that theater is a dying art, and a lost cause, especially in an age of multi-media entertainment. But there are more young playwrights, actors, and directors entering the field today than at any other time in American history. Focus is on the work of today's theater artists, with an emphasis on an emerging generation of playwrights. Students read a cross-section of plays from writers currently working in the US and UK, covering a spectrum of subjects and styles from serious to comic, from the musical to the straight play. Hits and misses from recent seasons of the New York and London stages and some of the differences of artistic taste across the Atlantic. Hands-on exploration of the arts and skills necessary to make a play succeed. Students develop their own areas of interest, in guided projects in design, direction or performance. Conversations with playwrights, designers ,and directors. Labs and master classes to solve problems posed in areas of creative production. Class meets literary managers and producers who are on the frontlines of underwriting new talent. Class trips include two plays at major Bay Area Stages.

Preference to Freshmen.Beyond the obvious traits that make a good (court room) drama, theater and jurisprudence have much more in common. Just as drama is engaged not only in entertainment but also in examination of social conventions and mechanisms, so law is not only concerned with dispensing justice but with shaping and maintaining a viable human community. In this class we will read and discuss a series of plays in which court proceedings are at the center of dramatic action and concluding with an investigation of the new genre of documentary drama.

This course explores history via cultural responses in modern India. We will examine a range of fiction, film and drama to consider the ways in which India emerges through its cultural productions. The course will consider key historical events such as the partition of the subcontinent, independence from British rule, Green Revolution, Emergency, liberalization of the Indian economy, among others. We will reflect on epochal historical moments by means of artisticnresponses to these events. For example, Ritwik Ghatak's experimental cinema intervenes into debates around the Bengal partition; Rohinton Mistry's novel, A Fine Balance grapples with the suspension of civil liberties during the emergency between 1975-77; Rahul Varma's play Bhopal reflects on the Bhopal gas tragedy, considered the world's worst industrial disaster. Students willnread, view and reflect on the aesthetic and historical texts through their thoughtful engagement in class discussions and written e ssays. They will also have opportunities to imaginatively respond to these texts via short creative projects, which could range from poems, monologues, solo pieces, web installations, etc. Readings will also include Mahashweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Girish Karnad, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manjula Padmanabhan, Salman Rushdie, Aparna Sen, among others.

What is modern theatre and how is it created? In this course, we will explore some of the most important works of the last century and a half. These plays, by writers such as Ibsen, Beckett, and Brecht, will be a springboard for our own leap into the art of the theatre. This course stresses that the theatre truly lives when performed. In addition to reading plays, we will watch productions (recorded and live), and stage some scenes informally ourselves. No theatrical experience is required¿only an openness to creative and intellectual challenge.

StoryCraft is a hands-on, experiential workshop offering participants the opportunity, structure and guidance to craft compelling personal stories to be shared in front of a live audience. The class will focus on several areas of storytelling: Mining (how do you find your stories and extract the richest details?); Crafting (how do you structure the content and shape the language?); and Performing (how do you share your stories with presence, authenticity and connection?).

For actors who complete substantial scene work with graduate directors in the graduate workshop.

Students cast in department productions receive credit for their participation as actors; 1-2 units for graduate directing workshop projects and 1-3 units for major productions (units determined by instructor). May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Team-taught. An introduction to theatrical set, costume and lighting design. Emphasis on balancing practical skill with conceptual ideas for live stage performance. Hands-on projects.

The production process, duties, and responsibilities of a stage manager. Skills needed to stage manage a production. Ph.D students should enroll in 2 units. Undergraduates should enroll in 3 units.

For students working backstage, on run crew, or in the theater shops on TAPS department productions. Night and weekend time required. Pre-approval from Laxmi Kumaran (laxmik@stanford.edu) required for enrollment.

For students Stage Mananging a TAPS Senior Project or Assistant Stage Managing a TAPS department production. Pre-approval by Laxmi Kumaran (laxmik@stanford.edu) required for enrollment.

A survey of the history of theatre and dance from the ancient Greeks to the modern world. While primarily intended to help TAPS graduate students prepare for their Comprehensive Exam, this course may also be taken by undergraduates or non-TAPS graduate students in order to gain a broad understanding of some of the seminal plays, dances, theories, and performance practices of the past 2500 years.

The improvisational theater techniques that teach spontaneity, cooperation, team building, and rapid problem solving, emphasizing common sense, attention to reality, and helping your partner. Based on TheatreSports by Keith Johnstone. Readings, papers, and attendance at performances of improvisational theater. Limited enrollment. Improv, Improvisation, creativity and creative expression.

Introduction to interdisciplinary approaches to gender, sexuality, queer, trans and feminist studies. Topics include the emergence of sexuality studies in the academy, social justice and new subjects, science and technology, art and activism, history, film and memory, the documentation and performance of difference, and relevant socio-economic and political formations such as work and the family. Students learn to think critically about race, gender, and sexuality from local and global perspectives.

The class offers an overview of the musical as an American genre, but will focus primarily on the evolution of the dramatic musical over the past 50 years, especially the work of Stephen Sondheim, Jeanine Tesori, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and similar artists. The class will culminate in participation in the creation of TheatreWorks' production of the musical Jane Austen's Emma, including discussions at rehearsals and previews with its author-composer Paul Gordon (Tony Award nominee for Jane Eyre) and its professional actors and designers. Final project rather than final exam. Some classes will be held off-campus during class hours. Taught by visiting lecturer Robert Kelley, Artistic Director, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.

A substantive introduction to the basics of the craft of acting, this course gives all incoming students the foundation of a common vocabulary. Students will learn fundamental elements of dramatic analysis, and how to apply it in action. Topics include scene analysis, environment work, psychological and physical scoring, and development of a sound and serviceable rehearsal technique. Scene work will be chosen from accessible, contemporary, and realistic plays. Outside rehearsal time required.

Workshop. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. Prepares PhD students for the academic profession by honing skills in conference presentations, job market, and scholarly publications. Also offered to undergraduates to help prepare them for careers in theater.

A practical course in movement, acting and character development for stage or screen. This course is appropriate for all artists; no prior movement training is required. We will explore expressive possibilities in the body in order to build characters with nuanced physicality and rich emotional life. Students will learn strategies for awakening the body, find a greater range of expression, and widen the variety of characters they can inhabit. We will conduct live observations and take inspiration from photographs, memories, dramatic texts and other sources to build vivid portraits of character in performance. Actors will work independently and as an ensemble, learning techniques derived from Michael Chekhov. We will also practice physical conditioning for the actor through a daily warm-up sequence that improves strength, flexibility and alignment.

Formerly TAPS 20. Creative play, ensemble work in a supportive environment. Designed for the student to experience a range of new creative skills, from group improvisation to partner work. Introductory work on freeing the natural voice and physical relaxation. Emphasis on rediscovering imaginative and creative impulses. Movement improvisation, listening exercises, and theater games release the energy, playfulness and willingness to take risks that is the essence of free and powerful performance. Course culminates with work on dramatic text.

This course explores the unique demands of playing Shakespeare on the stage. Through deep exploration of language and performance techniques in sonnets, speeches and scenes, the student will learn how to bring Shakespeare's passions to life through research, analysis, and a dynamic use of voice, body and imagination. This course is designed to increase the actor's physical, vocal, emotional, and intellectual responsiveness to the demands, challenges and joys of playing Shakespeare.

The physical actor is ever working to develop a wider range of emotional expression, an unconscious attentiveness to fellow actors, and a compelling presence that conveys a sense of truth in action and in word. In this course, students will explore movement as a means of physical training and performance-building. This course is for those interested in dynamic storytelling; no prior acting or physical training is required. Our work consists of four main components: physical conditioning, practical technique, movement improvisation and the creation of several short performance pieces. Through mime technique (from Tomaschevski and Decroux) students will increase precision and control, create images with the body, and examine basic compositional elements. Students will also learn the fundamentals of contact improvisation for theater, which offers actors another way to explore text and make discoveries about character. Exercises in movement composition will sharpen tools necessary for creating original work and crafting strong performances on stage.

For students stage managing a Department of Drama production.

A seminar course for students performing significant production work on Drama Department or other Stanford University student theatre projects. Students serving as producers, directors, designers or stage managers, who wish mentorship and credit for their production work sign up for this course and contact the instructor, Linda AppersonnPrerequisite: consent of instructor.

Focus is on Shakespeare's Hamletas a site of rich critical controversy from the eighteenth century to the present. Aim is to read, discuss, and evaluate different approaches to the play, from biographical, theatrical, and psychological to formalist, materialist, feminist, new historicist, and, most recently, quantitative. The ambition is to see whether there can be great literature without (a) great (deal of) criticism. The challenge is to understand the theory of literature through the study of its criticism.

This course explores the cultural and historical unfolding of the genre of contemporary performance known as postmodern dance over the past six decades. It begins with the formative influence of the émigré Bauhaus artists of the 1930s, then the postwar experiments of the Beat artists in the 1950s, to Merce Cunningham, the Judson Dance Theatre, postmodern formalism, neo-expressionism, dance theatre and through to the global, spectacle-rich, cross-genre dance work of the early 21st century as the most recent extended legacy of this history. This course uses dance history to trace with special emphasis the effects of these visual art and movement experimentalists on gender representation and nationalist identity construction in the negotiation of boundaries between dance and life.

How different disciplines approach topics and issues central to the study of ethnic and race relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Lectures by senior faculty affiliated with CSRE. Discussions led by CSRE teaching fellows. Includes an optional Haas Center for Public Service certified Community Engaged Learning section.

A studio course focused on creative processes and generating original material. Students will be encouraged to think critically about the relationship between form and content exploring the possibilities of site specific, gallery and theatre settings. Students will reflect throughout on the types of contact and communication uniquely possible in the live moment, such as interaction or the engagement of the senses. The emphasis is on weekly experimentation in the creation of short works rather than on a final production.

This course explores dramaturgy and directing in the research and production of theatre primarily through practical creative projects with secondary readings on dramaturgy as a discipline. In this course we will consider the role of the dramaturg in its broadest sense, running across theatrical production from research to playwriting, adaptation, choreography, devising and directing. Students will work individually and in small groups researching, adapting, crafting and workshopping material.

This class examines narrative design in performed storytelling, especially live drama, oral storytelling, and radio, and compares it to narrative design in other forms, such as print, photography, and the graphic novel. After considering what media theory, psychology and neurobiology understand about how different forms of narratives operate on us, students will create a "base narrative" in print and then versions of that narrative in two different other forms. The goal is for students to understand narrative design principles both across and specific to media forms and be able to apply them to move audiences. Students will have the opportunity to meet and work with master storytellers from the Moth and with graphic novelists Chris Ware and Marjane Satrapi.

More and more of our best fiction, plays, and comics are being created out of documentary practices such as in-depth interviewing, oral histories, and reporting. Novels like Dave Egger¿s What is the What and plays like Anna Deavere Smith¿s Let Me Down Easy act as both witnesses and translators of people¿s direct experience and push art into social activism in new ways. This course takes a close look at a diverse range of these contemporary works and explores how to adopt their research and aesthetic strategies for work of your own. We start with a brief look back at the recent origins of this trend and look at excerpts from forerunners such as Richard Wright, Truman Capote, and Bertolt Brecht. We then turn to the rise of documentary fictions in the last few decades and read works by Eggers, Adam Johnson, G.B. Tran, Maria Hummel, and Daniel Alarcon and watch performances by the Tectonic Theater Project and Elevator Repair Service. Students write one analytic essay and then conduct or study interviews to design a work of their own. The course will feature class visits by a number of our authors and a special half-day workshop with Smith.

Course introduces students to the basic elements of playwriting and creative experimentation for the stage. Topics include: character development, conflict and plot construction, staging and setting, and play structure. Script analysis of works by contemporary playwrights may include: Marsha Norman, Patrick Shanley, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, Octavio Solis and others. Table readings of one-act length work required by quarter's end.

Individual project on the work of a playwright, period, or genre. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Individual supervision of off-campus internship. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

All TAPS Majors must complete a Senior Project that represents significant work in any area of theater and/or performance. The project must be an original contribution and can consist of any of the following: devising a performance, choreographing a dance, stage managing a production, designing a large theater work, performing a major role, writing a play, directing a show, or researching and writing a senior essay. Work for this project normally begins in Spring Quarter of the junior year and must be completed by the end of the senior year. Students receive credit for senior projects through TAPS 200. A minimum of 4 units is required, but additional units are available for larger projects. Students pursuing senior projects must submit a two-page proposal to a faculty advisor of their choice, which must be approved by the Undergraduate Advisor and the department faculty no later than the end of Spring Quarter of the junior year.

A survey of the history of theatre and dance from the ancient Greeks to the modern world. While primarily intended to help TAPS graduate students prepare for their Comprehensive Exam, this course may also be taken by undergraduates or non-TAPS graduate students in order to gain a broad understanding of some of the seminal plays, dances, theories, and performance practices of the past 2500 years.

See "Undergraduate Programs" for description. May be repeated for credit. (Staff)

Individually structured class in lighting mechanics and design through experimentation, discussions, and written reports. Prerequisite: 131 or consent of instructor.

Individually structured tutorial for costume designers. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 132 or consent of instructor.

Individually structured workshop. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 133 or consent of instructor.

For students stage managing a Department of Drama production. Prerequisite: 134.

This course explores the cultural and historical unfolding of the genre of contemporary performance known as postmodern dance over the past six decades. It begins with the formative influence of the émigré Bauhaus artists of the 1930s, then the postwar experiments of the Beat artists in the 1950s, to Merce Cunningham, the Judson Dance Theatre, postmodern formalism, neo-expressionism, dance theatre and through to the global, spectacle-rich, cross-genre dance work of the early 21st century as the most recent extended legacy of this history. This course uses dance history to trace with special emphasis the effects of these visual art and movement experimentalists on gender representation and nationalist identity construction in the negotiation of boundaries between dance and life.

Course introduces students to the basic elements of playwriting and creative experimentation for the stage. Topics include: character development, conflict and plot construction, staging and setting, and play structure. Script analysis of works by contemporary playwrights may include: Marsha Norman, Patrick Shanley, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, Octavio Solis and others. Table readings of one-act length work required by quarter's end.

Individual project on the work of a playwright, period, or genre.

This graduate seminar introduces you to advanced methodologies in two key areas of theatre and performance studies research: historiography and ethnography. The course is divided into two sections. The first concentrates on questions of historiography and the archive as they relate to studies of theater, dance, and performance. We will think about how events have been historicized, how absence has been represented, and how bodies are re-figured and remembered, and we will investigate important principles and best practices of performance documentation and historiography. The second part of the course explores the relationship between performance and ethnography. We will discuss different critical perspectives on ethnographic methods and data gathering, including participant-observation fieldwork and interview techniques. This course purposefully blends theory and practice, connecting philosophical discussions to concrete case studies, field trips, and your own research practices. In this spirit, you will also be encouraged to conduct research and present findings in different modes and media.

Workshop. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. Prepares PhD students for the academic profession by honing skills in conference presentations, job market, and scholarly publications. Also offered to undergraduates to help prepare them for careers in theater.

This seminar examines an array of works from various gloabl sites to explore how artists have used performance to raise vital questions about location, citizenship, identity, community, and human agency in migrant contexts. By considering a range of examples from international commercial collaborations to the crisis-ridden narratives of asylum seekers, the course stages theoretical, practical, and ethical inquiries into art's role in relaying local concerns beyond national boundaries while extending students' appreciation of approaches in comparative theatre and performance studies.

The production process, duties, and responsibilities of a stage manager. Skills needed to stage manage a production. Ph.D students should enroll in 2 units. Undergraduates should enroll in 3 units.

A studio course focused on creative processes and generating original material. Students will be encouraged to think critically about the relationship between form and content exploring the possibilities of site specific, gallery and theatre settings. Students will reflect throughout on the types of contact and communication uniquely possible in the live moment, such as interaction or the engagement of the senses. The emphasis is on weekly experimentation in the creation of short works rather than on a final production.

This course explores dramaturgy and directing in the research and production of theatre primarily through practical creative projects with secondary readings on dramaturgy as a discipline. In this course we will consider the role of the dramaturg in its broadest sense, running across theatrical production from research to playwriting, adaptation, choreography, devising and directing. Students will work individually and in small groups researching, adapting, crafting and workshopping material.

Presentation of a new or newly adapted work for the stage, in a mode employed in professional theater for the development of new plays. Two to four rehearsals. Public performance.

Students may take directing reading only with the permission of their dissertation advisor. Might be repeatable for credit twice for 6 units total.

(Staff)

(Staff)