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Presence in Performance: Alexander Technique and Mindful Movement for Performing Artists

DANCE 453

This course provides group and individual instruction in principles and methods from Alexander Technique and other somatic arts for training mindful, embodied presence in performance. Mindful movement techniques are widely used by professional dancers, actors, and musicians to enhance performance skill and to address/prevent injury and chronic pain. Through a workshop process of guided learning, students gain awareness of subtle inefficiencies in coordination and balance that cause pain and limit ability. Students gain ability to self-assess and adjust problematic movement patterns to improve freedom and expression. Alexander Technique works at fundamental levels of movement coordination, and its methods are applicable to all performing art genres. Training is tailored to each individual student's needs, skills and goals. This course involves experiential learning supported with related readings, discussion, personal research projects and presentations. Prerequisites: Graduate standing; also open to undergraduate students studying at the 400 level in their discipline with permission of instructor.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Performing the Political in American Dance

DANCE 426

This course is an exploration of the politics of performance and the performance of politics through the lens of American dance in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through readings, screenings, and discussions, we will examine the ways in which American dance developed against and alongside political movements in the United States, particularly ones concerning nationalism, race, gender, and human rights. We will also investigate how the lens of dance and choreography offers an expansive means to conceptualize political questions of citizenship and social protest, broadening our understanding of embodied performance. Guided by several key philosophical texts, this course will focus on the concepts necessary for examining the convergence of performance and politics (e.g., representation, ritual, spectacle, body, mimesis, propaganda) while also paying special attention to the politics of funding and censorship that has governed the creation and presentation of dance in the United States. No dance experience is necessary.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU BA; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS SD I; AS WI I; AS SC; FA CPSC; FA HUM; AR HUM

Encountering Chinese Culture: Performing Tradition, Engendering Transformations

DANCE 1080

This course will introduce students to the Chinese civilization through its rich cultural beliefs, norms, and values from pre-modern China to modern and contemporary eras, including the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. For the pre-modern section of this course, we will engage two role-playing games through a program called Reacting to the Past (RTTP). As students progress in the class, they will become more adept at crafting arguments, learning to work and to communicate with others, and understanding how the past still informs our present struggles. In the second half of the semester, students are presented with modern and contemporary ideologies and cultural discourses surrounding the idea of the Chinese identity. Through political speeches, realist stories, dystopian science fiction, cinematic comedies, martial arts movies, and Asian diaspora on American screens, we will engage with notions such as reality, realism, love, revolution, irony, utopia, dystopia, in order to look at how different ideologies and cultural beliefs are performed by different historical agents, as well as their social and political implications. This course is only for first-year, non-transfer students in the Encountering Chinese Culture Ampersand Program.
Course Attributes: BU Hum; BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; AMP; FA HUM; AR HUM; EN H

Presence in Performance: Alexander Technique and Mindful Movement for Performing Artists

DRAMA 4530

Seminar in Dramatic Theory

DRAMA 449

This course is an in-depth exploration of core works of dramatic theory from the ancient world to the present, and it will introduce texts that enunciate what theater is, has been, and should be. We will study authors' expressions of theater's role in society, their articulations of and responses to anti-theatrical prejudice, and their negotiations of the contradiction of putting "the real" on stage. Other significant themes include accounting for the aesthetic pleasures of drama and theater; theater as a means of educating the citizen; and the relationship between dramatic form and social and political revolution. Moving chronologically, we begin with foundational documents of the ancient world, including Aristotle's "Poetics," Bharata's "Natyasastra," and Horace's "Ars Poetica." The course then progresses through the Middle Ages, the Neoclassical and Romantic eras, and the explosion of fin de siecle avant-gardes. We will also read key texts from beyond the European tradition, including works of dramatic theory written in medieval Japan (Zeami), postcolonial Nigeria (Soyinka), and the millennial, multicultural United States (Parks). Along these same lines, we will also be attuned to transnational exchange and influence, particularly as it appears in the 20th-century theories of Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Konstantin Stanislavsky. Although the course will be focused on efforts to describe and prescribe theories of drama, dramatic genre, and theatrical pleasure, it will also position play scripts alongside the theoretical treatises that guide or are guided by them.
Course Attributes: EN S; AS SSC; FA SSC; AR SSC

Directing II

DRAMA 444

To expand and develop the work begun in Fundamentals of Directing. To develop preparatory habits for challenging scripts. Attention will be given to improving staging and communication skills. The course aims to promote the growth of a strong and personal directorial approach.Prerequisites: Drama 343 and permission of instructor.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Performing the Political in American Dance

DRAMA 4261

Dramaturgical Workshop

DRAMA 403

A laboratory course that investigates dramaturgy from four vantage points: New Play Dramaturgy, Institutional Dramaturgy, Dramaturgy of Classics, and Dramaturgical Approaches to Nontraditional and Devised Theater. This is a "hands-on" course where student dramaturgs will not only pursue the study of dramaturgy, but will work actively and collaboratively with playwrights, actors and each other.
Course Attributes: AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; EN H

Contemporary American Theater

DRAMA 378

This course is a focused investigation of the contemporary American theater, and an exploration of the role students might play in its future as artists and audiences. We will read published and unpublished plays, familiarize ourselves with the country's most important companies, festivals, and institutions, and discuss issues facing the American theater now. We will also explore the artistic experiments (performance in online spaces, promenade theater, audio drama, and more) taken up and extended in the face of COVID-19 restrictions and undertake some experiments of our own. We'll listen to artists who have chronicled inequities in the American theater and consider paths forward. Artists whose works will be studied may include Mimi Lien, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Dominique Morisseau, Annie Baker, Sylvan Oswald, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Students will attend contemporary performance locally. A small lab fee will apply; the Performing Arts department is committed to assisting students for whom this fee is financially burdensome. Students will also enjoy class visits from artists working in theater, dance, and performance today.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; FA CPSC

Ampersand: A Performative Perspective on Chinese Culture and Identity.

DRAMA 1080