Over the past twenty years, "the body" has become a popular subject of study across multiple disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, women's/gender/sexuality studies, religious studies, and the growing field of performance studies. This graduate seminar pairs critical theory readings about embodiment (and its attendant phenomena, including corporeality, kinesthesia, emotions, the senses, etc) with investigation into how specific artists work out such ideas in performance. Identity categories often marked by the body, including race, gender, and sexuality, will be particularly important. For example, we will wrestle with how "the black dancing body" as a conceptual framework maps (and not) onto the material realities of African American dancers. In addition to discussion of texts, in-class work includes embodied and creative exercises as a way for students to apply theory to practice. Assignments deepen students' artistry, help them develop analytical writing and presenting skills, and prepare them for professional work in both performative and academic arenas.
Course Attributes:
Topics in Contemporary Theoretical and Historical Research
DRAMA 507
What is an authentic representation of a text, a historical moment, a culture? How are questions of authenticity entwined with claims to authority and access to resources? What is at stake when a particular iteration of a source is deemed authentic, and who decides? Through dramatic analysis, production reconstruction, and a review of critical literature, students will consider these questions across a range of performance contexts from Shakespeare's Globe to Disney theme parks, ComicCon, and nostalgia tourism. This course is intended for graduate students; advanced undergraduate students may apply for instructor permission.
Course Attributes:
Race, Memory, and Performance
DRAMA 4996
This course takes as its starting point the vexing questions of history, memory, and identity that activists, scholars, artists, and others have posed in recent years: what is to be done with the commemorative landscape of monuments and memorials? How do we account for the silences and erasures in archival records? How should histories of racial violence be commemorated? These are questions that have been taken up in many arenas of public life, including public art, tourism, museum studies, and urban planning. They have also been taken up by theater artists and performance artists who use their bodies, narrative, historical fact and (sometimes) fiction to bear witness to the past and to imagine new futures. In this course, we will examine the role of theater and performance in constituting-and challenging-the historically contingent meanings of race; we will also explore how performances of history shape national narratives. Artists whose work will be explored might include Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Dread Scott, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Simone Leigh, and Heidi Schreck. Artistic and/or performance experience is not required. Graduate students and undergraduate students are welcome in this course. Students will have the opportunity to propose their own commemorative projects; together we will explore whether and how performances of the past can do a certain kind of reparative work necessary for a more equitable future.
Course Attributes: BU Eth; BU BA; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; AS SC; FA VC; EN H
Advanced Playwriting
DRAMA 473
This course explores the tendencies and relationship between each individual student writer and the page. Exercises dispel any lingering doctrine that presupposes a certain style of writing. A large part of the class centers around collaborations. The writers write scenes as a final project for an acting class, and also work with two professional actors in an extended writing project that culminates in a script-in-hand presentation. The informal moments between collaborations look at the process beyond the first draft -- i.e., the playground of language, non-verbal options, and the maintaining of "the work" through rewrites, readings, workshops, and productions. Prerequisite: Introduction to Playwriting, Drama 351 or permission of instructor..
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM
The Japanese Theater
DRAMA 446
An investigation, using English materials, of the major developments and forms of the Japanese theater, from Noh and its antecedents to the rise of a modern drama. In this course we are less concerned with the performative aspects of theatrical arts (though these will be introduced via videos) than with the ways in which dramatic texts influenced and borrowed from the literary tradition. Readings from major theatrical texts, secondary studies on Japanese theater, and literary sources. Prerequisite: junior level or above or permission of instructor.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS SD I; FA HUM
Advanced Stage Lighting
DRAMA 410
This course is an advanced, continuation of Drama 310 Stage Lighting. Emphasis is placed on cultivating design aesthetics and a further exploration of controlling light in a laboratory and live setting. Students will dive deeper into color theory, light plot development, and ultimately into advanced lighting console programming. The course objectives will cover a wide range of production styles and performance venues within a series of challenging design projects. Prerequisite: L15 310 or permission of instructor.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM
The Commedia Dell' Arte
DRAMA 407
This course explores the history, style and dynamics of the commedia dell'arte: an originally Italian type of improvisational theater that has flourished from the time of Shakespeare to the present day. As we study, we will also put this theater on its feet. Students with a background and interest in improvisation are encouraged to take the class. (At the same time, no acting background is required to take the course--just a willingness to try.) We will examine primary and secondary texts regarding the Italian "golden age" of 1570-1625, and we will study the flowering of the commedia dell'arte in Paris during the seventeenth century. The influence of the commedia dell'arte on Shakespeare and Molière will be examined, and we will experiment with a new body of French scenarios from the time of Molière that have never before been translated into English. Questions of theater and performance history will be examined, as we consider various historical myths regarding this theater in the light of actual primary documents. We'll spend the final part of the course looking at political uses of this form of theater in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, considering things like the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the radical socialist theater of Dario Fo, and the international Theater Hotel Courage that uses commedia-style performance for social change.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; AS LCD; FA HUM
The Women of Greek Tragedy
DRAMA 3153
This course examines the role of women in Athenian drama. You will read English translations of the works of the three major tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and their near contemporary, the comedian Aristophanes. Direct engagement with ancient texts will encourage you to develop your own interpretations of, and written responses to, the political, social, and ethical manipulation that these mythological women were compelled to endure, and the subtle ways in which they appear to exercise power themselves. Selected scholarly articles and book chapters will help you contextualize these ancient dramas in their culture of origin. Because such issues continue to preoccupy both sexes today, you will see how Greek tragedy addresses perennial historical and cultural concerns through the examination of adaptations of Greek tragedies ranging from Seneca in ancient Rome to Spike Lee's Chi-raq. Your final research paper will encourage you to consider how a specific female character from antiquity is transformed for a 'modern' dramatic audience.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; AS WI I; FA HUM; AR HUM
Ampersand: Shakespeare's Globe: All the World's a Stage
DRAMA 119
Why-more than 400 years later-do we continue to read the works of William Shakespeare? Why do we continue to stage his plays, identify with his characters, and communicate our thoughts in his language? Why do his poems and plays retain their vibrancy and immediacy, even today?
This course invites students to answer these questions by inhabiting Shakespeare's language from the inside and out-breathing in the words of his characters with creative and careful study, while moving out to fully engage the text in performance. Reading plays, watching films, listening to monologues, voicing dialogue, physically enacting fight scenes, and even navigating plots with joysticks, students will develop deep appreciation for the writer who is the original GOAT-the greatest of all time.
In this two-semester course, we will read and study Shakespeare's plays in their historical context, learning about the original practices used in performance at both the Elizabethan and Jacobean court theatres as well as the public theatres on the South Bank of the Thames. We will also consider them as adaptable playscripts that have been rewritten over the past 400 years, reinterpreted at different times by different actors in different cultures the world over. Students will contribute to this performance repertoire with their own 21st-century interpretations, striding the stage of the reconstructed Globe Theatre in a capstone experience that concludes the course with a summer trip to London. If all the world's a stage, come be a player in it!
Course Attributes: AS HUM; AMP; EN H; FA HUM; AR HUM
Ampersand: A Performative Perspective on Chinese Culture and Identity
DRAMA 107
This course will introduce students to the variety and rich history of the Chinese visual and performance cultures of the Chinese Mainland, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and throughout the Chinese diaspora. A collaboration between the East Asian Languages and Cultures and Performing Arts Departments, this course explores Chinese cultural narratives in relation to how they have been performed-on stage, on screen, and as experienced in everyday life-from the imperial period to the present. It includes a hands-on component that introduces students to jingju (Beijing opera) instrumental music, and stage makeup, as well as the four main performance skills: singing, speaking, dance-acting, and combat. Combining creative and critical assignments, the course invites students to rehearse songs, dance pieces, and fight sequences, to stage plays, and to create videos that demonstrate their developing knowledge of historical and contemporary Chinese culture. This course is only for first-year, non-transfer students in the Encountering Chinese Culture Ampersand Program.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; BU IS; AS LCD; AS SC; AMP; AS HUM
