How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
Introduction to Theater Making is a working laboratory, which gives students hands-on experience with theater's fundamental building blocks — writing, design, acting, directing, and producing. Throughout the semester, students read, watch and discuss five different plays, music theater pieces and ensemble theater works.
An introduction to the craft of acting. Emphasis will be placed on honesty, spontaneity, and establishing a personal connection with the substance of the material.
An intensive immersive exploration of experimental, documentary-style music theater that investigates the history, form, and performance of the choreopoem.
This is a workshop in the fundamentals of writing plays. Through writing prompts, exercises, study and reflection, students will be guided in the creation of original dramatic material. Attention will be given to character, structure, dramatic action, monologue, dialogue, language and behavior.
In this studio course open to all, we will dive into experiences in which body and language meet. We'll think about these from aesthetic, cultural, political, medical, personal, and philosophical perspectives. We'll explore language from, in, around, and about (our) bodies.
FRE/THR 211 will offer students the opportunity to put their language skills in motion by exploring French theater and acting in French. The course will introduce students to acting techniques while allowing them to discover the richness of the French dramatic canon
This course will invite student singers and pianists to prepare and perform songs from 20th and 21st century American Musical Theatre. Each week students will be coached on their songs in a master class format with an emphasis on musical, vocal, and acting issues. Repertoire will be covered in a historical overview from the beginning of the 20th century to the present.
This seminar offers an intensive introduction to working with cultural documents emerging within and from LGBTQ+ communities in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from Company (1970) to Road Show (2009) as a lens onto America. We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.
The first half of Shakespeare's career, with a focus on the great comedies and histories of the 1590s, culminating in a study of Hamlet.
An exploration of theatrical sound design and engineering, this class will explore sound for both theater and music theater. We will investigate text from the point of view of sound, and learn how to communicate the ideas, palette and arc of a design to others. We will explore developing a creative process and turning our ideas into sounds that can be used onstage.
This workshop will introduce students to the craft of writing words and music for the musical theatre.
In this community-engaged class, students will be invited to learn about the dynamic history and role of the arts in Trenton through conversations with local artists and activists. Students will develop close listening skills with oral historian/artist Nyssa Chow. Readings include texts about urban invisibility, race, decoloniality, and public arts policy. Students will participate in the development of a virtual memorial and restorative project by Trenton artist Bentrice Jusu.
This studio class will explore a broad range of approaches to art-based performance: from instruction pieces and happenings, to the body as language and gesture, to performance as a form of archiving.
The South African Anti-Apartheid movement saw mass resistance against the government's racial segregationist policies. Students will learn about the conditions that gave rise to Apartheid and the Anti-Apartheid movement, taking a look at the instrumental role that the performing arts and protest theatre played in dismantling the unjust system.
This cross-genre, interdisciplinary, and creative project based course explores digital imagery combined with human movement. Students work with technologies including projectors, projection mapping software, modular coding, Unreal engine, and mocap suits, to create works of art and shareable experiences incorporating images, space, and the human body.
In this course, we will study the works of feminist-identified scholars and performers to examine how they use different mediums to excavate, stage, and theorize lives that place, front and center, the relationship between (P)olitics, embodied knowledge, and creative expression. Examining works in theater, students will learn about different forms of feminist practice and how those forms may support and conflict with each other.
Students will explore the world of voice acting and vocal foley design. Students will investigate historical and contemporary techniques used in audiobooks, animation, commercials, and video games. They will utilize industry-standard Logic Pro and user-friendly Garageband to collaborate with the Princeton University Library's Special Collections and reimagine public domain masterpieces through a sonic lens.
From Cross Colours to boom boxes, the 1990s was loud and colorful. But alongside the fun, black people in the U.S. dealt with heightened criminalization and poverty codified through the War on Drugs, welfare reform, HIV/AIDS, and police brutality. We will study the various cultural productions of black performers and consumers as they navigated the social and political landscapes of the 1990s. We will examine works growing out of music, televisual media, fashion, and public policy, using theories from performance and cultural studies to understand the specificities of blackness, gender, class, and sexuality.
The course will lead students toward the creation of a work of musical theater (for lack of a better term) which will run parallel to the collaboration of the two instructors of the course, Adam Gidwitz and Steven Mackey. Instrumental musical performers of any instrument, composers, writers, actors and others who feel they can contribute to a theatrical presentation are needed. The course will include introducing existing relevant works, the progress and process of the ongoing work of the instructors collaboration and of course facilitation of the student creations.
This course offers an exploration of visual storytelling, research and dramaturgy, combined with a grounding in the practical, collaborative and inclusive skills necessary to create physical environments for live theater making. Students are mentored as designers, directors or project creators on realized projects in our theaters, or on advanced paper projects. Individualized class plans allow students to imagine physical environments for realized and un-realized productions, depending on their area of interest, experience and skill level.
The purpose of this course will be to explore the dynamics of spectacle and performance (artistic, political, sexual, anthropological) in representative plays by major Italian authors of the 20th century.
The course is designed to encourage the development of directors for Theater and Music Theater. The course will incorporate a strong practical element, giving student directors the opportunity to explore and hone their own practices, developing useful and appropriate style and language as they move forward in their work as young directors.
This course will offer students the opportunity to bring a play from page to stage. Students will work with professional director Bi Jean Ngo in rehearsals to create and embody characters using physical theater, voicework, and script analysis. Through focused exploration of text and character along with ensemble collaboration, students will develop and strengthen their skills in acting and public performance.