THEA 256
The Expressive Body
Last Offered Spring 2020
Division I
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This course aims to allow students to develop the body’s capacities for expression and reflect on the experience of movement. On one hand, we will enhance our potential as performers — both in the rehearsal process and on stage. On the other, we will explore how training our corporeal intelligence can enrich our everyday lives. Studio sessions will seek to cultivate strength, endurance, flexibility, alignment, and balance so that we can gradually expand the body’s range of safe possibilities as we begin to work with images, gesture, and emotions. Exercises will be drawn from a range of movement and theatrical techniques including yoga, Bharatanatyam, contemporary dance, Grotowski, butoh, and Schechner’s Rasaboxes. Integral to our work will be consideration of the relationship between words, objects, and moving. Concurrently, we will read, write, and discuss some significant ideas about the consciousness of the body to expand our understandings of ourselves from various perspectives. The spirit of the class is one of bold investigation and refined observation in the context of supportive camaraderie as we all grapple with encountering the new, the surprising, and the wonderfully unexpected.