THEA 301
Embodied Archives: Global Theatre Histories, From Antiquity to 1900
Last Offered Spring 2024
Division I D Difference, Power, and Equity
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Class Details

A survey of global theatre and performance, spanning from antiquity to 1900. Students will engage with the archives and repertoires of the theatrical past, approaching subjects both critically and creatively. Topics to be considered may include: Indian Sanskrit drama; ancient Greco/Roman theatre; pre-Columbian Mesoamerican dance/drama; Japanese Noh and Kabuki performance; Medieval and Renaissance English theatre; West African masquerade; French Neoclassicism; Spanish “golden age” theatre; and American melodrama. In addition, we will consider receptions of such traditions in the present, examining how contemporary theatre makers have engaged with (adapted, appropriated, recycled, or re-appropriated) historical sources. As a major project in the class, students will develop and share their own artistic approaches to selected archival works. While attending to theatre’s formal aspects, we will at the same time focus on the relationship of performance to politics and society, as well as to the enduring legacies of empire, state power, colonialism, and private capital in which theatre is historically embedded. If and when possible, we will encounter archival sources housed in College Archives and WCMA. This course is required for Theatre majors and is a prerequisite for THEA 401.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 14
Expected: 8
Class#: 3608
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active participation in class discussion; a 5-7 page midterm paper; an oral presentation on a selected historical resource; a final creative adaptation/script, or live performance
Prerequisites: Theatre majors must have already taken THEA 101 by the time they enroll in this course
Enrollment Preferences: Theatre majors; Comparative Literature majors
Distributions: Divison I Difference, Power, and Equity
DPE Notes: This course works to dismantle the ongoing bias in theatre studies that positions textual and literary forms of theatre in the globalized north as the primary sites of knowledge transfer, status, and value in the field. Instead, theatre and performance are approached as global and diverse forms of repertoire and embodied knowledge that must be analyzed in relation to the structures of social inequity and power in which they historically arise.

Class Grid

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