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Students in this class will read a weekly selection of Pulitzer Prize winning plays and be required to analyze and explore these plays beat by beat in class discussion and weekly critical writing exercises. This is an in-depth script interpretation class in which theme, dramatic structure, arc, character development, tone, style and extensive study of the given playwrights and their influences will be explored in detail and in a way that centers the questions one would need to interrogate in order to bring these diverse and extraordinary pieces of work to life.

The craft of acting will be the main focus of this class.

This is an advanced scene study class which will explore the canon of work by Tom Stoppard. Students will be assigned scenes and monologues from this canon, and the class as a whole will read all of the plays being worked on during the term. Rehearsal techniques, character development and sensory exploration of these plays will be a large part of the focus for the actors in the class. Written analysis of the plays being worked on will also be expected. Students interested in this class must be able to commit to a rigorous out of class rehearsal commitment.

The course will be for sustained work on an animation or projection design project, and should be a space for both experimentation, ambition and consistent endeavor. The first half of the semester will be concerned with conceptualizing and framing the world of the animations or projections, by research, drawings, investigation, imagining. The second half will be creating the animation or projections.

A set design communicates lots of information to an audience, and provides the physical world in which a performance takes place. In his book The Dramatic Imagination, the great set designer Robert Edmond Jones wrote: “…we may fairly speak of the art of stage designing as poetic, in that it seeks to give expression to the essential quality of a play rather than to its outward characteristics.” Students in this course will work through the process of designing stage sets in which poetic expression is evident and functionality is addressed.

Lighting design has the powerful ability to shape the experience of an audience. Its practice incorporates elements of artistry and craft, and should interest those working in all aspects of visual and performing arts. In addition to hands-on work with theatrical lighting equipment in and outside of class, awareness of light, play analysis and conceptualization, color, angle, composition and focus are explored in class demonstrations and in a series of individual and group projects.

As a follow-up to the course Working With Light, participants in this class will learn how to adapt lighting design ideas to work within the common constraints of theater architecture and scenery. We will take a deep dive into the process of choosing lighting equipment and figuring out where it needs to be, in relation to everything else in the theater space. Beginning with basic drafting techniques, the course will move ahead to planning lighting coverage with scaled drawings, and then to the creation of a light plot and other supporting paperwork.

The Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski defined his theory of “poor theatre” as the theatre that values the body of the actor and its relation with the spectator. Poor Theatre used the simplest of sets, costumes,lighting and props requiring the actors to employ all of their skills to transform a space into other imaginative worlds.

Viewpoints is a physical improvisational form used for training actors and creating movement for the stage. This class encourages students to explore the physical and vocal possibilities of time and space, with a specific focus on developing the capacity to be physically present, emotionally open, and free to follow creative impulses. Special emphasis will be placed on developing listening skills and ensemble building. Coursework will cover the nine Viewpoints and their application to character exploration and composition within the world of a play.

This class is an exploration in fabric modification through the use of dyes and various stitched resist techniques often referred to as shibori. Students will learn to work with acid, direct, cold process, union, and natural dyes. Concurrently students will learn a variety of resist techniques such as kanoko, mokume, orinui, makinui, karamatsu, boshi, arashi, itajime, adire eleso, and katano which create patterns and designs on fabrics when dyed and/or overdyed.

This course is designed to assist graduate students with the research and development of their new work. The weekly format is determined with the students. In class, they show works-in-progress, try out ideas with their colleagues, and discuss issues involved in their creative processes. Though the class meets only once a week, students are expected to spend considerable time each week in active, ongoing creative research; their independent projects will be presented to the public, either formally or informally, by the end of the term.

Graduate Teaching Fellows in Dance are integrated into the dance program as teaching assistants. In consultation with their academic advisors and the dance faculty, MFA candidates develop an assistantship schedule of approximately ten hours weekly; the courses they develop and teach are listed in the curriculum. All Teaching Fellows bring their own professional histories and contribute their own manners of teaching. Outside of listed class times, TBD, the Teaching Fellows will meet to discuss their courses with the designated faculty and with each other.

Acting is the art of bringing text to life with heart, soul, and skill—and in this course, we’ll train your voice, body, mind, and spirit to do just that!

In a fun and supportive space, we’ll dive into the building blocks of actor training, pushing our creativity to build dynamic, three-dimensional characters ready for the stage.

Through scene work, improv, readings, and engaging exercises, we’ll tap into your unique experiences to strengthen your craft and bring your performances to life. Let’s play, explore, and grow together!

Whose class is this anyway? Yours! Improv is for everyone—just like life, it’s all about making it up as we go.

In this course, we’ll explore the fundamentals of improvisation through high-energy theater games, pattern and rhythm exercises, and ensemble-building activities. We’ll dive into character, object, and environment work while staying grounded, truthful, and spontaneous.

In this 7-week course, we’ll explore a variety of approaches to improvised scene work, focusing on techniques beyond the Upright Citizens Brigade paradigm. Emphasizing Chicago-style improv, we’ll shift away from a strict ‘Game’ focus and instead prioritize relationship and character.

Get ready to jump in, take risks, and perform hundreds of scenes as you sharpen your skills and expand your improv toolkit. And of course, we’ll top it all off with a final class show where anything can happen!

At the center of almost every live performance is a single human being who quite literally runs the show: the stage manager. This course will explore the stage manager’s role as both an artist and an administrator, using the SM’s wide-ranging responsibilities as a roadmap to understanding the production process and all the people involved in it.

For students doing work-study or internships, we will focus on three core areas of professionalization. First, each week will journal our work weeks, discussing and sharing our work experiences in a round-table. Second, we will build our professionalization skills, especially networking (in person and on LinkedIn), resume writing, and doing practice interviews. Finally, we will work on writing 5-year plans, to help us figure out where we’d like to be a few years after graduation. More specifically

The large-scale consumer web has been defined by epochs. The first epoch was defined by the user as consumer: large companies created content which was consumed by the masses. The second web epoch (web 2.0) has been defined by consumer creators, large companies own and deliver content created by users to other users (Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, …). The third web epoch is—if you believe the hype—to be defined by self-ownership of content.

This course will serve as an introduction to working with circuits in a lab setting. We will learn about the relatively simple rules necessary for working with analog circuits and how those rules can be used to build objects of growing complexity. We will then move on to understanding how to build circuits that can measure properties of and interact with their surroundings.

The Alexander Technique invites students to engage with how they move through the world. Students will learn to notice what it is they are doing in their everyday movement, dance practice, performance, & an overall deeper engagement with the body. 

Every fictional universe has its own history, culture, geography, and ecology that act as a backdrop to the narratives that inhabit it.  This course will investigate the relationship between such a fantastical place and its characters – with a particular emphasis on the philosophy and symbology of the characters and their clothes.

A sustainable design process with found clothing 

Every year, roughly 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills. This course seeks to support students rescuing our cast-offs by upcycling fast fashion. Students will explore how to deconstruct garments, rethink their intention, and reconstruct them anew. 

research to design to construction

“Clothes aren't going to change the world. The women who wear them will.” – Anne Klein

How do we organize data to solve complex problems efficiently? This course studies the fundamental structures and algorithms that form the cornerstone of computational problem-solving. Building upon the programming foundations established in CS1, we will explore how algorithmic thinking and sophisticated data organization enables us to tackle increasingly challenging computational problems.

Have you ever wondered what a computer is and how it actually works?  In this course, we’ll answer the hardware half of this question.

Together with calculus, linear algebra is one of the foundations of higher-level mathematics and its applications. This is NOT just the algebra you know from high school. There are several perspectives one can take on linear algebra: it is a method for handling large systems of linear equations, it is a theory of linear geometry (including in dimensions larger than three), it is matrix algebra, and it is a theoretical structure that appears throughout mathematics, physics, computer science, and statistics.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mathematics underwent a vast expansion, into new, exciting, and increasingly counter-intuitive realms. The subject risked mystification and mutual incomprehensibility between experts in different sub-fields. In the first part of the twentieth century, a group of French mathematicians, under the pseudonym Bourbaki, undertook an ultimately successful program to use the foundation of set theory to put all of mathematics onto a common conceptual and logical foundation.

An exercise in planning, communication, creativity and resourcefulness, property design applies to film, television, and theatrical production. This course will look at theatrical props and set dressing from a property designer’s perspective. Starting with a script, we will uncover the questions you didn’t know needed answering in order to comprehensively produce or curate props that are functional, period appropriate, and successfully contribute to a production.