ENGL 315 - Studies in Performance

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This course offers advanced study in the relationship between performance and text. Performance in this case is broadly conceived. It can include dramatic performances of plays, as well as storytelling, comic or musical performance, performance art, and poetry. The course may also explore such categories as gender or identity as forms of performance.

Topic for 2014/15b: Writing for Performance. This seminar examines a range of culturally significant entertainments from Homer to Homer Simpson; Euripides to YouTube; Beowulf to Snoop Dogg; and Shakespeare to Shakira—but it is designed chiefly as a workshop for theatrical writers who already know, and value, the Western dramatic tradition. Coursework includes theater visits and the rehearsal of one another’s original writing (monologues, forms of dialogue, scenes, a one-act play). Our emphasis is insistently dramaturgical, though not without a dose of criticism, and performance theory. Focus: writing for the stage, not for TV or film. Mr. Foster.

Prerequisites: an original writing sample; evidence of successfully completed coursework in dramatic literature; and permission of the instructor.

Limited enrollment.

One 2-hour period.