In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. How have Sondheim's musicals conversed with American history and American society since the mid-20th century? How do Sondheim's musicals represent America and Americans, and how have various productions shaped and re-shaped those representations? 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.

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. We'll question hierarchies between body and language, use embodied approaches to examine pressing issues of our time. We'll play with the physicality of voice and the material qualities of words and sentences. We'll find literary structures in movement. We'll move and create together with tools from dance, theater, visual art, improvisation, writing, and somatic practices.

Disability is front and center in a global social justice revolution. But who are the disabled artists and ideas behind this movement? How can we embrace Radical Accessibility and Care in our daily artistic practices? This course invites all artists, from choreographers to theater makers, film makers, visual artists, writers and composers to immerse in a highly collaborative, improvisational, experimental and inclusive community to explore Disability Justice as a framework for creative, dramaturgical and curatorial practices.

This course uses texts and methods from history, theatre, performance studies, and dance to examine artists and works of art as agents of change in New York (1960-present) and contemporary "Rust Belt" cities. Issues addressed include relationships between artists, changing urban economies, and the built environment; the role of the artist in gentrification and creative placemaking; the importance of local history in art interventions; and assessing impacts of arts initiatives. A Spring break trip, and visits to key local sites, are included. Students will use data and methods from the course to produce final projects.

Dance/Theater Pedagogy Seminar explores the connection between engaged dance and elementary school literacy, mathematics and social studies while allowing students the opportunity to be civically engaged and contribute to the community. The course combines teaching dance and movement classes to public school students from underserved communities in the Princeton region, while collectively engaging in an in-depth exploration of Dance in Education with an emphasis on recent developments in the field. Fieldwork takes place weekly at designated out-of-class times.

This studio course culminates in student-created performances in the Roberts Theater at the end of the term. Students from across fields who are interested in slowing down the art-making process to explore the nature of devising, developing, revising, and performing are invited to join. We'll delve into the often-intermingled roles of creator, performer, designer, technician, and audience member. We'll use embodied tools to generate material and hone collaborative processes. We'll question why and how and in what contexts we make work. We'll look at forms like the lecture-performance, the happening, concert dance, and one-person shows.

We all need more care. That much is clear. As it pertains to artmaking, the imperative to incorporate systems of care and healing into the greater conversation within the frameworks of modern performance making has increased dynamically since 2020. It has become even more vital for contemporary artists to consider holistic care models as an utmost concern while creating work in the age of global crisis. But how do we practice care within performance? This seminar examines how contemporary artists and creative researchers consider dramaturgy as a radical act of care within contemporary performance practice.

This class will investigate William Shakespeare's play Hamlet through discussion and performance. Students will explore and rehearse an adaptation of the play to understand Shakespearean characters, narrative, and language, and to consider the play's resonance in the current moment. The class will culminate in workshop performances at the LCA during reading period. Students must be able to commit to group rehearsals outside of the official class time, working with a student assistant director and a faculty acting coach, in addition to faculty member Professor Wolff.

Inter-disciplinary class on early modern Amsterdam (1550-1720) when the city was at the center of the global economy and leading cultural center; home of Rembrandt and Spinoza (Descartes was nearby) and original figures like playwrights Bredero and Vondel, the ethicist engraver Coornhert, the political economist de la Court brothers and English traveling theater. We go from art to poetry, drama, philosophy and medicine. Spring Break is in Amsterdam with museum visits, guest talks and participation in recreation of traveling theater from the period.

Contemporary French Theater will introduce students to the vibrant and diverse scene of contemporary theater in France. Every week we will read a new play by a celebrated or an emerging living playwright, and examine their shared topics of interest and writing styles. A great emphasis will be put on honing the students' speaking and writing skills through staged readings of excerpts of plays in class, and creative play-writing exercises. Some playwrights will join us virtually from France, as well as actors and directors specializing in the contemporary repertoire so as to share their experience creating it in the present times.

In Advanced French Theater Workshop, students will focus their work on three main French playwrights: one classical, one modern, and one contemporary. This year, students will rehearse and perform excerpts from the great works of Marivaux, Alfred de Musset, and Bernard-Marie Koltès. The course will place emphasis on refining and improving students' acting and speaking skills. It will culminate in the public presentation of the students' "Travaux" at the end of the semester.

This class will look at the works of Latin American and Latinx women playwrights who have created works that are either adaptations of mythical Greek heroines or reinterpretations of the historical Latin American and Caribbean record. These works challenge our visions of history: they use the power of the canon to make us think about the weight of tradition, and use that weight to shatter our preconceptions of gender, race, and identity. The course will include dialogues/workshops with contemporary artists and scholars, and will include performance, creative writing, and digital work as part of our class assignments and/or final project.

A creative performance lab that engages spoken word, storytelling, devised theatre and physical movement to explore domestic and international structures of liberation, expression, oppression, social movements, and political power. Research assignments, as well as observations and analysis of masterworks, including Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Ntozke Shange's For Colored Girls, and the documentary film series Plutocracy, will generate critical responses to theories of decolonization, power structures, as well as political and domestic forms of violence and peace.

This workshop will introduce students to the craft of writing words and music for the musical theatre. In addition to weekly and in-class practical assignments in technique and skill-building, the course will explore key moments in musical theatre history and criticism to place students' work in a larger context. Readings will illuminate how the specific areas of craft addressed have been handled by masters in different areas of musical theatre. Because collaboration is central to the creation of musical theatre, students will work in different teams during the semester. The workshop will culminate with a presentation of works-in-progress.

Introduction to Theater Making is a working laboratory, which gives students hands-on experience with theatre'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. We will analyze how these plays are constructed and investigate their social and political implications. In-class artistic responses provide hands-on exploration as students work in groups to create and rehearse performances inspired by our course texts.

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.

We will explore the foundations of black performance theory, drawing from the fields of performance studies, theater, dance, and black studies. Using methods of ethnography, archival studies, and black theatrical and dance paradigms, we will learn how scholars and artists imagine, complicate, and manifest various forms of blackness across time and space. In particular, we will focus on blackness as both lived experience and as a mode of theoretical inquiry.

This course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual medium. Students will develop their ability to think about the physical environment (including clothing) as key components of story-telling and our understanding of human experience. Students will expand their vocabulary for discussing the visual world and work on their collaborative skills. We'll spend half the semester focusing on costuming and half focusing of the scenic environment, both in a practical, on your feet studio class taught by professional theater practitioners. Absolutely no experience required.

This course develops basic acting technique which focuses on the pursuit of objectives, given circumstances, conflict, public solitude and living truthfully under imagined circumstances. Practical skills are established through scenes worked on with student directors. This is a working laboratory where we will approach an acting method of identifying conflicts, defining objectives, and pursuing actions. Our goal is to leave the semester with confidence in our acting technique, stronger stage presence, collaborative skills for working with peer directors, and a means whereby to continue working and improving.

If no one will cast you, create a role for yourself. Maysoon Zayid's Page to Stage will teach you how to write your way into the spotlight. Students will be divided into three writers' rooms. Each room will pen a comedic one-act play that the writers themselves will star in. For their final, they will perform a full production of the three original vignettes in front of a live audience.

A continuation of work begun in Introductory Playwriting, in this class, students will complete either one full-length play or two long one-acts (40-60 pages) to the end of gaining a firmer understanding of characterization, dialogue, structure, and the playwriting process. In addition to questions of craft, an emphasis will be placed on the formation of healthy creative habits and the sharpening of critical and analytical skills through reading and responding to work of both fellow students and contemporary playwrights of note.

This course explores the many different ways in which the whole idea of a distinctively Irish theatre has been transformed every few decades, from Wilde and Shaw's subversions of England, to the search of Yeats and Synge for an authentic rural Ireland, to the often angry critiques of contemporary Ireland by Murphy, Friel and Carr. Plays of the Irish diaspora (O'Neill and McDonagh) are examined in this context. The course will also explore the ways in which ideas of physicality and performance, including the popular spectacle of Riverdance, have conflicted with and challenged Irish theatre's peculiar devotion to poetic language.

An introduction to the art and craft of lighting design for the stage and an exploration of light as a medium for expression. Students will develop an ability to observe lighting in the world and on the stage; to learn to make lighting choices based on text, space, research, and their own responses; to practice being creative, responsive and communicative under pressure and in company; to prepare well to create under pressure using the designer's visual toolbox; and to play well with others-working creatively and communicating with directors, writers, performers, fellow designers, the crew and others.

A progressive journey through the art of devised theater. Students learn improvisation techniques and creation tools, which they apply while making their own pieces, both individually and in collaboration with others. This course transforms the classroom into a playful space of exploration, with the performer - their body and imagination - as a hub for theatrical innovation.

Questions of historical style, poetic stage language, and contemporary approaches to heightened realism and nonrealistic acting. A scene lab in which we investigate human embodied truth on a wide spectrum of scale, size, technique and play. Playwrights explored may include Shakespeare, Shaw, Lorca, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan Lori Parks, Naomi Izuka, Christopher Chen, Aishah Rahman, Maria Irene Fornes, Chuck Mee, Aleshea Harris, Caryl Churchill and Brandon Jacob Jenkins.

This theater making studio is intended to support students creating theatrical projects, at Princeton and beyond, in a time of seismic change in our field. We'll address your creative process and collaborative skills, develop inclusive practices and support your growth as visual storytellers and critical thinkers. We will incorporate theater going, guests and practical exercises as we consider how to create theater using bodies, space, imagination and a desire for change. We will focus on developing a collaborative cohort of advanced students, and on theater makers as active citizen, through the lens of nonprofit theater making practices.

Creative Intellect is a collaborative workshop course designed to bridge the critical and creative dimensions of performance research. Students will lead the development of performance research projects, compose a written report documenting the development of these projects, and devise and produce a public event that engages observers in the principles and methods guiding the work. This course cultivates a rigorous ethic of practice wherein the theater-maker participates fully and creatively in documenting their own performance work and in commenting critically on that work.

Directing assignments will be created for each student, who will work with the actors in the class and whose work will be analyzed by the instructor and other members of the workshop. Students will be aided in their preparations by the instructor; they will also study script analysis and formulation of a director's point of view, staging and visual storytelling, the musicality of language, collaboration and rehearsal techniques, productive methods of critique, and the spectrum of responsibilities and forms of research involved in directing plays of different styles.

This course will be an exploration, rehearsals and performances of a production of the play King of the Yees by Lauren Yee. The project will be directed by a professional director, and will lead to performances in the Berlind Theater. Rehearsals for this project will be several hours a week in addition to class time. Students who missed the theater program's fall 2022 Try On Theater days should reach out to earaoz@ for more information about remaining performing or production roles.

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. We move through the history of performance to investigate techniques of narrative, site, the audience, duration, voice, movement, installation, with a particular emphasis on documentation and how performance has engaged virtual spaces. Readings and critiques expand vocabulary in assessing performance art. Exercises explore different forms of performance building a foundation of techniques and positions for developing art-based performance work.