Good morning, First-Years!
Happy registration! We wanted to call your attention to Critical Histories of Drama, Theatre, and Performance, which also satisfies the Arts and Humanities Requirement, and "Thinking Through Global Inquiry," or "Thinking with Historical Perspective."
This is a course description:
How does theatre think? And how do the different practices of theatre in the past reframe our thinking about theatre today? This course integrates several ways of approaching drama, theatre, and performance, from the ancient world to medieval and early modern Europe. We will be reading a wide range of plays, to get a sense of the dramatic opportunities offered by different concepts of theatre and performance, and also take in a stunning variety of aesthetic, social, and political ways of organizing performance, from the ritual spaces of ancient Sanskrit performance, through the civic space of the Athenian City Dionysia, the refined symbolic stage of Japanese Noh, medieval guild and street performance, the emerging capitalist “entertainment” theatre of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s London, to the manifest interaction of drama and indoor proscenium theatre with the absolute monarchies of seventeenth-century Spain and France. Throughout, we will be attentive to the work of gender and race in the drama4zed fic4ons of social power, and, toward the end of the semester, to the emerging discourse of colonialism as well. During the semester, we will also take up critical reading: the texts that explained theatre to its contemporary audiences (the Natyasastra, Plato and Aristotle, Zeami, Lope de Vega, and others) as well as recent essays taking a contemporary perspective on the past (Butler, Bhabha, Schechner). And we’ll punctuate our reading of earlier plays with contemporary performances on video, and with modern plays and performances that respond to, rework, revise, and reanimate some of these concerns, plays like Césaire’s A Tempest, or Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, or Parks’s The America Play.
The course meets twice a week for an interactive lecture-discussion; there is a final examination during the examination period and both short and longer writing (discussion posts, 2 papers). This course is required for Columbia Theatre/Drama and Barnard Theatre majors, but is open to all undergraduates and English majors might find the integration of literary and theatrical dimensions of dramatic writing especially useful (this course can meet a requirement for the Columbia English major, and for the theatre concentration of the Barnard English major).
Have fun on this beautiful day!
Sophia
