GRMUS 640P — Theatre Études

2 credits
Fall and Spring
Amy Beth Kirsten

This two-semester course places a “composed theatre’ practicum in the context of history. Students of all disciplines explore works of the 20^th and 21^st centuries that reimagine the musician as a performing body on a theatrical stage. Areas of focus include the evolution of ‘composed theatre’; experiments in voice; the development of collaborative processes; and the rise of embedded technologies. Material to be discussed includes works by Samuel Beckett, Georges Aperghis, Harry Partch, A.B. Kirsten, Theirry de Mey, Meredith Monk, Claude Vivier, Tan Dun, Heiner Goebbels, Liza Lim, Karmina Šilec, and Michel van der Aa. In addition to the close examination of repertoire, students will put new knowledge into practice by collaboratively developing their own ten-minute music-driven theatrical works. By engaging with different modes of collaborative development and all the elements the theatre has to offer, students learn to lean artistically into the visual aspect of music performance to evoke ritual, the otherworldly, the deeply human, and images of absence, with the aim of discovering new ways of storytelling using music-driven performance. These new works-in-progress are publicly premiered at the end of the spring semester.