GRMUS 640P-641P — Theatre Études

1 credit per semester
Fall and Spring
Amy Beth Kirsten

This two-credit course emphasizes an integration of disciplines at the structural level and fosters long-term cross-disciplinary collaborations through the creation and performance of original works. Composer-performers, performer-composers, writer-performers, actors, singers, dancers, and instrumentalists are all encouraged to enroll. In the first term, responsive creative processes are explored as we develop new materials and study works of the 20th and 21st 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. Students will then put new knowledge into practice by collaboratively developing their own ten-minute music-driven theatrical works, integrating movement, text, sound, and lighting design, to be publicly premiered at the end of the spring semester. 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.