As an introduction to graduate-level theatre and performance history and historiography, this course will teach students how to do theatre and performance history. It will combine consideration of selected topics and case studies with methodological awareness of the problems and questions that arise in the writing of such histories. The course will endeavor to present theatre and performance history as a subject that encompasses dramatic literature, material culture, embodiment, visual culture—and even how history can itself be understood as drama. Emphasis will be directed towards learning how to contextualize and situate sources within their historical and cultural frameworks.

Instructor: Izuchukwu Nwankwo

Time: Fall, Friday 10am–1pm
Location: Walden Room UP103

This course provides an experiential learning opportunity to MA students by allowing them to pursue a practice-based project of their design under the supervision of a faculty member and with feedback from their cohort. Major components of the course are the discussion and application of various models of integrating critical analysis into practice, the introduction of different modes of research-based and critical creative practice, the development of students’ individual projects toward a workshop-oriented presentation, and the practice of peer critique.

Instructor: Francesco Gagliardi

Time: Winter, Wednesday, 10am-1pm
Location: Luella Massey Theatre GM1

This course provides introduction to the overlapping fields of drama, theatre and performance studies at the graduate level. Engaging the key texts in these fields, the course also addresses recent scholarship and artworks. It may include playtexts, performance texts, and theory, and develops and refines critical reading and analysis of this material. The course also models how scholars in the three fields use case studies to integrate analysis with theory. It builds a foundation for scholarly inquiry by incorporating local, national and international scholarship, and examines interrelationships of scholarly and artistic works.
Instructor: Signy Lynch
Time: Fall, Thursday, 10am-1pm
Location: Walden Room UP103

This course provides a capstone experience to MA students by allowing them to pursue a major research project of their design under the supervision of a faculty member. It has two options: a written scholarly thesis of approximately 40-50 pages or a hybrid artistic and scholarly project comprising a practical component and a substantial, 20-page long critical essay explicating the project’s conceptualization and execution. This work is evaluated by the course instructor and two other readers assigned from within the faculty of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. The course develops students’ conceptual understanding and methodological competence.

Instructor: Doug Eacho

Time: Winter/Summer F Terms, Thursday, 10am-1pm

Location: Walden Room UP103

Sources and Concepts of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies I is the first of a two-part cycle of foundational PhD-level semester courses in international histories of intellectual and creative ideas that inform drama, theatre, and performance studies. The courses invite students to examine the most significant dramatic and theatrical developments—in both theories and practices—across cultures. They focus on the historically, methodologically and theoretically informed analyses of dramatic texts, theatre productions, and performances with reference to their formal and stylistic choices, performative significance, cultural systems and conventions, and historical contexts. The courses provide ways of integrating culture-specific theory/criticism/ideas into a comprehensive understanding of world drama, theatre, and performance. This cycle may not use a fixed structure. According to the course instructor’s pedagogical approach and academic expertise, the courses may be organized along chronology, around themes, with a focus on geography, or with a combination of the previous perspectives.

Instructor: Jill Carter
Time: Fall, Thursday, 2-5pm
Location: Walden Room UP103

Sources and Concepts of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies II is the second of a two-part cycle of foundational PhD-level semester courses in international histories of intellectual and creative ideas that inform drama, theatre, and performance studies. The courses invite students to examine the most significant dramatic and theatrical developments—in both theories and practices—across cultures. They focus on the historically, methodologically and theoretically informed analyses of dramatic texts, theatre productions, and performances with reference to their formal and stylistic choices, performative significance, cultural systems and conventions, and historical contexts. The courses provide ways of integrating culture-specific theory/criticism/ideas into a comprehensive understanding of world drama, theatre, and performance. This cycle may not use a fixed structure. According to the course instructor’s pedagogical approach and academic expertise, the courses may be organized along chronology, around themes, with a focus on geography, or with a combination of the previous perspectives.

Instructor: Nikki Cesare Schotzko
Time: Winter, Thursday, 2-5pm
Location: Walden Room UP103

Modelling New Scholarship is a PhD-only seminar focusing on the practice of professional scholarship in drama, theatre, and performance studies. In the course, students cultivate the research, writing, and presentation skills necessary for success in graduate school and the professional sphere. It serves as an introduction to some of the most current scholarship in the field, and develops the tools—analysis, historiography, theory—required both to engage with and to produce original work. Students will examine how scholars translate their research into original contributions to the field: from dissertation chapters, to conference presentations, to journal articles, and monographs. Students will also gain an overview of the profession, including relevant organizations, conferences, and journals, and learn how to gear their writing toward a particular audience. The seminar also considers the ways in which scholarship in drama, theatre, and performance studies both intersects with, and distinguishes itself from, other disciplines, including cultural studies, history, ethnography, and literary studies. The course may include a public humanities and/or community-based component.

Instructor: Antje Budde
Time: Fall, Tuesday, 2-5pm
Location: Luella Massey Theatre GM1

This course is designed to acquaint students with contemporary approaches and issues in teaching and learning as they pertain to the interdisciplinary field of drama, theatre and performance studies. Emphasis will be on the theory and practice of knowledge construction and transmission. By the end of the course, students will have developed a stronger understanding of the history of pedagogy in the field, considered important theoretical paradigms in relation to their practical applications, been introduced to Indigenous and non-Western perspectives on teaching and learning, developed and experimented with specific teaching techniques appropriate to their individual professional goals, and positioned their own values and practice in relation to a community of learning, producing a statement of teaching philosophy.

Instructor: Elliot Leffler
Time: Winter, Friday, 10am–1pm
Location: Walden Room UP103

This course has three components: (1) students prepare for and compose their dissertation proposal; (2) methodological training through which students further develop their research skills pertaining to their specific dissertation projects; and (3) logistical guidance as the students fulfil language requirements, secure a supervisor, and compile a supervisory committee. This course is CR/NCR.

Instructor: Xing Fan
Time: Fall, Monday, 3-6pm
Location: Walden Room UP103

Concentrating upon the in-depth knowledge and practice of playwriting with an emphasis on advanced style and technique of writing. Students develop their own  work through in-class exercises, one major written assignment, and the final public presentation.

Selection is based on an portfolio submission. Applications will open in mid September. Apply online by November 10th. https://drama-apply.chass.utoronto.ca/login 

Instructor: Djanet Sears

Time: Winter, Tuesday, 6–9

Location: Playhouse Theatre UP200

A continuation of DRM331H1 Dramaturgy, deepening the critical exploration of more specific and/or specialized aspects of dramaturgy, such as digital dramaturgy, new media dramaturgy, intercultural and transcultural dramaturgy. Students in this course will also work closely with the MainStage production, providing dramaturgical assistance to the director.

Instructor: T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko

Time: Winter, Friday, 10am-1pm

Location: Sidney Smith 1080

This elective casts a look at the concepts, frameworks and practices that abound in the application of drama, theatre and performance genres to social, educational and research-based interventions and innovations. Drawing from applied theatre, drama education, spectatorship, performance studies and research methodology scholarship, this elective asks how performance operates as an interdisciplinary modality that ‘reorients other fields’ to uncover justice-oriented ways of knowing and being in times of social, political, economic and ecological upheaval (Kim and Solga 263). Areas for investigation include: the philosophies and ethics underpinning applied theatre interventions in contexts of war, disaster and institutionalized neglect; the role of drama, theatre and performance in the climate emergency; the processes and practices of drama pedagogy as a live art for fostering collective wellbeing; and the affordances of harnessing performance-based methodologies in qualitative inquiry and community-based research. The course will intersect with decolonizing, feminist, critical race, queer, and disability studies perspectives, asking what applied theatre, drama education and performance practices bring to bear on intersecting themes including ecologies, biopolitics, technology, solidarity, citizenship, repair, care, trust, and risk, in an age of uncertainty.

Instructor: Christine Balt

Time: Fall, Wednesday 3-6pm

Location: Walden Room UP103

Bertolt Brecht played a specific role in the paradigm shift of the art which began at the end of the 19th century. He advanced this change by trying to connect art to its social and political functions and structure with the positive acceptance of the industrial revolution and by trying to transform it with the help of the new technological media. Restricted to students in the Drama Specialist or Major.

Instructor: Pia Kleber

Time: Fall, Monday, 10am-1pm

Location: Media Commons RL 3025

In the late 1920 and early 1930 – before Bertolt Brecht became a refugee fleeing the fascist authoritarian regime in Germany that came to power in 1933 – he engaged in highly experimental creative intermedia and participatory work which sought to envision and test new social and creative functions of emerging new technologies in media (radio, film, photography), the modern sciences (social psychology, quantum physics) and develop a radically critical praxis of theatre/poetry/music. In 1926 Brecht started to engage with materialist-historical philosophy (Marx, Engels) which had a profound impact on his development as a multi-disciplinary, dialectically thinking artist regarding content, form and social function of the arts, artists and audiences in a capitalist society with the purpose of changing this society. One of the main innovations were his revolutionary learning plays which even in the 21st century could not be realized as intended for social, political and economic reasons which still govern the capitalist apparatus and the product logic within the cultural-industrial entertainment complex. What came into focus for Brecht was the learning-by-doing amateur as a collaborative learner and performer, a high level of playfulness, process-oriented working methods, a political form of laughter as critique and resistance, as well as non-oppressive forms of exploration, curiosity, and learning.

In this course we will engage in a hands-on scholarly and creative manner with Brecht’s innovative suggestions, their potentiality for the future within and beyond artistic considerations.

This is a graduate course of the Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared, which currently employs strategies of Brecht’s learning plays in interactive and participatory inter-media projects in support of student mental health.

Instructor: Antje Budde

Time: Winter, Wednesday 3-5pm

Location: Luella Massey Theatre GM1

An exploration of dramatic literature by writers from the African Diaspora (Canada, USA, UK and the Caribbean) from 1959 to the present. The course will identify a selection of playwrights central to the development of Black drama, their plays, and performance practices. Emphasis will be placed on dramaturgical analysis, sociohistorical context, the author’s influences, and relevant critical writing, in order to evaluate these works as sites of social resistance, cultural resilience, and aesthetic transformation. Readings include works for the stage by Lorraine Hansberry, Wole Soyinka, August Wilson, Derek Walcott, Debbie Hunter Green, George Elliott Clarke, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Walter Borden, Jocelyn Bioh, Kwame Kwei-Armah and Ntozake Shange.

Instructor: Djanet Sears

Time: Winter, Thursday, 6-9pm

Location: Playhouse Theatre UP200

This interdisciplinary graduate course explores the collision between the arts and technologies with all of its creative potential, unintentional collateral damage, compelling attraction, and complex social implications. It brings together scholars, artists, and students from Drama/Theatre, Visual Studies, Comparative Literature Music, Engineering, and Computer Science who are already excited by and engaged in this intersection. For students coming from an arts background the course offers direct experience of emerging technologies and chance to explore their applications to their research. For students with a technology background, the course provides the opportunity to integrate their research into an art-based, publicly presented project. The course exposes all of the students to rigorous interdisciplinary practices and their conceptual, practical and theoretical challenges through group discussions, concept generation, practical experimentation and research, and engagement with visiting artists. The course will culminate in a collaborative performance project.

Please note: entry into this course requires an interview. Contact Prof. Rokeby at david.rokeby@utoronto.ca.

Instructor: David Rokeby

Time: Fall, Wednesday, 10am-12pm

Location: Underwood Room H012

Syllabus

This course serves as a graduate-level introduction to the field of black performance studies. We will have two principal objectives: (1) to survey primary and secondary materials as a way to theorize field formation and (2) to assess the current state of the field. We will move toward accomplishing these goals by engaging and mapping some of the most pressing critical preoccupations that have animated the field since its inception and that continue to enliven contemporary debates and conversations. This will entail discussions of topics that range from race, ontology, and the archive to gender and sexuality. Ultimately, we are concerned with the world-making capabilities of the black body in performance, while considering how the study of this body and its global contexts, fosters different epistemologies for understanding the shape of blackness and the production of the modern world.

Instructor: Leticia Ridley

Time: Winter, Tuesday 3-5pm

Location: Walden Room UP103

What does “Asian theatre and performance” embrace, on page and on stage? How do practitioners in Asian cultures define and accomplish aesthetic pursuits? When do “traditions” begin and end in their cultures? And, how do Asian classical theatre and performance relate to contemporary experiments in a global age? In Asia, theatre, dance, and music are real-life events through which participants celebrate the happiness, joy, coincidence, misunderstanding, crisis, and pain, in both the secular and the sacred worlds. Asian theatre and performance contribute to breathtaking and colorful practices, and unique and inspiring aesthetics. This course invites students to explore foundational theories in Asian theatre and performance, to integrate hands-on experience in their aesthetic analysis, and to conduct further research based their academic interest.

Instructor: Xing Fan
Time: Summer, Mondays & Wednesdays, 2-4pm
Location: TBD

This seminar-style course is about experimentalism, play and collaboration in alternative storytelling methods and processes. We will look at artists breaking down conventions and decolonizing the collaborative process who do not necessarily use typical or conventional approaches to creating new work and/or who do not necessarily fit into the Western theatre perspective. Through an overview of artists working in immersive and site-specific theatre in Turtle Island (North America) students examine how these approaches can be successful in decolonizing new theatrical work. This will be a theoretical and practical seminar.  

Instructor: Olivia Shortt
Time: S term: Wednesdays, 5pm–8pm
Location: UP 109
Prerequisite: DRM220Y1 (DRM Majors, Minors & Specialists)
CAP: 16 undergrad/4 grad

Our departmental policy regarding reading or research courses: 

1. PhD students can take up to one Y or two H reading/research courses during their studies in our program. MA students may take one H reading/research course.
2. Generally, PhD students who take two H reading/research courses should choose different topics for those and change instructors with a new H course. Exceptions can be made on a case to case basis pending approval of the department’s director or associate director. However, this will not happen on a regular basis.

To request a reading/research course you must: 

1. Write a proposal for such a course.
2. Find an instructor who is willing to take you on as a student for such a course on the basis of your proposal.
3. Submit your proposal (after revisions by your instructor) along with the completed Request for Reading and/or Research Course form and a tentative reading list. Make sure, that you and the instructor agree on the number, deadlines and grade value of the course assignments. Make sure that you provide information about the frequency of meetings with your instructor (i.e. bi-weekly 2 hours, weekly 1 hour, monthly four hours).
4. Sign the form, get the signatures of your instructor and finally the signature of the associate director (after approval you can be enrolled by our Graduate Administrator). Always check the School of Graduate Studies deadlines for course enrolment.

COL5122H TEXT AND DIGITAL MEDIA

This course examines new forms of textualities and textual practices that are emerging in the digital era. It highlights an understudied dimension of the text, i.e. the medium that forms its material and technological infrastructure such as scroll, codex, book, CD, e-book, the Internet, and smartphone. The course starts with a historical investigation into the printed text and print culture. Then it moves on to the question of how digital technologies shape reading and writing as well as other text-based cultural practices. While the course revolves around the mediality of the text, it distances itself from technological determinism by stressing the facts that digital technologies are always embedded in and shaped by historically specific political, social, and cultural conditions. This course is designed for students who are interested in questions and issues related to literary production in the digital era and more generally the materiality of the text. Theoretical and scholarly works we will engage with in this course include, but not limited to, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (McLuhan, 1964), The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Adrian Johns, 2000), Writing Machines (N. Katherine Hayles, 2002), Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (Jay David Bolter, 2001), Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (Mark Hansen, 2006), The Interface Effect (Alexander R. Galloway), The Language of New Media (Lev Manovich, 2002), Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009).

Instructor: R. Bai
Time: Winter, Wednesday 11-2pm

COL5109H JEAN-LUC NANCY: RETREATING THE AESTHETIC
Instructor: J. Ricco
Time: Spring term, Thursdays, 10-12

Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on art, aesthetics, and sense has achieved widespread significance in contemporary philosophical, art historical, and theoretical discussions and debates on the relations between art, politics, and ethics. This course provides students with an opportunity to engage with close readings of his work, in order to develop an understanding of the specific priority granted to the praxis of art and aisthesis in his thinking on sense, existence, and being-with. Books by Nancy such as The Muses, The Ground of the Image, Being Singular Plural, Corpus, The Pleasure of Drawing, and Noli Me Tangere, will be read along with the work of other philosophers who have informed Nancy’s own thinking (e.g. Hegel, Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot and Derrida).

ENG2017HF
Early Modern Asexualities
L. Blake

Course Description:
This course will have two main goals. First, we will read and discuss modern scholarship on asexuality, the sexual orientation often characterized by or defined as a lack of sexual attraction. We will investigate asexuality as a queer identity, and talk about how the study of asexuality has the potential to bring new perspectives to queer theory. Second, we will think about what it means to look for and read for asexuality in history. We will read sixteenth and seventeenth century literature, asking what it means to look for asexuality and aromanticism beyond the twentieth century. We will continually ask not just how to build an “asexual archive”—how to find traces of asexuality and aromanticism in the past—but also how the particular shapes of asexuality that we find in early modern texts might help us rethink modern allonormativity (the assumption that everyone experiences sexual attraction) and amatonormativity (the assumption that most people should be striving to be in romantic pairings or couples).

The class does not assume any prior knowledge of asexuality.    

Course Reading List:
Possible primary readings include: William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing [play]; Anon, The Four Prentices of London [play]; Margaret Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure [play]; William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis [long narrative poem]; Thomas Nashe, “The Choice of Valentines” [short narrative poem]; John Marston, Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image [erotic epyllion]; Katherine Phillips, metaphysical poetry of friendship; Abraham Cowley, The Mistress [a collection of poetry that caused Samuel Johnson to call him a “philosophical rhymer who had only ever heard of the other sex”]; C17 “Platonic Love” poetry movement and its opponents
 
Possible secondary readings include theory and criticism by Ela Przybylo, Danielle Cooper, Kim F. Hall, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Christine Varnado, Eunjung Kim, Mel Y. Chen, Simone Chess, Michael Cobb, Melissa E. Sanchez, Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, as well as asexual blogs and other public writing from the online ace community.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Class participation, class presentation, targeted research writeups, annotated bibliography, final paper

Term: F-TERM (September 2022 to December 2022)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 9:00 am to 12:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 100A (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person

ENG2226HS
Early Modern Manuscripts
M. Teramura

Course Description:
While the digitization of early English printed books has revolutionized literary scholarship, a massive field of textual production, one that permeated every facet of early modern life, remains comparatively understudied: manuscripts. Poetry, drama, prose fiction, letters, diaries, depositions, wills, recipe books -- the rich and varied manuscript archive offers ever-expanding horizons for research as new digitization projects are making manuscripts around the world more accessible than ever before. This seminar will introduce participants to a wide range of manuscript genres while providing sustained practice in paleography. We will begin by examining the kinds of manuscripts most closely relevant to literary study (authorial holographs, verse miscellanies, dramatic scripts, playhouse documents) before exploring and move on to other forms of manuscript production of the time (letters, government documents, commonplace books, financial records). The goals of this seminar are: to introduce participants to the scope of early modern manuscript culture; to develop participants' skills in reading a variety of early modern hands; to provide orientation to the resources that will allow participants to locate and access manuscripts; and to give participants a sense of the new research possibilities on manuscript sources.

Course Texts:
Primary readings will include manuscripts of works by authors such as John Donne, Queen Elizabeth I, John Milton, and Hester Pulter; while many of these texts will be short, the most substantial will likely be the collaboratively authored play Sir Thomas More (Arden edition), and The Concealed Fancies by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley. Primary readings will be paired with secondary texts on manuscript culture from a range of historical, literary critical, and paleographical perspectives.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Participation 20%; Mini-Assignments 20%; In-Class Presentation 10%; Final Project 50%. 

Term: S-TERM (January 2023 to April 2023)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 616 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person

ENG2506HF
Shakespeare's Theatrical (After) Lives
H. Syme

Course Description:
In this course we will investigate how the texts, meanings, and ideological affordances of Shakespeare's plays have been shaped and reinvented by successive generations of theatre artists from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. With a focus on Anglophone theatre, primarily in Britain and the US, we will trace how and why certain plays by Shakespeare disappear from the repertory and reemerge at other times, sometimes in radically altered forms, even as Shakespeare (in markedly different configurations) remained central to the Anglophone theatrical tradition over the centuries. Our investigations will focus on two related issues: on the one hand, the changing status of the text in discussions and practices of theatre making, and the effects of the rise of the scholarly textual editor on theatrical practices; and on the other hand, the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have functioned as occasions for negotiating questions of gender, race, and (nationalist) politics.

Course Reading List:
Plays including (but not limited to) _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Midsummer Night's Dream_, _The Merchant of Venice_, and _Richard III_; archival materials ranging from 18th-century prompt books to contemporary stage managers' accounts from Shakespeare's Globe; works by scholars including Barbara Hodgdon, Peter Holland, Robert Hornback, M. J. Kidnie, Judith Pascoe, Richard Schoch, Ayanna Thompson, and many others.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Final paper 40%
Conference-style final presentation 15%
Paper proposal and brief annotated bibliography 10%
Assigned reading presentation 15%
Participation 20%

Term: F-TERM (September 2022 to December 2022)
Date/Time: Thursday / 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person

Please contact gradadmin.music@utoronto.ca to enroll. 

ITA1540HF Renaissance Italian Theatre/ Prof. Laura Ingallinella

Mondays 10am-12pm

This course will investigate the representation of identity and difference in Renaissance Italy by interrogating spectacles designed for a public or private audience. By using an interdisciplinary approach, this course will combine close reading and book history with diverse critical frameworks such as gender performativity, Marxist theory, premodern critical race studies, and disability theory. Our goal will be to investigate how critical theory, in its varying facets, can help expose power structures and tensions within Renaissance and early modern literary artifacts—in this specific case, dramaturgical texts—as they relate to gender, sexuality, class, religious difference, and race. Representative authors to be studied are: Isabella Andreini, Pietro Aretino, Lodovico Ariosto, Feo Belcari, Maddalena Campiglia, Niccolò Machiavelli, Lorenzo de' Medici, Antonia Pulci, Beolco-Ruzante, Gian Giorgio Trissino

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