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: Front and Long Rooms UPFront

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, 6–9pm

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 2-5pm

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 F Term, Mondays & Wednesdays, 2-4pm
Location: Waldent Room UP 103

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: Winter, Wednesdays, 5–8pm
Location: UP 109