4 credits This course, intended for prospective theater majors, focuses on accessing the beginning actor's imagination and creative energy. Using theater games, movement work, and improvisational techniques, the intent is to expand the boundaries of accepted logic and to encourage risk-taking in the actor. Course work includes intensive classroom sessions, individual projects designed to promote self-discovery, and group projects focused on the process of collaborative work.

2 credits Scene preparation and beginning scene technique. Emphasis on relaxation, breathing, and concentration. Teaching the actor to make choices and implement them using sense memory and to integrate this work with the text. Group and individual exercises and improvisations. Continuous work on the acting instrument stressing freedom, spontaneity, and individual attention. Materials: poems, monologues, stories, and scenes. Reading of American plays, 1930 to the present.

2 credits This is a course for potential or non-majors using theater games, movement work, and improvisational techniques. The intent is to expand the boundaries of accepted logic and encourage risk-taking in the actor.

2 credits See description above.

3 credits A course intended for students who have taken one semester of Intro to Acting and would like to continue their study. The course deals with a movement from a games oriented curriculum into work with theatrical texts and discovery of the processes of scene study.

3 credits It is important for the actor to be in an intimate studio situation, in the pure process of scene study, to learn how to break down a scene, understand its "beats" and go for emotional depth without concern for the product. This is the actor's research lab. Intended for Upper-College theater students. Repeatable for credit.

3 credits Scene technique with work on specific rehearsal tasks as preparation and approach to each rehearsal and practice of their application. Continued work on the acting instrument, understanding the actor as artist and deepening the physical, emotional, and intellectual availability of each actor. Advanced individual exercises, scenes, and monologues from all dramatic literature. Intended for Upper-College theater students. Repeatable for credit.

2 credits This course develops awareness of physical equipment, natural pitch, purity of vowels and consonants, tone, inflection, diction, agility, nuance and vocal imagination.

2 credits This course is designed for those students who have already had some training in Voice and will concentrate on addressing demands which occur in performance such as speaking over underscoring, sustaining dialogue in fights or dances, and developing power and range. Technical exercises will be used to promote coordination of speech and movement. In addition to these exercises we will work on selections from "Under Milk Wood" and Façade. Prerequisite: THTR 131; THTR 231-232 or permission of the instructor.

2 credits The roots of masks come from a diverse system of traditions: the Balinese, the great teachers and the theorists Michel St. Denis and Jacques LeCoq, Francis Delsarte. Two

courses are intended to be taken in sequence; in Neutral Masks, students learn to identify physical elements that contribute to a range of characters and physical expression.

Prerequisite: Introduction to Acting

2 credits This is an advanced course dealing with the application of the skills learned in the previous units in a project-oriented environment. Students will work on the process of developing their own mask performances both individually and in groups while simultaneously working with masters in the field on practical projects. Projects will include the New York City Halloween Parade, a new piece to be performed at OPUS 40, and a Winter Solstice event for the Bard Community.

Prerequisite: THTR 227; THTR 228, or permission of instructor.

1 credit A world respected technique for body investigation, alignment, and relaxation, the Alexander Technique is a valuable tool for performers, writers, scholars, and artists. This is a kinesthetic reeducation that provides a means of monitoring and eliminating self-created tension in order not to interfere with creative process.

1 credit A continuation of the study of body investigation, alignment and relaxation, as begun in Alexander Technique I.

1 credit, Basic training in movement, rhythm, development of technique and confidence in space.

Survey of Drama courses study the major styles and periods in drama from a literary, stylistic, and performance perspective, and are at the center of the Theater Program. They are practical courses, applying text to scene work. All theater majors are expected to take four courses over two years from the Survey of Drama.

4 credits Reading, scene work and research in the world of German theater. An examination of eight plays by Georg Büchner, Franz Xavier Kroetz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Heiner Müller, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Ödön von Horvath, and Franz Wedekend.

4 credits This course will examine the plays of Shakespeare as works of theater focusing on the unique demands his plays make on the theater artist. Through lecture, group reading and writing assignment, students will be introduced to basic textual interpretation and scansion, explore issues of style which confront the contemporary interpreter of Shakespeare, as well as the use of rhyme and music in his plays. The course will focus on the following plays: Hamlet, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II, and Love's Labors Lost. The following critical works will be read: Peter Brook's The Empty Space, Harley Granville Barker's Prefaces to Shakespeare, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms by Bert O. States and Cicely Berry's The Actor and His Text. In addition, each student will research and write about a 20^th century production of a Shakespearean work.

4 credits A year-long studio course that covers the practice of directing from text analysis, "table work", imagining the world of the play, design, casting, space, rehearsal and blocking in different configurations. The work will proceed from scenes to a full-length work for public presentation. By permission of the instructor.

4 credits An introductory course that focuses on discovering the writer's voice. Through writing exercises based on dreams, visual images, poetry, social issues, found text, and music, each writer is encouraged to find his or her unique language, style, and vision. A group project will explore the nature of collaborative works. Students learn elements of playwriting through writing a one-act play, reading assignments, and class discussions.

See description above.

4 credits This course will function as a writer's workshop. After writing a short play, students focus on developing a full-length play, with sections of the work-in-progress presented in class for discussions. Students grow as playwrights by being exposed to diverse dramatic literature and doing a short adaptation project, either of a classic play or a short story.

Prerequisite: Playwriting I

4 credits In this workshop students learn to sing and act parts in opera.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor.

4 credits As a symbolic event, opera continues to gather into itself a wide range of meanings. On one hand it is perceived as a ridiculously old fashioned, even ludicrous, entertainment for the snobbishly monied; at the other extreme it is sought out as a powerful connection with heightened emotional and transfiguring passion seen to be lacking in our increasing bland and banal world. This course will discuss and question various aspects of opera's continuing presence in and influences on contemporary cultures and the various metaphorical guises it assumes within them.

4 credits, For the beginning college theater student, a study of selected plays (of varying length) to discover how a play communicates its intention and idea. An examination of the dramatic conventions and strategies at work in a playtext. Impromptu class performance of passages or scenes to aid the prospective theater student in assessing the demands of his/her role in performance.

4 credits This survey course looks at the major periods of dramatic literature, from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century. Plays will be read with particular reference to historical context and dramatic convention informing theater practice during these periods. Along with the plays, we'll look at critical and theoretical essays that elucidate these social and aesthetic conditions.

4 credits, In this workshop students will focus on creating unique theatrical experiences inspired by sites on and around the Bard campus. Through a series of weekly assignments focusing on a reaction to the kinetics, space, sound, history, poetry and revelation of the uniqueness of particular sites, students will script, direct, choreograph, perform in and critique each others' works.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor.

4 credits In recent times Asian theater has become a notable influence on the work of adventuresome theater practitioners around the world. Asian theater has changed how we think about performance style, duration, rhythm, narrative, movement, costume, lighting, set design, make-up and music. Except for Butoh, Asian theatrical forms have been created, preserved, and transmitted from generation to generation. The course is taught in three parts: the Kathakali section is a practical introduction to this classical dance-drama from Southern India from a historical, dramaturgical and practical perspective (which includes exercises of the Kathakali technique [eye, hand, face and leg] applied to familiar poetic texts). Ancient Japanese Theater is a survey of the great forms of Noh, Kyogen, Bunraku Puppet Theater and the spectacular Kabuki. This section includes an examination of acting techniques and also touches on the plays of Chikamatsu, the great playwright of sixteenth century Japan. Butoh performance emerged in post-WWII Japan and it is one of the most mysterious and compelling of the Asian arts, as much to do with martial art and meditation, as with the conventional dance. Butoh is an image-based movement, developing awareness by concentration. It will be shown how to apply Butoh exercises to Western dramatic texts.

1 credit Open only to actors cast in one of the semester's productions and meeting during the rehearsal of that play, this one-credit tutorial, in three segments of five weeks each, serves as an extension of the rehearsal and is concerned with such matters as the source, style and background of the play. Its aim is to provide fuel for the actors' imagination through relevant discussion, reading, and inquiry into any problem presented by the script and/or the world of the play, or into conceptual issues raised in the course of the production. Permission of the instructor is required. Students may not register until the plays have been cast.