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 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 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.

See above.

4 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 Verse is a significant part of drama and learning to interpret it and speak it is essential for the performer. This course deals with verse from the great poets and dramatists.
Prerequisite: THTR 131

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 Students will work with masks that have very stylized and recognizable expressions, leading the actor to a liberation behind the mask, developing character in the body and the story of the person in the mask.
Prerequisite: THTR 227

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.

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.

A study of women playwrights of the western world, from the first-known female playwright (Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, a 10^th century Saxon nun) through Aphra Behn, the Restoration playwright, and ending with the works of the Irish playwright Lady Gregory. The course will focus on the English Queen Anne period (1660-1720). Students will research particular writers and critically analyze their work through oral presentations and written papers. Students will also prepare scenes from selected plays and discuss the theatrical techniques of the writers. Discussion will focus on the history and role of women playwrights in the theater traditions of the western world.

The course will focus on the 19^th century Russian theater from a theoretical and performance perspective. The student's intellectual, aesthetic, and visceral understandings of the style of each playwright will be the major course objective. The primary focus of the course will be Chekhov, and will secondarily include the beginnings of Russian realism in Gogol, Sukhovo-Kobylin, and Ostrovsky. Turgenev's dramaturgy and influence on Chekhov will also be considered, as will the work of Stanislavsky. The course will also explore contemporary and historical paradoxes of producing Chekhov's plays on the stage. The three major components of the course will be: literary analysis, production history, and scene work, potentially culminating in a studio-style performance of a Chekhov play or of excerpts from several plays.

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.

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.

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: Playwrighting I

2 credits, Beginning with exercises in broad physicality, balance, rhythm, discovery, physical mask and surprise, this class explores what about the individual student is unique and funny. When we begin to forget what is an appropriate response, and imagine what we would be like if we were never socialized, we begin to discover "the clown" that lives in each of us. By embracing the archetypes of childhood and reclaiming the "internal response" without the diminishing filter of socialization, we start to lose the inhibitions that block us from being purely expressive. This class encourages openness, invention, playfulness, generosity, sensitivity, and courage
Prerequisite: Introduction to Acting

4 credits In this workshop students learn to sing and act parts in opera.
Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor.

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.

2 credits A course taught by leading designers and directors in the field. It examines the explosive prominence of visionary visual ideas on the stage in the past 30 years, the emergence of a new form of collaboration between directors and designers and the inclusion of the new media on the stage. This course is required for upper-college theater students.

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.

2 credits This course serves as a meeting/workshop involving faculty, students, and visitors from the field of theater - playwrights, directors, designers, and actors. Group projects might include adaptations or shared readings and discussion, but this is mainly a forum for the discussion of ongoing work. Students visit New York theaters and opera productions. Enrollment is limited to theater majors, for whom this is a required course. The class meets alternate weeks.

The junior seminar is a requirement of all juniors majoring in Theater. The seminar meets on a bi-weekly basis and carries no credit.