2201F - Understanding Performance
This course will equip students with the primary tools necessary to conduct basic performance analysis. From costumes to lighting and sound effects to textual alterations, students will learn to analyze a production while exploring the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of the required texts. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

2201F / 001

M.J. Kidnie

DRAFT Syllabus

2202G - Performance Beyond Theatres
Performance isn’t just for actors at the theatre; we are all performing, all over the place, all the time! Since the 1960s, scholars and makers of theatre have been researching a vast array of performances of “everyday life,” from church services to hockey games to the way you flirt when you’re out at the bar. Performance Studies is the discipline dedicated to thinking about how performance works outside the four walls of the theatre; Applied Theatre is the discipline that helps artists and scholars to bring the pedagogical benefits of performance into the community, to support social justice, advocate for change, or activate (and celebrate!) our differences. Performance Beyond Theatres is the course that will introduce you to the many ways we might usefully conceive of theatre and performance as not just an art of the stage, but an art by and for us all. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

2202G / 001

K. Solga

Sample Syllabus

2204G - Forms and Genres: The Greeks to Shakespeare
This course will introduce students to the range of plays and theatre practices that shaped the first two millennia of theatre. Landmark texts will be studied in the context of the diverse theatre spaces, festivals, and political cultures in which the drama first came into being. 0.5 course

2212F - Adapting Across Page, Stage, and Screen NEW! (cross-listed with Film 2212F and English 2112F)
How does the shape an artwork takes contribute to its aesthetic and political power? When artworks flex across form and media how do their messages change? What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said “the medium is the message”? How do genre and form shape social and political discourse? In this course, students explore these questions and more as they investigate texts that assume multiple cultural forms and represent a diversity of perspectives. 0.5 course

ARTHUM 3200E - Knowledge Creation Through Performance INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSE
This is a pilot course led by award-winning teacher Kim Solga. It will introduce students from across campus to embodied, relational, arts-based methodologies as they help drive research and innovation in a wide range of fields. 

Playwrights teaching medical students. Applied performance scholars training cops to intervene more safely in mental health crisis situations. Tech labs staffed with artists and engineers side by side. Composers helping high school kids create a record of their lived environments. And lots more.
 
Our class will be small (maximum 20 students!) to ensure an optimal learning environment. The fall term will be guest-speaker led: learn from experts already applying interdisciplinary models in all kinds of ways, both virtual and IRL. In our winter term, a customized CEL placement will let you bring your particular expertise to a partner in London’s arts and culture community, putting your own interdisciplinary engagement into practice! Assessments will include lots of options for letting your creative juices flow, and lots of reflection on how we learn, and what that means for our future as lifelong learners.
 
Find out how your discipline intersects with arts-based ways of making, doing, and thinking. Discover where in your own work you can learn to play! For more information or to join an orientation session, please contact Amala Poli: apoli@uwo.ca. 1.0 course

3208F - Table Work
Students will close-read parts in plays in order to analyze a script's vocal patterning, experiment with the pacing of a scene in terms of breath, silences, and "beats", shape interpretations of character, tone, and motivation, and debate what constitutes textual "clues" to performance. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

3208F / 001

D. Leyshon

Syllabus

3209G - Indigenous Theatre and Performance
This course examines Indigenous drama and performance practices, combining an attention to aesthetic traditions, Indigenous storytelling and innovation with an awareness of the cultural and political contexts shaping dramatic texts and performances. 0.5 course

4216F - Reviewing Performance
This course explores the function of modern arts reviewing. We will study the form across several media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and think critically about the place of long-form review criticism in contemporary culture. Students should expect to write multiple reviews over the course of the semester. 0.5 course

4999E - Thesis Project
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, preparation of materials, and creation of a thesis project with a focus on theatre or performance studies. The outcome may be a written piece of research or a performance-creation project. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Program Director, Theatre Studies. This course is restricted to students with an 80% or above average and who have completed at least 1.0 course(s) from Theatre Studies 3000-4999 or approved substitutions. See Theatre Studies 4999E - Thesis Project for details. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

4999E / 001

Various

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