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, Thursday, 3-6pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms

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: Antje Budde

Time: Winter, Wednesday, 11am-2pm
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: Christine Balt

Time: Fall, Tuesday, 10am-1pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms

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: Nikki Cesare Schotzko

Time: Winter S Term/Summer F Term, 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: Doug Eacho

Time: Fall, Thursday, 3-6pm
Location: UC 53

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: Signy Lynch

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: Barry Freeman

Time: Fall, Monday 10am-1pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms

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: Luella Massey Theatre GM1

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, Thursday 10am-1pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms

This course explores plays, playwrights, and writing/theatre styles in the African dramatic oeuvre. It engages critically with the socio-cultural and historical cum philosophical contexts within which the plays under discussion were written. The focus is on dominant dramatic styles and traditions, and play samples will be drawn from central, eastern northern, southern, and western parts of the continent as a way of showing the rich diversity of written play forms across Africa. Significantly, the course explores the syncretic nature of these writings, particularly identifying the unique blend of indigenous performance traditions and other dramatic formats within these texts. Plays from, but not limited to, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thing’o, Stella Oyedepo, Tewfik Al-Hakim, Ama Ata Aidoo, Efua Sutherland, Femi Osofisan, Athol Fugard, Tess Onwueme, Ola Rotimi, will be read, discussed, and critically examined in class to give students first-hand experiences of how African plays have been presented in the written form over time.

Instructor: Izuu Nwankwọ

Time: Winter, Monday 11am-1pm

Location: Walden Room UC 103

What does “intercultural theatre and performance” entail? How has this paradigm been changing in Anglophone scholarship and on the global stage? How do practitioners negotiate artistic choices in intercultural collaborations? What are some challenges, strategies, and pitfalls in analyzing intercultural theatre and performance? And how does discourse in this field interact with critical race theory, postcolonial studies, multiculturalism, and diasporic studies? This course offers an examination of intercultural theatre and performance, covering but not limited to its historical contexts, conceptual debates, thematic concerns, artistic features, and aesthetic pursuits. Students will have an opportunity to conduct research on topics of their interest.

Instructor: Xing Fan

Time: Winter, Tuesday 3-5pm

Location: Front & Long Rooms

I offer a critical examination of noteworthy dynamics, movements, figures, and dramatic texts within the history of African American theatre and performance. Beginning with the horrors of American Slavery, this course examines the myriad ways in which theatre and performance have shaped, reflected, and impacted the lives and culture of African Americans and the American populace at large. We will discuss The African Grove Theatre, early Broadway musicals, lynching plays, the Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights theatre, and the Black Arts Movement. In so doing, this course investigates important developments, pioneering artists, and paradigmatic texts to survey the rich history of theatre and performance of African Americans. 

Instructor: Leticia Ridley

Time: Fall, Thursday, 3-5pm

Location: Front & Long Rooms

“Resignification entails the queering or refunctioning not only of discourses, but also practices and infrastructures and their simultaneous reinscription within newly imagined heterotopias, spaces with alternative conceptual, physical, architectural, digital, environmental, spiritual, and even cosmic dimensions. (Leeker, Schipper and Beyes. Performing the Digital: Performance Studies and Performances in Digital Cultures. 2017. 288-289)

Subject matter: In this course we will study queer, queering and feminist ideas and practices regarding the materiality, politics, irony, gender, and performativity of playing with/through/as/ against machines while imagining alternative apparatuses of socio-economic relations. In the current context of AI, generative AI and automation technologies, surveillance capitalism and cyber colonialism – apparently threatening human existence and the planet - a central question becomes what A/I or artistic intelligence as explored in projects of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab^Squared (DDL2) has to offer? Dramaturgical strategies like game, play, performance, inter/multi/media and theatre (intersecting the arts, engineering, sciences) as well as dialectically contingent provocations of established tropes like (re)presentation, repetition, imitation, simulation, automation, acting and the structures of feeling will be of interest. 

Questions: Dada? What did Gertrude Stein like about Brown’s “readies”? How did Alan Turing attempt to test the intelligence of machines? Bauhaus? Is “Eliza” a representation of gendered idiocy? When did Michel Foucault invent the term anarcheology that inspires media archeology experiments interfacing machines of the past and today? Was Andy Warhol a computational thinker? Where is the irony coming from in Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto and how does it help decolonize? What does Judith Butler discuss as “Theatrical Machines”? Can the arts be a future-generating machine? Who played musical chess in Toronto? How does the avatar, as discussed by Sue-Ellen Case, connect the theatre of the sciences with scientific theatre? What does J. Halberstam think about intelligent machines? Is it stupid intelligence or intelligent stupidity that drives artistic awe and curiosity? What is a machine metaphor? What does Ursula Franklin say? Who is in control of the apparatus? What can we learn from Octavia Butler? Which manifestos should we know?

Format: This is a seminar style course that fluctuates between short lectures, informed (!) discussions, experiential learning and hands-on experimentation in a theatrical laboratory setting.
A course by https://www.ddlsquared.rocks/

Key words: queering machines, feminism and machines, A/I artistic intelligence, digital dramaturgy as experimental performance, machine provocations

Instructor: Antje Budde

Time: Fall, Tuesday 3-5pm

Location: Luella Massey Theatre GM1

Days before seizing power, Benito Mussolini declared, “We have created our myth. Myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary that it be a reality. It is a reality to the extent that it is a goad, a hope, faith, courage.” A more performative theory of politics could scarcely be found. Fascism, ever obsessed with representations and projections, while also insistent on its devotion to the corporeal, has from its origins forged close ties to performance and the performing arts. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Shōwa Japanese Empire, and Vichy France commanded the respect and even commitment of numerous theatrical modernists, including Filippo Marinetti, Adolphe Appia, Gertrude Stein, W. B. Yeats,  Mary Wigman, and Rudolph von Laban. Their afterlives invited ironic retrospective devotion from playwrights Mishima Yukio and Peter Handke, rock band Laibach, and several J-Pop idol groups. This turn to playing the fascist stamps our present. We face a set of rather theatrical fascists, as figures such as Narendra Modi or Donald Trump often seem more intent on casting themselves into the public imagination of a dictatorial ruler than they are with affairs of state. What does the stage do for fascism?

This seminar will explore what the history of the fascist performing arts can offer a contemporary understanding of performative fascist politics and their opposition. Our readings will draw from primary texts, scholarship on fascist-affiliated performing artists, and from a century of competing theorizations of fascism (Bataille, Adorno, du Bois, Césaire, Davis, Reich, Deleuze & Guattari) and the “post-fascist” (Griffin) or “late fascist” (Toscano) present. We will develop critical concepts of how race, modern technology, and erotics structure the fascist appeal. Particular attention will be paid to globalizing our spatialization of fascist modernity and postmodernity, encompassing Indian, Argentine, Israeli, and US American examples.

Instructor: Doug Eacho

Time: Winter, Wednesday, 3-5pm

Location: Walden Room UC 103

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

The seminar explores the rich and diverse landscape of African theatre and performance. Through critical analyses, practical workshops, case studies, and multiple readings, the course delves into historical, cultural, and socio-political contexts of theatre and performance expressions across the continent. The course also examines how Africa performance practices intersect with identity, resistance, and varying artistic modes. Through the course, students will gain a deeper understanding of African performance traditions and their global impact.

Instructor: Izuu Nwankwọ

Time: Fall, Monday 3-6pm

Location: Robarts Library Building, RL 14190