Theatre CUE Offerings for '24-'25
updated 1 May 2024
Dear rising senior Theatre majors:
As many of you know, the Theatre CUE is a full one-credit course meeting twice per week and extending over the entire semester. Students will need to register for and pass one of the CUE courses in order to complete the THR major. Please find below the course descriptions of the CUE courses being offered for both Fall ’24 and Spring ’25. There will be two CUE offerings in the fall and three in the spring. The Spring offerings will not be available for registration until the next academic year; however, the THR program would like students to know what is being planned for the whole year so that individuals can make the best choices for Fall registration.
Each CUE is rooted in a theme selected by the instructor and will enroll approximately 15 students. The courses will include both seminar and studio components, but are ultimately oriented more strongly toward the practice of theatre-making. Each CUE will have some sort of public sharing of the work, though this will take different forms based on the content and goals of the CUE itself. These courses will be structured so that students of diverse theatrical specializations can participate.
FALL 2024
Solo Performance
Jim VanValen
Students will explore the world of solo performance and create their own original pieces within a focused process of personal discovery. Students from all backgrounds will work together in shaping their artistic voices and releasing their personal visions as writers, performers, and theatre-makers. The course will also examine and analyze various forms of solo work, various solo plays and pieces, and various solo artists throughout theatre. All will be incorporated as individuals seek out the stories waiting to be told within themselves, discover how they wish to tell such stories, and, in turn, experience the relationship, partnership, and possibilities that exist between story-teller and spectators within the theatrical space. The class will culminate with students sharing their own solo pieces for an audience. Please note: students in the course need not consider themselves "performers" to take the class, participate in the assignments, and express their stories — all are welcome.
Your Time Begins Now (Executing the Escape)
Jess Bien & Eric Covell
This CUE will explore all aspects of interactive experiences - primarily escape rooms. Analyzing design, storytelling, audience engagement, puzzle creation, team building, marketing, and performance will result in a student-created escape room experience. The course aims to equip students with a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted process involved in designing and creating escape rooms, blending theoretical knowledge with practical, hands-on experience. By delving into areas of performance and shared spaces, this work will explore the intersectionality of interactive experiences where participants actively engage, manipulate, and/or communicate with the content or environment, making decisions that affect outcomes. Students will be provided with the opportunity to utilize their theatre training and scholarship -- from creative collaboration to problem-solving; from design and production to artistic expression and audience interaction - while examining, researching, and developing aspects of collaborative creation, problem solving, and artistic expression. Students with interests in every aspect of theatre will be able to find unique and exciting ways to express their artistic voices.
The Body Holds the Story
Holly Cate
This CUE course is an invitation to investigate and celebrate the storytelling power of the body. Our bodies carry so much wisdom. They carry our histories, our joy, our pain, our dreams, our secrets; our bodies also bear witness to the impact of oppression and are powerful sources of resistance and resilience. This journey will be an opportunity for all bodies of all abilities to explore the stories their bodies have to tell. Our inspirations will include physical theatre companies, Complicité and Frantic Assembly, and recent dance theatre works such as Illinoise and Message in the Bottle. All art-makers are welcome in this CUE. We may create a physical theatre piece or a dance theatre piece or end up inventing a new genre of performance that centers the body — wherever the inspiration leads.
SPRING 2025
Fantastic Stories
Rebecca Lustig
What if the performance that is most exciting, active and alive happens when we ask the audience to bring their imaginations with them to the theatre? That question will be the hypothesis of a series of small experiments in making performance that tells stories from non-realistic traditions (myths, folktales, fairy tales etc). The class will work as an artistic collective that will create the shape and schedule for the course, research source material and performance styles, make the worlds of our experimental performances, and present them during the semester. This section is best for theatremakers of all sorts that are excited to make new things, have lots of ideas and want to get up and try them, enjoy collaboration, and are willing to change course as we learn together.
Theatre and Spirituality
Jim Peck
This course investigates a strand of contemporary theatre and performance art that treads the border between performance and spirituality. The course has two related goals. First, students will investigate the longstanding dialogue between theatre and religion, with an emphasis on contemporary work that invites a sense of transcendence. Artists studied may include Raven Chacon, Lia Chavez, Heather Christian, Erik Ehn, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sybil Kempson, Taylor Mac, and Peter Sellars. Second, students will create partially realized performance pieces that unfold within questions, methods, openings, and tensions that arise from the interaction of theatre and performance, religion and spirituality. Students will work with the instructor to identify promising material and craft it into a form that can be shared with a public; specifics will be worked out based on the interests and aptitudes of the participants. The course is consciously pluralistic; students of any or no religious background are welcome. The only expectation is interest in the phenomena of religion and spirituality and their relationship to theatre and performance.
Reality in Memory through Space and Objects
You-Shin Chen
This CUE course seeks to explore memory as a topic for creating theatrical experiences. How do we document a smell that triggers a piece of memory unfolding in your mind? How do senses contribute to constructing a piece of memory? What are the qualities and traits when a piece of memory presents itself? In a performance space, how can we create a shared memory among the audience and between the audience and the performers? Across the semester, we will read about research and theory on how memories are formed and deteriorate through time and illness and how memories are stored in the brain and documented; we will research and examine how artists, such as Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekhov, Rajiv Joseph, the Civilians, the Caretakers, and many others, explored this topic and transformed it into their own artistic expressions in music, film, opera, performance art and drama. Drawing inspiration from the research and readings, students will lead the process as a collective to experiment and create a theatrical event centering around Memory.
Many Thanks,
Jim VanValen
