Graduate courses in Drama

(Same as DRAMA 140.) Assistant directing; stage, costume, lighting, and sound design; technical production, stage managing, or other work in connection with Department of Drama productions. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

1-5 units, Aut (Ramsaur, M), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

DRAMA 255T. Drama of the Holocaust

(Same as DRAMA 155T.) The Holocaust as a recurrent theme in American, Israeli, and German drama; issues at the heart of the theatrical experience such as the role of theater as witness, representation of memories, and performance of real-life events on stage. Possible texts: Ghetto, The Investigation, Arbeit macht Frei, The Kastner Trial, and Bent.

5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 256H. History of Performance Art and Live Art

(Same as DRAMA 156H.) From 1950 to the present, emphasizing the U.S. Precedents in visual arts, modern dance, and experimental theater. Modes include happenings, fluxus, body art, everyday performance, solo monologue, and bio art. Sources include surveys, essays, and artists' writings, and visual documentation.

3 units, not given this year

DRAMA 257T. Performance and Ethnography

(Same as DRAMA 157T.) Performance as a mode of engagement in fieldwork, as conceptual framework, and as a mode of representing cultural data. Readings from Clifford Geertz, Smadar Lavie, Dwight Conquergood, Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, Barbara Meyerhoff, Diana Taylor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Antonin Artaud, Soyini Madison, E. Patrick Johnson, Renato Rosaldo, Jon van Maanan, and Diane Wolfe.

5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 260. Performance, Dance, and History

(Same as DANCE 160, DRAMA 160.) Transitional periods in the history of theatrical and popular dance from the 19th through the 21st centuries; how the dancing body and choreography have been constructed in relation to social, aesthetic, and cultural agendas. This year, focus is on ballet migrations and the ballerina.

4 units, Win (Ross, J)

DRAMA 261H. Dance and Live Art in the 20th and 21st Centuries

(Same as DANCE 161H, DRAMA 161H.) History and development of postmodern dance and performance art. Topics include the body as art medium, performance art, experimental dance, and redefinitions of gender in live art

4 units, not given this year

DRAMA 262. Performance and the Text

(Same as DRAMA 162.) Formal elements in Greek, Elizabethan, Noh, Restoration, romantic, realistic, and contemporary world drama; how they intersect with the history of performance styles, character, and notions of action. Emphasis is on how performance and media intervene to reproduce, historicize, or criticize the history of drama.

5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 263. Performance and America

(Same as DRAMA 163.) Dramas by women, men, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and African Americans are examined with regard to the role of dramatic performance within contemporary American society, and as an affective and effective arena for inducing social change.

5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 265. Theater History: Classical to 1900

(Same as DRAMA 165.) A dramaturgical, historical, and design approach to the study of drama, theater, and performance.

4 units, not given this year

DRAMA 266. Twentieth-Century Theater History: Production Research and Design

(Same as DRAMA 166.) A dramaturgical, historical, and design approach to the study of drama, theater, and performance.

4 units, not given this year

DRAMA 268H. Art and Life: The Second Avant Garde

(Same as DRAMA 168H.) Experiments in the second half of the 20th century that produced new genres such as happenings and performance art, and theoretical debates that attempted to reformulate relations between art forms and their changed role in society. How these fundamentals of performance were challenged and reshaped.

5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 276. Dramaturgy Project: The Wasteland

(Same as DRAMA 176H.) Piecing together a lost world, from which The Wasteland is a kind of surviving text, from other texts including the referenced literary works, art, music, and films of the early 20s, and the political and social history. The poem's cultural background that gave rise to it and was reflected in it.

1-3 units, Aut (Freed, A)

DRAMA 277. Playwriting

(Same as DRAMA 177.) The autobiographical monologic and poetic possibilities in performance art explored to learn the elements of playwriting.

5 units, Win (Moraga, C)

DRAMA 278. Page to Stage: Playwriting and Solo Performance

(Same as DRAMA 178.) Dramatic writing: scripted and solo, and as performed by actors or by the playwright. Physical and psychological theatrical action. Development of skills in dialogue, story structure, style, and personal voice. Script readings and directed staging sessions.

5 units, Spr (Freed, A)

DRAMA 279D. Imagine Freedom: Dramatizing the Undocumented

(Same as DRAMA 179D.) The docudrama (plays and films) as an art practice of political transgression. Focus is on texts in which a socially marginalized community serves as the main character of the drama. Texts include Salt of the Earth; Chavez Ravine by Culture Clash; Canadian First Nation playwright Marie Clements' The Unnatural and Accidental Women; and Doris Pilkington Garimara's Rabbit Proof Fence. Script analysis and scriptwriting.

5 units, alternate years, not given this year

DRAMA 279F. Flor y Canto: Poetry Workshop

(Same as DRAMA 179F.) Poetry reading and writing. The poet as philosopher and the poet as revolutionary. Texts: the philosophical meditations of pre-Columbian Aztec poetry known as flor y canto, and reflections on the poetry of resistance born out of the nationalist and feminist struggles of Latin America and Aztlán. Required 20-page poetry manuscript.

3-5 units, Spr (Moraga, C)

DRAMA 279G. Indigenous Identity in Diaspora: People of Color Art Practice in North America

(Same as CSRE 179G, DRAMA 179G.) Gateway course for Institute for Diversity in Arts concentration. People of color aesthetics from contemporary art works in conversation with native (American, African, Asian) origins, gender, and sexuality; the formation of cultural identity. Final project.

5 units, Spr (Moraga, C)

DRAMA 290. Special Research

Individual project on the work of a playwright, period, or genre.

1-5 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

DRAMA 300A. Critical Styles I

Literary criticism and theory, emphasizing style as evidence of historical, cultural, and ideological concerns. Assumptions about written texts by authors such as Coleridge, Bradley, and Burke. How style reveals context. Students write in the style of authors discussed.

3-5 units, Aut (Rayner, A)

DRAMA 300B. Critical Styles II

Notions of performance as they relate to gender, race, and globalization in critics such as Derrida, Butler, and Phelan. How style reveals context. Students write in the style of authors discussed.

3-5 units, Win (Rayner, A)

DRAMA 301. Performance and Performativity

Performance theory through topics including: affect/trauma, embodiment, empathy, theatricality/performativity, specularity/visibility, liveness/disappearance, belonging/abjection, and utopias and dystopias. Readings from Schechner, Phelan, Austin, Butler, Conquergood, Roach, Schneider, Silverman, Caruth, Fanon, Moten, Anzaldúa, Agamben, Freud, and Lacan. May be repeated for credit.

5 units, Win (Jakovljevic, B)

DRAMA 302. Racial Erotics

Issues in postcolonial studies; the shifting erotics of race and nation; and the management of sexuality within geopolitical contexts in colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. The historicity of these categories; how race, gender, and nation continue to shape the world.

3-5 units, Spr (Menon, J)

DRAMA 303. Race and Performance

How and if race is performed. Readings from W.E.B. DuBois, Michael Rogin, Paul Gilroy, Lisa Lowe, and Richard Dyer.

3-5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 303A. Theory/Theater

How theater has provided the ground for epistemological concerns with questions of being, events, human action, and ethics, from classical Greek thought to postcolonialism. Theoretical work including Aristotle, Artaud, Anzaldúa, Brecht, Bhabha, DuBois, and Derrida. Theater practices including perspectival staging and postmodern performance.

3 units, not given this year

DRAMA 304. Historiography of Theater

(Same as DRAMA 166H.) Goal is to design an undergraduate theater history class. Standard theater history textbooks, alternative models of theater history scholarship, and critical literature engaging historiography in general.

3-5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 316V. Metaphysics and the Mise-en-scène

Theoretical paradigms of avant garde practices past and present.

3-5 units, Aut (Jakovljevic, B)

DRAMA 320. Basic Approaches to Teaching Acting

Workshop. The pedagogy of acting to prepare graduate student teachers for introductory classes in acting.

1-3 units, alternate years, not given this year

DRAMA 321. Proseminar

Workshop. Skills needed to participate in the academic profession including abstract, conference presentation, and dissertation or book chapter.

1-3 units, Aut (Phelan, M)

DRAMA 323. Composing Performance

(Same as DRAMA 170P.) Workshop.Generating performance materials for solo and ensemble creative work.

3-5 units, Aut (Staff)

DRAMA 335. Contemporary African American Drama: August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Beyond

(Same as DRAMA 219.) From 1984 to the present. What constitutes African American drama; how contemporary playwrights confront intersections of race, gender; and sexuality; Blackness and historical constructions. How does the political and social climate affect the form and content of contemporary African American drama? How does the urgency of rap music translate into Hip Hop theater? Sources include critical and theoretical works on drama and contemporary African American cultural expression.

3-500 units, Spr (Elam, H)

DRAMA 358C. Beckett

(Same as DRAMA 152, ENGLISH 389B.) Beckett's plays and late writing, which have been described as proto-performance art. Recent Beckett scholarship, including new work about his analysis with Bion.

3-5 units, Spr (Phelan, M)

DRAMA 370. Concepts of Directing

(Same as DRAMA 170A.) Directorial definitions of time, space, movement, and the performer/spectator relationship. Experimentation with texts from literary and other sources, including works from the realistic tradition in drama, using a multi-form performance space.

5 units, Aut (Staff)

DRAMA 372. Projects in Directing

Theatrical text and its transformation into performance. Textual analysis, research, evolution of a directorial concept, and its investigation in scene-work with actors. Students design and stage the production of a short play in a multi-form space. Public performance. May be repeated once for credit.

3-5 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff)

DRAMA 372B. Projects in Directing

3-5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 373. Directing and Dramaturgy

Dramaturgy, directorial methods, and visual concepts in the production of plays from the Elizabethan tradition to postmodernist texts. Work on the text is tested in the staging of scenes.

3-5 units, not given this year

DRAMA 374. Graduate Directors' Performance Project

Production of a full-length play, selected in consultation with faculty. Project is designed by graduate students, sometimes in collaboration with undergraduate design students, under the supervision of design faculty. Four to five weeks rehearsal. Public performance.

3-5 units, Aut (Ramsaur, M), Win (Ramsaur, M), Spr (Ramsaur, M), Sum (Staff)

DRAMA 375. Main Stage Production

Production of a full-length play as part of the Department of Drama season. Public performance.

3-5 units, Win (Staff)

DRAMA 376. Graduate Directors' Dramaturgy Project

Serve as a dramaturg on any department production. Work includes research on the production's text source, the writing of program notes, and the compilation and editing of the play bill. Possible adapting/editing of the performance text, and translating text from a foreign language.

2 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

DRAMA 377. Graduate Directors' Staged Reading Project

Presentation of a new or newly adapted work for the stage, in a mode employed in professional theater for the development of new plays. Two to four rehearsals. Public performance.

2 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

DRAMA 390. Tutorial

1-9 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Moraga, C), Sum (Staff)

DRAMA 399. Dissertation Research

1-9 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

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Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Alphabetical Index

Bulletin Archive

Graduate courses in Drama