Learning Outcomes:
Engage with modern and postmodern theatre
Acquire vocabulary to deal with a range of contemporary performances
Experienced a range of different approaches to contemporary performance
Have explored responses to non-text based theatre
Indicative Module Content:
Indicative Only--Subject to Change
Class 1: Introduction: Modernisms, Postmoderism, Postcolonialism, and Identity politics
Class 2: End of Master Narratives: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
Class 3: Pastiche, Parody, and Postmodern Politics: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine
Class 4: Anti-representation: Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience
Class 5: Orientalism: David Hwang’s M. Butterfly
Class 6: Race and Representation: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Week 7: Performing the Archive: The Wooster Group’s Hamlet
Spring Recess
Week 8: Crisis, Hope and the Utopian Performative: debbie tucker green’s random
Week 9: Writing, History, and Death: Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of The Last Black Man in the Entire World
Week 10: The Death of Character/Postdramatic Theatre: Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis
Week 11: Memory, Trauma, Abstraction: The Brokentalkers’ Blue Boy
Week 12: TBA + Conclusions/Essay Prep