Title:
Dramatic Interpretation I

Offered:
Full Year

Instructors:
Faculty

Description:

An Approach to the Play: A detailed examination and explanation of a play designed to help the student identify a play's theme, its structure, and its character relationships. By discovering how to analyze a text and to appreciate a whole play, the student will be better able to approach a specific role in it and to do useful research and homework for rehearsal.

Basic Masks: Improvisation on large themes, including mythology and poetic texts, incorporating the wearing of simple masks. The work is designed to free the student from self-consciousness and to release imaginative impulses leading to uninhibited physical expression together with economy of gesture.

Point of View: POV (Point of View) is a new course of study that carries through all four years of the training. The aim of the course is to help the students see their training and their art in a larger context – historical, political, and artistic. On a regular basis, interwoven with their training in voice, movement, and acting, they see, meet, work with other artists from theater and other art forms (dance, music, architecture) and encounter scientists, politicians, and activists. In these encounters with multiple points of view, students develop their own sense as actors, artists, and citizens.

Rehearsal Projects: Throughout the year, students are cast in plays and rehearse them under the guidance of professional directors. Plays are selected to challenge the students in a variety of progressively demanding ways. The rehearsal projects are laboratory exercises for exploring an actor's process and are not aimed toward perfomance results. Casting is determined by the needs of the training rather than the demands of the play. While the projects are developed to a point at which they are shared with an audience of fellow students and faculty, they are not "produced" but are shown in a room with only basic rehearsal clothes, props, and furniture. These projects are also yardsticks for measuring the degree to which the student is able to apply and integrate what has been learned in the various classes.

Scene Study: Aims to free students from self-consciousness, fear, and pretense, and to enhance their powers of concentration; to foster a full awareness and control of their inner resources; through a broad spectrum of improvisation, to expand the imagination and to encourage expression, interaction, and temperament; and finally, in order to emphasize the requisite sense of process, to explore the initial stages of work on scenes.

Return to Music Division Course Search Page