PMA 6825 - Staging Dissent: Theater and Social Change

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with PMA 4825.

S. Warner.

This class will explore the wide and varied application of theatrical techniques and practices to struggles for social justice in diverse historical moments, cultural contexts, and geographic locales. Framed by theoretical investigations into the relationships among performance, politics, and civic engagement, this participatory course will examine how power relations “play” themselves out in grand “spectacles,” how authorities “mask” their privilege, and how social “actors” use theatricality to “(re)stage” repressive social “scripts.” We will investigate theater’s function as a forum for rethinking and rehearsing notions of agency, citizenship, and community by analyzing and devising performances aimed at fomenting personal, collective, and institutional change.