Schedule
Mon-Thu, 11:00 AM - 12:25 PM (9/2/2024 - 12/13/2024) Location: SLC TITS LH
Thu, 12:30 PM - 1:25 PM (9/2/2024 - 12/13/2024) Location: SLC TITS LR
Fri, 12:30 PM - 1:25 PM (9/2/2024 - 12/13/2024) Location: SLC TITS LR
Description
Athens, London, Paris, Berlin, New York...the history of Western theatre has always been associated with cities, their politics, their customs, their geography, their audiences. This course will track the story of theatre as it originates in the Athens of the fifth-century BCE and evolves into its different expressions and practices in cities of later periods, all of them seen as “capitals” of civilization. Does theatre civilize, or is it merely a reflection of any given civilization whose cultural assumptions inform its values and shape its styles? Given that ancient Greek democracy gave birth to tragedy and comedy in civic praise of the god Dionysos—from a special coupling of the worldly and the sacred—what happens when these genres recrudesce in the unsavory precincts of Elizabethan London, the polished court of Louis XIV, the beer halls of Weimar Berlin, and the neon “palaces” of Broadway? Sometimes the genres themselves are challenged by experiments in new forms or by performances