Theater, Dance & Media (TDM) combines the study of theater, dance, and media practices with the histories and theories of expressive and embodied culture. It offers students the opportunity to investigate the myriad ways that live and digital arts have been used to convey the breadth of stories about the human experience. Undergraduates may pursue a Concentration or a Secondary Field.
Director of Undergraduate Studies: Debra Levine
For all questions, please contact tdm@fas.harvard.edu
Gateway Courses
Spring 2024
TDM 121MV: Physical Approaches to Acting and Storytelling
Pete Simpson
This course will focus on introductory principles and practices of performative and material-generative movement. We will explore movement techniques foundational to: creating characters; generating scripts and narratives; economizing and grounding stage presence; fostering ensemble cohesion; sensitizing the body to its unique capabilities of expression.
Utilizing principles from Richard Maxwell, James Donlon, Blue Man Group and other ensembles/artists, we will attempt to anatomize an idealized ‘neutrality’, investigating the meaning and application of physical/environmental ’neutrality’ on stage. We will identify the roles of idiosyncrasy and ‘nonverbal disfluency’ in the pursuit of that neutrality, and the opportunities and challenges they present to the performer. We will investigate rudimentary components of story, seeking along the way the most essential markers for perceiving story, emotion and thought in physical performance. We will explore the beginnings of creating character and story through gradual stages (solo body, body in relationship to object, bodies in interrelationship w/ each other). In the latter part of the semester, we will experiment with stylistic schools of physical performance, including mime, commedia, Blue Man Group, clowning/acrobatics and Viewpoints, and will also investigate ensemble cohesion through games and improvisation.
Throughout the semester’s explorations, we will also develop basic familiarity with simple yoga flow sequences, Taoist tai chi and other body practices geared toward conditioning/lengthening/strengthening the physical instrument.
The class will be both rigorously physical and dialectical, will include several short solo and ensemble performance pieces throughout the semester and will culminate in both a full-ensemble long form piece, as well as short individual pieces.
TDM 148P: Koteba: Bamana Performative Traditions
Jeffrey Page
The origin of blues music—and therefore gospel, jazz, and hip-hop—has been traced directly to Mali, West Africa. Within Malian ideology, dance is a culture and there is no separation between dance and theatrical practice. Koteba is a masquerade performance tradition that utilizes the theatrical elements of satire to comment on and confront civic injustices within the Bamana ethnic society. Koteba is a word that means “big snail” in the Bamana language, and like the snail, it carries the ideologies and cosmologies of the Bamana people on its back. There are nearly 20 rhythm and movement stylings situated within Koteba. In a multiday festival, these dances are traditionally performed in succession, and often executed with the dancers forming concentric circles, which gives this theater tradition its snail-like name. Traces of this masquerade tradition can be found throughout the Caribbean and the United States in the form of Carnival and Mardi Gras.
This class will focus on unpacking four of the dance and rhythm stylings over the course of 12 weeks: (1) Forokotoba, (2) Tansole, and (3) Bara/Baradong. The traditions of Noh drama, Sanskrit theater, and Greek tragedy have informed the development of American dance and theatrical forms, and similarly, a deep investigation of Koteba masquerade performance traditions will offer students of theater and dance informative tools as theorists, practitioners and historians.
TDM 151: Foundations in Design: Scenography 1
Dede Ayite
Great design for live performance requires synergy between all the key elements to unlock the visual power of a play. This course explores the fundamentals of set, costume, lighting and sound through critical texts and applied projects.
Students will be taught the fundamentals of design with an emphasis on script analysis, research and the articulation of a design concept through rendering, collage, model building with an introduction to basic drafting principles. The goal is for students to develop key skills for conceiving and designing visual elements for live performance. Students should not expect a technical survey, but rather an exploration of how visual elements shape a given performance.
TDM 194S: The Show-Tune Canon Meets the No-Show Songbook
Stew
THE SHOW-TUNE CANON & THE NO-SHOW-SONGBOOK invites students to view the history of musical theater’s greatest songs through a comparative lens which places the Show-Tune-Canon in dialogue with the “No-Show-Songbook” a songbook stretching from African- American blues & jazz all the way to rock and roll, disco, punk, and beyond. This course wants to take Company's Bobby for a walk on Lou Reed's wild side, or maybe find Lou waiting at Bobby’s stage-door.
The course asks many questions:
1. What can we learn about musical theater by listening to the music that often informed it, but never made it to the stage in its authentic form?
2. What can we learn about musical theater by listening to the popular music it influenced?
3. What can we learn by creating radical conversations between ultra-modern pop and traditional show-tunes?
4. What can we learn about the chosen subject matter of show-tunes vs no show tunes?
5. What can we learn about race, class, gender, sexuality, capitalism and beyond by comparing how these subjects are framed in the show-tune realm vs the popular song realm?
6. This course will help students locate what is dramatic about The Slits “Typical Girls” and what is punky about Elaine Strich's "Ladies Who Lunch." (When Strich sings "Everybody dies!!!" It has decidedly more to do with Siouxsie than Streisand)