Mission Statement
The Department of Theatre & Dance develops creative citizens who pursue multiple ways to know and articulate truths about the world through the study and practice of performance. The curriculum melds intensive studio training and substantive critical analysis in the liberal arts tradition.
The departmental production season affords further opportunities for embodied application of artmaking in the public arena. We aim to produce flexible, rigorous artist-thinkers who can contribute to the greater good. Our course offerings and productions embrace diverse aesthetic forms drawn from various performance techniques, historical eras, and cultural traditions.
Collaboration is our core value and the foundation of the program. Faculty, staff, and students join together to create a spirited department characterized by trust, personal responsibility, healthy risk-taking, and mutual respect. Ultimately, the department equips students with the intellectual, artistic, and interpersonal skills to comprehend and adapt to a changing world and in turn remake it as independent thinkers, citizens, and creators.
Learning Goals
Students should:
- Investigate the functions and value of performances in human life by making performances and by studying them.
- Create meaningful and vivid performances using a variety of generative artistic processes.
- Analyze performances in cultural and historical context using a range of contemporary scholarly methods.
- Integrate embodied and scholarly/analytic approaches to performance.
- Make artistic choices informed by conceptual understanding and practical training.
- Exhibit a rigorous work ethic grounded in a productive approach to collaboration.
- Develop a personal yet self-reflective voice, expressed in artistic and scholarly/analytic modes.
- Discern their individual contribution to the performing arts as producers, advocates, critics, and consumers of culture.
- Write creatively and cogently about performances.
- Cultivate an informed artistic point-of-view sharpened by the integration of knowledge about theatrical performance with insight derived from interdisciplinary connections within the broad liberal arts framework.
