Add/Drop Period: TDM Courses Still Enrolling
Date and Time
Welcome back students! Add/Drop runs August 25 - September 9. Looking for the perfect Theater, Dance & Media class to add to your courseload? Check out TDM courses still enrolling below! For the full course list, visit this page.
TDM 158A: Introduction to Costume Design
Dede Ayite
An Introduction to Costume Design that embraces a global view. All levels are welcome to take this course. This class explores the design of clothing for the stage. How it can amplify, interpret and extend the message of the production to the viewer through delight, astonishment and provocation. Together we will explore how costume design can even assist in changing a cultural narrative.
Phillip Howze
The television writers room is a unique organism. It’s an occasional group, like an elected legislature — or an ephemeral society — that convenes for the sole function of collective storytelling. This exploratory writing and community-building course will examine the craft, skills and future of writing original works for televised media.
Each week, we’ll engage a series of practical, critical, and creative exercises. We’ll also read, write, and co-create work together, in real-time. This is an intensive, highly collaborative course intended to serve as a bootcamp to those who want to write for television. The semester will consist of three modules: (1) a skills-building practicum to hone the tools of screenwriting craft and team-building, (2), a writers room simulation where you’ll model positions, role-play, and collaborate with fellow writers, and (3) in-class encounters with working professionals from film and television.
TDM 128MT: Mask Theater: Performing and Designing
Kate Brehm
The mask conceals as it reveals.
This course explores the practical application of masks in theater performance for actors and puppeteers. Divided between mask construction and physical explorations, the course guides students through sculpting and rendering three separate masks, which are utilized in classroom performance exercises across the semester. Students study neutral mask, character mask, the counter mask, and complex character masks as it applies to acting without a mask. Object masks and full body creatures then take students into the realm of puppetry and mask theater where symbolic figures onstage offer opportunities for metaphor and distance from the particular.
TDM 174PO: Performing the Orient
Phil Chan
Magic carpets, glittering pagodas, harem fantasies...Orientalism dominated Europe's creative landscape and imagination since the 1700s, but what purpose did it serve? This class will explore over 300 years of "exotic" portrayals of "Orientals" on the Western ballet and opera stages, and geopolitics that impacted how we view Asian people and cultures to this day: from Genghis Khan, the Opium Wars, Chinese Exclusion, to Japanese Internment and #StopAsianHate. The course will also examine the creative process of shifting a Eurocentric work of art for a multiracial audience and provide practical frameworks for how to create art outside of your own cultural experience.
TDM 169S: Singer + Song = Story
Stew
In Singer + Song = Story (Fall 2025), I am inviting students interested in writing songs and scenes to experiment with a unique approach to musical theater making, in a course which injects personally-political, free-spirited, DIY, Punk practices into the process of musical theater making. All this is done with an aim to shake up the show-tune and mess with the well-made-musical.
TDM 164H: Playwriting: Ritual Practice and Curious Worlds
Phillip Howze
A play is a new world in and of itself. What sorts of strange, curious worlds are theater makers crafting today? What approaches are they taking to create these worlds?
In this new playwriting course we will explore both text and non-texts, the wild (as well as the conventional) to discover what drives contemporary plays, devised works, and performance today.
We will discuss the practices employed by various playwrights and directors—particularly women and artists of color—and try our own hand at some of these approaches. In addition, we will see live performances in realtime; engage special guest/visiting artists; collaborate with fellow classmates; and expand our curiosities.
Most importantly, we will write. This is an exploratory writing workshop with a focus on generating new material. By the end of the semester, you will have created a portfolio of new works, ideas, processes and rituals.
TDM 195HT: Making Horizontal Theater: Playwriting and Songwriting from Interviews
Jay Stull & EllaRose Chary
This workshop teaches the practices and politics surrounding what has been defined variously as “non-fiction,” “documentary,” “interview-based,” or “investigative” theater. We call this theater “horizontal” because its text, source material, and process are multivariate, self-consciously non-hierarchical, and aspirationally democratic: generated by and with communities through interviews.
In this workshop students will build and present a reading of a full-length piece of horizontal theater. They will collectively choose the topic and scope of the production, study existing models, and interrogate the design of live theater in order to develop an original aesthetic sensibility for a stage presentation. Students will determine by consensus whom to interview and about what subject of interest; they will conduct those interviews, record them, and transcribe them; and they will use verbatim language from those interviews to build lyrics, write songs, monologues, and dialogue, ultimately constructing a full-length play with music and/or a musical.
TDM 90CR: Fall Dance Production Studio: Odd Couple: The Dancing Body in the Digital World
Ali Kenner Brodsky & Andy Russ
Dance is the creative expression of bodies in space and time - a centuries old art form of immediacy and feeling. Interestingly, as our lives become more digitized and removed from IRL reality, dance has gained a “new life” in the virtual world, through videos on social media and streaming platforms. As stages are swapped for smartphones, what changes can be felt, for choreographers, performers and audiences? How are the experiences of attention, agency, effort, empathy, space and time different in both mediums? And perhaps most interestingly, what happens when the worlds collide, and video technology “invades” the physical stage?
In this course, we will be examining these questions through an historical survey of dance in media, and direct embodied research, manifesting as weekly choreographic experiments. Starting from a place of no particular presumed movement experience (ie. this class is equally for the ballet pro, breakdance influencer, and living room dancing queen) we will be investigating and inventing various methods of making, with and without technology. We will learn various techniques of capture (cameras) and display (monitors and projectors), which in turn will lead to experiments with incorporating video back into live performance. The culmination of the course will be an original multimedia public performance event, co-created with lecturers, Ali and Andy.
TDM 157PL: Backstage Blueprint: Operational Strategy & Production Leadership in Theater
Timothey Sullivan
This course delves into the core elements of technical theater management, focusing on operational strategy, backstage infrastructure, and effective leadership. Students will gain practical knowledge in areas such as stage management, lighting, sound, technical direction, costumes, automation, and production coordination while also developing the language and communication strategies essential for managing teams and collaborating with creatives, performers, and production staff. Topics include backstage operations, managing production logistics, coordinating meetings, and problem-solving in live environments. Whether you're managing a production team or navigating complex technical systems, this course prepares you to drive successful productions with confidence and precision.
TDM 150VT: Your Responsive Eye: Visual Thinking and Creation for Theatermakers
Jeff Adelberg
This course is about seeing and making, because theatre, dance, and media artists of all kinds must think visually with the same depth and precision they bring to text, story, and music. We begin by examining how the eye and brain interact—how we perceive, process, and assign meaning to visual information. From there, we will develop a rich vocabulary of visual design concepts, exploring how form and content shape attention, emotion, and narrative.
On stage, the visual world must be treated as an active force in storytelling, as essential as the play itself. Through analysis, discussion, and hands-on exploration, we will train our responsive eye to see more deeply and create with intentionality. Drawing from nature, visual arts, media, architecture, everyday experience, and our individual and collective imaginations, we will compose striking, meaningful visuals and explore how they might evolve into theatrical environments. Scenery, costumes, light, projections/video, and movement will all be considered.
By the end of the course, students will have developed a nuanced visual vocabulary, enabling them to craft onstage worlds where form and meaning converge to create striking, evocative experiences.
TDM 196SS: The Singer-Songwriter: Intimacy, Parasociality, and the Confessional
Katelyn Hearfield
Over the past few decades, audiences have grown increasingly enamored with the figure of the singer-songwriter. Listeners today crave the confessional and the direct address, modes of intimacy through which artists sell themselves as much as their music. In this course, we will explore the biographies and oeuvres of popular musicians who divulge their private lives—or at least seem to—for our pleasure. In particular, we will consider how the relationships between artists and audiences are constructed in the media, from democratized social media platforms to exploitative tabloids to the controlled narratives of production and industry. Surveying musicians from Joni Mitchell and James Taylor to Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan, we will disentangle the contradictory knots tying together authenticity, persona, labor, and profit in the music industry. How does identity inform production and consumption of popular music, from the gendered expectation that women perform “confessional” music, to racialization of genre in popular music? We will also confront our own culpability as consumers, exploring themes of parasociality, intimacy, and the expectations society places on celebrities.
For full course list, visit this page.