Course Number:  TAPS 2505/ 2555

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course will provide a fundamental understanding of the principles of Stanislavski-based acting within the realistic style, help the actor develop a working understanding of a five-week rehearsal process and a system of text analysis based upon events and cause-and-effect, and begin the work of integrating vocal and physical technique into each individual student's acting method.  This course continues as TAPS 2555 in the Spring, incorporating an introduction to verse work.

Instructor:  Skiles/ Christopher/ Scurria

Course Number:  TAPS 2505/ 2555

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course is an introduction to voice for performance and moves through theory, experiential anatomy and
physiology, and employs kinesthetic exercises for physical release, respiration and support, phonation, resonance, expression (pitch/rate/volume), and articulation.  All work explored will develop a kinesthetic awareness of coordinating breath, the vocal tract, resonance, expressivity, and articulation skills as synergized parts of a holistic communication system that are able to respond truthfully to imaginary circumstances and to the real needs of the performance space. This course continues as TAPS 2555 in the Spring, incorporating an introduction to working with structured verse.

Instructor:  Moser

Course Number:  TAPS 2505/ 2555

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

The work of this foundational movement course seeks to illuminate and grow our athletic capabilities and expand our capacity to perceive and act through the deepened attention gained through improvisation. Through an evolving practice of reading, moving, reflecting verbally, and writing about our physical research, we will achieve a deeper understanding of the body as an instrument for communication and expression.  This semester we will be primarily invested in the practice of Contact Improvisation, an open research frame that promotes a range of kinesthetic investigations.  

In the Spring, this course (2555) will delve deeply into the Viewpoints as directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau have adapted and defined them for training performers and generating composition. Viewpoints Technique systematically breaks down elements of Time and Space, providing a precise language for makers to communicate about dynamic staging and offering performing artists the tools to direct themselves more successfully from within composition.

Instructor:  Baryshnikov

Course Number:  TAPS 2515/ 2565

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course will offer students an introduction to the basic principles of Laban Movement analysis and its practical application for the actor. The class will consist of an investigation into the basic principles of Body, Effort, Shape and
Space (BESS). Students will investigate and discover the full movement potential of their bodies, be introduced to useful terminology to analyze, articulate and notate movement sequences and discover practical ways to approach character development through physicality.

In the Spring, students in this course (2565) will be invested in a study of physical range and articulation through Physical Play. This course explores the actor’s capacity for play and the idea that games provide theatrical moments of truth and joy. Through a continuum of games, improvisations, and devising activities, students will develop a vulnerable and egoless state of existence that empowers them to take risks, access their imagination, and play more fully with their voice, body, and mind. Exercises explore physicality, vocality, status, focus, scale, presence, flow, and impulse while immersing participants into the wild soup of “le jeu,” or the pleasure of playing.  

Instructor:  Mitchell, Hogan

Directors, guided by faculty, may choose an elective course of particular interest from Brown's course catalog to fulfill this requirement.  

Course Number:  TAPS 2535/ 2585

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course, designed to activate the mind of the director, is a detailed investigation of the
creative process and the beginning of the foundation for communication with actors, designers
and audiences in the making of live performance with text.  This course continues in the Spring as TAPS 2585.

Instructor:  Mertes

Course Number:  TAPS 2535/ 2585

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course is a cross-cohort seminar discussion for the first, second, and third-year directors that centers around current work in process and production, the exploration of contemporary dramatic forms and practitioners, issues in the art and craft of directing, and diagnostic and exchange around the breaking of boundaries and best practices.  Seminar runs concurrently in the Fall with Director’s Lab, which provides material for critical analysis using this course’s diagnostic tools. 

Instructor:  Mertes

Course Number:  TAPS 2535

Term:  Fall

Course Description:

Director's Lab is a cross-class collaborative opportunity for all participating students to work on a variety of material of their choosing and to stretch the boundaries of our individual and collective theatrical imaginations in a vibrant laboratory setting. Lab culminates in five Saturday morning work sharings over the course of the semester for the Brown/Trinity Rep community.  Directors direct in each of these five Labs, first-year actors participate as actors in their first year, while second and third-year actors act in Labs and are also offered the opportunity to direct one Lab each semester.

Instructor:  Mertes

Course Number:  TAPS 2535/ 2585

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course will enable the student to gain an overview of the field and begin to understand how a director might carve out space in it, enhance it, and disrupt it, with a particular emphasis in developing the entire directing cohort.  All six directors will meet weekly to develop and hone the practical skill sets of persuasive communication;
personal, financial, and organizational management; literacy in the languages of one’s co-creators both onstage and
off; navigating the terrain of collaboration; assessing and adapting to different institutional cultures and practices; and how to lean into and hold space for convergence, community and conversation.

Instructor:  Kievman

Course Number: TAPS 2535/ 2585

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This weekly course with Trinity Rep's Artistic Director is intended to broaden the participants’ knowledge of the work of a director and how it is shaped by external forces, as well as being a survey of the field of the American Theater.  Particular emphasis will be placed on the development of participants as institutional theater leaders. The class will promote not only knowledge of our selves as directors, but also knowledge of self and the world around us as raw material for our art.  

Instructor:  Columbus

Course Number:  TAPS 2545/ 2575

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course will be an introduction to dramaturgy for MFA students and advance undergraduates. The course will introduce a wide variety of play and critical approaches to dramatic texts and performances with emphasis on culturally divergent dramaturgies, embodied dramaturgy, adaptation, and textual analysis for performance. 

In the Spring, this course shifts to Theater History in a Changing Present (2575).  Working in the service of linking performance, history and perspective; it will provide an introduction to theatre history by focusing on analyses of plays, playbills and ephemera, performances, non-performances or occluded performances, and audiences and spectatorship. We will attend to how performances move temporally -- citing past events, producing alternative times, and gesturing toward worlds to come across several spatial scales, such as regional borders, local terrains, and the limen or threshold of the stage. The course also crucially aims to explain the histories of representing race, gender, sexuality, ability and nationalism, noting how these histories remain relevant and urgent within contemporary
theatre and the larger world.

Instructors:  Columbus, Ybarra

Course Number:  TAPS 2545

Term:  Fall

Course Description:

In this introduction to playwriting course, we will do close readings of texts to observe and define how works are built. We will explore, discover, and map the mechanics of a diverse range of texts. Students will use those same tools to write their own material, experiencing the full process of writing, revising, and––ultimately––staging original works. In charting and defining others’ voices, students will discover their own particular voices and what makes them valuable and necessary.

Instructor:  Smith, Chum

Course Number: TAPS 2605/ 2655

Term:  Fall/ Spring 

Course Description:

This course will teach the actor to apply the principles of personalization and real speaking to the conventions of
classical verse; to incorporate an understanding of meter, metaphor and rhetoric into an ongoing working technique; to develop a method of physicalization and staging not dependent upon realistic stage settings; to continue the ongoing process of integrating full and supportive breathing technique, full resonance and forward placement in all pitch ranges, intellectually specific and emotionally responsive connection to language, as well as strong, integrated, and tension-free physical presence.  In the spring this course continues as an elective for directors:  TAPS 2655, Acting for the Camera.  Foundational knowledge of acting technique and script analysis will be honed further with the camera's eye.  Actors will work with contemporary material written for film and television to develop an understanding of and facility with working for the camera.

Instructor:  Fall/ Skiles, Christopher.  Spring/ Waterhouse

Course Number:  TAPS 2605

Term:  Fall

Course Description:  This course is a continuation of skill sets explored in the first year voice classes, including a brief review of concepts and techniques from the first year:  theory, experiential anatomy and physiology, and kinesthetic exercises for physical release, respiration and support, phonation, resonance, expression (pitch/rate/volume), and articulation. We will also review text and language work, rhetorical devices, and basics of scansion. The work will also consider how the preparation sequence can be adapted to performing in different spaces, and will continue to explore the idea of truthful expression in response to given circumstances, and how to be a healthy actor inside of a tense character.  

Instructor:  Moser, Gibel

Course Number:  TAPS 2605

Term:  Fall

Course Description:

Devising:  This course will explore various entry points to creating collaborative performance as well as the origins of devised work within our western tradition.  Student companies will work to cultivate a unique ecology of making, drawing upon the work of the previous two semesters in Viewpoints and Contact Improvisation.  We will work to craft without using a source text, but we will also source with a text (or texts) as our compositional anchor.  In this devising studio, form is as important as content. Theatrical narrative is as important as dramatic narrative. We’re not engaging in adaptations of dramatic texts, we’re making worlds.  The work of this course culminates in an end-of-semester community showing by the acting company. 

Instructor:  Baryshnikov

Course Number:  TAPS 2615

Term:  Fall

Course Description:

This class is designed to give a solid understanding of unarmed stage combat. Topics covered include: falls, rolls, shared weight techniques, chokes, slaps, grabs, contact punches and kicks, non-contact punches and kicks, blocks, knee and elbow attacks, and found objects combat work. Students will learn how to execute the stage combat techniques safely, and how to commit to the high stakes of a fight scene with clear and specific acting. The course will culminate in a Skills Proficiency Test for a Fight Master from the Society of American Fight Directors. If the students’ work meets the SAFD’s criteria for safety and dramatic effectiveness, the students may be recognized with either Basic or Recommended Proficiency.

Instructor:  Jepson

Directors, guided by faculty, may choose an elective course of particular interest from Brown's course catalog to fulfill this requirement.

Course Number:  TAPS 2635/ 2685

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course will focus on language in non-linear plays. Using Cicely Berry’s work, there will be a technical focus on rehearsal room techniques for unleashing heightened language in absurdist plays. In addition, the class will embark on a thorough investigation of race and drama.  In the fall semester we will read The Balcony, some critical thinking around Genet, and Cicely Berry. Towards the end of our time together, each student will direct a small portion of the play for classroom presentation. In the spring semester we will read works by Adrienne Kennedy, and some critical thinking about race and drama by Suzan-Lori Parks, bell hooks and Claudia Rankine.  Towards the end of the semester, each student will direct a small portion from one of Kennedy’s pieces.

Instructor:  Magar, Mertes

Course Number:  TAPS 2635/ 2685

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course is a cross-cohort seminar discussion for the first, second, and third-year directors that centers around current work in process and production, the exploration of contemporary dramatic forms and practitioners, issues in the art and craft of directing, and diagnostic and exchange around the breaking of boundaries and best practices.  Seminar runs concurrently with Director’s Lab, which provides material for critical analysis using this course’s diagnostic tools. 

Instructor:  Mertes

Course Number:  TAPS 2635

Term:  Fall

Course Description:

Director’s Lab is a cross-class collaborative opportunity for all participating students to work on a variety of material of their choosing and to stretch the boundaries of our individual and collective theatrical imaginations in a vibrant laboratory setting. Lab culminates in five Saturday morning work sharings over the course of the semester for the Brown/Trinity Rep community.  Directors direct in each of these five Labs, first-year actors participate as actors in their first year, while second and third-year actors act in Labs and are also offered the opportunity to direct one Lab each semester.

Instructor:  Mertes

Course Number:  TAPS 2635/ 2685

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course will enable the student to gain an overview of the field and begin to understand how a director might carve out space in it, enhance it, and disrupt it, with a particular emphasis in developing the entire directing cohort.  All six directors will meet weekly to develop and hone the practical skill sets of persuasive communication;
personal, financial, and organizational management; literacy in the languages of one’s co-creators both onstage and
off; navigating the terrain of collaboration; assessing and adapting to different institutional cultures and practices; and how to lean into and hold space for convergence, community and conversation.

Instructor:  Kievman

Course Number: TAPS 2635/2685

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This weekly course with Trinity Rep's Artistic Director is intended to broaden the participants’ knowledge of the work of a director and how it is shaped by external forces, as well as being a survey of the field of the American Theater.  Particular emphasis will be placed on the development of participants as institutional theater leaders. The class will promote not only knowledge of our selves as directors, but also knowledge of self and the world around us as raw material for our art.  

Instructor:  Columbus

Course Number:  TAPS 2645/ 2695

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course is a practicum supporting the work in fall and spring directing projects.

Term:  Fall or Spring

In one semester of their third year directors, guided by faculty, will choose an elective course of particular interest from Brown's course catalog to fulfill this requirement.

Course Number:  TAPS 2975

Term:  Fall or Spring

Course Description:  In their third year, directors will direct a thesis project with full design and extensive technical support.  

Course Number:  TAPS 2705

Term:  Fall

Course Description:

Directors will work with their advisor to enroll in Brown/ Trinity Rep courses in Acting, Voice, and Physical Theater that will support their continued artistic growth.  When possible, independent studies may be created to fulfill this requirement.

Course Number:  TAPS 2735/ 2775

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course is a cross-cohort seminar discussion for the first, second, and third-year directors that centers around current work in process and production, the exploration of contemporary dramatic forms and practitioners, issues in the art and craft of directing, and diagnostic and exchange around the breaking of boundaries and best practices.  Seminar runs concurrently with Director’s Lab, which provides material for critical analysis using this course’s diagnostic tools. 

Instructor:  Mertes

Course Number:  TAPS 2735

Term:  Fall

Course Description:

Director’s Lab is a cross-class collaborative opportunity for all participating students to work on a variety of material of their choosing and to stretch the boundaries of our individual and collective theatrical imaginations in a vibrant laboratory setting. Lab culminates in five Saturday morning work sharings over the course of the semester for the Brown/Trinity Rep community.  Directors direct in each of these five Labs, first-year actors participate as actors in their first year, while second and third-year actors act in Labs and are also offered the opportunity to direct one Lab each semester.

Instructor:  Mertes

Course Number:  TAPS 2735/ 2775 

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This course will enable the student to gain an overview of the field and begin to understand how a director might carve out space in it, enhance it, and disrupt it, with a particular emphasis in developing the entire directing cohort.  All six directors will meet weekly to develop and hone the practical skill sets of persuasive communication;
personal, financial, and organizational management; literacy in the languages of one’s co-creators both onstage and
off; navigating the terrain of collaboration; assessing and adapting to different institutional cultures and practices; and how to lean into and hold space for convergence, community and conversation.

Instructor:  Kievman

Course Number: TAPS 2735/ 2775

Term:  Fall/ Spring

Course Description:

This weekly course with Trinity Rep's Artistic Director is intended to broaden the participants’ knowledge of the work of a director and how it is shaped by external forces, as well as being a survey of the field of the American Theater.  Particular emphasis will be placed on the development of participants as institutional theater leaders. The class will promote not only knowledge of our selves as directors, but also knowledge of self and the world around us as raw material for our art.  

Instructor:  Columbus