Socially Engaged Performance Curricula

Socially Engaged, aka Applied, Theatre, is the application of artistic practice to the fields of education, medicine, therapy, political advocacy, environmental justice, community organizing, human services, social justice, and more. This is an ever-evolving, hybrid arena of artistic, cultural, and social practices

Samples of Individual Courses

Introductory

Urban Ensemble: interdisciplinary community-based arts, team taught with photo and imagining professor Lorie Novak, NYU Tisch School of the Arts

Art and Community Development

Art in Action— Get on the Bus: How art contributes to community development, using Syracuse’s Connective Corridor, a broad effort to link an array of arts and cultural institutions, businesses, and neighborhoods towards the city’s revitalization, as a touchstone. The class inter-weaves workshops in creating public performances; principles and theories of art for community development; and student projects on and off the Corridor bus. 

Methods and Techniques

Community-based Performance Practices: Community-based performances are artistic collaborations with groups of people with a shared identity on a fundamental level. This course integrates community-based performance methodology, history, and issues with hands-on experience. We will try out techniques, discuss readings, and screen video clips. Students will co-facilitate or assist approx. 10 sessions of a community-based workshop or performance. 

Research for Devising Community-based Performance: with choreographer Jawole Zollar et al and culminating in an ambulatory performance with NYU Tisch School of the Arts students.

Masks, Movement, and Giant Puppets: Studying, making, and using masks, enhanced movement, and giant puppets, students explore a range of performance styles, outdoor performances, and puppet and mask building, and participate in the creation of a public performance with community participation. Team taught with Syracuse Stage’s Lauren Unbekant and Open Hand Theater’s artistic director, Geoffrey Navias. 

Cultural Diplomacy

Arts and Cultural Democracy: Examining international art exchanges in the spirit of participation, plurality, and equity. Topics include cultural diplomacy, arts and globalization, and the ethics of artists working in “other places.” Student research supports artists who are part of smARTpower, a program designed by the Bronx Museum and funded by the US State Department, whereby US artists facilitate art projects with local participants across the globe. 

Interdisciplinary

Performance, Social Justice, Community Education, & the Law:  We’ll study and try out methods of performance that have contributed to social justice and are applicable to legal community education. Includes Brecht’s plays to build anti-Nazi resistance; Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed problem-solving; personal story-based Theatre of Testimony; etc. Students collaborate with Syracuse University law clinics to create and perform a performance or facilitate a workshop that educates around criminal justice, elder fraud, or family and children issues. 

Correspondences: between art and science, co-taught with film and tv professor Carlos de Jesus; NYU Tisch School of the Arts

Instrumentalities of Social Transformation: co-taught with politics professor Mark Roelofs, NYU Arts and Sciences

Other Classes

Boal & Beyond

Community-based Theatre 

Documentary Performance

Expanded Conception of the Artist

Global Perspectives on Applied Theatre

Making Art/ Impacting Policy

Popular Entertainment & the Avant-Garde 

Ritual & Theatre

Twentieth Century Political Theatre 

US Activist Theatre 

Plays for Political Theatre 

Play Building 

Street Theatre

Samples of Programs Developed

NYU Undergraduate Drama Applied Theater Minor

Three, four-credit courses and an internship chosen from a menu of possibilities and including: 

a. An introductory course on Applied Theatre; 

b. A course that explores the critical discourse of a social, political, or historic topic that relates to the issues that the student hopes to engage with their Applied Theatre practice;

c. A course on an Applied Theatre Praxis; and

d. An Applied Theatre internship and min-sessions on community engagement ethics and collaboration. 

Touchstone Theatre/Moravian University Masters in Performance Creation

Cohen-Cruz piloted three classes for this practically-focused MFA:

Research and Theory: Introduction to relevant critical theory and research tools. Includes introduction to Performance Studies, a field not limited to theater but also encompassing other embodied expressive acts--behavior in everyday life, ritual, activism, games, etc. Students examine how their own work fits into this world through readings, discussions, exercises, research, presentations, writing, and check-ins. Student writing is both scholarly and reflective of their own sensibility. Each student writes a 5,000-word essay on a personally-relevant performance topic. 

Culture and Identity: Performance theories and practices through the lens of culture and identity. Opens the students to new ways of viewing their own unique artistry in the global context of artistic and cultural voices. Looking at the interplay of the local and the global, students also consider issues of culture and identity locally in Bethlehem. Students then propose a project that they develop with ensemble guidance post-semester. Course culminates w/ a 5,000-word research paper.

Thesis: Students write a 10,000-word paper as they develop and carry out a final performance project. The three parts of the paper are research, documentation, and evaluation.