Graduate Courses
The following Graduate Courses are being offered in 2025-2026.
[View previous years' graduate courses here.]
DRAMA 601/401: Methods and Tools of 91ÒùĸÊÓƵ
Instructor: Selena Couture
Schedule: Friday | 1-3:50 p.m.
Location: Timms Seminar Room (TC 203)
Description: This course will guide students in recognizing theatre and performance research methods in existing works related to their area of specialty in order to develop, justify and plan their own research project. Students will learn how to work with the tools that enable fruitful research in libraries, archives, special collections and performance-specific data-bases and bibliographies. We will also follow the trajectory of research to analyze a variety of academic dissemination forums. Assignments include oral presentations, reviews, and academic papers. DR 401 / 601 prepares students to write their thesis proposal and culminates with a presentation at the honours /grad symposium.
DRAMA 622: Intermediality in Theatre & Performance
Instructor: Donia Mounsef
Schedule: Monday | 12-2:50 p.m.
Location: Timms Seminar Room (TC 203)
Description: This course provides an in depth analysis of the ever-increasing integration of new media, emerging and digital technology across a variety of performance genres and platforms. We will examine the theatre’s implicit and explicit relationship to media from aesthetic, structural, socio-cultural, and ideological perspectives. Relying on both media theory and performance theory, we will investigate the difference between “synthetic, transformational & ontological intermediality” (Schöter) by creating and challenging taxonomies of multimedia performance. Students will develop the necessary critical and research tools to understand media in performance, immersive theatre, site-specific and locative performance. You will be able to re-imagine artistic practice in light of mediation and mediatisation and reflect on your own work and the work of key practitioners. The course helps you formulate answers in theory and practice to some of these questions: what are the objectives, modalities and effects of performance in the digital milieu? How is presence, co-presence, tele-presence understood in performance? Is the opposition of liveness and mediation that distinguishes theatre from media arts a valid one in the 21st century? Have theatrical texts transformed in response to the new ways that intermedial performances tell stories and create narrative? Do the different strands of multimedia/intermedial/digital media performance practices already merge or collide renegotiating corporeal/virtual boundaries? What effects do intermedial performances have on acting, dramaturgy (inter-mediaturgy), spatial and design elements? What is the impact among others of Goldberg’s tele-epistemology, Latour’s technologized liminality, Bolter and Grusin’s immediacy and remediation, and Mann’s sousveillance on performance practices.
DRAMA 640: Voice Pedagogy I
Instructor: Alison Mathews
Schedule: Thursday | 2-4:50 p.m.
Location: Timms Seminar Room (TC 203)
Description: This course provides study of the major theories of voice and speech teaching for the theatre and for other oral communicators. We will examine the underlying philosophy of voice work, along with how to develop an actor’s voice for today’s theatre. The study is always in the context of voice, speech and text work forming a cornerstone for acting training.
There is a major component of practical experience in those approaches with acting students and other oral communicators in BFA and BA classes.
DRAMA 624: Studio Practice
Instructor: Lin Snelling
Schedule: Tuesday | 2-5:50 p.m.
Location: Movement Studio (FAB 3-117)
Description: This seminar focuses how methods and routines in a studio practice can fine tune experiential research. Students will practice and study methods through a lineage of dance and theatre artists; writers and academics who understand what embodiment can mean to research and creation in the performing arts. The seminar will teach from each student’s practice and how our practices (as we practice them with together) can be sites of knowledge for emergent discoveries. How is methodology for studio practice framed within the current context of performing and research and creation? What methods are necessary for your research to gain awareness of a perceptive and sensing body in an academic and artistic practice? What does an experiential and critical study of the body have to offer to theatre and performance making? Studio Practice refers to the methods and routines established by artists to create and develop their work within a dedicated space. This seminar aims to give opportunities to students to expand the boundaries of their own studio practice. Please wear clothing you can move in comfortably. This class is 4 hours and open to students across all disciplines interested in studio practice.
DRAMA 608: Historical Approaches to Dramatic & Theatrical Critical Theories
Instructor: Stefano Muneroni
Schedule: Wednesday | 1-3:50 p.m.
Location: Timms Seminar Room (TC 203)
Description: This seminar will introduce students to some of the major theoretical writings on drama and theatre from classical antiquity to the 1950s, and it will locate these theories in their historical and cultural contexts. Together with seminal texts from the western canon, including Aristotle, Horace, and Castelvetro, among others, students will also investigate Japanese, Chinese, and Indian critical texts. Selected plays will help frame the relevance and applicability of these theories and showcase the interconnection between the theory and practice of theatre. This course is not simply a survey of critical theories of the past; it also draws on these theories to reflect on the crisis of representation that theatre faces today. Students will frame their subjective responses to various historical dramatic genres, theatrical practices, and plays as a way to understand and respond to contemporary postmodern and postdramatic perspectives. Through class discussions, presentations, and short papers, students will develop an overview of dramatic and theatrical theories from the past and rethink the ways in which the representation and reception of theatre have changed from ancient times to today.
DRAMA 686: Devised Theatre and Performance for Directors
Instructor: David Kennedy
Schedule: Tuesday | 1-4:50 p.m.
Location: SAB 158
Description: This practice-based seminar focuses on theories and methods for the creation of devised theatre and performance. Through devising exercises and projects, students will develop advanced tools for generating and shaping material, while exploring how a group of artists goes from an initial idea or inspiration to a finished work. The seminar will cover disparate approaches to collective creation, with an emphasis on helping directors successfully engage with an ensemble throughout the process. Please note that this seminar is open to all graduate students in Drama, is FOUR hours per week, and involves practical work, readings, presentations, and discussions.
TDES 275/575: History of Dress and Decor
Instructor: Robert Shannon
Schedule: Monday and Friday | 10-11:20 p.m.
Location: ED 262
Description: Given the interdisciplinary scope of this course, graduate students from other departments are strongly encouraged to register. This intensive course is a survey of style as displayed in dress, architecture, and decorative art from the Northern Renaissance to the present day. The course provides an overview of the historic cultures which have exerted prominent and sustained influence over the styles of design in the West. Using extensive primary source documentation, the course will examine the progression and elaboration of major styles, within the framework of the social and political forces which shaped them. The course is highly visual and infuses visual literacy as a core instrument that will deepen the understanding of the pervasive power of style and image, while also equipping students with the appropriate terminology to critically discuss and analyze dress, architecture and interior design.
TDES 475/775: Topics in History of Scenography
Instructor: Guido Tondino
Schedule: Wednesday | 9 -11:50 p.m.
Location: FAB 3-092
Description: This is a course about some of the central ideas that came to shape the theories of design for the stage in the twentieth century. It is partly a course in Intellectual History and partly a course in Art History from a practitioner’s point of view. It also reflects my own journey in my career. Students will be asked to read contextual material as well as primary sources in preparation for class discussions. In addition, each student will be required to give one or two oral presentations based on the weekly readings and to submit a final paper analysing the ideas, social context, and theories of one specific designer in relation to one specific production and its design.