Drama 461

Directing is fundamentally an act of communication. While the role of a director can feel overwhelming, this course helps you focus on the director’s primary craft: working with actors to shape dynamic, emotionally truthful work. Students will develop practical tools for rehearsing actors, giving clear and actionable direction, and fostering a collaborative rehearsal room. Throughout the quarter, students will direct short contemporary scenes under faculty supervision, practicing the craft of rehearsal, feedback, and revision to develop confidence, clarity, and flexibility in directing. Through hands-on scene work and faculty guidance, students will develop practical tools for building collaborative rehearsal processes.

This is a class based in the ideas of praxis – a process that is equal parts researching/thinking in your mind and on-your-feet testing/trying out of those proposals through real-world implementation. In this kind of creative process, good ideas are only half the work – we can only know if an artistic choice is the right by testing it out. Iteration is key to praxis – we form a creative idea, come up with a proposal about how to execute it, try that idea and collect data about how the experiment went, then go back and reflect on whether to keep pursuing it or make changes it given the new information gained.