Dave Mctier on "what is dramaturgy?"
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Employment for full time dramaturgs
CENTERSTAGE has one of the country's largest and most accomplished Dramaturgy departments. Our dramaturgy staff includes a full-time resident dramaturg and a part-time Associate Artist.
In my brief meeting with the instructor, he asked me if I knew what a dramaturg was, then said that I would be a good one and asked me to come work for him as his Literary Intern at San Diego Repertory Theatre. He was Todd Salovey, the Rep’s Associate Artistic Director. While I took his acting class, I started learning about script evaluation at the Rep, and within a month or two I began doing research on his first directing gig there. He took me under his wing in several aspects; in class I became his teaching assistant, giving feedback to fellow students on their scenework, and at the Rep I became his dramaturg for his first production: The Dybbuk. I ended up graduating as a Theatre Major and was accepted into the graduate program at UCSD, earning my MFA in Dramaturgy while continuing my professional dramaturgy career at the Rep. After graduate school and some freelance shows, the Rep gave me my first full-time theatre job as their Resident Dramaturg & Artistic Associate.
by: April, Nakissa Etemad
The Sidney Theatre Company
Degree Programs in Dramaturgy
THE AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE INSTITUTE
FOR ADVANCED THEATRE TRAINING
AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
The institute was founded in 1987.
Vision: The program bridges the worlds of academic study and theatrical production. Students participate in the professional lives of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and the Moscow Art Theatre. To complement their rigorous academic training, students serve as the primary or assistant dramaturg on a wide range of student and professional productions both in Cambridge and Moscow.
Degree: MFA from Moscow Art Theatre School, certificate from the IATT
Heads of Program: Arthur Holmberg, ART literary director; Gideon Lester, ART resident dramaturg; Anatoly Smeliansky, Moscow Art Theatre School
Contact: www.fas.harvard.edu/~art/institute
BROOKLYN COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE,
BROOKLYN, N.Y.
A redesigned dramaturgy program began in 1994.
Vision: The program combines intensive scholarship with an abundance of practical experience and professional involvement. Central is a commitment to the dramaturg as an artist and to the process of collaboration. New dramaturgy coursework is organized around teams of dramaturgs and directors, focusing on the creation of student projects, including revivals and new plays. A new theatre and education initiative responds to the increasing participation of American dramaturgs in education programs at professional theatres.
Degree: MFA in Dramaturgy and Theatre Criticism
Head of program: Dr. Benito Ortolani, chair, department of theatre; Dr. Lynn M. Thomson, head, dramaturgy program
Contact: www.depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/theater
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
The dramaturgy program was established in 1982.
Vision: The goal is to train informed practitioners for literary and dramaturgical positions in the full range of American theatre. At the same time we aim to expand the definition of dramaturgy to include script development for television and film and to provide our students with the tools for moving into artistic leadership, producing and related fields. All students participate in classes, workshops, and productions with playwrights, directors, actors and managers.
Degree: MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. There is also a Ph.D. with a dramaturgical component offered in conjunction with English and Comparative Literature.
Head of Program: Kristin Linklater, chair of the division of Theatre; Arnold Aronson, head of dramaturgy and co-chair of the Ph.D. program in theatre
Contact: www.columbia.edu/ cu/arts/theatre
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
The Ph.D. program for directing/dramatic criticism began in 1973.
Vision: Stanford emphasizes the integration of theory or criticism and performance. We base this format on the assumption that scholarship is strengthened by people who are directly involved in performance, and that performance is enhanced by practitioners whose analytic skills have been honed in scholarship. Focuses on process as much as product.
Degree: Ph.D. in Direction/Dramatic Criticism
Head of Program:: Michael F. Ramsaur
Contact: www.stanford.edu/dept/drama/
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK-
STONY BROOK
Dramaturgy degrees were first offered in 1984.
Vision: Stony Brook seeks to find and nurture dramaturgical collaborators skilled in numerous practical sides of the theatre. Student dramaturgs work from the center of the production process, not as critics working from the outside or from the margins; they also act, write, produce and stage plays in addition to more traditional dramaturgy work.
Degree: M.A. in Theatre Arts and an MFA in Dramaturgy
Head of Program: John Lutterbie, chair of theatre arts; Michael X. Zelenak, director of graduate studies in theatre arts at SUNY Stony Brook
Contact: www./sunysb.edu/theatrearts
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT SAN DIEGO
AND IRVINE DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE AND DANCE
The redesigned program began in 1997.
Vision: The UCSD/UCI Joint Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Drama offers students the combined faculty and research resources of two nationally ranked theatre departments at two leading research campuses. Students take seminars on both campuses and write dissertations under the supervision of faculty at both locations. An innovative curriculum allows each student to develop a custom-designed program of instruction in collaboration with the faculty.
Degree: UCSD Theatre and Dance, in conjunction with the Department of Drama at UC Irvine, offers a Ph.D. in Theatre. Students were admitted to the new Ph.D. program in 1997. The department decided to offer a Ph.D. in Theatre rather than an MFA in Dramaturgy in response to a student demand that emerged in the early 1990s, fueled in part by the scarcity of career opportunities for dramaturgs (i.e., positions that paid a living wage) and the increased opportunities in the universities.
Head of Program: Jim Carmody
Contact: jcarmody@ucsd.edu
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS
AT AMHERST
Dramaturgy degrees were first offered in 1977.
Vision: The UMass program is small and prides itself on the intensive mentoring of projects and production assignments. Our dramaturgy students are actively involved in all aspects of the department's production work. They also have an opportunity to intern with New World Theater, an institution devoted to developing new work by playwrights of color. Though the dramaturgy program is academically rigorous, its emphasis is on training the professional dramaturg. All students accepted into the program receive full teaching assistantships.
Degree: MFA degree in Dramaturgy
Head of Program: The program is collectively administered by Harley Erdman, Julian Olf, Virginia Scott and Roberta Uno.
Contact: www.umass.edu/theater
YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA
DEPARTMENT OF DRAMATURGY AND
DRAMATIC CRITICISM
The theatre criticism program began in 1966, and the first MFA in dramaturgy was conferred in 1977.
Vision: MFA students receive intensive training to prepare for careers in three areas: to work in theatres as dramaturgs and in related positions; to work in theatre publishing as critics and editors; to teach theatre as practitioners, critics and scholars. At the core of the training are seminars in literature, theory and criticism, and history. Of particular importance are the criticism workshops, designed to improve skills in thinking and writing. Qualified students also have the opportunity to work for Theater, the tri-quarterly published by the Drama School in conjunction with Duke University Press. Under the supervision of the resident dramaturg of the Yale Repertory Theatre, students are assigned to work on varied productions; they also assist in the literary office with script evaluation and communication with writers and agents. Students may also take courses offered by the Theatre Management department. In addition, every effort is made to give interested students teaching experience within the university.
Degree: MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. Upon completion, a student is eligible to register as a DFA candidate and propose a dissertation topic. If the proposal is accepted, a student may proceed toward a terminal degree.
Head of Program: James Leverett, chair
Contact: www.yale.edu/drama
VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY
Since 1989, MA students have been able to declare a concentration in dramaturgy.
Vision: Our program stresses a commitment to a theatre of ideas, vision, language and experience that stretches and opens awareness beyond materialism. There is great departmental commitment to the interaction of the academic/scholarly with the artistic/imaginative in a dynamic synergy. We have close relationships with several professional theatres in the Philadelphia area.
Degree: M.A. degree with a concentration in dramaturgy
Head of Program: Fr. Peter Donohue, OSA
Contact: www.theatre.villanova.edu.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Is the musical available for amateur production?
No it isn't available for amateur production, but maybe if you sign up and if you get the rights and license from MTI, or Music Theater International.
Where I can go and see the National Tour of Spring Awakening
CHICAGO, IL 08/04/09 - 08/16/09
Call (312) 902-1400
Visit the Cadillac Palace Theatre Box Office located at 151 West Randolph, Chicago, IL
For group sales, call (312) 977-1710
How the Broadway version differed from the Off Broadway version
“Spring Awakening” has changed in small ways and improved in large ones since it opened last summer Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company. It has moved further away from the Wedekind play, but only scholars are likely to care that a key plot turn, a sex scene with the central female character, the pubescent Wendla Bergman (Lea Michele), has been thoroughly softened from confused ambiguity into a consensual act...Most significant, the performances of the actors in the central roles of the anguished teenagers — Ms. Michele as the inquisitive Wendla; John Gallagher Jr. as Moritz Stiefel, the goof in mortal fear of failing grades and the mysterious blue legs that haunt his dreams; and Jonathan Groff as the free-thinking heartthrob Melchior Gabor — have become deeper and sharper.
A review of the show after it moved to Broadway
Think of the Broadway musical, its past, present or future, and any number of phrases may spring to mind, depending on your affection for this embattled but persistent form of popular entertainment. The great American art form. Karaoke nightmare. Bring the kids, leave the I.Q. at home. Another op’nin, another revival. Probably nobody thinks: pure sex. That might just change. A straight shot of eroticism steamed open last night at the Eugene O’Neill Theater under the innocuous name of “Spring Awakening,” and Broadway, with its often puerile sophistication and its sterile romanticism, may never be the same.
by: Charles Isherwood
The 1917 New York Production
Spring Awakening" was first staged in Germany in 1906, in a heavily censored version. It played in New York for one day in 1917 but was condemned as obscenity. I wonder, would an audience in 2009 find this play horribly shocking, or would we smugly guffaw at the 19th Century moralities that it mocks. I have a feeling that the world has been so thoroughly Wedekinderized since 1891 that we'd need real blood and nudity on stage to be sufficiently shaken up. When the central character, the boy Melchior, is sent to the reformatory, for instance, he joins a circle of boys competing for a coin by trying to be the first to spurt semen on it. That might startle even a New York audience today.http://www.amazon.com/review/R1S3H9WUKL029V/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
The Play
Spring Awakening: The Play
http://books.google.com/booksid=OMhJAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=spring+awakening
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Theatre Review
Sex and Rock? What Would the Kaiser Think?
BYLINE: By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
SECTION: Section E; Column 3; The Arts/Cultural Desk; THEATER REVIEW; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1533 words
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
BYLINE: By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
SECTION: Section E; Column 3; The Arts/Cultural Desk; THEATER REVIEW; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1533 words
Think of the Broadway musical, its past, present or future, and any number of phrases may spring to mind, depending on your affection for this embattled but persistent form of popular entertainment.
The great American art form. Karaoke nightmare. Bring the kids, leave the I.Q. at home. Another op'nin, another revival.
Probably nobody thinks: pure sex.
That might just change. A straight shot of eroticism steamed open last night at the Eugene O'Neill Theater under the innocuous name of ''Spring Awakening,'' and Broadway, with its often puerile sophistication and its sterile romanticism, may never be the same.
In ''Spring Awakening,'' with a ravishing rock score by the playwright Steven Sater and the singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik, flesh makes only a single, charged appearance. And for all its frankness about the quest for carnal knowledge, it is blessedly free of the sniggering vulgarity that infects too many depictions of sexuality onstage and on screen.
But in exploring the tortured inner lives of a handful of adolescents in 19th-century Germany, this brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill and quite a bit of the terror to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls sometime around the age of 13, well before most of us have the intellectual apparatus in place to analyze its impact. ''Spring Awakening'' makes sex strange again, no mean feat in our mechanically prurient age, in which celebrity sex videos are traded on the Internet like baseball cards.
Wait a minute. Nineteenth-century Germany? Was sex even invented back then? Officially no. When the Frank Wedekind play on which the musical is firmly based was self-published by the author in 1891, Freud's ''Interpretation of Dreams'' was still almost a decade away, and the subject of adolescent sexuality was so controversial that it was 15 years before the play was produced, even in a heavily censored form.
The smartest decision made by the creators of this adaptation was to retain the original setting in provincial Germany, to resist a facile attempt at updating the material. It wouldn't have worked. The painful public silence on the subject of sex that warps the characters' minds and in some cases destroys their lives would make no sense in a contemporary context. But the yawning gap between the force of desire and the possibilities for its release is not exactly an antique phenomenon.
Adolescents today may not have to sheath their hormones in itchy woolen uniforms, but the emotional essence of the story still transmits an ache that few will fail to recognize. ''Spring Awakening'' lingers almost painfully on those passages in youth when the discovery of sex temporarily disorders everything: relationships to family, friends and the piano teacher; the feel of your body; even the fabric of the world itself, which suddenly seems to shimmer before you like a mirage, alive with danger and promise.
This agonizing state may not sound like something you want to return to, but ''Spring Awakening'' has been created with such care and craft that the voyage back is a deeply rewarding one. Michael Mayer's seamless direction works hand in hand with the inventive but unshowy choreography of Bill T. Jones to give potent physical expression to the turbulent impulses of adolescents living splintered lives. Outwardly, in narrative scenes written by Mr. Sater in a formal language appropriate to the era, they are obedient schoolchildren kept on short leashes by their stern parents and watchful teachers. But under their girlish frocks and constricting uniforms, the souls of incipient rock stars squirm and throb, bursting forth whenever a riff from a guitar signals the unquenchable force of their flourishing ids.
''Spring Awakening'' has changed in small ways and improved in large ones since it opened last summer Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company. It has moved further away from the Wedekind play, but only scholars are likely to care that a key plot turn, a sex scene with the central female character, the pubescent Wendla Bergman (Lea Michele), has been thoroughly softened from confused ambiguity into a consensual act.
Stephen Spinella and Christine Estabrook now play the roles of various adults, from sympathetic to snarlingly repressive. If their Boris-and-Natasha act as a pair of conniving schoolmasters is a little overripe, they are effective as the less villainous members of the parental class.
The set designer, Christine Jones, steadfastly recreates the atmosphere of the Atlantic Theater, once a church, which gave an aptly transgressive perfume to the proceedings. Kevin Adams's gorgeous lighting has now become a key player in the mix, giving visual punctuation to the transitions between rock-concert romping and storytelling.
Most significant, the performances of the actors in the central roles of the anguished teenagers -- Ms. Michele as the inquisitive Wendla; John Gallagher Jr. as Moritz Stiefel, the goof in mortal fear of failing grades and the mysterious blue legs that haunt his dreams; and Jonathan Groff as the free-thinking heartthrob Melchior Gabor -- have become deeper and sharper.
Mr. Gallagher's lean face twists into a tortured exclamation point beneath the frenzied shock of hair that seems to symbolize Moritz's inner confusion. Failing at school and at life, Moritz hollers forth his frustration with an affecting scrape in his voice, in driving songs that ride on cutting electric guitar riffs and often explode into communal rants that fill the stage with schoolboys burning off energy in physical abandon. (The supporting performances have improved too, with Jonathan B. Wright's gay seducer Hanschen now stealing all of his scenes with a delicious air of weary loucheness.)
Moritz turns to his friend Melchior for illumination on the subject of those disturbing nocturnal images that keep getting in the way of his Latin lessons, but Melchior's informal textbook only sends his friend's imagination careering down new erotic paths. Meanwhile Melchior's fertile mind has followed his hormones down the road to freedom, and he's ready to question every tenet of the social contract, and embrace every ''ism'' he can find, from social- to nihil-.
Imbued by Mr. Groff with a nice mix of ardency and thoughtfulness, Melchior most of all aches to embrace Wendla, whose own yearnings sometimes take disturbing form. Strangely excited by a schoolmate's confession that her father beats her, she begs Melchior to take a wooden switch to her.
As that daring sequence suggests, Mr. Sater, who wrote the book and lyrics, remains faithful to the play's awareness that the discovery of sex can carry in its heady wake both salvation and destruction, particularly when it is coupled with ignorance. Mr. Sheik's music, spare in its simple orchestrations, lush in the lapping reach of its seductive choruses, embodies the shadowy air of longing that infuses the show, the excitement shading into fear, the joy that comes with a chaser of despair. The singing throughout is impassioned and affecting, giving powerful voice to the blend of melancholy and hope in the songs.
For the characters' confusions are ultimately not sexual but existential too. Sex is a central expression of life's mystery, and a metaphor for it too. But the awakening really taking place in ''Spring Awakening'' is to something larger than the insistent needs of the flesh. Mr. Sater and Mr. Sheik's angst-riddled teenagers are growing into a new awareness of ''the bitch of living'' itself. And the beauty of living too.
Spring Awakening
Book and lyrics by Steven Sater; music by Duncan Sheik; based on the play by Frank Wedekind; directed by Michael Mayer; choreography by Bill T. Jones; music director, Kimberly Grigsby; sets by Christine Jones; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Kevin Adams; sound by Brian Ronan; orchestrations by Mr. Sheik; vocal arrangements by AnnMarie Milazzo, additional arrangements by Simon Hale; music coordinator, Michael Keller; fight director, J. David Brimmer; production stage manager, Heather Cousens; associate producers, Joan Cullman Productions and Patricia Flicker Addiss; technical supervisor, Neil A. Mazzella; general manager, Abbie M. Strassler. Presented by Ira Pittelman, Tom Hulce, Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, the Atlantic Theater Company, Jeffrey Sine, Freddy DeMann, Max Cooper, Mort Swinsky, Cindy and Jay Gutterman, Joe McGinnis, Judith Ann Abrams, ZenDog Productions, Jennifer Manocherian, Ted Snowdon, Harold Thau, Terry Schnuck, Cold Spring Productions, Amanda Dubois, Elizabeth Eynon Wetherell, Jennifer Maloney, Tamara Tunie, Joe Cilibrasi and StyleFour Productions. At the Eugene O'Neill Theater, 230 West 49th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.
WITH: Skylar Astin (Georg), Lilli Cooper (Martha), Christine Estabrook (the Adult Women), John Gallagher Jr. (Moritz), Gideon Glick (Ernst), Jonathan Groff (Melchior), Brian Charles Johnson (Otto), Lea Michele (Wendla), Lauren Pritchard (Ilse), Stephen Spinella (the Adult Men), Phoebe Strole (Anna), Jonathan B. Wright (Hanschen) and Remy Zaken (Thea).
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Character Synopsis,Moritz
The play Spring Awakening to me is this beautiful piece of literature that was both funny and heartbreaking. One of the characters that stood out to me the most was Moritz and he was this boy who was misunderstood by his teachers and he was very suicidal because of the environment that he was put in by his teachers and also by his parents. The school has this rule as to where you can only flunk so many times before they let you into the next grade and of course they might have to intentionally hold some kids back because they don't have very many seats. Now even though Moritz passed, he was not let through because there weren't enough seats. Moritz writes Mrs.Gabor a letter which is basically about him wanting to run away and asking if she will give him money to do it, because this is when he becomes suicidal and tells her that he will kill himself if she doesn't try to help him. She tells him that even if she did want to help him, she wouldn't know where to get that amount of money, but she can't help him anyway because she finds it morally wrong and that he should just pull himself together because things like this happen all the time and that he should just put his best foot forward. During the middle of the show, Moritz commits suicide and the board of education decides that this is an epidemic and that it's getting out of hand. So they call Melchior to the office because one of the things found in Moritz belongings was a note about the reproduction of women which is what he drew for him and they automatically think that this is the cause for his death.
What Is Dramaturgy?
LMDA home page
http://www.lmda.org/
http://www.lmda.org/
Dramaturgs establish the connections between the actors, the text, and the audience.
What is Dramaturgy Home Page
A production dramaturg is a consultant and an advocate for the playwright's intentions.
Dramaturgy
The art or technique of dramatic composition or theatrical representation.
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