Performance Opportunities

| Teaching Opportunities | Research Opportunities | Performance Opportunities |

The graduate program in Theatre Studies provides a number of rich opportunities for students to explore performance as research as part of our commitment to emphasizing synergies of theory and praxis. At York, we recognize that performance is not only an object of research, but can also constitute a form of research in itself. As Canada’s only graduate program in theatre housed within a Faculty of Fine Arts, York’s MA/PhD program is nourished by its connections with faculty who are both practicing artists and artist-researchers. A recently established partnership with Harbourfront World Stage brings top-tier artists to campus each year to work with graduate and undergraduate students; in spring 2011, MA and PhD students had the opportunity to take a workshop with renowned British live artist Adrian Howells through this initiative. MA/PhD students participate in department productions, serving as performers, dramaturgs, and directors, etc. For example, graduate students in Theatre Studies are invited to collaborate with MFA students each September in a collective creation project, devising a performance piece based on the myths of a particular culture. Theatre Studies graduate students recently took the initiative to create York’s first “V-Day,” staging a successful production of The Vagina Monologues in the Price Family Cinema. Students who took part in the 2010 Summer Institute on interactive performance art subsequently formed the Life and Limb Collective, which presented work as part of the 2011 Rhubarb Festival in addition to staging activist interventions in Queen’s Park and elsewhere.

We offer several courses that foreground performance as research, including a Theatre Laboratory course in which students create original performance pieces drawing on their areas of research expertise, as well as a course in Performance Art that combines theoretical and practical assignments.   Another course, Theories of Praxis, examines theories of acting and directing from Stanislavski to the present, considering the implications of shifting theoretical understandings of the body and its mechanisms for the actor’s craft.

Each year, our program offers a six-credit Summer Institute, which gives students the opportunity to engage both practically and intellectually with the work of a major guest artist. The 2007 Summer Institute focused on Greek Theatre. In 2008, students worked on Brechtian political theatre with Brecht’s granddaughter Johanna Schnall. In 2009, Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan taught African political theatre.  In 2010, renowned performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes led a workshop on interactive performance art. The 2011 Summer Institute featured Mario Biagini, Associate Director of the Workcenter for Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, assisted by Workcenter performer Alejandro Tomás Rodriguez.