Our intent is to present you with a range of possible skills to fill your theater artist's "toolbox" while providing you with a stimulating learning environment within which you can develop a vision of yourself as an independent artist with a unique creative voices and a lucid process for approaching your work. Your education will be grounded in a dynamic relationship to the history of the craft and an awareness of the conditions of the world around you. As a Cornish Theater graduate, you should be physically and vocally flexible and powerful, critically astute, articulate, and in command of a wide variety of techniques applicable to a range of theatrical styles. In addition, you should be able to work effectively within an ensemble for a goal larger than yourself, and to present yourself and your personal artistic talents with clarity and confidence.

Concentrations

Acting

The Cornish Acting Program is the foundational core of our educational offerings, and all students entering the Cornish Theater Department participate in it for the first two years of instruction.

As an Acting Major, you will learn to ground your work in a fundamental understanding of a wide range of acting techniques while experiencing comprehensive instruction in Acting, Improvisation, Text Analysis, Voice & Speech, Theater History, Literature of Theater, and Movement (which may include aerobics, tumbling, Feldenkrais, contact improvisation, yoga, biomechanics and both neutral and character mask work).

Following a successful audition at the end of the Sophomore Year, Acting majors engage in intensive study of classical theater texts, exploring material from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Chekhov. You will learn the technical skills necessary to bring heightened and poetic language to life on stage, while imbuing a sense of dramatic truth to your portrayal of extreme characters in extreme circumstances. In the Senior year, Acting majors delve deeper into subtext, ambiguity and mystery through playwrights such as Beckett and Pinter. You will also explore in detail the ethics and logistics of a career in the contemporary American theater, along with developing useful skills such as Stage Combat, Audition Techniques, Dialects, Voiceover and On-camera Acting. Each student is required to produce a senior thesis in order to graduate.

Original Works

The Original Works Major is designed for artists whose goals are to generate original performance pieces, and/or to operate as members of the artistic staff of a theater.

After successful completion of an audition at the start of the junior year, you explore a wide variety of generative methods, including playwriting, directing, personal clown and other physical/improvisational approaches, as well as self-producing and dramaturgy. In the fourth year, your Senior Thesis should be a generative piece, either one written by you or one that is created by an ensemble under your creative supervision and which reflects your particular aesthetic vision.

Reading and research are essential aspects of the program. In addition to intensive practice in writing and directing, you will research and do presentations on the work of important generative artists, playwrights and directors. Although the O.W. major has fewer required performance skills courses (which thus allows you a choice of electives within and outside the department) the demands of the necessary reading and research, writing and directing are high. Important note: A 3.0 grade point average is a requirement to audition for Original Works. Because the workload is heavy, the faculty will take your GPA and overall academic performance into account when we assess whether you should be accepted into the Original Works major.

Music Theater

The Music Theater emphasis integrates the exploration of heightened forms of acting with development of dance and singing skills applicable to contemporary musical theater.

This course of study moves across disciplines, to include courses both in Music and in Dance. Freshmen and Sophomores can take a series of classes and private voice lessons in the Music Department, as well as Arts Elective dance classes.

Placement in singing classes is determined by audition. Junior and Senior Performing Arts majors participate in a yearlong class in Music-Theater performance techniques in the Theater Department, and perform in productions of both original and established musical theater works.