Curriculum and Concentrations
The Theater Department offers you a comprehensive curriculum that enables you to build the physical, vocal, intellectual, and imaginative skills to make a life for yourself as a theater artist. While you are studying, you put those skills to the test in a wide variety of performance opportunities, including productions of classical and contemporary plays, ensemble-generated productions, and a large number of new plays written by student authors.
The department is designed to provide a safe learning environment where you can grow and challenge yourself, both as a human being and as a theater artist. Emphasis is placed on the ethics of theater as well as on the skills and crafts. You, your peers, and your instructors focus on supporting each other as individuals and as an ensemble.
Through our Acting and Performing Arts tracks, you are introduced to a wide range of skills that allow you to explore different areas of performance, from classical work and music theater to on-camera acting. The Original Works Program provides a unique opportunity to create your own synthesis of writing, directing, personal clown, and ensemble-generated performance. Finally, the setting of a theater program within a dynamic and interactive arts college gives you more opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration.
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 being 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.
Performing Arts
The Performing Arts 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.