COMM 3041 Writing For Performance

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Credit Points 10

Legacy Code 100895

Coordinator Sabrina Achilles Opens in new window

Description In this unit students will consider the history and theory of a selection of performance traditions including Greek tragedy, Elizabethan and Jacobean and modern drama and post-modern performance and write scripts for one or a number of media, including screen (film and television), dramatic theatre, performance poetry and song lyrics and contemporary performance.

School Humanities & Comm Arts

Discipline Written Communication

Student Contribution Band HECS Band 4 10cp

Check your HECS Band contribution amount via the Fees page.

Level Undergraduate Level 3 subject

Equivalent Subjects LGYB 4928 - Writing for Performance LGYA 0302 - Writing for Screen and Stage

Restrictions Successful completion of 60 credit points of study in currently enrolled program.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:
  1. critique performance, both experientially and experimentally;
  2. demonstrate an understanding of a range of performance genres, styles and traditions
  3. create performance texts; and
  4. collaborate in and critically explore the process of developing scripts for stage and/or screen and or environment.

Subject Content

Content will draw from, or elaborate upon, a number of the following topics:
- Dramatic styles, including Aristotelian poetics, psychological drama (Bergson), Jacobean theatre (Greenaway), non-bourgeois theatre (Brecht).
- contemporary lyrics, rap, performance poetry.
- Postmodern aesthetics and performance.
- Feminism and The politics of representation.
- The politics of media institutions.
- Theories of the author/auteur (Allen, Luhrmann, Greenaway, Fassbinder).
- Voice and the performance text; writing for radio and video.
- Displacement of the stage as site of performance; text as performer/performing image; audience as performer, life as performance
- Technology in performance and as extended body.
- Theatrical traditions critiqued, including environmental theatre, Living Theatre, Grotowski's Poor Theatre, political theatre, guerilla theatre, ritual.

Prescribed Texts

  • A book of primary readings prepared by the subject coordinator.

Teaching Periods

Structures that include subject