ITA 353 Italian Theater Workshop
This course introduces the advanced Italian student to a wide array of Italian writers, cultural theorists, and filmmakers through the cultivation of performance skills, exercises in improvisation, acting games, textual analysis, peer critiques, and group discussion. Conceived as a student-centered workshop, the main objective of the course is to experiment creatively, and across literary genres, with the task of making Italian culture come alive on stage. The pronunciation and fluency of the advanced Italian language student is expected to benefit greatly from the memorization, dramatization, and rehearsal of Italian-language scenes and monologues. Creative writing assignments, requiring different methods of stage adaptation, will invite students to "play with" the Italian language as they "play out" their interpretations in the form of weekly performances. Students who sign up for this course need not have prior theater experience, but must be motivated to collaborate in a dynamic workshop setting and willing to interact both creatively and intellectually with a wide variety of texts ranging from the essays of Umberto Eco to the screenplays of Federico Fellini to the poetry of Eugenio Montale and Alda Merini.