Guest artists D'Amour and Connelly to Teach Spring Semester

The Department of Theater Studies is honored to welcome Lisa D'Amour and Brendan Connelly to campus to teach spring semester. Take a look at their courses and see their bios below.

D'Amour and Brendan are teaching together on THEATRST 290-4 Theater Studies Workshop: CoLAB: Contemporary American Collaborative Theater Making (Short title: Collaborative Theater Making)
Synopsis:
CoLAB is designed as a laboratory that invites students to "try on" different modes of collaborative creation. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the creative practice of four contemporary American Theater ensembles who create theater that opposes / reacts to / subverts conventional, linear narrative. We will examine the theatrical lineage of each company, read criticism and watch video excerpts of the company's work, identify the company's core working methods and interview company members. Then, students will be divided into groups to create short pieces inspired by each company's working methods. Through reading, writing, researching and making, students will develop collaborative theater making skills, learn about the history of collaborative theater making and gain a working knowledge of current contemporary theater practices.
Offered Wed/Fri 1:25p-2:40

Brendan Connelly is teaching THEATRST 390S-3 Special Topics in Design: Sound, Image, Word: Sound Design in Theater and Film  (Short title: Sound Design in Theater/Film)
Course Synopsis:
What is a sound? What is music? And noise? How are these phenomena used to affect, enhance, and distort our understanding of words and images, to make meaning. This is a broad introductory course to the use of sound and music in theater, film and television, balancing the technical aspects (hands-on use of the standard software and hardware of sound design - ProTools, Qlab, Audacity) with the historical/theoretical (from Andre Bazin to The Futurists to John Cage). Two group projects and two individual projects, using script analysis, composition and live performance, will be assigned.
Crosslistings: AMI 290S, MUSIC 290S and DOCST 290S
Offered Wed/Fri, 11:45a-1:00p

Lisa D'Amour is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist. She is one half of the OBIE-Award winning performance duo PearlDamour, whose work has been presented by HERE Arts Center, PS122, The Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Arts Center and the FuseBox Festival. Her plays have been commissioned and produced by theaters across the country, including The Women's Project, Playwrights' Horizons, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, Clubbed Thumb, (all in NYC), Children's Theater Company (Minneapolis), Steppenwolf Theater Company (Chicago) The Wilma Theater (Philadelphia), Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington D.C.) and the Royal National Theater (London). Lisa's play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn prize. She is the recipient of the 2008 Alpert Award for the Arts in theater, the 2011 Steinberg Playwright Award and is a recipient of the 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.  http://www.lisadamour.com

Brendan Connelly is a sound designer and composer, splitting time between Brooklyn and New Orleans.  In 1998, he co-founded the Obie-award winning theater company, The Two-headed Calf along with director Brooke O’Harra, and has composed scores for all of its productions including Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, Trifles, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, Major Barbara (for which Brendan received an NYIT Award for Brst Original Score) and the recent You, My Mother (a collaboration with Karinne Keithley-Syers, Kristen Kosmas, Rick Burkhardt and the new music ensemble Yarn/Wire). His work has been seen/heard at La MaMa, E.T.C., PS 122, the HERE Arts Center, Soho Rep, Ontological-Hysteric Theater, LAByrinth Theater, the Perishable Theater and others. http://brendanconnelly.com