History of Directing

There is a lot of great theater out there waiting to be made, and the primary goal of this class is to help students prepare to achieve that goal. In this class, "history" is not only a narrative about the past and its interpretations, but a repository of ideas and techniques that can provide students with useful techniques and sources of inspiration for their own practice. In the graduate component of the class, we will take a historiographic approach to this art form that has often veered towards the biographical and the anecdotal. This is not a history of directors, but a history of directing. That does not mean that we won't look at the work of individual artists: we will do that, while keeping in mind the historical, social, economic as well as aesthetic circumstances under which directing evolved as a distinct profession in the theater.