Theater Arts 250: Community Performance in West Philadelphia

Faculty: Dr. William Yalowitz
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Spring 1999

Course Description and Goals
The course combines work in Performance Studies theory with the application of teaching, directing, and design skills in the production of an inter-generational community performance, at a community site inscribed with local significance.  Community performance brings theater artists together with people of a community of location, spirit, or tradition, to tell the stories collected in oral history interviews, animating local architecture and urban landscapes with movement, stories, and sound, and creating collective historical fiction based on local issues and mythologies, students will help to create a community performance as a means for West Philadelphia to celebrate their histories and to show their struggles - in short, to create public discourse through performance-making.