Our most recent show: Dissident Acts: 3 Plays
Dissident Acts: 3 Plays presents works by Samuel Beckett, a member
of the WWII resistance, as well as by his political counterparts and dramatic
inheritors, the Polish and Czech playwrights Slawomir Mrozek and Václav
Havel. Beckett's miniature 1982 Catastrophe interrogates the public
role of art in a taut homage to Havel, at the time imprisoned for subversion
of the state. Mrozek's 1958 The Police, unveils the deep absurdity
of totalitarianism, and Havel's 1975 Unveiling, transforms this absurdity
into the hypocrisy of its elite. Taken together, these plays, performed by
Barnard and Columbia students, refuse to be museified as documents of the
(in)human past; they extend the dissident inquiry of the liberal arts, animating
an ongoing interrogation of the politics of our present.
Finnish director Kristian Smeds at Barnard and Columbia
 The
Theatre Department—in close collaboration with the Finnish Program,
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Columbia University, the
Finnish Theatre Information Centre, and the Consulate General of Finland—is
very pleased to welcome the playwright and theatre director Kristian Smeds
to Barnard College and Columbia University from November 30 to December 4.
After graduating from the Helsinki Theatre Academy in 1995, Kristian Smeds
founded the Takomo Theatre in Helsinki, serving as its Artistic Director
until 2001. From 2001-2004, he led the Kajaani City Theatre in northern Finland,
transforming this regional venue into a theatre of national distinction.
Since then, Smeds has gained an international reputation for the adventurous
work of the Smeds Ensemble. His
most innovative productions include Uncle Vanya (1998), A Cry in
the Wilderness (2001), Woyzeck (2003), Three Sisters (2004),
Sad Song from the Heart of Europe (2006), The Unknown Soldier
(2007, review by Alyson Fortner), God
Is Beauty (2000, repremiered 2008, reviews by
Kati Fitzgerald and
Elizabeth Richardson), and Mental
Finland (2009, pictured below).
 In the last decade, the work of Kristian Smeds has become synonymous with
artistic, intellectual and even political debate in Finland and abroad as
well. While the economic and political discourse of the European Union suggests
a common European identity, the constructs of national and cultural identities
clash against this transnational and politicized concept, and Smeds's most
recent work for the theatre, whether The Unknown Soldier (Tuntematon
sotilas) or his newer Mental Finland, unsettles an easy equilibrium
between national and larger European perspectives. It destabilizes rigid
notions of national identities, while provoking reflections on the position
of the Finnish National Theatre as the vehicle for their dissemination. In
the larger context of European theatre, while working with the themes that
occupy humans' global existence, Smeds's work is at the center of artistic
experiments inquiring into the constructions of humanity on the contemporary
stage.
Kristian Smeds's visit to Barnard and Columbia expresses our commitment to
internationalizing our understanding of contemporary theatre and performance,
extending some of the work of the research
journey to Helsinki undertaken by students and faculty in May 2009.
Photo credits:
Director's portrait copyright Smeds Ensemble;
Mental Finland photograph by Bart Grietens
About the department
The Barnard College major
in Theatre
The Columbia College major in Drama and Theatre Arts
Situated at the intersection of the arts and the humanities, and in a world
theatrical capital, drama and theatre studies at Barnard and Columbia is
committed to the interaction of creation and critique in the shaping of
articulate performance: to the distinctive practices of reading, writing,
and research and their capacity to illuminate and ignite the conceptual work
of performance; to drama as the exploration and instigation of consequential
action; to acting as a means of claiming and clarifying embodied meaning;
to design as a practice for shaping meaning in material, space, and time;
to directing as an inquiry into the form and tempo of the theatre's world-making;
and to playwriting as the struggle to invent new performance languages to
impel, enrich, and interrogate that world, and ours.
The Barnard College Theatre major / Columbia College major in Drama and Theatre
Arts builds on its liberal arts setting by imagining an integrative approach
to performance, drama, and to theatre studies. Taking advantage of a wide
variety of studio coursework, of the Department's production season in the
Minor Latham Playhouse, as well as of a rich panoply of drama and theatre
studies courses, students' creative work develops in dialogue with critical
inquiry into the literature, history, culture, and theory of western and
nonwestern performance, typically combining coursework in theatre and drama
with study in other fields, such as anthropology, architecture, art history,
classics, dance, film, languages, literature, music, and philosophy. Students
work with accomplished artists, directors, designers, actors, and playwrights
whose work enlivens and enriches the contemporary American theatre; they
also study the critical, historical, and theoretical lineaments of drama,
theatre, and performance with celebrated teachers and internationally-recognized
research scholars. The coursework in the major also engages productively
with Barnard's "nine ways of knowing" and with Columbia's Core Curriculum,
by considering how critical questions and traditions are animated by the
forms, genres, and practices of dramatic theatre, and by conceiving the mutual
responsiveness of critical and artistic work to those questions. Making,
thinking about, and writing about art are an essential part of any undergraduate
education: for this reason the courses offered in the Barnard Theatre Department
and casting for its theatrical production are open to majors and nonmajors
alike.
In a small program, students at once receive individual attention and ample
performance and production opportunities. All students develop a vocabulary
for conceptualizing performance in common courses in the history, literature,
and theory of various world performance traditions. They also engage in the
range of disciplines sustaining modern theatre--acting, design, directing,
dramaturgy, playwriting--before taking up culminating work on a senior thesis.
An original creative project, the thesis can take several forms: a significant
research essay; a new play; or acting, dramaturging, directing, or designing
as part of the Department's annual showcase of thesis productions. Theatre
is a site of cultural innovation, transmission, and contestation, involving
a variety of verbal, visual, spatial, musical, and gestural languages.
Barnard/Columbia theatre majors understand the power of performance as an
act of articulation; in speech, through movement and embodiment, as the
manipulation of space, in the construction of an expressive event. Theatre
majors are well-placed to pursue advanced professional training in the arts,
as well as undertaking the kind of humanistic education that provides a solid
platform for success in a wide range of endeavors. In recent years students
have gone on to do graduate work in acting, dramaturgy, playwriting, arts
management, and theatre studies in prestigious MFA and PhD programs as well
as professional careers.
The Barnard College Theatre department collaborates
closely with two graduate programs housed at Columbia University; if you
are interested in MFA or Ph.D. studies in drama, theatre, and performance
studies at Columbia, please see
The Columbia
University Doctoral Program Subcommittee on Theatre and the
Theatre
Division of the Columbia University School of the Arts. |
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