UC Davis DRA 24 - Design for Performance

Designation:
Teaching Assistant (Prof. Maggie Morgan)

Term Taught:  Winter 2022

Number of Students:  75

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Learning Outcomes/Course Objective:
Material covered is the designers’ process for theatre, dance, opera, cinema, and television including scenery, lighting, costume, sound, projection, and makeup, the history of design for theatre, theatre architecture and design. A survey of noted individual designers, and career opportunities in the field.
This course is intended to help students develop:

• an understanding and appreciation of the art of design for the stage and screen
• their skills in the interpretation and analysis of visual design for performance

• their basic technical and analytic vocabulary of performance and media criticism 


• an understanding of the various means and methods of creating designs for performance

• their visual literacy skills through viewing, discussing, and writing about performance design

• an understanding of how to appreciate and analyze various forms of stage visuals in their historical and socio-cultural contexts
• an understanding of the history, theory, and characteristics of various aesthetic modes of design
• an understanding of the aesthetic approaches and concepts in the context of contemporary live performance of theatre, dance, feature films, and shows primarily in the American cinema and television

Partial Reading List

• Stage Design by Tony Davis
• Sculpting Space in the Theater: Conversations with the Top Set, Light and Costume Designers by Babak A. Ebrahimian
• American Set Design 2, Smith, Ronn
• Designing Costume for Stage and Screen by Deirdre Clancy
• Hamilton: the revolution: being the complete libretto of the Broadway musical, with a true account of its creation, and concise remarks on hip-hop, the power of stories, and the new America, Miranda, Lin-Manuel
• Ming Cho Lee: a life in design, Aronson, Arnold
• Julie Taymor: Playing with fire: theater, opera, film, Blumenthal, Eileen
• Diaghilev: Costumes and  Designs of the Ballets Russes, Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Dance & Fashion, Steele, Valerie