In collaboration with the Drama Department and Carl Weber, Stanford Professor Emeritus of Directing and Dramaturgy, PWR lecturer Kevin DiPirro will be teaching a Winter 2009 Sophomore Introductory Seminary entitled “Devised Theater Project.” DiPirro is also the recipient of a 2008 grant from The Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA) for his proposal "Devised Theatre Project II:  A Showcase for Collaborative Student Theatre." He will use the funds to produce a follow-up graduate student-led production of the pieces created in the Intro Seminar. This production will extend the course’s reach to the campus community at large and across the entire 2008-9 academic year. He also looks forward to inviting a devised theater troupe to campus to demonstrate their work in a symposium setting.

DiPirro, himself a playwright and writing teacher for both the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and the English Department’s Sophomore Playwriting Seminar, has long been invested in broadening the visual and design aspects in playwriting instruction. Having taken part in workshops at the Edward Albee Conference and the Playwrights Foundation, he has integrated various units into his own playwriting seminar (English 83Q) to stress this cross-platform learning. According to one of his former students, “this devised theater-making course is a logical extension of the playwriting seminar because it puts the writer squarely into the concrete world of theater production.”

Devised theater capitalizes on the critical skills taught in the PWR 2 classroom, most prominently in the way its plays and other performance work are made through intensely collaborative ensemble work.  Often this means starting with a theme or subject but no script, and bringing together all participants (writers, actors, directors, and designers) right at the outset to generate the material that will be performed. This approach has been championed as, variously, non-hierarchical, non-narrative, non-textual, non-Western, and non-linear. Additionally, devised theater has been frequently associated with physical, visual, and performance-art aesthetics rather than traditional theater genres.

In the “Devised Theater” Introductory Seminar course this winter, students will first create material through writing and   performance exercises, then supplement the material with research. Next, they will move to shape the storyline and the dramatic structure, then prepare the performance space, needed props, and costume pieces, and lastly rehearse and perform a short piece by quarter's end.  As DiPirro says of the course, “its spirit is in learning by doing, and in particular, in learning from what others do collectively.”  Supplementary instruction will come from guest professionals, campus faculty, and a reading/viewing list on devised theater. Key figures on the list include Berliner Ensemble, Joint Stock Theater Company; Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project; Complicite; Anne Bogart; and Viola Spolin.