Teaching Theater and Performance in the Romance Languages Department
Session coordinator and organizer: Encarnación Juárez-Almendros
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
343 O’Shaughnessy Hall
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Juarez.6@nd.edu
The Italian Theater Workshop: Proficiency, Performance, Perception
This workshop designed as an immersion experience and aims to improve language learning, literary analysis, and learner confidence. This presentation explores the various types of student interaction and communication that take place between members of a foreign language theatrical troupe˜actors, stage managers, designers, and directors--and discusses quantitative and qualitative results of the experiment as well as fundamental issues pertaining to the Foreign Language curriculum.
Colleen Ryan-Scheutz
Univ. of Notre Dame
cryan@nd.edu
Introducing Performance into the Teaching of Spanish Comedia
There are inherent problems involved in reading dramatic texts whose origin and destination are oral and visual performance. When authors conceive and write plays they are conditioned by the current staging practices and ideology of their time. These same conditionings occur at the moment of its rendition. The dramatic text is, therefore, a dynamic text, that includes complex processes from its conception to its performance. Learning about the comedia will always be an incomplete experience if we concentrate exclusively on the literary text and leave out the performative component. This presentation explains ways of bridging the teaching of Golden Age theater in the classroom and the performative aspect of it. In particular, I will concentrate on explaining the experience of teaching Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo in the traditional way in conjunction with attending a live performance of the play in El Paso, Texas.
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros
Univ. of Notre Dame
Juarez.6@nd.edu
From Page to Stage: Creating Undergraduate Production of Classical Theater
The Department of Romance Languages at the University of Notre Dame has been staging undergraduate productions in various languages. These performances are a final product of a foreign language class and are intimately linked to the curriculum. This presentation will provide an overview of the history of staging Moliére’s plays and Cervantes’ Entremeses. The presenters will offer a unique perspective on this exciting undertaking, focusing on the benefits and challenges of staging drama in the target language. Curricular implications will be stressed, as well as the contrasting approaches to the course/production that each faculty director uses.
Kelly Kingsbury and Paul McDowell
Univ. of Notre Dame
kingsbury.1@nd.edu and mcdowell.2@nd.edu
Bridging the Gap: Performance in a 200-level French Class
Performance, understood as recitation, is an important component of "Facets of French, France and the French," a course designed to bridge the language and literature offerings. In this presentation, I will discuss, in a wholly non-theoretical way, the role which the recitation and public performance of literary texts play in "Facets of French, France and the French." In this course, as a final class exercise, students work up oral interpretations of worthy literary texts and then perform them publicly. I spend a good deal of time with each student working on pronunciation, intonation, rhythm, dynamics, speed, and drama. The quality of the recitations varies from satisfactory to superb but the performance exercise undoubtedly enhances the students’ linguistic, cultural and literary competence.
Louis MacKenzie
Univ. of Notre Dame
lmackenz@nd.edu