Hampshire College

Hampshire Theatre is a sequential, process-oriented program offering flexibility in curriculum and demanding strong initiative and motivation from each student.

The Hampshire Theatre Program stresses the use of flexible performance spaces and a commitment to process and experimentation that often results in innovative and original work, including multimedia and interdisciplinary productions. The program recommends a complement of courses and activities that will prepare students for independent work in theatre. Although each student’s curriculum is individually negotiated around his or her particular interests, there is an expectation that students will explore all facets of production.

Theatre students at Hampshire are encouraged to take their work a step further—gaining a sense of where theatre fits into a larger intellectual context, through studies in such areas as psychology, sociology, biology, history, and literature. A student coming to Hampshire as a seasoned high school designer, for example, may discover to her surprise that she is actively encouraged by the faculty to contextualize her design training by immersing herself in performance, in dramaturgy, in dramatic literature, and by going even further afield into art history and the psychological dynamics of drama. Students are also encouraged to incorporate some aspect of multiculturalism into their course of study.

At Hampshire, production is at the heart of the theatre program. Students are exposed to a close examination of the theatre’s rich traditions from a variety of perspectives, while being trained in all facets of hands-on production. Unlike many schools where student participation in actual productions is limited to the last one or two years of study, Hampshire allows first-year students to get involved immediately by collaborating with more advanced students, both on stage and behind the scenes. Collaboration in the theatre program is strongly emphasized, and participation of non-theatre concentrators is both welcomed and encouraged.

Theatre students are responsible for all facets of the production process at Hampshire, from play selection to strike. These responsibilities are distributed and monitored by the Theatre Program’s governing body, Theatre Board, which is made up of elected students, faculty and staff. Theatre Board presents a season of about six student-produced shows within the college’s two black box theatres, including the annual New Play Festival, which showcases student-written work. In addition to these performance opportunities, students can choose to participate in a variety of flexible workshop productions, production-oriented classes, guest artist and faculty productions, and classes and productions through the Five College Theatre Program.

The Hampshire Theatre Program allows each student to devise an individualized course of study that includes some combination of coursework, independent readings and papers, production work and other learning activities. These are negotiated with the student’s faculty committee and formalized by a signed contract.

Division I (Basic Studies)
First-year students at Hampshire take at least one 100-level course in each of Hampshire’s five schools: Cognitive Science; Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies; Interdisciplinary Arts; Natural Science; and Social Science. While courses in each of these schools may be used to support a theatre concentration, most theatre classes are contained within Hampshire’s school of Interdisciplinary Arts. Some recent 100-level course offerings include: Theatre of the Eye (Design); Playwrighting; Principles of Directing; and Principles of Acting. Within these Division I courses, students do both group work and independent projects. Additionally, students are encouraged to participate in various capacities in campus productions, audition for five-college productions, or help in the creation of an advanced student’s Division III project.

Division II (The Concentration)
The Division II represents the core of a student’s concentration at Hampshire. With the help of the Division II faculty committee, the student drafts a concentration statement – a description of the various learning activities to be completed over the span of three semesters—that reflects the student’s interests and goals and demonstrates breadth and intellectual rigor. Students must include at least one course in each of the following: acting, directing, design, playwriting, theatre history, and theatre literature. Many Division II concentrations are multidisciplinary, interweaving two or more fields of study, and may include fieldwork, internships, or study abroad programs.

For example, a student with interests in theatre and Asian Studies took a range of courses at the Five Colleges in elements of both theatre and cultural studies. She did an internship with New Century Theatre, in nearby Northampton, to gain some directing experience. To include her interests in Asian studies and satisfy her Multiple Cultural Perspectives requirement, she traveled to China and took classes while directing students there in a play about American culture. The possibilities for integrating multidisciplinary passions with in-depth production work are endless.

A Selection of Division II titles includes:
An Exploration in Producing, Directing and Design
Levels of Communication in Theatre and Education
A Tale of Two Arts: Designing as a Director, Directing as a Designer
Profitable Narcissism: Theater, Creative Writing, and Acting
Social Identity and Social Communication – How Theatre, Fiction and Social Theory Communicate Identity

Division III (Advanced Studies)
In the final year at Hampshire, students undertake a major independent study project with the guidance of a faculty committee. Students are expected to complete two advanced learning activities during this year (which often include assistant teaching), and spend the majority of their time working intensively on their Division III project. A production-based Division III project usually involves some combination of producing, playwriting, acting, directing, or designing (lights, sound, costume, or set). A research-based Division III project could be anything from an analysis of genre in dramatic literature to a curriculum proposal for a community-based after-school program.

Some Division III projects don’t fit neatly into either category. Take, for example, a student who concentrated on religious studies and theatre at the Division II level, and decided to write a musical about the Annunciation for her Division III. In the fall term of her fourth year, she took a course at Smith College that focused on representations of the Virgin in art through the centuries. Additionally, she worked with one of her Hampshire professors, a classicist, researching various accounts of the Annunciation in literature and sacred texts. In the spring, she began the work of writing the text and lyrics of the play in collaboration with a Division II music student who wrote the songs. She also took a Theatre Concentrators’ Seminar in which early drafts of the play were given a staged reading and were critiqued by the rest of the class. In the late spring, she produced her musical as a staged reading, and received a lively and detailed response from her audience. For her final portfolio, she wrote a retrospective, detailing her research, the process of writing itself, and what she had learned from the audience’s feedback

Recent Division III titles in theatre:
Theatre and Psychology
Exploring Theatre
A Sense of Humus: Drama as a Tool for Sustainable Agriculture Education
Social Identity and Social Communication – How Theatre, Fiction and Social Theory Communicate Identity
Experimenting with the Semiotics of Theatre to Create a Multi-leveled Analysis of the Way in Which we Receive and Transmit Information
Winners and Losers: Scenic and Lighting Design for a Variety of Historical Periods
Acting on Faith: The Dramatization of Christian Liturgy
Shifts of Focus: Acting, Directing, and Writing Theatre

 
After Hampshire

Hampshire theatre students are attractive candidates for graduate and professional internship programs because of the independent work and hands-on experiences they’ve had. Schools that have recently accepted Hampshire students into such programs (including those in acting, directing, design, playwriting, drama therapy, and dramaturgy) include:

Brown University
Columbia University
Harvard University
Julliard School
New York University
North Carolina School of the Arts
StageWest Theatre Conservatory
Yale University

Roberta Uno(F75) founded the New World Theater at the University of Massachusetts as a program to promote and expand cultural opportunities for minority students. The program has grown and is internationally recognized for its productions and programs to support innovative artists. Uno has received numerous awards, including a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a William Dawson Award, and being elected convener of the International Women Playwrights’ Conference in Athens, Greece.

Naomi Wallace (F78) is an accomplished playwright. After Hampshire, Naomi wrote numerous plays including One Flea Spare, War Boys, Heart of America, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek and Slaughter City . Naomi has received critical acclaim across the globe, including numerous commissions from London’s Royal Shakespeare Company. She attended the prestigious Iowa Playwrights' Workshop and has won numerous awards for her plays, culminating in a 1999 MacArthur “genius” Fellowship.

Not many actors have a degree in semiotics, as Liev Schreiber (F85) does from Hampshire College. As an undergraduate, he spent a year in England studying with faculty from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. After Hampshire, he went to the Yale University School of Drama. Schreiber’s roles have included the accused murderer in the horror film Scream and its sequels, Scream 2 and Scream 3 . He portrayed the young Orson Welles in the HBO original movie RKO 281, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award, and appeared in movies such as Sphere, Kate and Leopold, The Sum of All Fears, and A Walk on the Moon . Liev has also acted in numberous Broadway and off-Broadway productions.

Program Resources
The Five College Theatre Program offers a multitude of theatre resources to Hampshire students. Four proscenium stages are supplemented by eight studio/black box theatres, where approximately thirty-five shows are produced each year. About forty theatre faculty members, including several professional visiting artists, offer more than one hundred classes relating to theatre each year. Course offerings, special guest artists, and all auditions are published in a Five College Theatre Newsletter, which is available to all students on the five campuses.