Will MacAdams

Recent and Upcoming Courses

• We Make Community By Hand: A Transdisciplinary Arts Workshop

  In this course, students from many artistic disciplines will come together to create original artistic work inspired by their stories in order to foster community, dialogue, celebration, and provocation. We invite theater makers, dancers, poets, writers, visual artists, musicians, designers, film/photo/video makers, and animators interested in the collaborative process to join us. The course will be divided into four units, inspired by the core questions at the heart of the college's learning communities: in/justice; environments & change; media & technology; and time & narrative. In each unit, guest artists/scholars from across the campus will visit the class to share their scholarship, art, and stories and students will create collaborative work inspired by this learning and rooted in their own lives, bodies, identities, ancestries, and ideas. Through this exchange, we hope to build a laboratory of multi-disciplinary artistic expression that will illuminate the visionary imagination that helps our college to thrive. (keywords: dance, theatre, music, poetry, visual art)

• Theatre Directing for Zoom

  Generation after generation, theatre makers craft new ways of telling stories and imagining worlds in the face of tumultuous odds. This moment is no different. As lights dim on stages across the country and around the world, directors have begun to reimagine theatrical conventions for a virtual medium. In this fully remote class, students will create a series of original, scripted, and movement-based theatre pieces in collaboration with students in Professor Djola Branner's Theatre Acting for Zoom and Professor Peter Kallok's Theatre Design During the Pandemic courses. This work will be paired with on-line visits from contemporary theatre makers who are using digital landscapes as a springboard for possibility and invention. We invite students to meet this moment with us and create theatre that continues to challenge and inspire as we envision a new language for our resilient medium. (keywords: theatre, theater, directing, acting, collaboration)

• Desire Lines: Theatre/Text/Movements through Space and Place

  "Desire lines" sometimes refer to the unofficial and uncontrolled paths made by bodies that are finding their way. In this collaborative course, "desire lines" are an opening to create theatre and dance exploring our relationship to the environment during a time of uprising and pandemic. Students begin by creating writing and movement inspired by their living spaces. They then move outside, reading artistic/critical work, and creating movement and text pieces grounded in questions: how do our identities meet the worlds we move through? How do choreographies of protest movements redefine public space? How do we move and speak in relationship to water, soil, and sky? Throughout, we will explore land and memory, and how colonization has sought unsuccessfully to silence Indigenous histories of all our spaces. This course runs parallel with Desire Lines: Mapping Home in the Dancing Body. Culminating work(s) will emerge through collaboration and will be presented together. (keywords: Dance, theatre, theater, writing, environment)

• Theatre of Community, Revolution, and Radical Joy

  Across the country - and around the world - theatre artists are partnering with organizers, activists, elders, young people, and visionaries of all kinds to envision and embody a more just world. Rejecting the belief that theatre can only happen on traditional stages, this work is made in farming towns, in parks, in Indigenous communities, and in places in between - and celebrates the ritualistic roots of theatre while helping to build the future by speaking it into being. Always vital, this work is particularly essential in revolutionary moments, as it can both inspire joy and be a place to practice the world that is possible. Through reading and creative practice, students in this course will study this vibrant art form and create original works of theatre and performance across the campus and in online spaces. Theatre experience is not required. (keywords: theater, social change, activism, community engagement)

• Before the Harlem Renaissance

• Community-Based Theater: Weaving Stories, Building Movement

  Across the country - and around the world - theater artists are creating work with organizers, elders, young people, and those whose stories are rarely on stage but who form the living heart of communities. Rejecting the belief that theater can only happen on traditional stages, this work is made in farming towns, on city blocks, in indigenous communities, and in places in between - and celebrates the ritualistic roots of theatre while building the future through partnerships with movements for justice and healing. Through reading and creative practice, students in this course will study this vibrant art form and create original works of theatre across the campus and beyond, with members of your own communities and in places you call home. Theatre experience is not required.

• Theater Directing Lab

  This course is a hands-on, practical approach to directing guided by the belief that "directors learn to direct by directing." Our focus is on the collaboration between performer and director and on challenging outdated notions of power by bringing your full selves - in your complexity and with the fullness of your identities - to the embodied practice of directing. The pace will be rapid and the workload significant: every three classes, you will either present a piece that you have directed or perform in a work directed by your peers. Rehearsals will take place outside of class. During the first part of the course, our work will be largely devised and ensemble-created. The second part of the course will focus on text-driven work. Throughout, you will explore, take risks, experience the joys and challenges of collaboration, and work together to make vital work. Previous directing experience is not required.

• Special Projects

• Acting And Presence

  What is presence on stage? And how does an actor manifest it? In this course, you'll explore acting through a hands-on, ensemble-based approach that is grounded in listening. The course begins with an exploration of the many stories that you carry, hear, and express through movement. We'll then move to language, developing skills of text analysis and character development - and read plays from a range of diverse playwrights whose work challenges the way we see and embody stories. Throughout this process, you'll explore how listening deeply helps foster ensemble - guided by the core belief that dynamic life on stage is found not within oneself but in relationship: to the text, to other performers, to the audience, and to the larger world.

• Storytelling & Art of Technical Theatre

  In the course, students will explore the art of ensemble through the exploration of technical theatre - from the sculpting of stage space through lighting design to holding the rhythm of a play through the role of the stage manager. Learning will take place in the classroom, where you will read and discuss plays and historical texts, as well as in the theatre spaces, where you will create ensemble-based, creative projects that are inspired by your stories. The class will be bolstered by Div II and Div III students who are exploring theatrical design and production and who will visit the class to share their skills and stories, in support of your learning. It is designed as an introduction to the student-led, interdisciplinary nature of Hampshire theatre.