Drama

Drama is not being offered during the 2008 Summer Sessions.

   
In the Drama Workshop, students explore a Stanislavskian approach to acting with a special emphasis on creating belief in a play’s given circumstances (the “who, what, where, and when” of the story). Initial work develops a foundation of focus and sensitivity through exercises in observation and sensory awareness conducted at various locations throughout Italy.

Thereafter, using an English translation of a classic Italian text, students learn to slowly build a performance. They begin by discerning the text’s circumstances, fleshing out missing information in a manner consistent with and supportive of the play, and, finally, embodying all through a step by step application of acting craft that introduces one technique at a time. Students synthesize these various stages of learning into a coherent whole in a group performance of a scene from the Italian text.

  
 
 
Drama majors also apply the aforementioned techniques in an hour-long performance of a separate piece that rehearses in the evening as the centerpiece of the Drama Seminar.

Their final performance at the session’s end takes place in a splendidly restored early 19th century theatre. Our former SPOLETO STUDY ABROAD drama students performed in the following productions:  an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times in Summer Session 2006; an adaptation of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors in 2005; an adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead in 2004; the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in 2003; and in 2002, The Women of Spoon River adapted from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.
       
 
     
SPOLETO STUDY ABROAD  PO Box 13389  Charleston, SC  29422  843-822-1248  SPOLETO@mindspring.com