Theater Arts Class Schedule | Fall 2026

Explores the tools, techniques, and technologies that bring live performances to life. Through practical exercises, guest speakers, and field trips, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the different areas of stage production including carpentry, lighting, sound, video, rigging, and stage management. Explores stagecraft in action by touring local theaters and scene shops and attending the department’s student production as well as at least one professional production in the Boston area. All tickets are provided at no additional cost. Subject can count toward the 6-unit discovery-focused credit limit for first-year students.

3-3-6 units. HASS-A
Can be repeated for credit.

Students collaborate with Theater Arts faculty to create a bold, fully staged reimagining of the Old English epic Beowulf, set inside a surreal corporate office where a low-level bureaucrat descends into a dreamscape of monsters, memory, and myth. Drawing on a dark satirical vision of a world ruled by surveillance, paperwork, and malfunctioning systems, the piece explores alienation, control, and mortality, as fantasy and reality hilariously collapse into one another. Developed through rehearsals, design labs, and workshops, student collaborators are performers, puppeteers, designers, writers, choreographers, and creators. All levels of theatrical experience and abilities are encouraged to participate.

4-0-8 units, HASS-A

 Explores the actor's dramatic instincts with body, voice, imagination, language, and action. Studio exercises foster creative curiosity, improvisation, collaboration, and a sense of kinesthetic and spatial awareness. Develops communication skills and offers varied approaches to relating with self, ensemble, character, dramatic material, and audience. Limited to 20 per section.

4-0-8 units, HASS-A

 Thorough exploration of the voice in the context of human communication, provides a progression of exercises designed to free, develop, and strengthen the voice — first as a human instrument and then as the actor's instrument. Explores a progression of voice work that begins with physical awareness and breathing, moving into breath awareness, discovery of the body as the source and amplifier of sound vibration, opens the vocal channel, and develops strength and range in creative expression. Uses historical speeches and heightened language text to expand use and freeing of voice and self. Subject may culminate in a public presentation. Final grade highly dependent on attendance. Students taking graduate version will complete additional assignments. Limited to 20; preference to Theater majors, minors, and concentrators who have pre-registered.

3-0-9 units, HASS-A

Examines the theatrical event from the perspective of composition in a performance workshop. Studio exercises address the process of developing a theatrical work through an internalized understanding of compositional principles in theater. Examines physical action in time and space. Includes outside readings, videos, short essays, and in-class discussions. Provides the performer, director, choreographer, designer or writer opportunities to engage with large and small group ensembles in creation of theatrical events. Topics include image, motion, shape, repetition, gesture, and spatial relationship. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Preference to majors, minors, and concentrators. Admittance may be controlled by lottery.

4-0-8 units, HASS-A

 Explores the realities of the body in space and motion - interacting with gravity, momentum, inertia, alignment, negative space, one's imagination, one's body, other bodies, the present room and rooms from memory, geometry, stillness, and more. By releasing tension and abandoning the notion of pre-planning, students experience a natural, spontaneous flow of movement, opening themselves up to, and diving into, whatever might happen. Develops alertness in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, self-correcting what doesn't work and reinforcing what does on the spot, discovering physical/emotional truths and shared moments that leave students aware, centered, incredibly present, and sharply alive. Students taking graduate version will complete additional assignments. Limited to 20 per section.

3-0-9 units, HASS-A

 Explores drawing as a fundamental component of the design process. In-class drawing exercises focus on developing the hand-to-eye relationship and pre-visualization skills essential to any designer. Studies the use drawing as a route to understanding space and form and achieving accuracy through expression. By drawing figures, landscapes and/or still life compositions in a variety of media, students investigate the figure/ground relationship while dealing with tone, line, and composition, which are all requisite elements of design. Provides exposure to designers who have used drawing as a central component of their work. Students create a portfolio that includes in-class drawings, studies done outside of class, and one research-based written project. Lab fee required. Limited to 20.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A; CI-H

Focuses on reading a play's script critically and theatrically, with a view to mounting a coherent production. Through careful, intensive analysis of a variety of plays from different periods and aesthetics, a pattern emerges for discerning what options exist for interpreting a script from the distinct perspectives of the playwright, the actor, the designer, and the director. Students discuss the consequences of those options for production.  Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Introduces the craft of writing for the theater, with special attention to the basics of dramatic structure. Through weekly assignments and in-class exercises, students explore character, conflict, language and plasticity in scenes and short plays. In workshop format, students present individual work for feedback and heavily revise their work based on that response. Readings include a variety of plays.

4-0-8 units. HASS-A

Studio workshop explores the discipline of acting for the camera through in-class exercises that focus on the creative challenges inherent to both filming and being filmed. Investigates the performer in the history of cinema, television, and multimedia stage performance through readings, screenings, and experimentation with the theory and practice of performing for and with the camera. Culminates in student-written, edited, directed, and acted short films. Instruction in written and oral communication provided. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Limited to 20.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Students study a range of solo performances, explore their own artistic voices, and hone their individual acting skills. Selected viewings and studio exercises support students with diverse strategies for composing and staging solo work. Culminates with students creating their own original solo performance pieces. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited to 20.

4-0-8 units. HASS-A

Laboratory-style class explores and invents techniques used to create dances. Students practice techniques focused on how and where to begin making a dance — sampling some of the endless ways to start a process, such as from the body, an idea, text, or a song — and then how to build up from there. Students make dances that are more than just a collection of moves, but events that do something, say something, or ask something. Builds a clear understanding of how a dance has an arc, a clear beginning, middle, and end, so that by doing it or watching it, both participants and audience end up somewhere new. Develops an understating of, and facility with, a wide variety of topics used to explore, start, and generate movement, dance, and performative events involving bodies moving through space. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Investigates the creation of set design for live performance. Students develop designs related to current production projects at MIT. Focuses on developing the designer's communication tools, particularly in the areas of visual research, 3-D digital model making, and design presentation. Examines the relationship of set design to theater architecture, emerging media technologies and dramaturgies of the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to creating their own designs, students research, write about, and present the work and practice of a set designer. Lab fee required.

4-0-8 units. HASS-A

Introduces the elements of a sound designer's work, such as music and sound effects which inform and make stage action plausible, to sound system design and placement and the use of microphones. Discusses how effective sound design enhances live performance by clarifying storytelling, heightening emotional experience, and making words and music legible to an audience. Provides students with the tools to continue practicing and appreciating the art regardless of their professional ambitions. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Interdisciplinary dance theater studio invites students to investigate the spaces between dance and theater. Students engage in an array of acting and dance techniques to generate text from movement and movement from text. In-studio exercises examine the process of melding the expressive languages of words with languages of the body. Students use existing texts and compose original texts in the development of solo, duet, and ensemble projects. Explores the process of seeing and providing peer feedback to further expand the process of revision. Readings, short writings, video viewings, and guest lectures provide multiple avenues of understanding and illumine differing ways of making. Culminates with an opportunity for students to refine, develop, and share their projects in performance. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Students write and produce a pilot episode of a narrative podcast (about fifteen minutes in length); sources come from interviews or research that students conduct. At the start of the term, students pitch possible stories. Discussions of selected episodes of narrative podcasts such as Serial, Homecoming, and This American Life. Introduces the basics of podcast recording with a primer on using Logic Pro X and hardware like the Apogee Duet. Students record and edit a rough draft of their podcast using provided portable recording studio kits. Podcasts shared with the larger MIT community at the Podcast Listening Room at the end of term. Students taking graduate version complete alternate assignments. Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Seminar investigates the aesthetics of sport as theatrical performance and explores the performance of race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality in sport. Readings drawn from theatre/performance studies, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, gender studies, history, and kinesiology. Topics include barnstorming, Olympics, Title IX, Native American mascots, and a variety of sports ranging from football to figure skating. Limited to 18.

3-1-8 units. HASS-A

Explores the history and impact of Asian American theater. Readings include plays and materials about cultural and political issues, family, and identity. Includes short formal and creative writing assignments and scene work resulting in a collaborative final performance. Limited to 18.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Explores the fundamentals of screenplay writing.  Presents skills to create compelling characters and stories in different dramatic genres (comedy, drama). In addition to their own writing, students read a selection of screenplays and watch short films that form the basis of class discussion early in the term.  Class is modeled on a professional development workshop in which participants, over the course of the term, write a short screenplay, including a final draft.  Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Refines the student actor's investigation of languages of the stage, including work on heightened texts and physical presentations. Explores issues of creative expression and embodying character within styles of different theatrical traditions. Time periods and styles studied may differ from term to term and may include an open presentation. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited to 20.

3-4-5 units. HASS-A

Studies design, history, artistic purposes, and programming techniques involved in the development of interactive performance design systems for controlling video projection, media, and lighting for live performances. Includes readings, viewings of historical and contemporary works, and in class-practice and performance. Students use motion-sensing input devices, such as the Kinect, infrared-light tracking, accelerometers, live video, and generative graphics, to create interactive design systems. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.  Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A
Can be repeated for credit.

Designed as a forum for the next generation of makers; to expand, diversify and reflect on what we build and the effect it has in the world. The foundation for the course is literary sources across fields: in science, society and technology, embodiment and cognition, sustainability, colonial histories and feminist studies, data studies, and cybernetics. We also examine creative projects that challenge contemporary socio-technical systems such as data governance and surveillance, climate and environmental degradation, policing, carceral and correctional systems, class and labor disparities, discrimination, computation and (social) media. Through close readings, creative prototyping, research methods and personal experience, students respond to quandaries such as: What happens when the project that you make does not turn out as you intended? What methods and tools (conceptual + practical) for reflection and iteration can you engage as you build? This course provides students opportunities to consider the interrelated impacts of changes in technology, culture, and society - while guiding students to identify, interpret and build creative responses to issues that arise. The class employs reading and written responses, creative projects and in-class discussion.

3-3-6 units. HASS-A
Can be repeated for credit.

Students collaborate with Theater Arts faculty to create a bold, fully staged reimagining of the Old English epic Beowulf, set inside a surreal corporate office where a low-level bureaucrat descends into a dreamscape of monsters, memory, and myth. Drawing on a dark satirical vision of a world ruled by surveillance, paperwork, and malfunctioning systems, the piece explores alienation, control, and mortality, as fantasy and reality hilariously collapse into one another. Developed through rehearsals, design labs, and workshops, student collaborators are performers, puppeteers, designers, writers, choreographers, and creators. All levels of theatrical experience and abilities are encouraged to participate.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Refines the student actor's investigation of languages of the stage, including work on heightened texts and physical presentations. Explores issues of creative expression and embodying character within styles of different theatrical traditions. Time periods and styles studied may differ from term to term and may include an open presentation. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited to 20

4-0-8 units, HASS-A

 Thorough exploration of the voice in the context of human communication, provides a progression of exercises designed to free, develop, and strengthen the voice — first as a human instrument and then as the actor's instrument. Explores a progression of voice work that begins with physical awareness and breathing, moving into breath awareness, discovery of the body as the source and amplifier of sound vibration, opens the vocal channel, and develops strength and range in creative expression. Uses historical speeches and heightened language text to expand use and freeing of voice and self. Subject may culminate in a public presentation. Final grade highly dependent on attendance. Students taking graduate version will complete additional assignments. Limited to 20; preference to Theater majors, minors, and concentrators who have pre-registered.

3-0-9 units, HASS-A

Examines the theatrical event from the perspective of composition in a performance workshop. Studio exercises address the process of developing a theatrical work through an internalized understanding of compositional principles in theater. Examines physical action in time and space. Includes outside readings, videos, short essays, and in-class discussions. Provides the performer, director, choreographer, designer or writer opportunities to engage with large and small group ensembles in creation of theatrical events. Topics include image, motion, shape, repetition, gesture, and spatial relationship. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Preference to majors, minors, and concentrators. Admittance may be controlled by lottery.

4-0-8 units, HASS-A

 Explores the realities of the body in space and motion - interacting with gravity, momentum, inertia, alignment, negative space, one's imagination, one's body, other bodies, the present room and rooms from memory, geometry, stillness, and more. By releasing tension and abandoning the notion of pre-planning, students experience a natural, spontaneous flow of movement, opening themselves up to, and diving into, whatever might happen. Develops alertness in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, self-correcting what doesn't work and reinforcing what does on the spot, discovering physical/emotional truths and shared moments that leave students aware, centered, incredibly present, and sharply alive. Students taking graduate version will complete additional assignments. Limited to 20 per section.

4-0-8 units. HASS-A

Introduces the elements of a sound designer's work, such as music and sound effects which inform and make stage action plausible, to sound system design and placement and the use of microphones. Discusses how effective sound design enhances live performance by clarifying storytelling, heightening emotional experience, and making words and music legible to an audience. Provides students with the tools to continue practicing and appreciating the art regardless of their professional ambitions. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A
Can be repeated for credit.

Designed as a forum for the next generation of makers; to expand, diversify and reflect on what we build and the effect it has in the world. The foundation for the course is literary sources across fields: in science, society and technology, embodiment and cognition, sustainability, colonial histories and feminist studies, data studies, and cybernetics. We also examine creative projects that challenge contemporary socio-technical systems such as data governance and surveillance, climate and environmental degradation, policing, carceral and correctional systems, class and labor disparities, discrimination, computation and (social) media. Through close readings, creative prototyping, research methods and personal experience, students respond to quandaries such as: What happens when the project that you make does not turn out as you intended? What methods and tools (conceptual + practical) for reflection and iteration can you engage as you build? This course provides students opportunities to consider the interrelated impacts of changes in technology, culture, and society - while guiding students to identify, interpret and build creative responses to issues that arise. The class employs reading and written responses, creative projects and in-class discussion.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Students write and produce a pilot episode of a narrative podcast (about fifteen minutes in length); sources come from interviews or research that students conduct. At the start of the term, students pitch possible stories. Discussions of selected episodes of narrative podcasts such as Serial, Homecoming, and This American Life. Introduces the basics of podcast recording with a primer on using Logic Pro X and hardware like the Apogee Duet. Students record and edit a rough draft of their podcast using provided portable recording studio kits. Podcasts shared with the larger MIT community at the Podcast Listening Room at the end of term. Students taking graduate version complete alternate assignments. Enrollment limited.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Refines the student actor's investigation of languages of the stage, including work on heightened texts and physical presentations. Explores issues of creative expression and embodying character within styles of different theatrical traditions. Time periods and styles studied may differ from term to term and may include an open presentation. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited to 20.

3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Students study a range of solo performances, explore their own artistic voices, and hone their individual acting skills. Selected viewings and studio exercises support students with diverse strategies for composing and staging solo work. Culminates with students creating their own original solo performance pieces. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited to 20.

4-0-8 units. HASS-A

Laboratory-style class explores and invents techniques used to create dances. Students practice techniques focused on how and where to begin making a dance — sampling some of the endless ways to start a process, such as from the body, an idea, text, or a song — and then how to build up from there. Students make dances that are more than just a collection of moves, but events that do something, say something, or ask something. Builds a clear understanding of how a dance has an arc, a clear beginning, middle, and end, so that by doing it or watching it, both participants and audience end up somewhere new. Develops an understating of, and facility with, a wide variety of topics used to explore, start, and generate movement, dance, and performative events involving bodies moving through space. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Enrollment limited.