The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
This new course, taught by Ricardo Bracho (rbracho@sas.upenn.edu), will be offered during the Fall 2023 semester.
This writing for performance workshop will focus on the creation of plays, solo performance, collectively devised work, screenplays and videos. Students can work in both the autobiographical mode common to one person shows, traditional theater and screenplay form as well as avant-garde and experimental techniques. We will write and use theater exercises to develop character and narratives that either directly or obliquely speak to the conditions of subjects who struggle to make art and sense out of self and community, history and society, memory and fantasy. We will read the work of playwrights and solo performers as well as view film and video with an emphasis on the work of leftist, feminist, queer/trans, BIPOC and social justice artists such as Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, Holly Hughes, Kate Bornstein, Ana Mendieta, Valerie Solanas, Wallace Shawn, Tomata Du Plenty, Teatro Campesino and Act Up.