Comparative Theatre Studies

The course intends to offer a wide-ranging overview of the history of theater and performing arts by following the evolution and adaptation of a particularly significant and long-lasting theatrical theme or phenomenon. We will explore the subject matter within the production and receptive context, investigating the pathways through which themes and phenomena have migrated through time and space.
Theater has always been a particularly effective media in the dissemination of characters, myths, role models, mentalities, habits, ideas, aesthetic canons, and customs-contributing to their change, transformation, and/or entrenchment in different social and cultural contexts. Tracing the evolution of certain phenomena, from their origins to the present day, will be an opportunity to reflect on their relevance or discontinuity in relation to the contemporary world.

At the end of the course, students will have acquired the methodological skills particular to the history of theater and performing arts, that is, the ability to interpret phenomena through an interdisciplinary point of view, based on a rigorous critique of sources (literary, visual, musical, etc.). They will be able to orient themselves in the retrieval and selection of information through the different types of media and will know how to independently analyze a dramatic text and at the same time relate it to its staging. They will know how to discuss and argue in a seminar context the topics covered in the course, both by applying the methods learned and by developing and refining autonomous strategies of analysis. Finally, they will know how to prepare individual written work of adequate methodological rigor.