Slavic 199 hfa (Fall)/hfb (Spring) - Russian Culture in Performance

A one-time only, collaborative course organized around the October, 2016 performance at Harvard of Petersburg’s Bolshoi Drama Theater’s production of The Visible Side of Life, a one-woman play about the poet Elena Shvarts. This is a year-long course, for four credits. The course will meet for four 90-minute sessions in fall, 2016 to discuss traditions of performing poetry in the theater; the history of the Bolshoi Drama Theater; Russian performances as a research topic; Russian poets’ styles of reading; poetry performance across media; and the poetry of Elena Shvarts, particularly its dramatic aspects. The goal of the fall semester sessions will be to prepare students for the theater performance of The Visible Side of Life; to build a foundation for students to do academic work in performance studies; and to formulate research questions on adaptation, transformation, translation across media and art forms.

In the spring semester, students will work on independent projects under the supervision of a faculty member. Collaborations, curated web sites, performances, performance proposals, conference presentations, and traditional seminar papers will all be welcome. The spring semester will end in a celebratory gathering for participants to share their work.