20 Theatre Studies
Book Collections & Textbooks
- An Introduction to Technical Theatre: text draws on the author’s experience in both the theatre and the classroom over the last 30 years and is intended as a resource for both secondary and post-secondary theatre courses; provides a comprehensive overview of technical theatre, including terminology and general practices. [CC BY-NC]
- Theater and the Sacred in the Middle Ages: presents a theory of relationships between the forms of devotion and early drama genres [CC BY-NC-ND]
- Exploring Movie Construction and Production: covers major areas of film construction and production including theme, genre, narrative structure, character portrayal, story, plot, directing style, cinematography, and editing; defines terminology and types of analysis; includes: What Is Genre and How Is It Determined?; What Are the Mechanics of Story and Plot?; How Are the Characters Portrayed? [CC BY-NC-SA]
- Intro to Theater – Learning Resources: authored by Theatre Students of Cleveland State University, Lisa Bernd, PhD, and Heather Caprette, MFA; contains interactive learning content to test your knowledge over Theatre history and production [CC BY]
- Project Gutenberg: Theatrical managers — Great Britain — Biography; Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609; The Secrets of a Savoyard; The Art of Theatrical Make-up; Theatrical Dance; public domain
- Development of Theatre 1: Classical – Neoclassical Forms: covers poetics, Oedipus, Lysistrata, Introduction to Classical Indian Theatre, Everyman, with Other Interludes, Hamlet, and Life is a Dream [CC BY]
- Writing and Critical Thinking Through Literature: text offers instruction in analytical, critical, and argumentative writing, critical thinking through the study of literary works; sections include: How to Review a Play; Elements of Drama; How to Read Drama [CC BY-NC]
- Theatrical Worlds: seeks to give insight into the people and processes that create theatre; covers theory, history, design, and performance [CC BY-NC-ND]
- Technical Theatre Practicum: text covers jobs in technical theatre, performance etiquette, actor scene breakdown, scenery, stage properties, stage lighting, costume, sound, blocking notation, production reports, and cueing scripts, [CC BY]
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Exploring Movie Construction & Production: What’s so exciting about movies?: contains eight chapters on the major areas of film construction and production including genre, story mechanics, character portrayal, narrative structure, and more. [CC BY-NC-SA]
OER SPOTLIGHT: THEATRE STUDIES
HowlRound: a free and open platform for theatremakers providing free resources to include Latinx Theatre , Indigenous, First Nations, Native Theatre, and Deaf Theatre [CC BY]
Repositories & Research
- Improv Warm-Up Games: exercise sessions for theatre warm-ups [CC BY-SA]
- Drama: This handout identifies common questions about drama, describes the elements of drama that are most often discussed in theater classes, provides a few strategies for planning and writing an effective drama paper, and identifies various resources for research in theater history and dramatic criticism. We’ll give special attention to writing about productions and performances of plays. [CC BY-NC-ND]
- Voice Acting/Enunciation Exercises: a collection of enunciation exercises is intended to improve diction, articulation, pronunciation, and speech clarity. [CC BY-SA]
- 5 Major Themes and Motifs in Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet“: covers some of the major themes and motifs in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet [CC BY-NC-ND]
- Classical Greek Theater | Western Civilization: describes the common themes found in classical Greek plays [CC BY-SA]
- HowlRound: a free and open platform for theatremakers providing free resources to include Latinx Theatre , Indigenous, First Nations, Native Theatre, and Deaf Theatre [CC BY]
- Towards Italian Opera Houses: A Review of Acoustic Design in Pre-Sabine Scholars: the scope covers focus on the treatises, essays and publications regarding theatre design, written by pre-Sabinian Italian scholars. [CC BY]
- Theater Performance and Style: covers key considerations of theatrical performance, including:How to Read a Play, Performance and Audience, Meaning and Conventions, Direction, Production Concept, and Stage Design, and Acting and Characters [CC BY]
- Improv Games Directory: a collection of improv games. [CC BY-SA]
- Much Ado About Nothing, How Do We Judge People?, Character Analysis: a lesson plan to assist students with learning about the characters in Much Ado About Nothing [CC BY-NC]
- Analyzing Plays covers how to identify a play’s key elements [CC BY-NC-ND]
- A Theatre of a History: Major Themes in Early African-American Theater and their Relations with the History: article covers the relationship between the history and the theatre of Black Americans; details [CC BY-NC-ND]
- The Cultural Work of Drama Criticism in the Early 1890s: J. T. Grein’s founding of the Independent Theatre Society in 1891 marks a turning point in the cultural history of British theatre. For the first time, the London stage had a theatre that eschewed popular and profitable forms and embraced avant-gardism. While the Independent Theatre provided an alternative to the commercial theatre, drama critics began to define their work as a non-commercial assessment of theatre. Focusing on 1893, Miller demonstrates that reviewers in the early 1890s either directly used the Independent Theatre to define their own cultural roles or indirectly reflected the Independent Theatre’s concept of writing for an audience that is elevated above mass culture. [CC BY]
- Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: English Renaissance Theatre: article; [CC BY]
- Databases, Revenues, and Repertory: original essays that explore an initiative in the digital humanities, the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP): includes The Sound of Theater: Crowds, Acoustics, Oration; Introduction – Digital Technology and Theater History; [CC BY]
- Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory (1519-1544): [CC BY-SA]
- Folger Shakespeare Library Collection: Folger Shakespeare Library is a large Shakespeare collection; a resource for exploring Shakespeare and his world. [CC BY-NC]
- Variety Stage: Theater Playbills and Programs: 146 theater playbills and programs that provide information about variety theater productions, including names of performers, productions, the different acts that comprised an evening’s entertainment, and advertisements. Selected to represent all the variety-related materials found among the thousands of souvenir theater playbills and programs housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division; Library of Congress; public domain
- Theater Historiography: site contains resources and scholarly works for research in history knowledge within the Theatre discipline [CC BY-NC]
- Theatre and Performance Studies Commons:”The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.” [various open licenses]
- The Importance of Tragedy and Elements of Drama: covers the importance of dramatic performances of the ancient Greek theatre and some of the formal elements of drama [CC BY]
- Development of Roman Theatre and Mime: from the text, Spectacles in the Roman World, describes the foundation of theatrical performances in 364 and its development in the years after [CC-BY-NC-SA]
- Visualizing Theatrical Text: From Watching the Script to the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) [CC BY-ND]
- Performance – Perspectives: topics covered- identifying cultural performances within various settings; reasons why anthropologists study performance; role of performance in both reflecting and contributing to social change; define “presentation of self”; relationship between performance and cultural constructions of gender; social conflicts using a theatrical lens; differentiate between descriptive and performative utterances; evaluate the outcomes of performance, especially as they relate to hegemonic discourses; framing devices used to mark the boundaries of performance [CC BY-NC]
- Improvisation Recipe Book: games (“recipes”) intended to be used as reference and study for college level course on the topic of improvisation. [CC BY-NC-SA]
- History of Theatre: Middle Ages in 7B: supplemental resource used in college-level Theatre Appreciation course [CC BY-NC-SA]
- Improvisation in the Design Classroom: This essay is a discourse on the value and benefits of utilizing improvisation to teach and model responsiveness within a given learning moment, facilitate students’ interaction with the immediate social circumstances that contextualize a given design challenge, and prepare them to be ready for the uncertainties inherent in design processes.[CC BY-NC-ND]
- 3 Ways to Warm up for a Play: provides steps for warming up before a performance. [CC BY-NC-SA]
- Writing the Analysis of a Poem, Short Story, or Play: assignment page covers how to write a critical analysis, or interpretation, of a poem, short story, or play, in order to identify an author’s or text’s main idea [CC BY]
- Theater Performance and Style: covers key considerations of theatrical performance, including: How to Read a Play, Performance and Audience, Meaning and Conventions, Direction, Production Concept, and Stage Design, and Acting and Characters [CC BY]
- ArtsEdSearch: publicly available resource supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education
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Storytelling on Screen: An Online Playback Theatre Archive and Guidebook: a walkthrough exhibition from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA); covers theatre before the crash, The Federal Theatre Project, the plays, impact on African American theatre, and legacy {CC BY-NC-SA]
Videos
- Crash Course Theater and Drama: videos based on an introductory college level course in Theater and explores the history, theory, and technology that contributes to the art form most like life.
- TRIFLES: A Virtual Play Reading: part of Virtual Plays playlist [CC BY]
- Ideas about Theater: A collection of TED Talks on the topic of Theater [CC BY–NC–ND]
- HowlRound Theatre Commons: global, commons-based peer produced, open access live-streaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound
- The Creative Advantage: Theatre playlist: founded by City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, Seattle Public Schools, and the Seattle Foundation to increase student access to quality arts learning. Includes Shakespeare: How is he Relevant Today?; Romeo and Juliet, the “Prologue,” and Breaking Down the Text; Archetypes and the Characters of Shakespeare; Creating the Key Elements to Write Your Own Play; Voice: Clarity and Enunciation; The Actor’s Warm Up; Actor’s Physicality [CC BY]
- ILRS Technical Theatre: playlist covers the impact of cultural and historical trends, stage, set construction, costume, lighting, sound, and more [CC BY]
- Future of theatre: A short discussion on different types of performance space and the future of theatre post-pandemic [CC BY-NC-SA]
Images
- Smithsonian Image Collections (Theatre): filtered by public domain usage
- Set designs by creator: WIkimedia Commons [CC BY-SA]
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Theatre studies scholars: [CC BY-SA]