The Committee on Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) supports innovative work at the intersection of theory and practice across a broad spectrum of disciplines. For students seeking an intensive immersion in theater and performance studies at the graduate level, the MAPH TAPS Specialization is an excellent choice. It is designed to take advantage of the vitality and rigor of MAPH, while capitalizing on the university’s faculty strengths in TAPS as well as the culture of collaboration between the TAPS program and Chicago's professional theater and performance communities.
Selected Faculty
Sample Courses
Community Engagement and Transformative Education: The Practice of Teaching Artistry (TAPS 32505) Winter 2027
This course will explore the role of the teaching artist with a focus on school and community-based arts education, arts integration, teaching practice and curriculum design. Students will research the field of teaching artistry, explore models for arts education, and develop and implement plans for teaching a specific art form in a community setting. The course will carefully consider cultural competence, collaborative learning, and approaches to teaching practice. (Emily Hooper Lansana)
Playable Theater and Transmedia Games (TAPS 34460) Winter 2027
Over the 21st century, the internet has shifted from an information exchange platform to a performance medium. Especially following the pandemic, the landscape of live performance and interactive art has also changed. This course invites directors, designers, performers, and writers to explore theater experiments in digital and networked environments. The term “playable theater” highlights a new constellation of participatory, interactive, immersive, site-specific, and technologically-augmented performance events in which audiences have substantial agency and can actively influence elements or outcomes of a performance. Together, we will examine the transition from traditional stage performance to interactive online experiences, highlighting the potential of various forms such as netprov, alternate reality games (ARGs), online live-action role-playing (LARPs), live-streaming performance, interactive theater, and even video games. By integrating popular social media platforms, from Instagram to TikTok, students will push the boundaries of storytelling and audience engagement. Students will engage in a series of hands-on workshops, lectures, and design sprints as well conversations with guest artists. Work will involve short-form, interactive original works shifting between in-person and online platforms. No prior experience with coding or video production is required, making this course accessible to all creative and collaborative minds. (Heidi Coleman, Patrick Jagoda)
Dance Improvisation in Theory & Practice (TAPS 36215) Winter 2027
This course has a strong component of movement practice and is open to students of any experience level who are willing to move with creativity and generosity. The course takes a broad look at dance improvisation, exploring in equal parts key theoretical readings, historic and contemporary performance examples, and movement practices in the classroom. On its surface, improvisation is often understood to be based on total freedom or openness, where any movement choice can be made. Here, the notion of freedom in improvisation is reconsidered through the sociopolitical realities of how dancers’ bodies move through society, and across the studio or stage.
The Mind as Stage: Podcasting (TAPS 38320) Winter 2027
Audio storytelling insinuates itself into the day-to-day unlike other narrative forms. People listen to podcasts while they do the dishes, drive to work, or walk the dog. In this hands-on course, we will learn to produce a podcast from idea to final sound mix, and explore the unique opportunities that the podcast form affords the storyteller. Students will complete several short audio exercises, and one larger podcast project. The class will be held remotely, with an emphasis on remote recording techniques and what it means to document this moment using tools of non-fiction, fiction, and oral history. (Sarah Geis)
Theories of Performance and Performativity (TAPS 46900) Winter 2027
This course offers a critical introduction to theories of performance and performativity across a transnational scope. We will read theories of performance that explore the relationship between text, body and audience alongside the history of performative theory and its afterlives in queer and affect theory. Drawing on comparative literary method, this course presents texts both within and beyond the Euro-American canon, across languages, and across disciplines to consider how empire and post-coloniality, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality shape performances and the publics that they address. We will think about the relationship between performance and politics and how performance as both an aesthetic genre and theoretical concept shapes the relationship between text, language, and embodied experience and explore the role of the spectator and their participatory function in the making of performances. (Tina Post)
A complete listing of offerings is available at the TAPS course page.
The Theater and Performance Studies Specialization
The TAPS Specialization allows students to gain fluency in the critical analysis of theater and performance studies, and to gain familiarity with or deepen their expertise in one component of theater and/or performance practice. MAPH students may complement their coursework in TAPS with study in Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Germanic Studies, and Poetry and Poetics, among other disciplines.
Students who complete the following requirements will receive a Theater and Performance Studies notation on their MAPH transcript:
- The MAPH Core course (Foundations of Interpretive Theory)
- One course designated to fulfill either the theory or history core requirement in TAPS (see the TAPS DGS or MAPH liaison for a list of these courses)
- Three elective courses in theater and performance studies, of which one or two—depending on the student’s professional ambitions—will have a significant practice-based component (e.g., TAPS courses such as advanced acting, directing, dramaturgy, choreography or design; courses in Visual Arts such as video, experimental animation, writing for performance; or similar courses in Music and Creative Writing)
- An MA thesis in theater and performance studies under the supervision of a TAPS faculty member. Depending on a student’s focus, the thesis may combine performance work with critical analysis. The final topic and form of the thesis project will be determined in consultation with the Director of Graduate Studies in TAPS
Please direct any questions you may have about specializing in Theater and Performance Studies to maph-support@uchicago.edu.
Recent TAPS Thesis Projects
"The Fourth Wall Beyond: Death’s Direct Address in the Plays of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins"
Olivia Martin, MAPH '26
Advisor: Tina Post
"Master of Non: On Making and Taking Space"
Johanna Selmeczy, MAPH '26
Advisor: Marissa Fenley
“Encounters with the Divine: Theatrical Transformations and Negotiations”
Meenakshi Ajit, MAPH ‘24
Advisor: Andrew Ollett
“An Aim for Authenticity in Queer Performance: A Queered Dramaturgical Analysis and Staged Reading of Tony Speciale’s Unnatural Acts”
William DeVito, MAPH ‘23
Advisor: Devon de Mayo