Department of Performing Arts Mission Statement and Learning Goals
Georgetown’s Department of Performing Arts (DPA) integrates creative and critical inquiry, emphasizing artistic excellence, interdisciplinary learning, socially engaged performance, and the spirit of collaboration. The department is home to the College’s undergraduate degree programs in American Musical Culture and Theater & Performance Studies with dozens of performing groups in all aspects of the performing arts (music, theater, dance, and film). We administer a wide range of activities—from teaching critical and creative courses to scheduling the use of practice rooms and mentoring participation in student organizations. DPA also sponsors the professional Friday Music concert series in McNeir Hall and hosts a full season of Theater in the state-of-the-art Davis Performing Arts Center.
The Music Program at Georgetown is distinctive for its emphasis on the study of the performing arts as both a creative activity within contemporary society and a cultural manifestation of multiculturalism in the American World. The program offers courses in music history, criticism, theory, recording arts, film, social justice, and performance. We specialize in all forms of music associated with American Culture, including jazz, rock, dance, film, popular music from around the world, and music stemming from the Western European Tradition. Through this broad range of course offerings and numerous opportunities for community-building music performing activities, the Music Program clearly reflects the intellectual, multicultural, and international character of the liberal arts at Georgetown.
The Theater & Performance Studies Program at Georgetown has attracted significant attention for its unique curriculum (reflecting the political and international character of Georgetown), its commitment to social justice, its focus on adapting, devising, and developing new work, and its cutting-edge student productions. The program encourages interdisciplinary learning about culture, politics, and identity through the lens of performance research, community-based performance, play analysis and playwriting, stage direction, cross-cultural ensemble, solo performance, dramaturgy, design and multimedia production, and world theater history.
Departmental Goals
Students majoring in the Department of Performing Arts will learn how to question, research, analyze and interpret, and how to communicate in varied forms (written, verbal, visual, multimedia) and in diverse contexts.
Through courses that aim at an intensive depth of engagement using the methods of our fields, our students gain practical, experiential training as well as knowledge of the broader cultural and theoretical contexts of theater and performance, and music.
- Laying a foundation of knowledge/methodology
- Integrative learning
- Encouraging critical engagement across multiple fields and practices
- Developing social engagement through the arts
Departmental Practices
At every level, we work to integrate theory and practice, to provide training in the historical, critical, contextual, and theoretical aspects of theater and music as well as in the embodied work of making theater and musical performance.
- Immersive learning within a course and across the program
- Technology & Performance as methodology and subject
- Cura Personalis
- Engagement in critical research
- Applying critical models from various academic fields to performing arts
- Awareness: Social Justice, Community Engagement
- Encouraging self-learning/collaborative learning