08/10/2025
TDM 150VT: Your Responsive Eye: Visual Thinking and Creation for Theatermakers is an exciting new course from Jeff Adelberg on an essential topic for performance artists!
This course is about seeing and making, because theatre, dance, and media artists of all kinds must think visually with the same depth and precision they bring to text, story, and music. We begin by examining how the eye and brain interact—how we perceive, process, and assign meaning to visual information. From there, we will develop a rich vocabulary of visual design concepts, exploring how form and content shape attention, emotion, and narrative.
On stage, the visual world must be treated as an active force in storytelling, as essential as the play itself. Through analysis, discussion, and hands-on exploration, we will train our responsive eye to see more deeply and create with intentionality. Drawing from nature, visual arts, media, architecture, everyday experience, and our individual and collective imaginations, we will compose striking, meaningful visuals and explore how they might evolve into theatrical environments. Scenery, costumes, light, projections/video, and movement will all be considered.
By the end of the course, students will have developed a nuanced visual vocabulary, enabling them to craft onstage worlds where form and meaning converge to create striking, evocative experiences.
