Performing Arts, Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies Concentration, BA

In addition to existing minors in music, theater, and musical arts administration, the Performing Arts Program includes three possible major concentrations. The concentrations are:

Music: provides students with a full range of musical opportunities, academic and performance, guided with a high level of personal attention. We offer instrumental and vocal instruction, the opportunity to participate in ensembles, and coursework that supports an understanding of music in its wider historical, social, cultural and geographical contexts. Summer international and orchestral programs offer students the opportunity to expand horizons and deepen understanding of worlds beyond their own by engaging in conservatory-like, pre-professional training here and abroad. Taken together, these endeavors prepare our students for advanced training and careers in a variety of fields such as performance, composition, music scholarship, education and arts administration.

Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies: Students develop the knowledge and skills required to create theater, dance and performance, including visual thinking, design, dance, acting and performance, directing, movement, stagecraft, playwriting and critical analysis, writing and presentation.

Integrated Performing Arts: Students explore how performance of various kinds can serve as a method of research and communication that intersects in productive ways with other fields in the arts, sciences, and social sciences.

Minimum Grade and GPA Requirements

Students must earn a grade of C- or better in each course counted towards the major, and maintain an overall GPA of at least 2.0 in these courses.

Learning Outcomes

• Students will develop a wide range of skills necessary for the creation and/or performance of music, theater and/or dance.
• Students will collaborate to apply performing arts skills in public performances.
• Students will identify artistic and professional values and goals based on an understanding of the world of performing arts beyond SMCM and will begin to take steps to carry out those goals.
• Students will locate and use a wide range of evidence and theoretical frameworks in the performing arts.
• Students will construct clear, specific and well supported analyses and interpretations of the performing arts.
• Students will communicate ideas about the performing arts through writing for various audiences.
• Students will communicate ideas about the performing arts through discussion and formal presentations for various audiences.
• Students will evaluate how historical and contemporary sociocultural contexts, inequities, and systems of power affect and are influenced by the performing arts.
• Students will identify, imagine and practice forms of expression, structures, processes and systems within the performing arts that elevate and advocate for historically oppressed and marginalized groups and people.