about
The Performing Arts Department offers:
- Three distinct tracks for majors and minors:
- Performing Arts, Dance emphasis
- Performing Arts, Music emphasis
- Performing Arts, Theatre emphasis
- A range of performing opportunities
- Mentoring by faculty members who are both outstanding teachers and accomplished artists
- Frequent opportunities to attend world-class dance, music, and theatre performances
- An opportunity to perform in the first year
- A balanced curriculum with stimulating courses in three areas of concentration
- History and criticism
- Theory and analysis
- Performance practice
The Performing Arts Department provides students the experience of the arts from the pleasurable to a critical engagement. Team-taught core courses cultivate the skill of careful, thoughtful looking and listening while exploring the distinctive languages of each artform. Upper division courses provide the opportunity to discuss and analyze both acknowledged masterpieces and contemporary works. World-class performances around the Bay Area and contact with professional artists connect classroom learning to live performance. Our students enjoy attending an impressive array of performances at venues including Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Davies Symphony Hall, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, and Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall.
The Performing Arts Department builds performers. Majors and non-majors study together in studio courses and performing ensembles, building technique and performance skills with the guidance of professional teacher-artists. Dancers, vocal and instrumental musicians, and actors—both beginners and more experienced—are challenged creatively and encouraged in their individual development. Theatre technicians are given ample opportunities to develop their skills as stage managers, master electricians, and designers. The capstone of the Performing Arts degree is the senior project, for which students must produce a substantial original research paper or artistic work demonstrating their command of intellectual and artistic skills appropriate to the undertaking.
The Performing Arts Department successfully prepares students for graduate studies and professional performance in both the Bay Area and internationally. Our alumni have been accepted to the graduate programs of Mills College, California Institute of the Arts, CSU Long Beach, CSU Los Angeles, Smith College, and NYU School of the Arts. Others have found their performing arts degree an effective preparation for a career in arts administration, education, media and communications, even law.
The Performing Arts Department encourages students to understand dance, music, and theatre in the context of a long history of works and great ideas that have shaped the world in which we live, thus reflecting a deep commitment to the liberal arts tradition. Students explore humanity’s deepest desires and fears conveyed through the arts. The department requires students to develop critical thinking and communication skills plus performance practice that together are the hallmark of the liberally educated person.
