Tap into your authentic self—dance, act, design, direct, critique, and create.
If you want to experience theatre and dance from several different perspectives — by performing, directing, designing sets, creating your own performances, and critically reading and interpreting performance texts — you’ll have plenty of opportunities. You’ll learn to apply theory to performance and expand your creative and critical skills. With three on-campus theatres, several main-stage productions, well-supported student performances, and a lively community that embraces difference, you’ll be able to ground theory in practice. Working with expert faculty who are themselves actors, dancers, designers, directors, and scholars, you’ll experience close mentoring that will guide you in your chosen direction, whether that’s post-graduate study or a career in the arts.
In the Grinnell College Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, students develop as artist-scholars who are learning and practicing an integrated and holistic approach to making performance. We value a balance of knowing and doing, collaboration, active pedagogy, invention, multiplicity and diversity, experimentation, humane practices and welcoming every body.
Productions and performances, as well as scholarship about them, are placed at the center of what we do as a department. Learning in the classroom leads to and informs performances, and is informed by what is learned on stage and in the process of production, in a cycle of reciprocal advancement.
