IB Theater Conservatory at B-CC

Course Syllabi

IB Theater 1A - Boswell
IB Theater 1B - Boswell
IB Theater 2A - Boswell
IB Theater 2B - Boswell

Of all the arts, the theater is the one that looks most like life. Characters on stage court and marry, pick quarrels and fight, fall sick and die. In short, they seem to live, albeit in a compressed way. Theater, Alfred Hitchcock said, is life without the boring parts.

The truth of the matter is, of course, that theater is not life any more than landscape painting is nature. Theater is an art. The IB Theater Program at B-CC High School approaches theater as a composite art, which incorporates several arts and several crafts: that actor’s art, the playwright’s art, the director’s art, and the designer’s art; the carpenter’s craft, the scene painter’s craft, the costumer’s craft, and the electrician’s craft. Students in the program come to learn that it is the degree of skill and cohesion with which these arts and skills are combined which determines how effective, often how lifelike, a theatrical event will be.

The truth of the theater lies in its artifice. To approach an understanding of that truth, students in the theater program also study the forms and varieties that artifice has taken throughout history in a diversity of cultures. They also study the composite nature of the theater: that, although it incorporates literature, it is not simply literature on its feet and that, though it requires several kinds of physicality, it is not just athleticism.

Ultimately, by the end of their two years of advance level studies, students come to understand that the end and purpose of all theater, ancient and modern, occidental and oriental, simple and complex, is this: to clarify and illuminate human life, including their own, by a selective recreation of reality.

Having completed the course at Higher Level or Standard Level a student will be expected to have demonstrated:

1. a knowledge of the major developments and techniques in the theatrical history of more than one culture
2. an ability to interpret and illuminate playscripts and other theatrical texts analytically and imaginatively
3. an understanding of the art of the stage and of criticism in relation to it
4. an ability to perform before an audience, and to demonstrate an understanding of, and some skill in, acting techniques
5. the acquisition of sufficient technical skill to produce satisfactory work in at least one of the theatrical arts or crafts
6. an understanding of the processes of theatrical production
7. an ability to research imaginatively, selectively, and with persistence