BA Theater Arts – Technical and Design

BA in Theater Arts/Design & Production for Theater, Television & Film Concentration - We are an intensive program focused on teaching designers and craftspeople. We graduate critically engaged and technologically sophisticated students in the fields of scenery, costumes, stage management, lighting, sound and media design.

OUR APPROACH

We teach you to be a maker. You will hone your craft in our extensive array of courses devoted to technique. You will discover how to think to think like a designer in our fun but challenging studio classes. Your work will be grounded in a solid understanding in the history of the art form. And you will learn how to utilize what you’ll learn in the University’s rigorous and wide-ranging liberal arts curriculum in your artistic practice.

YOUR OUTCOMES

Graduates from Pace work. Our courses, production opportunities and internships give you practical skills to become a working professional upon graduation. The curriculum addresses production and design across a wide range of fields leading to jobs in theater, dance, opera, television, cinema, advertising, architecture, and art production. In addition, you’ll find yourself well positioned to continue your studies at the nation’s top-level graduate training programs.

THE CLASSES

The program begins with a core group of classes that emphasize the fundamentals of all design disciplines. Students then declare a concentration in scenery, costumes, lighting, sound, or media by the end of their second year. The advanced level studio and technique classes allow you to focus your course-work with classes in drafting, costume construction, lighting techniques and many more. These courses are paired with an innovative study of the historical and contemporary trends in drama and design. You’ll even take an acting class to understand how performers relate to design. In the classes, we make no distinctions between our design and production courses. We consider practical skills and theoretical study equally vital for all our students.

Design and Production at Pace is a rigorous enterprise that prepares students for work in the professional industry but also for a lifetime of creative exploration. Incoming students should expect a difficult but rewarding experience in which setbacks are seen as fundamental to the art-making process. Prospective students must submit a portfolio or interview to be accepted into the major. Specific experience in production and design is not a pre-requisite of acceptance, but prospective students should have an ability to express their ideas visually and verbally. See our notes on preparing a portfolio.

THE FACULTY

A faculty of innovative artist-educators is the bedrock of our program. Our teachers maintain active professional careers working on Broadway, in London’s West End, on feature films and in television production. Instead of offering a singular “method”, the faculty offers a diverse range of approaches to the creative and production process. In a collaborative atmosphere, you’ll be encouraged to embrace your own point-of-view. Guided by our master teachers, you’ll learn how to maximize your potential. In exchange, the faculty looks to learn from you. We believe that student work represents cutting-edge trends in how we will think about design and performance in the 21st century.

PRODUCTION

Pace Performing Arts sponsors 48 faculty-directed and student-directed productions a year in dance, music-theater and drama. You’ll be backstage from day one both at Pace’s theaters and in high-profile venues like New York’s Theater Row. The program exploits its location in NYC, the creative capital of the United States, to create linkages between students and professionals. Throughout the degree program, you will have the chance to engage with the city. Master classes, guest lecturers, internships and workshops with theater and film industry professionals create learning opportunities that are an extension of our classrooms.

FACILITIES

Nestled in lower Manhattan between the Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Center, the Pace campus is spread over seven buildings including the brand-new Performing Arts Center at 140 Williams Center (opening January 2013). This 7-story building will house a new costume and scenic shops, a state-of-art computer design laboratory, soundstage, screening room, rehearsal halls, dance studios, and three new performance spaces. These spaces supplement the department’s other theaters, the Schaeberle Studio Theater and the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts. Pace also performs at theaters around the city including The Lion on 42nd Street and the historic La Mama Theater in the East Village.

BEYOND THE MAJOR

At Pace you may choose to delve solely into the Performing Arts curriculum, but many of our students are encouraged supplement their theater degree with a double major or minor. You may choose to explore such fields as languages, literature, communications, computer science, arts management, anthropology, or business. Expertise in these other fields makes you a better artist while giving you options to pursue a career in arts management, dramaturgy, drama therapy, communications, broadcasting or education.