This course surveys and explores the forms, traditions, expressive styles and aesthetics of theatre from its origins to post-colonialism and contemporary globalized international theatre markets. This is to provide a solid introduction to several aspects of the world theatre: theatre histories, literatures, and theatre theories. Students will study an array of theatre practices, including Athens in the Fifth Century BCE, Roman theatre, early Modern European theatre, Asian theatre, contemporary American theatre, African and South American theatre, etc. Theatre architecture, technology, design concepts, acting styles and significant dramatic works of various theatre traditions of Western and non-Western cultures will be explored.

Students will read and analyse classical, modern and contemporary representative plays from different traditions and approaches from cultural, historical and a practitioner’s perspectives. Questions of indigenousness and cultural exportation are to be discussed. As a result, students will learn to situate dramatic forms and theatrical practices within historical contexts, recognize and analyse the rhetorics of periphery versus centre, Occident versus Orient, and cultural hegemony versus multiculturalism.