Leadership and Theatre: Ethics, Innovation and Creativity, University of Virginia (Darden)

The purpose of this course is to build leadership skills and ethical analysis skills by reading, discussing, and performing dramatic scenes from great plays. The scenes will be chosen for their relevance to both leadership and ethics. The course is built around the conceptual apparatus in Dunham and Freeman (2000) that the task of the theatre director is akin to the task of the CEO. For example, students will examine how directors draw vision from particulars, emphasize good casting or “getting the right people on the bus,” get the best out of their team, and approach work collaboratively. The class will examine theater companies as high-performance teams and attempt to construct such teams throughout the course. The course draws on the expertise of the artistic community in Charlottesville by providing several technical workshops on acting and directing. This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.