Lauren Reinhard

Undergraduate Discipline

Theatre

Graduate Program

MFA Theatre Program

MFA, Sarah Lawrence College. Director, movement director, and experimental playwright focusing on devised theatre in New York City. Reinhard’s work seeks to usher in a new epoch of feminine mythology with magic, symbols, and ritual as constant creative companions. Selected directing credits include: Iphigenia and Other Daughters, (Trojan) Women: Redux, Orson’s Shadow, The Inferno Project, House of Yes, Trojan Women 2.0, Rumors, ’night mother, Damnee Manon Sacree Sandra, and The Changeling. Selected performance credits include: 4.48 Psychosis, Crave, The Bakkhai, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and her solo show, All the Tiny Pieces. As a playwright, Reinhard’s plays have been performed in and around New York City. She has served on the advisory and literary board of Rapscallion Theatre Collective, as director of development for TheatreRats, and has worked in casting for Horizon Theatre Repertory. She is an audition coach in Manhattan and a member of Lincoln Center Directors Lab and The Magdalena Project, an international network of women in theatre. She is the founder of Lauren Reinhard Performance Works. SLC, 2022–

Undergraduate Courses 2023-2024

Theatre

Actor’s Workshop: Craft and Character

Open, Component—Year

This course will be made up of exercises, monologues, and scene work intended to teach actors how to use acting techniques like Stanislavsky and Hagen in the craft of acting. Students will learn how to craft a set of given circumstances and make playable choices and objectives based on the analysis of their chosen performance text in order to create a truthful performance. The goal of the class is to give each student his/her own understanding of the importance of developing technique, rigor, and artistic practice in the craft of acting, as well as how to unlock the layers and complexities of any character that they play.

Faculty

Think Tank

Component—Year

Think Tank is a component for all Theatre Thirds. Theatre Meeting/Think Tanks are held once monthly and are intended to expose students to guests from different areas of the theatre, who will join us to share their expertise.

Faculty

Graduate Courses 2023-2024

MFA Theatre

Actor’s Workshop: Craft and Character

Component—Year

This course will be made up of exercises, monologues, and scene work intended to teach actors how to use acting techniques like Stanislavsky and Hagen in the craft of acting. Students will learn how to craft a set of given circumstances and make playable choices and objectives based on the analysis of their chosen performance text in order to create a truthful performance. The goal of the class is to give each student his/her own understanding of the importance of developing technique, rigor, and artistic practice in the craft of acting, as well as how to unlock the layers and complexities of any character that they play.

Faculty

The Art of Pedagogy: Creating a Modern Theatre Classroom in Higher Education

Graduate Seminar

This graduate level course will focus on pedagogy and the theory of teaching theatre in higher education. Students will prepare to work as a theatre artist and educator in universities and colleges. Students will learn the practical skills of developing materials necessary to secure a position teaching theatre such as a teaching CV, pedagogical statement, artist statement, and diversity statement. Students will also learn the practical skills they will need once they’ve landed a teaching position such as developing a syllabus and other documents to track student progress.

We will discuss different perspectives on arts pedagogy and learn what is new and on the cutting edge of developing culturally competent, anti-racist, trauma informed, consent based, and inclusive teaching practices. Students will learn that Inclusive Teaching is a foundational framework for teaching in an increasingly diverse and globally connected society–one that recognizes and affirms the myriad backgrounds, perspectives, and identities individuals bring to learning environments. We will grapple with this in each class as students are encouraged to design their teaching materials to be welcoming, accessible, inclusive and explicitly centralizing of a broad range of students.

Students will learn how to identify their teaching goals for a course and then how to develop curriculums that will work towards those goals with each lesson. They will learn how to design exercises with multiple entrance points and they will learn how to design both summative and formative assessments. In addition to this in class work together, students will gain hands-on experience executing lessons and exercises by assisting a professor in the the SLC theatre program.

In this course we will discuss the ideas of thinkers including bell hooks, James P. Comer, Bettina Love, Kim Solga, Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire, Gada Mahrouse, Chanelle Wilson, Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, and Heidi Safia Mirza, among others. Open to graduate students.

 

Faculty

Previous Courses

Theatre

Undergrad Lab

Open, Component—Year

Undergrad Lab is a practicum course designed to give undergraduate students exposure to, and experience working with, ensemble-generated theatre. Students will get hands-on experience working with a wide range of devising methodologies that can be utilized to create original performance work. This class will be a laboratory environment in which to rigorously investigate how to generate work, how process affects the final production, and how to hone the student’s ability to edit and revise his/her own work. Each participant will get the opportunity to create original works of theatre as an actor, writer, and director. In the first semester, students will consider how to begin with a blank canvas; they will engage with vocabulary drawn from Tectonic Theater’s Moment Work, Frantic Assembly, and Jerzy Grotowski. In the second semester, students will study various types of long-form structures and investigate the relationship between form and content, as they experiment with editing and rehearsing their own longer-form devised project.

Faculty