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School of Drama
Drama is fundamentally a convergence of the arts. As such, the starting point of drama education is to help students gain an open mind to cooperate with others anytime and anywhere. The School of Drama in K-Arts consists of five Departments: Acting, Directing, Playwriting, Stage Design, and Theatre Studies. It offers a methodical drama education system for each system that is designed to integrate all curricula into 24 large and small scale performances given every semester. Performances are the melting pot and terminus for education in the School of Drama. Taking performance-oriented curriculum, the school of drama students aim to become ‘creators’ who constantly expand new horizons in the theatrical arts by taking on challenges and pursuing opportunities.
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The School strives to produce experts with critical views and executive production ability by offering fieldtrips so that students can participate in the established media production process. By providing wide-ranging experiences and experiments through practice-based and theoretical courses, the School helps students seek the creativity in integrated media language demanded in the new visual era. The School is proud to offer a 252-seat movie theater, a small and large film studio, 5 TV studios, over 90 practice rooms, and 12 preview rooms along with over 1,000 pieces of film equipment. The curriculum is designed for students to have hands-on experience in the media industry by attending various workshops and presentations that demand technical completeness, annual student exhibitions, and graduation shows with works in films, media and animation.
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Curriculum List of Curriculum
The educational objective of the School of Drama is to nurture “creators” who can lead the Korean and global theatrical artistic space and embody the School’s central premise of “drama as a starting point and completion of all kinds of performing arts”, rather than a conventional or staid notion.The curriculum focuses primarily on practical courses and experimentation with convergence into performance. For the undergraduate program, the first- and second-year curricula focus on core aspects of art education, humanities and introduction to drama, while the third- and fourth-year curricula focus on intensive courses for each major, encouraging students to take interdisciplinary courses with other fields of art, such as music, dance, visual and traditional art, and film. The graduate program focuses on student creation and experimentation to help students develop their own independent world of art as “creators”
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Department
Acting
The Department of Acting nurtures actors with sophisticated acting skills, rich imagination and creativity predicated on a strict training regime. Specialized and detailed education embraces Eastern and Western methodologies to help students learn various acting techniques in a professional capacity, from the classics of the East and West to modern experimental theatre, and create their own acting style through embodying Korean sentiments. Through core courses, students can learn the basics of role creation, through self-recognition based on relaxation of the body and mind; training of the body and mind through Eastern martial arts, beats and steps, mime, acrobatics, breathing and phonation; and analysis of characters and plays.Intensive courses help students broaden the scope of their competencies as actors through classes specializing in the predominant acting styles of the East and West, acting for the camera, traditional Korean dance, and advanced body techniques. Students are thus able to grow into actors with a distinct Korean identity through experiments that combine Korean tradition with Western styles. The Department of Acting offers a four-year undergraduate program and three-year graduate program, and the graduate program runs an Acting major and Drama/Theatre for the Young major.Drama/Theatre for the Young fosters experts who can create and perform plays for the young based on sensible imagination and thinking with physical body. Students can explore the artistic and educational potential of drama and play through creative theatrical works. Students receive practical training in performances related to children, teenagers and communities that are process-centered and interactive through joint creations, such as a story-theatre and community performance. Moreover, by balancing practical training with theoretical training, such as seminars and forums, students are able to experiment and engage in introspection on drama for the young according to cultural and social contexts.
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Directing
Directors are the designers of the stage and the drivers of imagination who breathe life into words and texts. Moreover, they act as conductors who integrate, organize and lead the whole performance process, handling human and material resources as well as mental and psychological factors. Therefore, unlike artists in other genres who work independently, directors are required to have not only an indepth understanding of all the elements of theatrical performances, but also a broad level of interest in the arts in general, as well as an insight into current issues and people more generally. The Department of Directing nurtures directors not as stage technicians and engineers, but as “dramatists” capable of leading the next generation of drama. The first- and second-year curricula focus on the basics and practice of the theatrical production process, while the thirdand fourth-year curricula as well as the graduate program focus on helping students explore and discover themselves as dramatists and complete their own production through experiments and performances. Undergraduates have the opportunity to direct two graduation projects, while graduates direct three performances. In addition, students participate in their professors’ works as production staff, as well as participating in practice production with directors in the field, presenting their own individual productions multiple times, and participating in incubator performances. Graduates also have the opportunity to start building their career through ‘Dolgoji’, the theatrical company run by the School of Drama.
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Stage Design
The Department of Stage Design aims to foster leaders who are in charge of the visual aspects of the performing arts such as stage design, lighting and costume, as well as creative artists who can actively deal with the changing environments andmedia. Grounded on education for historical, social and humanistic knowledge, the Department strives to produce stage artists with relevant insight through theory-based courses focused on practice. The years are divided between the first and second year, and the third and fourth year. Students in the lower years take courses on humanities along with courses that help build a basic knowledge of specialized courses such as modeling, stagecraft and computer-aided design.The Department focuses on helping students learn about the collaborative work process of performing arts and stage design, and discover and develop individual aptitudes and talents. Students in the higher years can build their hands-on stage experience by actively participating in not only practical courses, but also repertoire performances and production, as well as project performances as designers and crew members.
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Playwriting
The Department of Playwriting runs the Playwriting major and Narrative Writing major. The Playwriting major aims to produce playwrights whose works raise fresh questions about human life based on insight that can sensitively penetrate the delicate layers of life and hidden depth of humans, along with an organizing power that can dramatize any kind of material into something “trivial yet profoundly significant”. The curriculum is designed to promote student’s dramaturgic ability to enable them to complete a play by themselves through developing their individuality in terms of form and content, creativity related to originality. What’s more, students explore the ‘Korean archetype’ of drama, which has a demonstrable global competitive edge. The Narrative Writing major fosters ‘creative fiction writers’ who express themselves with precise and unique language based bothon sensitivity that values the trivial and on humanistic imagination that sees through temporal phenomena to the eternal. It avoids the traps of conventional creative writing education focused on grammar and it eschews the inertia of existing genres in order to nurture writers with unexpected ideation, challenging spirit and breadth of artistic experience. The curriculum also provides active support for interdisciplinary activities, with the education of genre convergence that promotes dynamic feedback among different genres. Students do not merely write traditional novels or poetry, but play with the interfaces with other arts through ongoing experiments designed to implement ‘New Fiction Writing’ and ‘Mix of Creative Writing’. Required major courses are minimized for students to choose from the School’s great variety of art education programs according to their own interest and design their own rough sketch of the curriculum.
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Theatre Studies
The Department of Theatre Studies offers two majors: Theatre Studies and Arts Management. The Theatre Studies program nurtures critics with a keen eye for artistic insight and emotional sensitivity, and production dramaturges capable of combining theory and practice in the industry. The program’s aim is to produce talented specialists analyze and predict the current state of plays in production to discover the future direction of Korean theatre by reflecting contemporary contexts in their creative work. Students can choose from four streams: Theatre Criticism, History of Theatre, Theatre Practicum, and Dramaturgy. Classes emphasize the understanding of hands-on stage work, and practical experience and education that teaches students to put theory into practice. Introduction courses to acting, stage, and directing help to build a strong practical foundation, and classes like Stage Adaptation of Traditional Performance, Dramaturgy Workshops, and Criticism Workshops encourage the pursuit of new directions for applied theory. Contemporary theatre phenomena are explored in classes including Dramatic Theory & Criticism, and Development of Experimental Theatre. Students discuss and present criticism on dramatic performances, and may take an active part as dramaturges for not only school performances but industry productions as well.The Arts Management major aims to produce theatre specialists capable of efficiently and effectively handling the management side of the production process. The curriculum fosters production planners, production administrators, and theatre managers, among a wide range of professionals with a clear understanding of both the artistic and management aspects of their work. The Arts Management major is divided into two streams: the first aims for a comprehensive understanding of the field at large, requiring a basic understanding of the fundamentals of the performing arts, analytical and linguistic ability for the acquisition of knowledge and theory on the performing arts industry. The second stream is focused on the development of hands-on management skill involving performing arts productions and relevant organizations. Students learn the theory behind the work via Venue Management and Cultural Economics classes, and gain practical experience through Venue Management and Industry Practic*ms.
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Musical Theatre Writing Program
The Cooperative Program for the Creation of Musical Play inherits the tradition of Korea’s outstanding musicals, rather than imitating the foreign legacy of America’s Broadway or England’s West End. Moreover, the Program intends to produce Korea’s own creative musicals that filter our traditions in a new sense. Musical education is not concentrated on a specific genre. Indeed, to maximize genre-crossover, this program was established in 2009 as a Cooperative Program, and has been directly supervised by the School of Drama since 2013. K-Arts is the only school equipped with a creative system that embraces everything from production to marketing, with a curriculum designed to lead directly to production. The Creation of Musical Play offers Korea’s first complete education system for musical creation. As such, it plays the key role in the development of Korean musicals predicated on the success of its high-quality musicals. The Cooperative Program for Creation of Musical Play is a three-year graduate program, and is subdivided into Playwriting and Lyric Making major and Composition major. Focusing on the practice of writing scripts and lyrics as well as composing, the curriculum offers courses focused on both theory and practice, such as the history and literature of musicals, work analysis and collaboration of lyric making and composition, and the practice of musical production, with extensive internship opportunities available.
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