Assignment: First Meditation

Please know that you can post anything to the class blog at any time. It makes a particularly useful space to articulate an idea, or ask a question, that we did not have time to cover in class.

Assigned posts for the blog - and there will be more details on these later this week - are called meditations. If a specific task or topic has not been provided for a meditation, presume that your subject should be the assigned reading or material for that week in the course.

Your first meditation should be posted no later than 12:00 noon on Wednesday (before our next class meeting). Consider the questions I posed to you in class today (Monday): what do you know about theatre, and about theatre history? What experience do you have with theatre from this period (600 BCE - 1850 CE)? What questions do you have about this period? What makes you curious about the material this course covers? These questions should inform not only this meditation but future ones as well.

Address this question: What do you know about the origins of theatre? How did theatre begin?

If you know little or nothing about this, find a source or two. If you know something about this, track down your sources - where did you get this information? Provide, in your meditation, not simply a summary of this data, but your own response to and evaluation of this information. Do you buy into it? Does this story make sense? Include not only a citation of your source, but some evaluation of it.

Meditations do not need to be comprehensive, but they should be complete - at least 150 words, and addressing at least one single idea with some depth. I recommend that you write in the first person; be prepared, however, to defend any claims you make with evidence or argument to support your views.