Student performers walking across a high-tech stage set.

Performance

Immersive + Experiential: Performing for the Stage and Screen

Performance is the pedagogical heart of the Theater Arts program at MIT. What students develop in the studios and classrooms is tested live and before a live audience. Performance in MIT Theater is a living, breathing art. Students work alongside renowned guest artists, faculty, and staff as actors, inventors, dancers, technicians, choreographers, and designers, engrossed in a collaborative exploration of classical and contemporary texts, immersive technologies, evolving dance vocabularies, and deeply personal modes of storytelling.

Sharing space with an audience is the program’s most fundamental value. Each year, Theater at MIT produces residencies—including the Gus Solomons Jr. Visiting Artist Series—alongside workshops, new play readings, and world premieres. These experiences carry students through the full creative arc: from ideation to technical execution, from rehearsal to opening night, and are frequently cited by students as among their most valuable experiences at MIT.

Foundational subjects such as Introduction to Acting, Drawing for Designers, Motion Theater, and Bodies in Motion frame performance making as an embodied practice and there is a deep focus on physical expression, imagination, and action. Other subjects like Performance Media and Solo Performance invite students into an array of artistic research—from autobiography and performance art to documentary theater and clowning—culminating in original works that are staged in an exciting series of term-end showcases.

Other subjects like Acting with the Camera, Screenwriting, Live Cinema Performance, Interactive Design for Live Performance, and Dancing with Cameras provide students with the opportunity to augment performance practices by collaborating with emerging technologies.

Faculty-led artistic research often begins in the studios and maker-spaces of Building W97 before traveling to theaters, museums, and galleries worldwide. Students regularly follow these projects into the field by participating in works at the Royal Opera House in London, the Prague Quadrennial, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City Center, American Repertory Theater, Houston Grand Opera, Shanghai Theater Academy, and other hallowed institutions in countries that have included Germany, Norway, United Kingdom, France, Indonesia, Peru, and Hungary.

Students are also encouraged to launch independent projects—full-length plays, films, and live art installations—under faculty or guest-artist mentorship.

Performance at MIT is always a dynamically expansive experience: real people expressing real things and grappling, as artists, with big questions that shape our experiences of the world.