School of Theatre and Dance

Minors

• Acting
  The Acting Minor is a sequence of courses in acting, improvisational techniques, voice training, and movement. This program allows you to deepen your commitment to performance and support collaborations with writers, musicians, and filmmakers.
• Dance
  If you’re majoring in another field, but want to explore your passion for dance, this minor will give you a physical and intellectual overview of the field. You’ll have access to technique courses in West African, ballet, modern/contemporary, and hip-hop and other street dance styles. You’ll also take courses in dance studies so you can better understand the physical skills you’re learning in the studio. This minor will enhance your understanding of the important role that dance plays in culture and society.
• Devising Collaborative Performance
  Devising Collaborative Performance offers additional pathways for students who identify primarily as interpretive artists to broaden their skills, be more collaborative and generative artists, and engage with multimedia and the world around them. This interdisciplinary minor—with electives in Theatre, Dance, Music, Creative Writing, Art, and Cinema and Television Arts—focuses on the creative work that goes into making original performance.
• Hip-Hop Studies
  Join an energetic community of hip-hop artists at Columbia and take your creative work to the next level. The Hip-Hop Studies Minor will deepen your connection to hip-hop through a blend of hands-on experiences and thoughtful coursework. Open to Columbia students in any major, the program reflects the interdisciplinary nature of hip-hop culture. It combines course offerings in music, dance, business, art, radio, and cultural studies.
• Playwriting
  Columbia’s playwriting minor provides exposure to dramatic structure, creative problem solving, script forms, and verbal presentation skills through the practices of reading, writing, and staging dramatic texts.
• Stage Combat
  From fisticuffs to sword play, stage combat is an essential tool for actors and storytellers across genres. In the four-semester Stage Combat Minor you’ll earn national certification as a stage combat specialist. You’ll be eligible for work choreographing fights and stunts in theatre, TV, and film. The safety-regulated program features training with weapons and unarmed combat, as well as the opportunity to “learn to fly” at Columbia's Media Production Center. It is the only fully-equipped stage combat program in the region.
• Theatre Directing
  With the Theatre Directing minor, you’ll learn the skills necessary to conceptualize, organize, and facilitate the preparation of scripted material for performance. In your capstone course, you will apply your study of acting, technology and design, project organization, and dramatic theory to the production of a one-act play.