Cornish College of the Arts Theater Department
The creative opportunities open to theater students are greater today than at any time in history. Stage, film, television are joined by web-based, immersive, and site-specific performance. You can reinvent the classics, tap dance in a musical, and take your solo show to Australia or China.
Find those opportunities at Cornish, where you can play Romeo or Juliet—or you can be the first to perform in a new one-act written by a classmate. You can record an animation voiceover for a Design student, or collaborate with Film colleagues on a web series intended to play on mobile phones.
In our dynamic Seattle campus you’ll find classrooms and performance spaces like historic Raisbeck Hall and the 400-seat Cornish Playhouse that we fill with stirring contemporary plays and musicals, improvisation, classical drama, neo-burlesque, solo performance, clowning, and anything else we can dream up.
Together, we’ll explore the art and craft of storytelling as well as the empathy and imagination that give it resonance and power. Our faculty of practicing artists can guide you to develop a healthy practice and your own unique creative process. Engaged with Seattle’s vibrant theater community, you’ll deepen the self knowledge that fosters creative risk-taking. You can walk into rehearsal and confidently access your skill set so that you can say “Yes, AND…” to any situation.
Our alumni act, sing, write, and direct on virtually every stage in Seattle, and all over the world. Recent grads are performing on Broadway, starring on television, starting new ensembles, leading theaters, dazzling cabaret audiences, making spectacular performance art at international festivals, attending prestigious MFA programs, and taking their communications and storytelling skills into executive positions at Google and Apple.
What stories are you going to tell?
Letter from the Chair Richard E.T. White
“The future is what artists are.” –Playwright Oscar Wilde
What are the stories you have to tell? What are the dreams you have yet to imagine? How can you use theater—the ultimate collaboration, an art form that can encompass every other art form—to tell those stories?
At Cornish you develop your artistic voice in a secure environment in which you can take creative risks. You discover your possibilities within the broad and embracing art form that is theater while you actively connect your work with the world around you. Your journey is facilitated by a faculty and staff of working artists who also connect you to a vibrant local and national theater community.
Your goals might be in regional theater, musicals, television, film, improvisation or multi-disciplinary experimental work. You might develop some new imaginative hybrid that none of us have thought of. At Cornish you can fill your storytelling toolbox while developing a vision of yourself as an independent artist with a powerful creative voice and a fundamentally grounded process for making work.
As a Cornish Theater graduate you will be physically and vocally flexible and dynamic, critically astute and articulate, and in possession of a wide variety of techniques applicable to a range of theatrical styles. You work effectively within a group for a goal larger than yourself, and you present yourself and your personal aesthetic with clarity and confidence.
The Cornish Theater Department provides you with an education centered on a stimulating approach to making theater which:
develops your gift for telling compelling stories in a range of mediums
values and fosters both personal and professional growth
places an equal emphasis on technical/performance education and intellectual/creative development
provides a bridge to the Seattle and national professional theatre communities, taking full advantage of the extended educational opportunities available
provides opportunities for students and faculty to engage in collaborative interdisciplinary projects including film and digital performance
Through our emphasis on professional preparation and whole-person education, the Theater Department supports the Cornish College of the Arts mission to prepare students to contribute to society as artists, citizens, and innovators.
Richard E.T. White
Theater Department Chair
