Theatrical designer/stage director Michael Counts and conductor/composer Jayce Ogren will explore the innermost workings of Mozart’s Symphony #40.
Courses
Fall 2017 Courses
Atelier
This course will take the form of an interdisciplinary, creative investigation of a rarely discussed chapter of Princeton’s past: the University's history as it relates to the institution of slavery in America.
Creative Writing
Practice in the original composition of poetry supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works.
The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers a perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts.
This studio course will introduce students to the essential aspects and skills of graphic design, and will analyze and discuss the increasingly vital role that non-verbal, graphic information plays in all areas of professional life, from fine art and book design to social networking and the Internet.
This studio course introduces students to graphic design with a particular emphasis on typography. Students learn typographic history through lectures that highlight major shifts in print technologies and through their engagement in studio design projects.
Exploding Text is a hands-on exploration of spoken word/performance.
This seminar will focus on journalism as an art form, especially as it regards social issues. We will explore the tradition of literary, narrative non-fiction with essays by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Katherine Boo, and others.
Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings.
Advanced practice in the original composition of fiction for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings.
In this workshop we will divide our time between translating excerpts of Italian fiction to English and vice-versa in order to better understand the beauty, breadth, points of connection and challenges of both languages.
This workshop course rehearses the writing and performance skills necessary to remake the raw material drawn from lived experience into compelling autobiographical storytelling.
Students will explore their own lives through various devices and discover that the truth is never elemental but can be released through literary strategies. During the semester each student will write either one long autobiographical piece or three shorter ones.
This course will introduce students to core screenwriting principles and techniques.
Students in this advanced screenwriting course will work both independently and in small groups to learn how to develop, pitch, outline, and draft an original television show.
This course will introduce students to screenwriting adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting “true stories” pulled from various non-fiction sources.
Dance
From grand plié to grand jeté, Introduction to Ballet is for students with a curiosity for the study of classical ballet.
In this studio course open to anyone with a body, we will explore power, structure, and human bodies through personal, political, anatomical, kinesthetic, and aesthetic lenses. We will delve into these issues as artists do: by reading, thinking, talking, moving, and making performances, actions, sense, and change.
A studio course introducing students to American dance aesthetics and practices, with a focus on how its evolution has been influenced by African American choreographers and dancers.
Designed for students with minimal dance experience who are curious about contemporary dance techniques and choreography.
Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world.
In this studio course open to all, we’ll ramble in the unknown searching for embodied philosophy, thinking art-making, and clarity that’s open for revision.
Using an interdisciplinary visual and performance studies approach to explore various sites of contemporary art practices, this course will provide an introduction to radical performance practices through which artists consider the gendered and racialized body that circulates in the public domain, both onstage and off.
This seminar investigates discourses and politics around the fat body from a performance studies perspective. How does this “f-word” discipline and regulate bodies in /as public?
Choreography Workshop I exposes students to diverse methods of dance-making by tracing the evolution of choreographic thought.
Technique and repertory course that focuses on developing technical expertise, expressive range, and stylistic clarity. In technique, students will examine concepts such as skeletal support, sequential movement, rhythm, and momentum to emphasize efficiency in motion.
Dance choreography, with a focus on contemporary practices and performance. Classes will workshop compositional tasks that set limitations to spark creativity.
Technique and repertory course that focuses on developing technical expertise, expressive range, and stylistic clarity. In technique, students will examine concepts such as skeletal support, sequential movement, rhythm, and momentum to emphasize efficiency in motion.
Choreography Workshop III extends students’ approaches to choreographic research by asking them to create complete works on dancers other than themselves.
Technique and repertory course that focuses on developing technical expertise, expressive range, and stylistic clarity. In technique, students will examine concepts such as skeletal support, sequential movement, rhythm, and momentum to emphasize efficiency in motion.
Students workshop their senior thesis projects either creating a choreographic production or enhancing their artistry as a performer. Classes workshop varying approaches to dance making, including examining practices from modern and post-modern dance, as well as diverse genres and cultural forms.
Technique and repertory course that focuses on developing technical expertise, expressive range, and stylistic clarity. In technique, students will examine concepts such as skeletal support, sequential movement, rhythm, and momentum to emphasize efficiency in motion.
Lewis Center
This class will focus on the career-long writing about jazz, blues, rock and R&B of Amiri Baraka (nee LeRoi Jones) and the significant impact it has had on cultural politics, scholarship and esthetics from the early 1960s to the present.
Music Theater
Vocal and instrumental students will rehearse and perform complete operas or evenings of select opera scenes in Richardson Auditorium with full orchestra.
This is a workshop based class for those interested in multi-skilled performance and in how performance skills can illuminate new forms of theatre making.
This course offers an intensive survey of gender crossings on the American musical theater stage.
Theatrical designer/stage director Michael Counts and conductor/composer Jayce Ogren will explore the innermost workings of Mozart’s Symphony #40.
Theater & Music Theater
Introduction to Theater Making is a working laboratory, which gives students hands-on experience with theatre's fundamental building blocks — writing, design, acting, directing, and producing.
An introduction to the craft of acting through scene study, monologues and, finally, a longer scene drawn from a play, to develop a method of working on a script. Emphasis will be placed on honesty, spontaneity, and establishing a personal connection with the scene's substance.
This is a workshop in the fundamentals of writing plays. Through writing prompts, exercises, study and reflection, students will be guided in the creation of original dramatic material.
Telling stories through performance is human nature, but how can we use technology to enhance, frame, or reveal new perspectives on stories told?
Telling stories through performance is human nature, but how can we use technology to enhance, frame, or reveal new perspectives on stories told?
L'Avant-Scène will offer students the opportunity to put their language skills in motion by discovering French theater in general and by acting in French, in particular.
Exploding Text is a hands-on exploration of spoken word/performance.
A continuation of THR 201: Guide students in ways to develop a role and to explore important texts and characters in an imaginative and honest manner.
This introductory course will provide a critical opportunity to explore the mutual craft of directing actors and acting for directors, with the goal of creating credible performances on screen.
This is a workshop based class for those interested in multi-skilled performance and in how performance skills can illuminate new forms of theatre making.
This course offers an intensive survey of gender crossings on the American musical theater stage.
This workshop course rehearses the writing and performance skills necessary to remake the raw material drawn from lived experience into compelling autobiographical storytelling.
A study of major plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett and others. Artists who revolutionized the stage by transforming it into a venue for avant-garde social, political, psychological, artistic and metaphysical thought, creating the theatre we know today.
The course will explore the creation, production, and management of pioneering international festivals from France's main historic festivals, such as Festival d'Avignon and Festival d'Automne, to more recent and emerging ones worldwide. It will use Le Festival de Princeton, Princeton French Theater Festival's sixth annual edition, as a case study, and closely follow its offerings at the onset of the fall semester.
This course is designed to endow students with the conceptual and practical skills that will enable them to design for productions in the theater program.
Special directing assignments will be made for each student, whose work will be analyzed by the instructor and other members of the workshop.
Theatrical designer/stage director Michael Counts and conductor/composer Jayce Ogren will explore the innermost workings of Mozart’s Symphony #40.
This course will take the form of an interdisciplinary, creative investigation of a rarely discussed chapter of Princeton’s past: the University's history as it relates to the institution of slavery in America.
Visual Arts
This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing.
This urban studies seminar in history and documentary filmmaking focuses on Trenton's unrest of April 1968, when a black college student, Harlan Joseph, was shot and killed by a white police officer. The course works outward from these events to examine the 1960s, race, region, economy, memory, and media representation.
An introduction to the materials and methods of painting.
An introduction to the processes of analog photography through a series of problems directed toward the handling of film-based cameras, light-sensitive paper, darkroom chemistry, and printing.
This studio course introduces students to aesthetic and theoretical implications of digital photography.
This studio course will introduce students to the essential aspects and skills of graphic design, and will analyze and discuss the increasingly vital role that non-verbal, graphic information plays in all areas of professional life, from fine art and book design to social networking and the Internet.
This studio course introduces students to graphic design with a particular emphasis on typography. Students learn typographic history through lectures that highlight major shifts in print technologies and through their engagement in studio design projects.
This course introduces students to techniques for decoding and creating graphic messages in a variety of media, and delves into issues related to visual literacy through the hands-on making and analysis of graphic form.
This studio production class will engage in a variety of timed-based collage, composition, visualization, and storytelling techniques. Students will be taught the fundamental techniques of 2D animation production.
A studio introduction to sculpture, particularly the study of form, space, and the influence of a wide variety of materials and processes on the visual properties of sculpture.
Using an interdisciplinary visual and performance studies approach to explore various sites of contemporary art practices, this course will provide an introduction to radical performance practices through which artists consider the gendered and racialized body that circulates in the public domain, both onstage and off.
In the real world, what relationships have the necessary friction to generate compelling films? Documentary Filmmaking will introduce you to the craft, history and theory behind attempts to answer this question.
This course will focus on the three major phases of cinematic storytelling: story development, principal photography, and post-production.
This seminar will frame the idea of black film as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race, rather than black film as a demographic, or a genre, or a reflection of the black experience, or something bound by a representational politics of positive and negative stereotypes.
To become a working filmmaker today, one has to master the short film—being a filmmaker no longer means creating feature films exclusively, if at all. This course will focus on the technical challenges of being short as well as the conceptual challenge of being funny.
This course explores the history of photographic portraiture as well as the work of contemporary artists working in a post-modern age where representation and identity are deconstructed.
In this class we will work in multiple media, such as photography, video, text, sculpture, and drawing prompted by Princeton University’s vast archives and collections. We will look at and think about art works that tell alternate histories by excavating archives, artists who work through various visual media to probe the politics of flower arrangements, the history of hip hop, to re-arrange museum collections and private photography collections from the middle east, artists who speculate and build possible stories through obscure artifacts such as private letters and merchandize receipts, and much, much more. We will work in multiple media while thinking about archives, artifacts, traces, collective and cultural memory, public monuments, alternate understandings of history and canons. What role does fiction have in a research based practice?
This introductory course will provide a critical opportunity to explore the mutual craft of directing actors and acting for directors, with the goal of creating credible performances on screen.
This course will introduce students to core screenwriting principles and techniques.
The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, and performance installation.
This course is designed to endow students with the conceptual and practical skills that will enable them to design for productions in the theater program.
This course is designed to teach students the skills necessary for drawing human figures as volumetric structures in clearly defined, illusionistic space. Exercises will investigate the dynamics of human bodies, light and shadow, tonal drawing, and hatchure.
Students in this advanced screenwriting course will work both independently and in small groups to learn how to develop, pitch, outline, and draft an original television show.
This seminar provides senior ART Program 2 and VIS certificate students a context for investigating and discussing contemporary art exhibition practices.
This course investigates the processes through which the ordinary can be transformed into the extraordinary. Fall 2017 will focus on the strategic challenge of turning waste material into a viable consumer product.
This course will introduce students to screenwriting adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting “true stories” pulled from various non-fiction sources.