Beginning with the embodied and vibrational foundations of sound, grounded in Indian tradition, we will create a cross-disciplinary experimental space for exploring our borderless voices and activating our bodies through sound. The formal and creative practice will address sounding and listening, tone and presence, body as archive, the musical origins of language, and the enacting of interdependence. Students will develop their own sonic creations and songwriting. We will also engage the thought experiment contained in Alvarez's musical NOISE.
Courses
Fall 2019 Courses
Atelier
Artists Laurie Anderson and Arto Lindsay will explore wave field synthesis including the dynamics of short stories, parades, suspended grammar, psychic states, animal consciousness, and depth of field in sound and film. Special attention will be paid to experimental forms of sound installation, use of different spatial techniques in live concerts, and spatial theater. There will also be discussions and study of sound in the work of various filmmakers, artists, directors, and musicians. Students will be able to create spatial sound works and participate in the work of Anderson and Lindsay.
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 interdisciplinary seminar will focus on Leonora Carrington. Students will be asked to respond to Carrington's oeuvre both critically and creatively, writing essays, responses, and imaginative texts inspired by a close reading of Carrington's idiosyncratic fiction and by studying her prints, drawings and paintings, which are part of the Princeton Art Museum's permanent collection.
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.
This course will introduce students to core screenwriting principles and techniques.
This course will introduce students to screenwriting adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting “true stories” pulled from various non-fiction sources.
Music Theater
This course offers an intensive survey of gender crossings on the American musical theater stage.
Beginning with the embodied and vibrational foundations of sound, grounded in Indian tradition, we will create a cross-disciplinary experimental space for exploring our borderless voices and activating our bodies through sound. The formal and creative practice will address sounding and listening, tone and presence, body as archive, the musical origins of language, and the enacting of interdependence. Students will develop their own sonic creations and songwriting. We will also engage the thought experiment contained in Alvarez's musical NOISE.
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.
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.
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.
This course develops basic acting technique which focuses on the pursuit of objectives, given circumstances, conflict, public solitude and living truthfully under imagined circumstances. Practical skills are established through scenes performed for classroom analysis.
This course offers an overview of comic drama, from the Greeks to the present.
The preparation, rehearsal and presentation of scenes from classic and contemporary plays, from Chekhov and Ibsen to Tony Kusher and Lynn Nottage.
Theater artists routinely bend, twist and break all kinds of rules to create the imaginary worlds they bring to life on stage. Why, then, has the American theater so struggled to meaningfully address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion? In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical overview of agitation and advocacy by theater artist-activists aiming to transform American theatre-making as both industry and creative practice.
This course offers an intensive survey of gender crossings on the American musical theater stage.
The dramaturg of a Theater is at the center of the theater-making process. The dramaturg reads and assesses new scripts; prepares classic plays for production; acts as an historical and literary resource for playwrights, directors, actors and designers; advises on artistic policy; writes program notes; and works with the education and publicity departments on the theater's "public face."
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.
Directing assignments will be created for each student, who will work with the actors in the class and whose work will be analyzed by the instructor and other members of the workshop.
Beginning with the embodied and vibrational foundations of sound, grounded in Indian tradition, we will create a cross-disciplinary experimental space for exploring our borderless voices and activating our bodies through sound. The formal and creative practice will address sounding and listening, tone and presence, body as archive, the musical origins of language, and the enacting of interdependence. Students will develop their own sonic creations and songwriting. We will also engage the thought experiment contained in Alvarez's musical NOISE.
Visual Arts
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.
Students in this course will consider the ways in which a graphic design object's characteristics are affected by its ability to be copied and shared, and by the environment in which it is intended to circulate.
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.
An introduction to narrative and avant-garde narrative film production through the creation of hands-on digital video exercises, short film screenings, critical readings, and group critiques.
This course will examine photography's constant negotiation of evolving technologies. Students shoot black and white and color film and scan and print it digitally to broaden their photographic strategies, their technical skills, and their understanding of the medium of photography. A range of tools will be introduced, including analogue film development, scanning negatives, Photoshop processing, and inkjet printing.
Over the past fifty years, many visual artists have taken up the process and methods of academic research as an impetus for works of art. Through readings, discussions, case studies, and studio projects, students in this class will engage the immediate context of the University as source material for their artworks, and as a means of exploring the effect that research and knowledge production might have on contemporary artistic practice.
This course will introduce students to core screenwriting principles and techniques.
What are the environments, fictions, fantasies, and ideologies that condition the artist at work? This course takes as its investigative locus the artist's studio, a space of experimentation and inspiration, but also of boredom, sociability, exhaustion, and critique.
An intermediate exploration of narrative and avant-garde narrative film production through the creation of hands-on digital video exercises, short film screenings, critical readings, and group critiques.
A required seminar for Practice of Art majors and Program in Visual Arts certificate students emphasizing contemporary art practices and ideas. The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, and performance installation.
Drawing is a distinct process; it can serve as a mode of documentation or as a preparatory step in many other processes. This allows drawing to point to a past event, create a primary experience in the present, and/or to serve as a model or plan for what is to come. We will explore these multiple uses of drawing and their accompanying temporalities through approaches that emphasize a wide range of formal effects — illusionistic form, space, flatness, mark-making, opacity, transparency — while simultaneously exploring how artists have turned to drawing to record, index, propose, invent, and fantasize.
This seminar provides senior Practice of Art Track and VIS certificate students a context for investigating and discussing contemporary art exhibition practices.
This course will introduce students to screenwriting adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting “true stories” pulled from various non-fiction sources.