Director and choreographer Will Davis will collaborate with projection designer and filmmaker Alex Koch to create a new work prioritizing the story we see when we turn the volume down on spoken language, and up on the myriad other languages we speak on stage.
Courses
Fall 2020 Courses
Atelier
With Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly and Video Artist Laura Snow students will create a devised dance-theatre production using the approach developed by Kelly's dance-theatre and media company the feath3r theory.
Creative Writing
How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
In this seminar we will study moments of change at seven crucial stages in the life cycle (childhood, adolescence, courtship and marriage, work, maturity, and death) in order to discover the conflicts and contradictions, the emotional truth, and the possibilities that such moments hold for us. Our medium will be the short story. Great short stories show us convincingly how change comes about, each one unique and yet ultimately universal. How do moments of revelation occur? What are these changes each of us must discover in a unique way? What pushes us? What shows us the way? Or, does it result from within?
This seminar will study the history and nature of fairy tales, superstitions, conspiracy theories, and urban myths, particularly in regard to the way that they reflect the concerns and fears of society. We will examine the ways in which these differ from one another, and the means by which entire communities create, preserve, disseminate and fortify them.
Practice in the original composition of poetry supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student’s growth as both creator and reader of literature.
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. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student's growth as both creator and reader of literature.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings and will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and pratice of literary translation.
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.
In this course we will write and interrogate poetry across many avenues. From written work to spoken word to Instagram, traditional lineated verse to poems that see the blank page as more canvas than paper, we ask ourselves how this ancient holder for prayer, confession, and our wild strangeness performs across different manifestations of text and body.
Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the places of literature among the liberal arts.
Advanced practice in the original composition of fiction for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student's growth as both creator and reader of literature.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings and will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.
In this writing workshop, students will be invited to write literary nonfiction essays that address their chosen imagined audience. We will engage writing by authors who have done the same in their work. From the fields of Oral History and Memory Studies we will borrow ideas of listening as a dialogic and intersubjective encounter, and the embodied self. We will reframe conversations about voicelessness + facelessness, and consider instead concepts of un-hearing + un-seeing — inviting new agencies and accountabilities into our creative practice.
This course explores works in which poets of color have treated racial identity as a means to destabilize literary ideals of beauty, mastery and the autonomy of the poetic text while at the same time engaging in groundbreaking poetic practices that subvert externally or internally constructed conceptions of identity or authenticity.
In traditional workshops content and context come second to craft. Here we will explore writing political fiction, the politics of fiction and writing as political engagement.
This course will introduce students to core screenwriting principles and techniques. Questions of thematic cohesiveness, plot construction, logical cause and effect, character behavior, dialogue, genre consistency and pace will be explored as students gain confidence in the form by completing a number of short screenplays.
This advanced screenwriting workshop will introduce students to the fundamental elements of developing and writing a TV series in the current “golden age of television.” Students will watch television pilots, read pilot episodes, and engage in in-depth discussion about story, series engine, character, structure, tone and season arcs. Each student will formulate and pitch an original series idea, and complete the first draft of the pilot episode and season arcs by end of semester.
This course will introduce students to Screenwriting Adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting “true stories” pulled from various non-fiction sources. The class will address the ethics of adaptation, questions and techniques surrounding the need to fictionalize truth for dramatic purposes, as well as touching on the differences between fictional and nonfictional original materials.
This team-taught seminar will examine ancient plots as generative forces for new creative work. We will ask how ancient Greek and Roman plots are appropriated, reused, and reimagined by modern and contemporary writers. We will read the ancient texts in their own historical and cultural context and then ask why later authors turn to these plots and how they transform them in conversation with their own time and in relation to their own artistic goals.
Dance
How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With school as we know it upended, we have a unique opportunity to develop daily habits that contribute to lifelong independent learning and creating. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, paying special attention to the ways we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we'll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.
A studio course introducing students to American dance aesthetics and practices, with a focus on how its evolution has been influenced by African American and European-American choreographers and dancers. An ongoing study of movement practices from traditional African dances and those of the African diaspora, touching on American jazz dance, modern dance, and American ballet.
This course offers a broad, embodied introduction to the breadth of contemporary dance. We will be moving, reading, watching, and writing about dance. Contemporary issues, such as Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, immigration, and American exceptionalism will be viewed through the lens of contemporary dance. We will try on the styles of essential creators in the field in an effort to understand their POV. We will create work ourselves (no experience necessary) to learn about the expressive and communicative potential of dance. We will be moving and meditating to release tension, increase personal awareness, and boost authenticity.
In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the unique aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities while school as we know it is on pause? We’ll dance, sit, question, and create practices and projects. We’ll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We’ll look at stillness as protest and power. We’ll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read widely within religions, philosophy, performance, disability studies, social justice, visual art, sound (and silence).
Performance and crisis have always been partners: entangled in epidemics, state violence and resistance, and austerity regimes, as well as the crisis ordinariness of settler colonialism and structural racism. This seminar examines performance in our extraordinary present using autoethnography, ethnography, and interviews.
‘Dance in Education: Dance/Theater Pedagogy Seminar’ explores the connection between engaged dance and elementary school literacy, mathematics and social studies while allowing students the opportunity to be civically engaged and contribute to the community. The course combines teaching dance and movement classes to public school students from underserved communities in both East Harlem in New York City and the Princeton region (remotely, through zoom), while collectively engaging in an in-depth exploration of Dance and Theater in Elementary Education with an emphasis on recent developments in the field.
How can we create new methods of dance and choreography for the online environment that reimagine frontiers of physical practice and the choreographic space? Each section of this course will be a unique venture into dance and choreographic creation culminating in a live, virtual Performance Festival. Students will explore the intersections of dance and multimedia performance, digital animation, filmmaking, site-specific theater and art, or music. Movement practice and creative work will be supplemented by selected readings and viewings to expose students to broad historical precedents and provide cultural, social, and political context.
This hybrid studio/seminar course progresses in two tracks: one of embodied movement practices and the other of theoretico-historical critique. The canon of modern dance — arguably an American trajectory — is the source material for our interdisciplinary work. We will mimic and examine landmark choreographies in order to explore foundational tenets of modern art and modernity at large. Ableism and nihilism, sovereignty and sexuality, race and gender, are some of the themes that we will face along the path of analyzing the work of Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and Vaclav Nijinsky.
In this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics.
The fat body operates at the conjuncture of political economy, beauty standards, and health. This seminar asks, How does this "f-word" discipline and regulate bodies in /as public? What is the "ideal" American public body and who gets to occupy that position? How are complex personhood, expressivity, health, and citizenship contested cultural and political economic projects? We will examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness using dance, performance, memoirs, and media texts as case studies
With Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly and Video Artist Laura Snow students will create a devised dance-theatre production using the approach developed by Kelly's dance-theatre and media company the feath3r theory.
Lewis Center
In this seminar students of all backgrounds are invited to participate in visiting some of the pioneers and innovators of Afrofuturist thought and literature and performance as well as becoming familiar with emerging technology like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).
How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
A performance course in West African drumming with a focus on music from the Mandé Empire (Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Senegal.) Taught by master drummer Olivier Tarpaga, exponent of the Mogo Kele Foli drumming technique, the course provides hands-on experience on the Djembe drum. Students will acquire performance experience, skills and techniques on the Djansa (Diansa), and develop an appreciation for the integrity of drumming in the daily life of West Africa.
In this transformative time, when national politics seems frayed at best, local government meetings remain sites of direct democracy and creative protest. Is Politics a Performance? looks at how we perform in these meetings, and who gets to play which roles. Drawing on the tools of sociology, philosophy, civics and theater, we will analyze meetings in Princeton and Trenton, as well as other US cities. With many government functions now taking place online, the course also reckons with our emerging, digital commons. Through a layered, practical and fun approach to decision-making, citizenship and dramaturgy, this class is ideal for students considering work in public policy, education, social sciences and performing arts.
In this seminar we will study moments of change at seven crucial stages in the life cycle (childhood, adolescence, courtship and marriage, work, maturity, and death) in order to discover the conflicts and contradictions, the emotional truth, and the possibilities that such moments hold for us. Our medium will be the short story. Great short stories show us convincingly how change comes about, each one unique and yet ultimately universal. How do moments of revelation occur? What are these changes each of us must discover in a unique way? What pushes us? What shows us the way? Or, does it result from within?
This seminar will study the history and nature of fairy tales, superstitions, conspiracy theories, and urban myths, particularly in regard to the way that they reflect the concerns and fears of society. We will examine the ways in which these differ from one another, and the means by which entire communities create, preserve, disseminate and fortify them.
This studio class is about painting and practice. Painting has such a long and complicated history that is now transforming and including adjacent events, perspectives, and artists—that there is no real place to start. It has become professional and is an academic area of study. That said—anyone can use a paintbrush somehow and make a painting.
Music Theater
How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With school as we know it upended, we have a unique opportunity to develop daily habits that contribute to lifelong independent learning and creating. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, paying special attention to the ways we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we'll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.
Vocal and instrumental students will rehearse and perform Francesco Cavalli's opera Calisto in Richardson Auditorium with full orchestra. Students are admitted by audition only.
In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.
This course offers an intensive survey of how Latina/o/x performers, characters, cultures, narratives and musical styles have always been a constitutive feature of the "American musical" — as performance genre, practice and tradition — on both stage and screen.
This junior methods seminar will prepare you to research, create and co-produce theatrical projects for your senior year independent work and beyond. We will address the development of theatrical literacy, individual creative process, and collaborative and leadership skills. We will incorporate practical exercises, virtual theater going, visitors and discussion. The seminar will offer a space for reflecting on art-making, individually and as a member of a collaborative cohort of advanced theater students, and will support you in developing an anti-racist theater practice. The class will culminate in a draft of an exciting theater season.
This course will be an investigative performance-driven process that will attempt to joyously uplift lives that have ended, using theater, song and dance. Led by a visiting professional theater director and working with professional collaborators, students will create theatrical work in large groups, small groups and alone. During an ongoing global pandemic, this living archive of the dead will offer up space for proposals, reflections, indictments, celebrations and imagined alternatives to a world numbed by an ambush of death. The class will culminate in student micro-projects that can be viewed in any order, at any time, from anywhere.
Theater & Music Theater
In this seminar students of all backgrounds are invited to participate in visiting some of the pioneers and innovators of Afrofuturist thought and literature and performance as well as becoming familiar with emerging technology like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).
How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
A working laboratory that gives students hands-on experience with theatre’s fundamental building blocks — writing, design, acting, directing, and producing. Over the semester, students read, watch and discuss several approaches to theater, including plays, devising, autobiography and site-specific work. Addressing both the live art, and the emerging realm of virtual performance, we analyze how theater is created now, as well as the social and political implications of different ways of working. Students spend class time collaborating on virtual artistic responses to each approach, and a culminating project that integrates theater’s essential elements.
In this transformative time, when national politics seems frayed at best, local government meetings remain sites of direct democracy and creative protest. Is Politics a Performance? looks at how we perform in these meetings, and who gets to play which roles. Drawing on the tools of sociology, philosophy, civics and theater, we will analyze meetings in Princeton and Trenton, as well as other US cities. With many government functions now taking place online, the course also reckons with our emerging, digital commons. Through a layered, practical and fun approach to decision-making, citizenship and dramaturgy, this class is ideal for students considering work in public policy, education, social sciences and performing arts.
An introduction to the craft of acting through character work, monologue work and script analysis. By engaging in both collaborative efforts and independent explorations, we will experiment with various acting traditions and techniques to develop methods of approaching performance. Emphasis will be placed on honesty, spontaneity, and establishing a personal/empathetic connection with assigned as well as devised material.
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. Attention will be given to character, structure, dramatic action, monologue, dialogue, language and behavior.
The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With school as we know it upended, we have a unique opportunity to develop daily habits that contribute to lifelong independent learning and creating. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, paying special attention to the ways we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we'll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.
Telling stories through performance is human nature, but how can we use technology to enhance, frame, or reveal new perspectives on stories told? Students will learn about tools and techniques from design professionals, and will engage directly and collaboratively with technology to design experiences focused around live performance. Areas covered may include projections and multimedia, lighting, sound, interactivity/wearable tech, and programming for creative applications, as well as other digital+analog techniques. This class aims to bring together students with arts and STEM backgrounds, and does not require prior experience.
Telling stories through performance is human nature, but how can we use technology to enhance, frame, or reveal new perspectives on stories told? Students will learn about tools and techniques from design professionals, and will engage directly and collaboratively with technology to design experiences focused around live performance. Areas covered may include projections and multimedia, lighting, sound, interactivity/wearable tech, and programming for creative applications, as well as other digital+analog techniques. This class aims to bring together students with arts and STEM backgrounds, and does not require prior experience.
FRE/THR 211 will offer students the opportunity to put their language skills in motion by exploring French theater and acting in French. The course will introduce students to acting techniques while allowing them to discover the richness of the French dramatic canon.
In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the unique aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities while school as we know it is on pause? We’ll dance, sit, question, and create practices and projects. We’ll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We’ll look at stillness as protest and power. We’ll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read widely within religions, philosophy, performance, disability studies, social justice, visual art, sound (and silence).
In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.
The first half of Shakespeare's career, with a focus on the great comedies and histories of the 1590s, culminating in a study of Hamlet.
This course offers an intensive survey of how Latina/o/x performers, characters, cultures, narratives and musical styles have always been a constitutive feature of the "American musical" — as performance genre, practice and tradition — on both stage and screen.
This course will survey plays written by Black playwrights in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore dramatic works of writers from Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics.
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of "real" life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative, and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
The course will explore the creation, production, management and future 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.
This course offers an exploration of visual storytelling, combined with a grounding in the practical, communicative, collaborative and anti-racist skills necessary to create physical environments for live theater making, whether in person or virtually. Students are mentored as designers, directors or creators (often in teams) on realized projects for the theater program season. Individualized class plans allow students to explore supporting online productions, to imagine physical environments for un-realized productions, or to explore exciting contemporary visualization techniques, depending on their area of interest and skill level.
The purpose of this course will be to explore the dynamics of spectacle and performance (artistic, political, sexual, anthropological) in representative plays by major Italian authors of the 20th century.
This junior methods seminar will prepare you to research, create and co-produce theatrical projects for your senior year independent work and beyond. We will address the development of theatrical literacy, individual creative process, and collaborative and leadership skills. We will incorporate practical exercises, virtual theater going, visitors and discussion. The seminar will offer a space for reflecting on art-making, individually and as a member of a collaborative cohort of advanced theater students, and will support you in developing an anti-racist theater practice. The class will culminate in a draft of an exciting theater season.
Beginning with Sophocles' Antigone, this course will examine different versions of this seminal Greek tragedy — from different countries and across the centuries.
This course will be an investigative performance-driven process that will attempt to joyously uplift lives that have ended, using theater, song and dance. Led by a visiting professional theater director and working with professional collaborators, students will create theatrical work in large groups, small groups and alone. During an ongoing global pandemic, this living archive of the dead will offer up space for proposals, reflections, indictments, celebrations and imagined alternatives to a world numbed by an ambush of death. The class will culminate in student micro-projects that can be viewed in any order, at any time, from anywhere.
Director and choreographer Will Davis will collaborate with projection designer and filmmaker Alex Koch to create a new work prioritizing the story we see when we turn the volume down on spoken language, and up on the myriad other languages we speak on stage.
With Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly and Video Artist Laura Snow students will create a devised dance-theatre production using the approach developed by Kelly's dance-theatre and media company the feath3r theory.
Visual Arts
How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
This studio class is about painting and practice. Painting has such a long and complicated history that is now transforming and including adjacent events, perspectives, and artists—that there is no real place to start. It has become professional and is an academic area of study. That said—anyone can use a paintbrush somehow and make a painting.
The great thing about drawing is you can do it anywhere! This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. We’ll introduce basic techniques while also encouraging experimentation, with a focus on both drawing from life and drawing as an expressive act.
An introduction to the materials and methods of painting, addressing form and light, color and its interaction, composition, scale, texture and gesture. Students will experiment with subject matter including still life, landscape, architecture, self-portraiture and abstraction, while painting from a variety of sources: life, sketches, maquettes, collages, photographs and imagination. Students will progressively develop personal imagery that will inform an individual final project.
How can art become a form of activism? This course investigates how technological media shape culture and society, and how we can actively reshape these dynamics through art and design. We will engage in the practice of "speculative", and "tactical" design using various digital tools to envision different futures, reflecting on social, political, and ethical implications of various technologies. Traversing digital and physical realities, students will develop skills in the Adobe suite, 3d modeling, rendering, AR/VR. The final project will be a technology-based artwork that actively engages with critical social discourse and activism.
An introduction to the processes of photography through a series of problems directed toward lens projection, the handling of light-sensitive material, and camera operation. Students will receive a kit that will contain the equipment and materials for analog image making at home, beginning with cyanotype printing and culminating with large format film exposure and processing. These processes trace the origins of photography. Final projects will examine new potentials in photographic expression including images that hybridize analog and digital interfaces.
This online studio course introduces students to the aesthetic and theoretical implications of digital photography. Emphasis will be on gaining competency with digital equipment and techniques so that students can learn to express themselves and their ideas through the medium.
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.
The practice of graphic design relies on the existence of networks for distributing multiple copies of identical things. 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. Through hands-on design projects, readings, and discussions, students will delve into different material forms of distribution — the printed newspaper, social network software, the community radio station, the PDF. Given the online context this semester, assignments will address and employ electronic networks.
This studio course engages students in the decoding of and formal experimentation with the image as a two-dimensional surface. Through projects, readings, and discussions, students take a hands-on approach to making with an array of technologies (the camera, video camera, computer, solar printing, web publishing) and forms (billboard, symbol, screensaver, book) to address the most basic principles of design, such as visual metaphor, composition, sequence, hierarchy, and scale.
This studio production class will engage in a variety of timed-based composition, visualization, and storytelling techniques. Students will learn foundational methods of 2D animation, acquire a working knowledge of digital animation software and technology, and explore the connective space between sound, image, and motion possible in animated film. Screenings, discussions, and critiques will relate student work to the history and practice of animation and to other media, art, and design forms.
This class will be a home studio introduction to sculpture, with particular emphasis on the study of how form, space, and a wide variety of materials and processes influence the visual properties of sculpture and the making of meaning. A balance of indoor, outdoor, and/or transient assignments will lead to the development of an understanding of contemporary sculpture, as well as basic technical facility with found objects, common materials, natural earthworks, ergonomics, and three-dimensional design.
This online course focuses on the technical, cultural, geological, and everyday characteristics of raw clay and fired ceramic objects. Students develop an understanding of and vocabulary for the physical properties of clay in all its states. Students will learn about clay harvesting, processing, making, drying, firing, and the local histories of ceramic production.
This class experiments with 3D fabric construction, weaving, knitting, knotting and more as a means for making sculpture. In her essay, "The Materialists", curator Jenell Porter asks, "Why not consider fiber as painting and sculpture, drawing and sculpture, installation and painting, and most problematically, art and craft?" Through this 'both/and' condition, this course introduces a range of art in which textiles are used as the primary material while providing techniques and materials for developing textile-based sculpture.
In the real world, what relationships have the necessary friction to generate compelling films? Documentary Filmmaking I will introduce you to the craft, history and theory behind attempts to answer this question. Through remote production and editing assignments, as well as readings, screenings, and zoom discussions, you’ll take your first steps into the world of non-fiction filmmaking. You will analyze different documentary methods and approaches as aesthetic devices and as a means of social discourse.
Narrative Filmmaking 1 is a hands-on production class designed for students from all academic backgrounds to learn about the art of video production and develop their creative voices using cellphones! The course will cover technical aspects of making films, including shot language, sound recording, and editing, and will explore what it means to make images at this critical moment of time.
"Pathological Color" will examine photography's ongoing negotiation of color technologies. The class will model historic and recent photographic modalities, cyanotype, tricolor, autochrome, psychedelic processes, to examine color vision and photography as both a physiological phenomenon and as technology of image reproduction and cultural bias. The class will use basic Photoshop techniques for weekly assignments. Readings ranging from Aristotle, Goethe, Elaine Scarry, Michael Taussig and Maggie Nelson will guide discussions. This course will include independent work, weekly assignments with lectures, guests and visits to virtual exhibitions.
This course will introduce students to core screenwriting principles and techniques. Questions of thematic cohesiveness, plot construction, logical cause and effect, character behavior, dialogue, genre consistency and pace will be explored as students gain confidence in the form by completing a number of short screenplays.
In this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics.
The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, performance and installation. It includes readings and discussions of current contemporary art topics, a visiting artist lecture series, critiques of students' work, and an artist book project.
This course offers an exploration of visual storytelling, combined with a grounding in the practical, communicative, collaborative and anti-racist skills necessary to create physical environments for live theater making, whether in person or virtually. Students are mentored as designers, directors or creators (often in teams) on realized projects for the theater program season. Individualized class plans allow students to explore supporting online productions, to imagine physical environments for un-realized productions, or to explore exciting contemporary visualization techniques, depending on their area of interest and skill level.
This advanced screenwriting workshop will introduce students to the fundamental elements of developing and writing a TV series in the current “golden age of television.” Students will watch television pilots, read pilot episodes, and engage in in-depth discussion about story, series engine, character, structure, tone and season arcs. Each student will formulate and pitch an original series idea, and complete the first draft of the pilot episode and season arcs by end of semester.
Record, index, propose, invent, and fantasize: drawing can point to a past event, create a primary experience in the present, and serve as a model for a possible or impossible future. This remote course will focus on drawing's relationship to time. Each student will be sent all the materials they need to work from home. Using pencil, charcoal, conté crayons, ink, and more, we will investigate multiple uses of drawing and their accompanying temporalities through synchronous and asynchronous explorations of a wide range of formal tactics that include mark-making, collage, value, color, space, scale, and gesture.
The structure of Senior Issues and Exhibition Methods is to create a conversation and vision for, and in regards to and around your Senior Thesis. The nature of the class is somewhat informal and conversational, with the majority of class time being for student studio presentations and visiting artists lectures. There are two projects; a proposition presentation and a “handmade” poster project which will be virtual this year.
This year, students will design, build, and critically analyze three common objects—a Cushion, a Prosthetic, and a Light Fixture—each of which will be informed by the differing structural properties of the same material: ash wood. Each assignment will be three weeks long, will be executed round-robin, and will be capable of being done from home. The round-robin structure will allow students to lead the way on some assignments, while learning from the work of their classmates on others. One larger goal of this class is to compare and contrast methods of evaluation in visual art, engineering, ergonomics, and social policy.
This course will introduce students to Screenwriting Adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting “true stories” pulled from various non-fiction sources. The class will address the ethics of adaptation, questions and techniques surrounding the need to fictionalize truth for dramatic purposes, as well as touching on the differences between fictional and nonfictional original materials.
With Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly and Video Artist Laura Snow students will create a devised dance-theatre production using the approach developed by Kelly's dance-theatre and media company the feath3r theory.
Music
A performance course in West African drumming with a focus on music from the Mandé Empire (Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Senegal.) Taught by master drummer Olivier Tarpaga, exponent of the Mogo Kele Foli drumming technique, the course provides hands-on experience on the Djembe drum. Students will acquire performance experience, skills and techniques on the Djansa (Diansa), and develop an appreciation for the integrity of drumming in the daily life of West Africa.