This course is a practical examination of Henrik Ibsen's epic play "Peer Gynt". Through close examination of scenes from the play, the internationally acclaimed director John Doyle aims to develop a new adaptation.
Courses
Spring 2016 Courses
Atelier
Graphic novelist Kevin C. Pyle and Jennine Willett, Co-Artistic Director of Third Rail Projects, a dance theater company known for immersive works, will collaborate with students across multiple disciplines to integrate movement, images, and text into a new story-telling format.
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.
Practice in the translation of literary works from another language into English supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works.
An introduction to the art of writing words for music, an art at the core of almost every literary tradition from Homer through Beowulf to W.B Yeats and beyond.
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 is a course in factual writing and what has become known as literary nonfiction, emphasizing writing assignments and including several reading assignments from the work of John McPhee 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.
Practice in the translation of literary works from another language into English supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works.
All literature is short — compared to our lives, anyway — but we'll be concentrating on poetry and prose at their very shortest. The reading will include proverbs, aphorisms, greguerias, one-line poems, riddles, jokes, fragments, haiku, epigrams and microlyrics.
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.
How can screenwriters prepare for the evolving challenges of our global media world? What types of content, as well as form, will emerging technologies make possible?
How does a screenwriter, organize and develop the ideas that will form a feature narrative script?
This advanced screenwriting course will introduce students to the post 1990’s “golden age of television” and outline the differences between writing for film and a scripted TV series.
Dance
In this introductory course we will make six field trips to view live dance in a variety of NYC performance venues.
From grand plié to grand jeté, Introduction to Ballet is for students with a curiosity for the study of classical ballet.
Designed for people with little or no previous training in dance, the class will be a mixture of movement techniques, improvisation, choreography, observing, writing, and discussing.
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.
This studio course is open to beginning and advanced dancers. We'll explore dance as a way to deepen both our self-knowledge and engagement with others.
Interested in learning more about ethnography, hip hop, butoh, Sufi whirling, and bharatanatyam? This seminar combines the study of dance's social and political moves across cultures with studio sessions in six global dance techniques.
This contemporary dance class focuses on strengthening fundamental alignment and coordination. It incorporates aspects of jazz, modern and ballet.
This introductory survey course gives equal weight to scholarly study and embodied practice, using both approaches to explore a range of hip-hop dance techniques, as well as the cultural and historical contexts from which these dances emerged.
Beyond spoken text and physical action, is the all-important performance of a work. How something is done is as crucial as what is done.
This course provides laboratories and cross-genre dance technique to facilitate a somatic understanding of kinesiology.
How did concert dancers and choreographers create and respond to modernity’s fascination with mobility between 1900 and 1950?
This advanced studio/seminar topics course explores the artistic, social, and cultural implications of hip-hop dance through an intensive focus on the concept of style.
This advanced studio course compares approaches to contemporary dance and movement techniques to explore how training fuels choreographic process and aesthetic research.
This course will be divided in units focusing on Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor, and other 20th century choreographers. Students will be coached by internationally known guest artists, Robert LaFosse, Amanda McKerrow, John Gardner, to master and understand the diverse styles of each piece of repertory learned.
Theater & Music Theater
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.
A continuation of work begun in Introductory Playwriting. In this class, students will complete either one full-length play or two long one-acts (40-60 pages) to the end of gaining a firmer understanding of characterization, dialogue, structure, and the playwriting process.
Advanced French Theater Workshop is a continuation of FRE/THR 211, French Theater Workshop.
This course maps some benefits and perils of theater made for, by, or about people of color in the United States. We will investigate the difficult-to-theorize and contested space between politics and artistic craft.
An introduction to the art and craft of lighting design for the stage and an exploration of light as a medium for expression.
An introduction to the art and craft of scenic design for the stage and and exploration of the use of space as a medium of textual interpretation.
An opportunity to explore what theatrical sound design is, how to look at a text from the point of view of sound, how to launch your creative process, and how to take the ideas based on that creative process and turn them into sounds to be used in a show.
A hundred years ago, an armed group of Irish nationalist rebels took over public buildings in Dublin, declared a Republic and held out for a week against the British army. After those leaders were executed, the Rising was embraced as a ritual of sacrifice, the most effective piece of public theater yet staged. In this course we look at what happened in Easter Week, 1916, how it was imagined at the time and how it was later reflected in drama, in poetry and in fiction.
This course looks critically at existing and possible creative and producing strategies for emerging artists in dance and theater.
From the 1920s until the 1950s Ireland locked up people who did not fit the state's desired image in a vast complex of institutions. In this course we consider how this system was reflected in plays, fiction and film, sometimes in direct testimony by survivors, sometimes in the most surprising ways.
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 and determine the ways diversity is (and is not) a guiding principle of contemporary American theater.
This seminar explores how iconic pieces of theatre can be re-explored for modern audiences. The course will examine various aspects of how an artist can think out-of-the-box and the mechanisms the artist can use to do so.
This hands-on seminar will explore contemporary theories and practices of community-based performance, investigating contemporary theatre, dance, and music groups that use these methods.
A practical, hands-on introduction to acting and directing in musical theater.
A collaboration between the Theater Program of the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Program in Hellenic Studies: an acting/directing workshop investigating how to stage ancient Greek plays on the contemporary stage.
This course investigates the history of popular entertainments in the United States from the colonial era to the present.
This course addresses when and why producing political theatre matters. We will look specifically at contemporary and canonical plays from around the globe that take on various political crises (e.g., the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Chile under Pinochet, the Liberian Civil War, the Arab Spring).
An exploration into verse, prose, and song and how they have been central to the way theater works.
This course is a practical examination of Henrik Ibsen's epic play "Peer Gynt". Through close examination of scenes from the play, the internationally acclaimed director John Doyle aims to develop a new adaptation.
Visual Arts
This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. Students will be introduced to a range of drawing issues, as well as a variety of media, including charcoal, graphite, ink, oil stick, collage, string, wire and clay.
An introduction to the materials and methods of painting. The areas to be covered are color and its interaction, the use of form and scale, painting from a model, painting objects with a concern for their mass and interaction with light.
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, with an emphasis on mastering digital equipment and techniques, managing print quality, and generally becoming familiar with all aspects of the digital workspace.
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.
A studio introduction to sculpture, particularly the study of form, concept, fabrication and the influence of a wide variety of materials and processes on sculpture and its consequences.
Through hands-on studio work, screenings, critical readings and group critiques, this course teaches the basic tools and approaches for film production with digital media including writing, camerawork, sound, editing, and postproduction.
This course introduces students to documentary film production using digital video, with an emphasis on the practical challenges of working in the real world.
This course introduces techniques of copper plate etching, and relief printing. Assignments focus on applications of various printmaking techniques, while encouraging independent development of subject matter.
This course looks at the way Italy has expressed its cultural, political, and social individuality in major cinematic works from the 1980s to the present.
An introduction to the art and craft of lighting design for the stage and an exploration of light as a medium for expression.
An introduction to the art and craft of scenic design for the stage and and exploration of the use of space as a medium of textual interpretation.
This course will explore the use of sound in relation to moving images, including film scoring, musicals, soundtracks, music videos, and experimental sound and video art.
In this course we will encounter the output of some of the most engaging filmmakers working today. No film shown in this course will be more than eighteen months from its world premiere, and each will be accompanied by a Q+A with its director.
How can screenwriters prepare for the evolving challenges of our global media world? What types of content, as well as form, will emerging technologies make possible?
How does a screenwriter, organize and develop the ideas that will form a feature narrative script?
This course explores a variety of possible "equations" by which a painting gets made. Students will experiment with different media and approaches: direct observation, ways to use photography, digital images and post-digital imagery.
This advanced screenwriting course will introduce students to the post 1990’s “golden age of television” and outline the differences between writing for film and a scripted TV series.
This class will investigate the idea of "manipulation" in photography and examine different approaches to controlling form and content. Class lectures will look at the work of such artists as James Welling, Collier Schorr, Arthur Jaffa, and Boris Mikhailov, among others.
In this course, each student will determine a specific theme that they will poke, prod and refine throughout the semester, ultimately completing three fully realized, thematically-linked sculptures and/or installations.
A script is only the beginning. Then come the interesting decisions: the actors, the visual style, and the sound design. In this class, each student will be given one segment of a script which they can interpret in any way they choose.
With roots in activities as diverse as mural painting, sports, street fairs, or community activism, publicly engaged art inserts itself into specific contexts and directly engages its audience-often with the hope for social change. This class will investigate the evolving practice of art by creating objects designed to interact with people and spaces around campus.
Artists have long deployed language as a kind of satellite hovering in the vicinity of their artworks, influencing their reception.