This course explores Beckett’s prose writings, specifically the novel Ill Seen Ill Said, challenging students to find myriad ways to dramatize a work that wasn’t initially meant for the stage.
Courses
Spring 2017 Courses
Atelier
This course is centered around the development of Fiasco Theater’s upcoming production of "The Beggar's Opera." The course is for performers, musicians, directors, writers, historians, designers, and more! If “opera” throws you, you should know that the piece is about businessman gangsters (male and female), mercenary prostitutes, beggars (economic inequality,) and love (which is nothing compared to money and status) — and the music explored will be new and contemporary, not old and operatic.
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.
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.
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.
A beginning fiction workshop designed to introduce students to the craft of imitation as a point of creative departure.
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.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format.
This course explores encounters with awe and terror via the "sublime" experience. How are these inner states generated and represented in a variety of cultural, political, emotive and artistic contexts?
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.
This course will be structured around female artists, both contemporary and historical, whose work exists at the crossroads of writing and moving images.
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? In this class, students will become familiar with feature film structure, plot evolution, character development, scene shaping and dialogue, and effective techniques for achieving the complex visual and emotional rhythm required by compelling narrative scripts.
This advanced screenwriting course will introduce students to the complexity and thought process behind creating a first season for a dramatic TV series.
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.
This studio course will introduce students to choreographic processes and questions of movement vocabulary, structure, pacing, orchestration and meaning.
Movement permeates every aspect of life, whether within our bodies, minds, or the world around us. In this studio course open to everyone, we use tools from Laban Movement Analysis to develop ways to dance, improvise, make performance, and fully inhabit our lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Choreographer/director Pavel Zustiak, composer/musician Shawn Jaeger, and visiting guest scenographers lead this workshop on the interdisciplinary creative process, with the aim to collaboratively research, create, and perform.
A studio course in modern dance technique for intermediate/advanced students. This course will consist of four units focusing on prominent movement innovators of the 20th century: Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, Lester Horton, José Limón, taught by experts in their respective dance techniques.
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.
This seminar is designed for junior dance certificate students to investigate current dance practices and ideas.
Dance is an under recognized political actor, despite widespread use of performance to project national identity onto the global stage. This course investigates dance as a both a state and a resistant practice of mobilization and identity construction.
This course is designed to provide a broad understanding of hip-hop dance, history and culture. We will explore the various dance styles and folk art traditions that preceded and influenced hip-hop dance and its essential elements.
This advanced studio course compares approaches to contemporary dance and movement techniques to explore how training fuels choreographic process and aesthetic research.
A studio course in Contemporary Ballet technique for advanced dancers. The course will consist of an advanced ballet class and explorations into contemporary choreography through readings, viewings, and the learning of and creation of repertory.
Lewis Center
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.
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 course provides a survey of opera from its inception in the 17th-century to the present, considering such issues as opera's relationship to its cultural context, contemporary stagings, opera conventions and singers (including the castrato), opera and literature, exoticism, and opera's representation of gender and sexuality.
This seminar explores how and why race is a key component of the Broadway musical theatre.
A practical hands-on introduction to acting and directing in musical theater. The course will require students to prepare songs and scenes from selected musicals with an eye to how best to approach the particular challenges the scene presents.
This course explores theories and practices in contemporary theater making, and will be a workshop of ideas for committed theater students. We will examine questions such as: what are the differences between process and product, what is collaboration, where does the audience fit in to the creative journey.
This course provides students with a rigorous and challenging experience of creating theater under near-professional circumstances.
Theater & 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.
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.
This new interdisciplinary 200 level course offers a broad introduction to the study of Irish literature, history and culture.
This course will consider Greek tragedy, its ancient context, and modern responses by focusing on the three canonical Greek tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Choreographer/director Pavel Zustiak, composer/musician Shawn Jaeger, and visiting guest scenographers lead this workshop on the interdisciplinary creative process, with the aim to collaboratively research, create, and perform.
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 211/THR 211, French Theater Workshop. Students focus their work on three French playwrights: one classical, one modern, and one contemporary.
This seminar explores how and why race is a key component of the Broadway musical theatre.
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.
An introduction to the art and craft of lighting design for the stage and an exploration of light as a medium for expression.
Taking as our context the fractured state of our country, this course investigates artists whose work brings us closer together. We will engage with diverse artists from a range of disciplines who, through their work, assert the absolute necessity of creative exchange and personal encounter to maintain a humane world.
This course examines one of the most popular of all theatrical genres — the comedy of mistaken identity.
A practical hands-on introduction to acting and directing in musical theater. The course will require students to prepare songs and scenes from selected musicals with an eye to how best to approach the particular challenges the scene presents.
This course explores theories and practices in contemporary theater making, and will be a workshop of ideas for committed theater students. We will examine questions such as: what are the differences between process and product, what is collaboration, where does the audience fit in to the creative journey.
This course provides students with a rigorous and challenging experience of creating theater under near-professional circumstances.
This course explores Beckett’s prose writings, specifically the novel Ill Seen Ill Said, challenging students to find myriad ways to dramatize a work that wasn’t initially meant for the stage.
This course is centered around the development of Fiasco Theater’s upcoming production of "The Beggar's Opera." The course is for performers, musicians, directors, writers, historians, designers, and more! If “opera” throws you, you should know that the piece is about businessman gangsters (male and female), mercenary prostitutes, beggars (economic inequality,) and love (which is nothing compared to money and status) — and the music explored will be new and contemporary, not old and operatic.
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 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.
This course is designed to provide a sound basis for understanding the ways that images communicate, both in terms of how they are made and how they are read.
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.
Choreographer/director Pavel Zustiak, composer/musician Shawn Jaeger, and visiting guest scenographers lead this workshop on the interdisciplinary creative process, with the aim to collaboratively research, create, and perform.
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.
Since it’s inception, the technical development of photography has arisen out of specific historical and political circumstances that have “naturalized” its practice and ideologically coded its apparatus. Through critical discussions, material examinations, and studio projects, this seminar will take a reflexive approach to photographic technology past, present, and future.
This course, conducted in English, is a study of Fascism through selected films from World War II 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 exploration of films made in the last fifty years featuring "descents into savagery" and the colonial, alphabetic texts that inspired them. Topics to be discussed, among others: primitivism and progress; coloniality; media and mediation; race and gender; intercultural dialogues; healing practices; community-based performances.
This course will be structured around female artists, both contemporary and historical, whose work exists at the crossroads of writing and moving images.
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.
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?
For those who have taken a 200 level film production course and want to pursue their interest in writing, shooting and editing digital media, whether through documentary, narrative or experimental films.
How does a screenwriter, organize and develop the ideas that will form a feature narrative script? In this class, students will become familiar with feature film structure, plot evolution, character development, scene shaping and dialogue, and effective techniques for achieving the complex visual and emotional rhythm required by compelling narrative scripts.
This class will focus on how current painting considers the human figure.
This advanced screenwriting course will introduce students to the complexity and thought process behind creating a first season for a dramatic 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.
This class will engage contemporary approaches to the figure and the various ways that artists contest, assimilate, and reckon with the human body in sculpture.