Led by Hannah Bos, Oliver Butler, and Paul Thureen, the founding members of acclaimed Brooklyn based theater company The Debate Society, students will collaboratively conceive and develop new theater pieces inspired by their own investigations into the mysteries of death and dying.
This course is centered around the development of a new performative installation by puppeteer Basil Twist entitled ‘Grandma’s Russian Painting’ inspired by childhood memories of an elaborate painting Twist’s grandmother had near her swimming pool in the desert.
The dancer/ choreographers Jean Butler (Riverdance) and Silas Riener (Merce Cunningham Co.) lead a groundbreaking Atelier that investigates the relationship between the seemingly disparate forms of Irish Step Dance and the Merce Cunningham Technique.
This course will focus on the development of a commercial game about climate change, giving students the opportunity to contribute to a piece with broad social impact.
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.
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 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.
Through a series of screenings, we will analyze the narrative structure and grammar of films' visuals to spur on an in-depth understanding of story, character, style and theme.
This is a course in factual writing and what has become known as literary non-fiction, emphasizing writing and including several reading assignments from the work of John McPhee and others. Enrollment is limited to 16 second-year students, by application only.
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.
What compels us to write about ourselves? And what drives us to read about the lives of others? In this workshop we will examine different approaches to writing about the people, places and events that have made us who and how we are.
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 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.
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? This class will use fairytales, films, games and new media to illustrate universal script principles while creating a rich interdisciplinary lens to explore the innovative intersection of narrative screenwriting, science and technology.
In this course, which is both a creative writing course and a literature course, students will study canonical French-language essays and newer forms of essayistic production (the essay film, photo essay, blog, and podcast) and will use these texts as models for their own writing.
This advanced screenwriting course will introduce students to the complexity and thought process behind creating a first season for a dramatic TV series.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Centering an interdisciplinary approach to live performance making, this creative lab will consider how we as artist-citizens strengthen the mind and body to resist normalized structures of performance to release, activate, and translate unknown, foreign, and/or vulnerable materials into live performance actions.
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.
This course provides laboratories and cross-genre dance technique to facilitate a somatic understanding of kinesiology.
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.
How did concert dancers and choreographers create and respond to modernity’s fascination with mobility between 1900 and 1950?
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.
The interdisciplinary field of performance studies offers generative strategies for theorizing social life. This course explores the ways performance as a critical theoretical tool and as a practice enables students to examine everyday self-presentation, political economy, gender, race, and sexuality, material culture, ethics, and other social practices.
This advanced studio course compares training, practice, and performance methods of diverse approaches to the body, community, and kinaesthetic values in contemporary dance.
A studio course in Ballet technique and repertory for Advanced dancers. The course will focus on choreographers Frederick Ashton and Matthew Bourne and other 20th and 21st century choreographers, and will explore methods for making narrative and abstract ballets.
The dancer/ choreographers Jean Butler (Riverdance) and Silas Riener (Merce Cunningham Co.) lead a groundbreaking Atelier that investigates the relationship between the seemingly disparate forms of Irish Step Dance and the Merce Cunningham Technique.
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.
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.
How can someone who loves the performing arts, but is also committed to civic engagement find a path to meaningfully combine their interests and use their artistic gifts in service to their communities? Throughout the course, students will be asked to read and think critically about the role of performing arts in society, explore and develop their own notion of civically-engaged art making, and consider the responsibility of theatre artists to address questions of civic engagement and service.
This course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual medium.
An exploration of theatrical sound design and engineering, this class will explore sound for both theater and music theater. We will investigate text from the point of view of sound, and learn how to communicate the ideas, palette and arc of a design to others. We will explore developing a creative process and turning our ideas into sounds that can be used onstage.
A Viking saga, a mad king, a vengeful husband: these are a few of the characters that we encounter in recent small-scale operas (or 'music-theater' works). They give us a starting point for considering how we tell stories in opera. We will look at the music, the staging and the performance and the ways these elements come together to provide a unified artistic work. Students will be encouraged to respond creatively through writing about the work, or musical composition or developing a particular performance idea. The course will be graded on a final project of the student's choice.
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 junior theater certificate students in preparation for their final year. 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. We will investigate different approaches to theater making. The course will incorporate practical exercises, seminar discussions and visits to rehearsal at Classic Stage Company in NYC.
This course provides students with a rigorous and challenging experience of creating theater under near-professional circumstances.
This course is centered around the development of a new performative installation by puppeteer Basil Twist entitled ‘Grandma’s Russian Painting’ inspired by childhood memories of an elaborate painting Twist’s grandmother had near her swimming pool in the desert.
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.
How can someone who loves the performing arts, but is also committed to civic engagement find a path to meaningfully combine their interests and use their artistic gifts in service to their communities? Throughout the course, students will be asked to read and think critically about the role of performing arts in society, explore and develop their own notion of civically-engaged art making, and consider the responsibility of theatre artists to address questions of civic engagement and service.
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.
A course on works of dramatic literature whose comparative dimension is theatrical performance. We will consider four Shakespeare plays covering a range of theatrical genres; the emphasis will be on the ways in which Shakespearean meaning can be elucidated when the reader becomes a performer. Students will move from the reading/performing of individual speeches to the staging of scenes to the question of how an overall theatrical conception for a play might be a key to the fullest understanding of the text. Students will write papers about their readings and performances; grades will be based on both the writing and the performing.
This course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual medium.
As a working laboratory with daily practice, we study the art of confidence and charisma, the anatomy of vocal production, how breath and articulation express action and emotion, how language and punctuation are a roadmap to communication, dispelling fears, and the strengths of vocal idiosyncrasies.
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.
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.
From epic bards, drinking songs, and classical tragedies to judicial speeches, funeral comedies and gladiators - ancient Greece and Rome knew how to put on a show! We will cover the most important performative genres of antiquity. We will read texts from the archaic to the Roman Imperial period in English translation, paying special attention to the reconstruction of their performance and cultural contexts. We will also listen to modern reconstructions of ancient music and look at ancient art representing various types of spectacles. The course also introduces occasional comparative material from other cultures, ancient and modern.
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.
The Advanced French Theater Workshop will exceptionally be co-taught by the Comédie-Française's leading actor Guillaume Gallienne and Florent Masse. Students will rehearse and perform excerpts from the works of Racine, Marivaux, Musset and Claudel. In doing so, they will focus on love, passion, and desire, as unifying themes in French Theater.
This workshop, open to playwrights, actors, directors, dramaturgs, designers, stage managers, or enthusiastic observers, aims to provide practical and theoretical techniques for collaboration on the development of new plays.
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.
An exploration of theatrical sound design and engineering, this class will explore sound for both theater and music theater. We will investigate text from the point of view of sound, and learn how to communicate the ideas, palette and arc of a design to others. We will explore developing a creative process and turning our ideas into sounds that can be used onstage.
A Viking saga, a mad king, a vengeful husband: these are a few of the characters that we encounter in recent small-scale operas (or 'music-theater' works). They give us a starting point for considering how we tell stories in opera. We will look at the music, the staging and the performance and the ways these elements come together to provide a unified artistic work. Students will be encouraged to respond creatively through writing about the work, or musical composition or developing a particular performance idea. The course will be graded on a final project of the student's choice.
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, as we connect those histories with the practices, structures and events determining the ways diversity is (and is not) a guiding principle of contemporary American theater.
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.
In 2016, Bob Dylan became the second person to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. The first was Bernard Shaw, arguably the first private individual in history to create a global personal brand: GBS was instantly recognizable from Shanghai to New York. In this course, we follow Shaw's career as the creator of Pygmalion, Man and Superman, Major Barbara and St Joan, see and review My Fair Lady on Broadway and explore his use of celebrity to unsettle and challenge his audiences.
The interdisciplinary field of performance studies offers generative strategies for theorizing social life. This course explores the ways performance as a critical theoretical tool and as a practice enables students to examine everyday self-presentation, political economy, gender, race, and sexuality, material culture, ethics, and other social practices.
In this course, we contemplate corpses from Antigone to Alfred Hitchcock and from Shakespeare's tragedies to Stand By Me and Weekend at Bernie's and bring the dead to life.
This course will look at a range of British and American drama from the second half of the twentieth century to the twenty-first, with an emphasis on the developments of the last twenty years.
The musical possesses unique conventions of form and narrative. Focusing primarily on the American musical post-WWII, this course will look at the phenomenon of musical theatre, analyzing musicals both as texts and as performances.
Through original research and creative process, this seminar immerses students in overlapping histories of race, protest, political mobilization and violence in 1960s Trenton and Princeton. Students will contribute to an archive, conduct interviews and make maps, and then use their research to create performance walks on campus and in Trenton. By combining disciplines, the course addresses questions such as: How can we change a place by walking through it with new knowledge? How do the imprints of various, even conflicting histories, impact the built environment? After the semester, students' final project tours will be offered regularly.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, playwrights such as Brecht, Beckett, Churchill and Jacob-Jenkins have written plays that challenged conventional notions of how theater works. This course is a scene study class in which we'll explore a variety of ways to act these plays.
This course explores theories and practices in contemporary theater making, and will be a workshop of ideas for junior theater certificate students in preparation for their final year. 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. We will investigate different approaches to theater making. The course will incorporate practical exercises, seminar discussions and visits to rehearsal at Classic Stage Company in NYC.
This course provides students with a rigorous and challenging experience of creating theater under near-professional circumstances.
Led by Hannah Bos, Oliver Butler, and Paul Thureen, the founding members of acclaimed Brooklyn based theater company The Debate Society, students will collaboratively conceive and develop new theater pieces inspired by their own investigations into the mysteries of death and dying.
This course is centered around the development of a new performative installation by puppeteer Basil Twist entitled ‘Grandma’s Russian Painting’ inspired by childhood memories of an elaborate painting Twist’s grandmother had near her swimming pool in the desert.
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.
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. Weekly laboratory sessions will explore the critical issues of working with black and white imagery today, supported by slide lectures, readings, and discussions of photography as a documentary tool, a political device, an art form. Class critiques of student work are augmented by feedback from guest photographers.
This studio course introduces students to aesthetic and theoretical implications of digital photography.
This course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual 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 and through their engagement in studio design projects.
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.
Through a series of screenings, we will analyze the narrative structure and grammar of films' visuals to spur on an in-depth understanding of story, character, style and theme.
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. While students learn the traditional methods of production, they are also encouraged to range widely in their thinking about how to document daily life. Production of videos will be augmented by screenings and readings.
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 its 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.
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.
New Orleans is decades ahead of any other U.S. city with respect to climate change. The city's culture embodies exuberance and improvisation, and inspires confidence, openness, and collaboration.
This course will examine photography's ongoing negotiation of evolving color technologies.
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? This class will use fairytales, films, games and new media to illustrate universal script principles while creating a rich interdisciplinary lens to explore the innovative intersection of narrative screenwriting, science and technology.
A second level film/video workshop focusing on digital media production.
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 examines ways in which lens-based media can frame the figure within different social, cultural, and emotional landscapes.
This studio course builds on the skills and concepts of the 200-level Graphic Design classes.
This studio course builds on the skills and concepts of the 200-level Graphic Design classes.
This class concentrates on the editing process. Students will re-edit samples from narrative and documentary films and analyze the results. We will also critique ongoing edits of your own thesis films.
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.
This course is centered around the development of a new performative installation by puppeteer Basil Twist entitled ‘Grandma’s Russian Painting’ inspired by childhood memories of an elaborate painting Twist’s grandmother had near her swimming pool in the desert.
This course will focus on the development of a commercial game about climate change, giving students the opportunity to contribute to a piece with broad social impact.