Two storytellers, working in different mediums, combine their processes and approaches to narrative to meditate on mortality. 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. The course culminates in a theatrical experience that will incorporate projected imagery, art installations, text movement and immersive elements.
Sample reading list:
Haruki Murakami, Tony Takitani
F. Gonzales-Cruss, Lights, Camera, Stillness! Death and the Visual Arts
Franz Liszt, Grief Gondola
Tomas Transtromer, Black Postcards
A.J. Dunning, The Anatomy Lesson
Philip Larkin, Aubade
See instructor for complete list
Reading/Writing assignments:
Students will read and discuss fiction, poetry, essays, and graphic novels around the course topic. They will identify lines of creative inquiry they wish to pursue and present research and create projects based on this material. Students will visit the library at the Museum of Morbid Anatomy in NYC and see the immersive theater performance Then She Fell. Students’ research and creative workshop exercises will culminate in a theatrical narrative around the idea of “Waking the Dead.”
