Category: Archive courses

For more than two centuries, the courts of Europe deployed lavishly staged events to perform, promote, celebrate and maintain their status. These displays employed the finest artists of many mediums–architects, poets, musicians, choreographers, painters, machinists–and played across Europe until aristocracy itself came to its violent closure at the end of the 18th century. No site has left richer and more abundant records of their performances than the baroque, yet since the fall of the ancien regime, and the subsequent tradition of marxist historiography that celebrated the demise of Aristocracy, the baroque has not faired well throughout the 20th century. As the most overly remembered neglected period, the baroque may provide the perfect concentrated site for a return to visibility, for new critical investigation, for reading and troubling the production of power.
This inter-disciplinary course invites treatments of the period through a host of multiple art forms, as, indeed, was practiced in the period itself.

Investigates and practices ways of teaching and creating dance suitable for diverse participants with a broad range of physical and conceptual abilities. Addresses the history, background and varying practices of integrated dance.

This seminar is designed to introduce the theatre scholar to the practice of local reading through the detailed exploration of one period loosely referred to as the Long Eighteenth Century.  It embraces a sweep of English and Anglophone print and performance culture from the Restoration to the close of the 18th century, emanating from London as the cultural center and spreading out across the transatlantic web of empire. We consider how performance (in its broadest sense) functioned in forging citizenship, making British bodies, London manners, and empire-building across this geography:  from the Anglophone provincial circuit, including Dublin, Edinburgh, the Caribbean and colonial America, to India.  
The course offers a working introduction to the practice of situating theatre and performance within a precise, complex social and political landscape of the period and how this landscape was represented in–and occasionally shaped by–the playhouse. Using primary resources of the period, an overview of the historiography and iconography, representative plays, biographies, contemporary criticism and seminal scholarship, we will explore the tense/dense relationship between the theatre and the culture at large.

Historiography as a mode of inquiry reflects a way of thinking about dance that draws one to understand and explain the past. The historian asks questions about the events, art works, and personalities that shaped dance in the past. Historical inquiry seeks to create a meaningful interpretation of what happened, an in some cases, why it happened and how it relates to who and what we are today. Penelope Hanstein, Reseaching Dance (p42)
This course spans topics in Western theatre dance history from Renaissance court dance through the 20th century. This quarter we will focus on developments and stylistic trends in ballet with attention to the cultural, historical, and political circumstances that helped to shape the works under review. Assigned reading, and viewing, and in-depth analyses of dances will guide a discussion of form, content, interpretation, and critical reception. This is a writing/research-intensive course.

“There are certain areas of scholarship, early Greek history is one. . . where the scantiness of the evidence sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules.” – Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
Description:
This seminar is an excavation into the sites of memory of Greek and Roman antiquity. As such it aspires to acquaint the scholar of this period with the ‘excavations’ of theatre culture of Attic and Hellenistic Greece, the Republican and Imperial Rome, and late antiquity, through its surviving artifacts, narratives, and its erasures. The objective of the course is to return to and re-encounter an overly constructed period through its basic primary sources (archeologic, textual, architectural, iconographic), with all their uncertainties, ancient and modern, in the attempt to consider the totality of a culture that has survived largely through its ruins and its fragments. Among the texts we will consider are plays and fragments of plays, forensic speeches, satires, travelogues, monuments, and architecture. The questions that propel the course are those of memory: how antiquity has been remembered, what are the marks of that memory, and what are the marks of memory’s! erasure. To this end, a basic acquaintance of the plays, playwrights, and critical texts of the period is imperative.

Examines the development of social and performance-based dance from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present with particular emphasis on major international stylistic trends, cultural influences, and principal artists and their work.

For more than two centuries, the courts of Europe deployed lavishly staged events to perform, promote, celebrate and maintain their status. These displays employed the finest artists of many mediums–architects, poets, musicians, choreographers, painters, machinists–and played across Europe until aristocracy itself came to its violent closure at the end of the 18th century. No site has left richer and more abundant records of their performances than the baroque, yet since the fall of the ancien regime, and the subsequent tradition of marxist historiography that celebrated the demise of Aristocracy, the baroque has not faired well throughout the 20th century. As the most overly remembered neglected period, the Baroque may provide the perfect site for reading the troubled aesthetics of state power, then and now.

This inter-disciplinary course invites treatments of the period through a host of multiple art forms, as, indeed, was practiced in the period itself.

Theoretical and practical experience in dance and performance ethnography, ethnology, and oral history. Introduces theories and methods of ethnographic fieldwork, ethnographic writing, and ethnologic analysis. Focuses on dance methods and theories. Also discusses methods and theories applicable to other physical practices such as music, theatre, sports, and performance art.

In this course, we will examine how American identity and culture was disseminated, constructed, and contested through popular theatre and performance forms in the nineteenth century. Topics include melodrama, circuses, world’s fairs, wild west shows, Vaudeville, and other emerging practices. Students will present on case studies of their own choosing, and compose a 10-page final research paper.
By the end of the course, students will have
1. a basic comprehensive knowledge of some of the major popular performance forms in the United States in the nineteenth century and the foundational scholarship associated with these forms;
2. a knowledge of several recent theories and methodologies of performance and historiography to apply to these forms for deeper understanding; and
3. a knowledge of the ways in which meaning is produced, disseminated, and contested through both textual and performative discourses vis-à-vis the cultures of nineteenth-century United States.

“There are certain areas of scholarship, early Greek history is one. . . where the scantiness of the evidence sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules.” – Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
Description:
This seminar is an excavation into the sites of memory of Greek and Roman antiquity. As such it aspires to acquaint the scholar of this period with the ‘excavations’ of theatre culture of Attic and Hellenistic Greece, the Republican and Imperial Rome, and late antiquity, through its surviving artifacts, narratives, and its erasures. The objective of the course is to return to and re-encounter an overly constructed period through its basic primary sources (archeologic, textual, architectural, iconographic), with all their uncertainties, ancient and modern, in the attempt to consider the totality of a culture that has survived largely through its ruins and its fragments. Among the texts we will consider are plays and fragments of plays, forensic speeches, satires, travelogues, monuments, and architecture. The questions that propel the course are those of memory: how antiquity has been remembered, what are the marks of that memory, and what are the marks of memory’s! erasure. To this end, a basic acquaintance of the plays, playwrights, and critical texts of the period is imperative.