The Department of Performing and Media Arts leads students from all disciplines through artistic and scholarly explorations of live and mediated forms of creativity and expression. Students are challenged to think creatively, critically, and historically about the world around them as they identify and interpret the power of image, sound, gesture, and movement and cultivate their own artistic and academic voices.
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We are excited to welcome you to Cornell or welcome you back! All of us here in Performing and Media Arts (PMA) look forward to helping you find opportunities to make your time in Ithaca more enriching, whether you are a budding performer, a seasoned auteur, an aspiring critic, or just a curious observer. Please use the page linked below as a springboard to the wealth of opportunities available to you in the Schwartz Center:
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PMA Associate Professor Christine Bacareza Balance Interviewed on This Filipino American Life Podcast
PMA Associate Professor Christine Bacareza Balance was interviewed on This Filipino American Life (TFAL) podcast about Here Lies Love, a musical about the life of former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, with concept and music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. The project began as a song cycle, premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2013, and then was staged as a Broadway musical in 2023. It recently had a run at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles where the TFAL podcast hosts are based. Balance has been following the production, since its inception, for her current book project, Making Sense: Poetics, Performance and Philippine Martial Law.
Here Lies Love takes place on a disco dance floor and has been billed as “a transformative experience combining disco beats with adrenaline-fueled choreography.” In the interview, Balance discusses how the theatrical production capitalizes on contemporary immersive theatre practices while drawing from longer musical theatre forms and traditions. This mix of aesthetics, she argues, impacts how the audience relates to the characters and therefore this history.
PMA Professor J. Ellen Gainor to Deliver Conference Paper at University of Toulouse
PMA Professor J. Ellen Gainor will be delivering her paper, "The Echoes of Closing Doors, or, Why is the American Theatre Still Obsessed with Nora Helmer?" at the conference "Of Mutability and Malleability: Reimagining the Contours of US Theatre and Drama" to be hosted by the University of Toulouse in June.
Land Acknowledgement
Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' (the Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign Nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York state, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' dispossession, and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' people, past and present, to these lands and waters.
This land acknowledgment has been reviewed and approved by the traditional Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' leadership.