Courses

"Women don't fit well into a trench coat and slouch hat," Marilyn Stasio has observed, yet female detectives can be found solving crimes and busting bad guys across media. Drawing from TV, film, fiction and theatre, this course explores the ways in which the female detective radically revises the conventions of the crime narrative in which she functions. Interrogating an inherent tension between gender and genre, we'll ask how different media construct female detectives and what gets re-visioned when Miss Marple and Clarice Starling fight violence and restore social order. By engaging with course texts, students will develop strategies for attentive reading and thoughtful writing. Assignments ranging from reviews to research papers will focus on critical thinking, preparation, clear prose, and papers structured around well-supported claims.

Full details for PMA 1104 - FWS: Gender and Crime: The Case of the Female Detective

What would it be like to go through life as a completely different person? In order to expose and combat social injustice, journalists have crossed lines of race, gender, age, class and appearance and gone undercover, sometimes risking their reputations, sanity and even their lives. But what are the results of these experiments? Do the ends justify the sometimes ethically questionable means? How does "going undercover" affect an individual or a community? By examining works of John Howard Griffin, Sarah Jones, Morgan Spurlock, Barbara Ehrenreich, Norah Vincent and a variety of identity-probing texts, we examine the complex facets of diverse identities. The course facilitates a range of writing assignments and culminates in students devising and executing their own undercover journalism and research projects.

Full details for PMA 1130 - FWS: Going Undercover: Radical Undercover Journalism and the (re)creation of Self

Creating documentary theater is a process of falling in love: with stories, with people, with theatrical possibilities. Critically intimate relationships between documentary artists, their community partners, and the stories told are the sustaining force behind the form's painstaking writing process. This course uses the documentary process as a model for the types of inquiry and argumentation required by academic writing. Documentary artists delve deeply into evidence, articulate compelling questions, and grapple with the possibilities those questions engender. Throughout this course, we will work to unearth similar modes of learning through the production of professional and academic writing. Like the artists we study, we will develop individual and collective approaches to writing that nurture and extend our understanding of content.

Full details for PMA 1140 - FWS: Testimonial (In)justice on the Documentary Stage

"We're all born naked and the rest is drag" - RuPaul. This course explores drag as a mode of queer cultural performance. Through a wide range of readings and viewings that introduce a diverse array of drag traditions and aesthetics, we will search for an understanding, even a simple definition, of drag. In so doing, we will explore drag performance as a queer cultural practice, a means of community formation, a potential disruption of gender norms and binaries, and as a radical act of liberation. By engaging in class discussion, practicing a variety of analytic writing styles, and establishing an essay drafting and revising process, students will develop and hone their college writing skills all while investigating drag performance and being absolutely fabulous.

Full details for PMA 1145 - FWS: Socks, Pads, and Other Stuff(ing): Drag Performance

Performance continues to serve as an effective laboratory for shaping and understanding our humanity. It offers itself as an embodied force for generating unique ideas and perspectives for evaluation, intervention and activism in our world. At a time when the reverence for human rights continues to decline in both democracies and autocracies, the recourse to performance to illuminate the sanctity of human rights cannot be overstated. Through an engagement of academic and creative resources (i.e. texts and films), this seminar situates the discourse of rights within the conceptual frameworks of race, class, gender, and performance. This course allows for a wide range of assignments designed to cultivate and deepen the analytical skills of students.

Full details for PMA 1150 - FWS: Performing Rights: Race, Class and Gender

What happens when we represent the scientific experiment onstage? How can we use the scientific method to ignite creative modes of storytelling and critical analysis? In the cross-pollinations between science, theatre, and writing, what magical mutations emerge?

Full details for PMA 1151 - FWS: Spectacular Science: Writing for the Theatre and the Scientific Method

This class will investigate work which demands or encourages interaction between audience and performer, examining various styles of interactive engagement in contemporary performance including Site Specific work, on site-collaboration/improvisation and Choose-your Own-Adventure. Contemporary performance often startles, surprises and instigates much more than a passive viewing from its audience. Immersive Performance, for example, eliminates the physical stage, placing its viewers at the center of the event necessitating a shift in perspective for all present. What would inspire an audience to leave its seats or change positions? What causes discomfort or distraction? What encourages (or demands) interaction? Class readings will include source inspiration material-contextual and video excerpts and performance texts. Students will be encouraged in their writing to examine the overall effectiveness of these pieces. What are the core artistic values and intentions of the work, the company, the author, or the group -who generated the work –how successful are these authors/creators in achieving these goals? Additionally, students will be asked to imagine their own immersive event.

Full details for PMA 1152 - FWS: Immersions & Engagements: Performance and the Evolution of Participation

Entry-level class. Covers the fundamentals of elementary dance training. Movement sequences focusing on rhythm, placement, and vitality of performance through an anatomically sound dance technique.

Full details for PMA 1200 - Dance Technique I

The Media Production Lab course is a series of self-contained lecture/workshops on various topics in the production of film and video. The workshops will be a mix of lecture and hands on experience with cameras, lighting and sound equipment. We will cover specific areas such as dollies and rigging, location sound and post production. Open to all skill levels.

Full details for PMA 1410 - Media Production Laboratory

Learn what it takes to prepare a live show. Students work on getting scenery, costumes, and lighting ready for performance or for production. Gain the practical skills and learn to use the tools that are integral to the presentation of live art.

Full details for PMA 1610 - Production Laboratory

Perform in a departmental theatre production or dance concert. Research a role, develop a character, and perform for a live audience in a faculty supervised production. Explore choreography and perform in a departmental dance concert.

Full details for PMA 1611 - Rehearsal and Performance

Introductory modern technique intended for students with some dance training. Material covered includes specific spinal and center work with attention to rhythm, design, and movement expression.

Full details for PMA 2220 - Dance Technique II/Modern

Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography. Students compose and present short studies that are discussed and reworked. Problems are defined and explored through class improvisations. Informal showing at end of semester. Includes informal showing of work.

Full details for PMA 2300 - Beginning Dance Composition

In this course, we will explore over one hundred years of Japanese cinema – one of the most prominent and diverse global film industries – from silent comedies to J-Horror, "ramen westerns" to Studio Ghibli.  You will gain a thorough grounding in film vocabulary and tools of cinematic analysis, allowing for deep investigations of gender, genre, history, and the connections between film and other media in modern and contemporary Japan.  All films will have English subtitles, and all readings will be available in English; no prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, or culture required.

Full details for PMA 2452 - Introduction to Japanese Film

Intensive consideration of the ways films generate meaning and of the ways we attribute meaning and value to films. Discussion ranges over commercial narrative, art cinema, documentary, and personal film modes.

Full details for PMA 2540 - Introduction to Film Analysis: Meaning and Value

Learn what it means to run a live show. Participate as part of a team to ensure all the elements work together and on time. Learn the intricacies of collaborating with a production group to create a unified artistic vision. Program lighting, sound, or video boards, or participate as a dresser, stage crew member, or assistant stage manager.

Full details for PMA 2610 - Production Crew Laboratory

Practical experience in the organization and management of a theatrical production as an assistant stage manager for a fully supported department production under the supervision of the staff stage manager.

Full details for PMA 2611 - Stage Management Laboratory

An introduction to Asian American performance, this course will consider both historical and contemporary examples and forms through the analytics of Asian American studies, theatre studies, and performance studies. Throughout the semester, we will pay equal attention to various forms of performance — plays and other staged performances, performance art, as well as everyday performances — as well as both primary sources and theoretical/critical readings. Students will be introduced to key concepts of Asian American performance studies, such as Orientalism, yellow face, radicalized accents, and the performing body, and will begin to not only map a history of Asian American performance but also situate contemporary examples within this tradition.

Full details for PMA 2621 - Introduction to Asian American Performance

Opera has been enthralling audiences for 400 years; this course explores the multiple facets of its appeal. Using seven operas as the focus-chosen from different periods, national traditions, and styles-the class will examine the texts that have been turned into operas, the musical conventions that have guided composers (or against which they have worked), and the decisions directors make when they put operas on stage. Each work will be seen as well as heard-either in a special screening or, at least once in the semester, in a live performance. Students who have a strong background in music may wish to also enroll in MUSIC 3901, which involves an extra class-period per week where the music is discussed in greater detail. Permission of the instructor is required for this one-credit addition.

Full details for PMA 2633 - Music as Drama: An Introduction to Opera

This class aims to give students a good historical and critical grounding in Shakespeare's drama and its central place in Renaissance culture. We read ten plays covering the length of Shakespeare's career: comedies, history plays, tragedies, and romances, including The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Othello, King Lear, Richard II, Henry IV Part One, and Henry V. Our study will include attention to dramatic forms, Shakespeare's themes, and social and historical contexts, including early modern English theater history. The course combines lectures and hands-on work in weekly discussions focused on performance, close reading, and questions raised by the plays. We will also view some film adaptations of Shakespeare. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for PMA 2670 - Shakespeare

This course is an introduction to Latina/o/x Performance investigating the historical and contemporary representations of Latina/o/xs in performance and media. Throughout the semester, students will critically examine central themes and issues that inform the experiences and (re) presentations of Latina/o/xs in the United States. How is latinidad performed? In situating the class around "Latina/o/x," as both an umbrella term and an enacted social construction, we will then turn our attention to (re) presentations of latinidad within different genres of cultural expressions.

Full details for PMA 2720 - Introduction to Latina/o/x Performance

An introduction to the actor's technique and performance skills, exploring the elements necessary to begin training as an actor, i.e., observation, concentration, and imagination. Focus is on physical and vocal exercises, improvisation, and text and character. There is required play reading, play attendance, and some scene study.

Full details for PMA 2800 - Introduction to Acting

Independent study allows students the opportunity to pursue special interests not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the course, must approve the student's program of study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

Full details for PMA 3000 - Independent Study

Intermediate Western classical dance technique. Work is done on strengthening the body through a movement technique emphasizing presence and musicality based on harmonic muscular control.

Full details for PMA 3210 - Dance Technique III/Classical

Pan-African Drum and Dance Ensemble is an introductory performance course where students learn performance traditions from across West Africa. No prior experience is necessary. Students may choose to focus on drumming or dancing.

Full details for PMA 3212 - Pan-African Drum and Dance Ensemble

Intermediate modern technique focusing on rhythm, placement, and phrasing for students who are prepared to refine the skills of dancing. Students are challenged by complex phrases and musicality.

Full details for PMA 3220 - Dance Technique III/Modern

This course will explore questions of how we perceive articulations of identity on the moving body. How do histories and cultural behaviors define differences? What are the conventions of race, gender, and sexuality as we follow the body in performance across borders? With the use of text, film, and the fine arts, the class will in collaboration conceive, choreograph, and perform an original body of work.

Full details for PMA 3225 - Mapping the Moving Body I

How does the social production of dance reflect its historical context? Is dance inherently political?  What is the meaning of the "beautiful" in dance?  Beginning with 16th century court dances, we will explore how aesthetics have been aligned both with and against politics in various periods, across borders, and genres of the performing body, looking at dance as insider's diplomacy and outsider's rebellion.  Is modern dance a democratization of the art form? Is postmodern dance a discourse of traditions?  This course is designed to promote a critical appreciation of dance, its values and its ambitions, by developing a historical and cultural understanding.

Full details for PMA 3226 - Global Dance I

Intermediate choreographic projects are critiqued in progress by faculty and peers. Consideration of design problems in costuming and lighting.  Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography. Students compose and present short studies that are discussed and reworked. Problems are defined and explored through class improvisations. Informal showing at end of semester. Includes informal showing of work.

Full details for PMA 3300 - Intermediate Dance Composition I

This course will cultivate collaborations between the practice and study of dance with fields such as architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, painting, digital arts, and other design and creative fields. The process of movement creation, spatial definition, and spatial analyses will be paralleled and interchanges will be made on a continual basis between chosen fields for each semester. Transposing between two, three, and four dimensional representations, concepts of framing, language (vocabulary), historical processes, concepts of performance and performativity, and concepts of audience are some of the topics that will be examined.

Full details for PMA 3351 - Transpositioning the Body I

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called "city films," combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces.  Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of "knowing" a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures.  This course will be offered in English and is open to all students.  The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.  Films will be shown outside of regular class meeting times, in the original languages with English subtitles.

Full details for PMA 3485 - Cinematic Cities

This course will consider the history, theory and craft of feature film screenwriting. We will examine the vital elements of effective motion picture narrative (protagonist, pathos, objective, action), along with structural principles, genre conventions and emerging non-linear ideas. This is primarily a readings course (history/theory/criticism rubric), which will address effective screenwriting in a cultural and critical context.

Full details for PMA 3533 - Screen and Story: Script Analysis

Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history. Global Cinema I covers the period from 1895 to 1960. Precise topics will vary from year to year, but may include: early silent cinema; the emergence of Hollywood as industry and a "classical" narrative form; Soviet, German, French and Chinese film cultures; the coming of sound; interwar documentary and avant-garde movements; American cinema in the age of the studio system; Italian Neorealism; the post-war avant-garde.

Full details for PMA 3550 - Global Cinema I

An introduction to filmmaking, students will learn to create compelling characters, as well as develop strong storytelling skills through basic character and story development and breakdown, cinematography, lighting, sound and editing. Over the course of the semester, students will deconstruct and analyze visual culture in an effort to learn effective techniques in visual storytelling. Students will write, shoot and edit a series of dramatic narrative exercises, participating in the preproduction to post production processes. Students will collaborate and rotate through various roles. The course will culminate with the screening of the various course projects, in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester. 

Full details for PMA 3570 - Introduction to Visual Storytelling

This is a variable credit learning experience for students engaged in creating productions in the Department of Performing and Media Arts.  Students may act, assistant direct, assistant stage manage, or pursue dramaturgical research and will learn through various channels (lecture, discussion, participation in rehearsal, individual and group research) how to think about and realize artistic choices, appreciate the discipline and demands of theatrical craft, be exposed to the uncertainty required to experiment and explore in rehearsal, and understand more fully the strategies through which a collaborative team can realize a shared vision.  Assessment of this course will include audience response to a public performance that will be the end product of this creative collaboration. This complex, pedagogical journey will be guided by an experienced, faculty director/teacher who will be responsible for creating a process of production that assures learning for each student enrolled.   

Full details for PMA 3609 - Making Theatre: Rehearsal and Production Techniques

Collaborate with a faculty member in the development and production of a live event, in a mentored role of Assistant Designer, Assistant Director, or Assistant Choreographer.

Full details for PMA 3610 - Intermediate Production Laboratory

A studio course working on the creation and development of characters on paper. The character designs explored will not be bound by the limits of the human body or physical costumes, but rather will push the limits of character imagery to that which could ultimately be achieved in print illustration, sequential art, traditional animation, digital special effects and animation, video gaming, various forms of puppetry and animatronic forms, depending on the student's area of interest. (Students will not engage in animation, or three-dimensional crafting of characters, but rather will develop the design content that could then be applied to these forms). Confident drawing skill is expected.

Full details for PMA 3614 - Creative Character Design

This course explores the evolution of western dress from the time of the ancient Egyptians to the early twentieth century by focusing on areas of the human anatomy and how each area has been presented, comported, supported, augmented, confined, or manipulated in costume.  Rather than indulging in the strange, we will endeavor to come to an understanding of the motivation for each gesture or the catalyst for each phenomenon in the context of the period, taking into consideration social, political, economic, environmental, technological, and aesthetic influences.

Full details for PMA 3616 - The Body of Fashion: A Head-to-Toe Journey through the History of Western Dress

The theory and practice of lighting design as a medium for artistic expression. This course explores the aesthetic and mechanical aspects of light and their application in a variety of disciplines. Emphasis is on understanding lighting's function in an environment and manipulating light effectively. Artistic style and viewpoint are also covered.

Full details for PMA 3620 - Lighting Design Studio I

Full details for PMA 3621 - Image Design Studio

Covering the basics of digital audio, bioacoustics, psychoacoustics and sound design, as they apply to theatre, film and music production.  Students create soundscapes for text and moving image using ProTools software.

Full details for PMA 3680 - Sound Design

"Sitcom Jews" uses close media analysis, theoretical discussion, and student performances or media projects to examine the representation of Jews on television and on the Broadway stage from 1948-2017. We'll ask whether study of performed Jewish identity can serve as a locus for discussion of cultural representation at large, including African American, Latinx, Asian American and LGBT communities on screen and onstage. Starting with classic sitcoms ("The Goldbergs" (1948), "All in the Family", and "Bridget Loves Bernie"), and continuing through current Jewish TV shows ("The Marvelous Ms. Maisel", "Transparent", "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), as well as major theater landmarks ("Fiddler on the Roof", "Cabaret", "Bad Jews", "Indecent"), we will compare these constructed media images to concurrent political, historical and cultural trends.

Full details for PMA 3711 - Sitcom Jews: Ethnic Representation on Television and on Stage

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of historical, cross-cultural, and transnational performance texts, theories, and practices; to motivate students to examine the broad social, political, cultural, and economic contexts in which performances take place; and to familiarize students with the major methodologies and paradigms for the creation, spectatorship, and interpretation of embodied performances. Our investigations of these issues will be routed through three organizing concepts: ritual, realism, and revolution.

Full details for PMA 3750 - Global Stages I

In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre.

Full details for PMA 3754 - Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of the Performance

Practical exploration of the actor's craft through exercises in physical and psychological action, improvisation and scene study.

Full details for PMA 3800 - Acting II

In this introductory class, students will study elements of successful dramatic writing: strong structure, effective dialogue, and imaginative theatricality. Students will craft and revise short plays, in addition to drafting several short assignments and one analytical paper. Readings include full-length and 10-minute plays. Through giving and receiving constructive feedback, each writer will aim to take their work to new levels of complexity, theatricality, and meaning.

Full details for PMA 3805 - Playwriting I

Telling jokes to a friend, making introductions, guiding meetings large and small, constructing and delivering business presentations, legal arguments or formal speeches are all examples of public performances.  The purpose of this course is to increase the student's effectiveness in meeting the demands and enjoying the opportunities of public performance.  The focus of this course is on the student as presenter on any subject, in any place, to any audience. What are the hallmarks of effective performance and how can you learn them? Employing techniques from actor/director training as well as dramatic writing, this course focuses the student on their own resources and self-imposed restrictions as a public speaker in everyday life. Subjects explored will include stage presence, audience connection, stage fright and mannerisms, speech making as storytelling, and gaining familiarity and finding comfort with one's own voice and gestures.  Public speaking will be taught as a craft that can be learned through understanding and practice.  Acting skill and experience are not required to take this course.   Students must, however, be willing to attend all classes and learn by doing.  Class size limited to 12 students.

Full details for PMA 3815 - Acting in Public: Performance in Everyday Life

This course is designed to explore the evolution and performance of material from nonscripted texts and focus on the performance of those texts by the solo performer. Material may be drawn from newspapers, novels, poetry, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, and interviews.

Full details for PMA 3860 - Solo Performance

Focused, practical exercises teach the student fundamental staging techniques that bring written text to theatrical life. A core objective is to increase the student's awareness of why and how certain stage events communicate effectively to an audience. Each student directs a number of exercises as well as a short scene.

Full details for PMA 3880 - Fundamentals of Directing I

In this advanced undergraduate-level seminar, all senior majors synthesize four years of study in a collaborative intellectual and artistic project with the faculty. Over the course of the fall semester, students conceive and produce work for presentation to the public in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Students also generate a supporting scholarly matrix for that work, and their collective genesis of material integrates the major's four rubrics (history, theory, and criticism; creative authorship; design; and embodied performance). As a crucible for artistic and intellectual collaboration, the senior studio may emphasize an area of study, a period, a text, or a theme. The studio's organizing emphasis will be specific to ongoing, pressing inquiries in the disciplines of performing and media arts.

Full details for PMA 4000 - Senior Studio

Advanced and pre-professional advanced ballet and modern technique. This class meets 4 days per week. This course is a combination of PMA 3210 and PMA 3220 in the same semester.  Attendance to concerts and related presentations, and short critical analysis of those events are required.

Full details for PMA 4222 - Advanced Dance Technique

This course will continue the critical inquiry investigated in Mapping the Moving Body. Intended for advanced students, it will address the dialogue between contemporary choreography and current sociopolitical theory. The class will choose to study one choreographer or theorist whose negotiations across critical boundaries of the global, postmodern space will afford a framework for the making of an original, collaborative work.

Full details for PMA 4225 - Mapping the Moving Body II

Pre-professional/Advanced ballet or modern technique with modern and contemporary ballet company repertory rehearsal and performances. This class meets 2 days per week, 3 hrs. 10 minutes per day with additionally scheduled rehearsal and performance times TBA. This course is a continuation of, and supplement to, PMA 3210 and PMA 3220.

Full details for PMA 4230 - Pre-Professional Technique & Repertory

Students work on advanced choreographic problems, to be presented in performance. Work in progress is critiqued by faculty members on a regular basis.

Full details for PMA 4300 - Advanced Dance Composition I

Continuation of PMA 4300. Intermediate choreographic projects are critiqued in progress by faculty and peers. Consideration of design problems in costuming and lighting.  Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography. Students compose and present short studies that are discussed and reworked. Problems are defined and explored through class improvisations. Informal showing at end of semester. Includes informal showing of work.

Full details for PMA 4301 - Advanced Dance Composition II

This course continues the work done in PMA 3351. At an advanced level, this course will further explore the choreographic and design principles of contemporary choreographer, William Forsythe, who began his tenure as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large in 2010. The course will begin by using tools developed by Forsythe in his CD ROM, Improvisation Technologies and will continue to be structured through student and faculty consultation. The long term goal is to establish curriculum that can continue to develop new performance and installation work based on Forsythe's philosophies in his various fields of interests and how they relate to concert dance. Collaborations between fields such as dance, architecture, engineering and other design fields will be cultivated.

Full details for PMA 4351 - Transpositioning the Body II

Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writings from feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films will be drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Full details for PMA 4451 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema

The course will treat various aspects of Indian film, with focal topics to vary from year to year.  These topics will include religion in Indian film, Indian art films, and the golden age of Indian film.  All topics will be discussed in relation to the conventions of mainstream Bollywood cinema and their social and cultural significance.  Each week a film must be viewed to prepare for class discussion; screenings will be arranged as appropriate. No knowledge of an Indian language is needed.

Full details for PMA 4536 - Topics in Indian Film

A continuation of PMA 3570, Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will dive deeper into creating story driven short form narratives. Students will have the opportunity to develop and produce a short film over the course of the semester. The expectation is the follow through of the filmmaking process, from story development, preproduction, production, post production and distribution. Students are expected to collaborate heavily and crew on each other's film productions, in various roles. Final film projects will be screened in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

Full details for PMA 4585 - Advanced Film and Video Projects

A studio practicum that is the culmination of several semesters of coursework in choreography and design, this course is the student's preparation for an end of semester public presentation of an original experimental creative work focusing on the moving body. The student must exhibit strong competency in dance technique and show promise in choreography and group organizational skills to be accepted into the course.

Full details for PMA 4607 - Advanced Undergraduate Practice as Research in Dance

AUPR in Design is a capstone experience in practice as research. Student take a leadership role as a designer, working with faculty as peers on a fully supported departmental production. After taking courses in an appropriate design sequence, in consultation with a faculty mentor, gathering experience on production both in and outside the department, and exhibiting the necessary ability and drive, students may be invited to this program by the faculty mentor in their area of concentration.

Full details for PMA 4608 - Advanced Undergraduate Practice as Research in Design

The purpose of this course is to give interested and able undergraduate students the ability to gain skill and experience in the practice and art of directing.  To be considered for the AUPR-Directing, a student must first complete or be in the process of completing a series of demanding courses and experiences to assure that the student is ready to undertake the direction of a fully supported, PMA theatre production in the Schwartz Center.

Full details for PMA 4609 - Advanced Undergraduate Practice as Research in Directing

The most studied and written about work in Western Literature outside the Bible, Hamlet according to Harold Bloom, is our secular savior and our ambassador to death.  This course centers on a close reading of the play.  Through research and assigned readings the course tests theoretical viewpoints about the play against the text itself by reading the theory in relationship to the production history.

Full details for PMA 4670 - Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Seminar

This class focuses on advanced challenges for the stage presented by particular authors or plays that have a particular stylistic or structural demand. Focuses on advanced challenges for the stage. Monologues and scenes are drawn from Shakespeare and classical sources.

Full details for PMA 4800 - Advanced Scene Study

Class members can expect to expand their skills using targeted approaches and methodologies of the instructors' choosing to develop scripted and/or original material for in-class study and presentation.

Full details for PMA 4801 - Advanced Studies in Acting Techniques

What does it mean to be-or to become-animated? How have thinkers ranging from ancient and modern philosophers to contemporary critical theorists conceptualized animated-ness as essence, feeling, form, or intensity? What relationship(s) between bios and zoe may be understood through the analytic of animation? And how does animation clarify-or render less legible-distinctions among subjects, objects, and things? Answering these and related questions about reanimation, hyper-animation, inter(in)animation, and the uncanny, we also test theoretical ideas about states of animation against a number of performance and media practices. Authors include Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Freud, Hansen, Kleist, Moten, Ngai, Schneider, and Sobchack. Art objects under investigation cross platforms and genres and span a gamut from premodern puppet theatre to The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Disney's Snow White to Pixar's WALL-E.

Full details for PMA 4841 - States of Animation

First of a two-semester sequence (the second is PMA 4951) for seniors engaged in an honors project.  Honor guidelines and form.

Full details for PMA 4950 - Honors Research Tutorial I

Second of a two-semester sequence (the first is PMA 4950) for students engaged in an honors project.

Full details for PMA 4951 - Honors Research Tutorial II

Academic credit can only be awarded for unpaid internships. Students must submit an Application for Academic Credit by April 15. The Application for Academic Credit must be received/approved prior to the start of the internship. If the internship opportunity is deemed eligible for academic credit, the student pursues the internship during the summer months and enrolls in this course the fall semester immediately following the summer internship. A written evaluation of the internship experience is required. Find complete information and application forms on the department website.

Full details for PMA 4952 - Undergraduate Internship

This seminar investigates the productive relationship that ties literary criticism to media studies in the North-American and European humanities—for the latter we will especially focus on the German-language context. We will trace the exchange that in recent decades has drawn on literature as a heuristic point of reference for appraising the rhetorical performativity and ideological effects of communication in both analog and digital media. In so doing we will develop a cross-disciplinary framework for examining the evolving relation between literary practices, technological developments, and conceptions of media within significant historical junctures and by drawing on influential methodological paradigms. Topics include reading and writing as cultural techniques and as spatialized processing of text/image dynamics; literary practice, materiality, and embodiment; Critical Theory and the digital humanities.

Full details for PMA 6481 - Literature, Media, Form

Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history. Global Cinema I covers the period from 1895 to 1960. Precise topics will vary from year to year, but may include: early silent cinema; the emergence of Hollywood as industry and a "classical" narrative form; Soviet, German, French and Chinese film cultures; the coming of sound; interwar documentary and avant-garde movements; American cinema in the age of the studio system; Italian Neorealism; the post-war avant-garde.

Full details for PMA 6550 - Global Cinema I

An introduction to the theory and methods involved in the study of the theatre. Attention focuses on pedagogy and the profession in Part I. Part II explores current scholarly trends.

Full details for PMA 6600 - Proseminar in Theatre Studies

What does it mean to be-or to become-animated? How have thinkers ranging from ancient and modern philosophers to contemporary critical theorists conceptualized animated-ness as essence, feeling, form, or intensity? What relationship(s) between bios and zoe may be understood through the analytic of animation? And how does animation clarify-or render less legible-distinctions among subjects, objects, and things? Answering these and related questions about reanimation, hyper-animation, inter(in)animation, and the uncanny, we also test theoretical ideas about states of animation against a number of performance and media practices. Authors include Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Freud, Hansen, Kleist, Moten, Ngai, Schneider, and Sobchack. Art objects under investigation cross platforms and genres and span a gamut from premodern puppet theatre to The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Disney's Snow White to Pixar's WALL-E.

Full details for PMA 6841 - States of Animation

Independent study in theatre allows graduate students the opportunity to pursue special interests not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the course, must approve the student's program of study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

Full details for PMA 7000 - Independent Study for Graduate Students in Theatre

Provides graduate students in the field of Performing and Media Arts an opportunity to work directly with a faculty member to explore pedagogical theory and practice for undergraduate theatre classes in all areas of the curriculum.

Full details for PMA 7100 - The Pedagogy of Theatre

Graduate student course while working on thesis and research for dissertation.

Full details for PMA 9900 - Thesis and Research Projects