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

Ours is a food-obsessed culture.  Whether we focus on diet and health, or binge-watch competitive cooking shows, or explore cuisine in relation to regional, racial, or ethnic identity, many of us either "eat to live" or "live to eat."  Television producers, investigative journalists, bloggers, and cultural critics feed our obsession, generating a burgeoning body of food-related prose and programming both informative and entertaining.  Through readings from Gourmet and Eating Well magazines, screenings of Beat Bobby Flay and The Great British Baking Show, and airings of Samin Nosrat's Home Cooking, among others, we will examine together how food suffuses our media and constitutes our Food Nation. Assignments will include food memoirs, food histories, food podcasts, food criticism, and food reporting.

Full details for PMA 1161 - FWS: Food and the Media

You're tired. I'm tired. We're all tired. Wait, is there a problem? In the 1970s feminists argued "the personal is political" – if we all suffer the same, problems can't be merely personal. We will view work and wellness through an intersectional lens, questioning how gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class affect our experiences of effort, emotion and eroticism. We will read authors like Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ursula Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Virginia Woolf, exploring diverse modes of address: memoir and essay, poetry and fiction, posts and podcasts. Coursework will develop key feminist writing skills:curiosity, contextualization, criticism, communication. Students will find their authorial voices through personal essays, political manifestos, and cultural criticism, culminating in a self-directed work of research or creativity.

Full details for PMA 1162 - FWS: Burnout Feminism: The Politics of Writing, Work and Wellness

What is the relationship between technology and power? If technology is political, how can we decode its meanings? This course invites students to examine how race, gender, class and technologies shape and reshape one another. We will think technology broadly - as race and sexuality - and concretely - as machinery, cables, code, and medicine. Students will gain an understanding of the intimate relationships between media, technology, ideology, and political economy through close readings of, and creative, analytical writings on, the many tools that we interact with daily. We will read work from Black feminism, queer theory, materialism, technology and media studies. Authors may include Angela Davis, Gayle Rubin, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Ruha Benjamin, and Frantz Fanon.

Full details for PMA 1163 - FWS: Decoding Race, Gender, and Class in Technology

Why tell the same story in a new way? More than half of all the shows nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical are adaptations. From Hamilton and Hadestown to The Wizard of Oz and West Side Story, playwrights and composers have been recreating pre-existing plots for the all-singing, all-dancing stage for generations. How do adaptations reinvigorate stories for new audiences in an ever-changing society? How do they intersect and impact understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and politics? Students will watch various musical theatre adaptations and compare them alongside source materials including fiction, film, comics, biography and more. Through writing performance reviews, analytic essays, and imagining an original musical theatre adaptation, students will become triple threats in critical thinking, argumentation, and literary style.

Full details for PMA 1164 - FWS: Page to Stage to Kick-Ball-Change: Adapting Musical Theatre

Recently, walls and other boundaries have played critical rolls in the symbols and substance of social and political movements—Black Lives Matter protesters confronting rows of police shields, the violation of bodily autonomy at the heart of the #MeToo movement, and chants of "build the wall" at right-wing political rallies—are but a few examples. Walls, or the lack thereof, are also an important feature and symbol in theatrical production. The "fourth wall" in theatre—referring to the imaginary boundary between actors and audience—is most noteworthy for its absence. Together, over the span of the semester, we will explore the use of walls and other barriers, both physical and figurative, in plays and performance. Through careful reading of scripts, attentive viewing of live and mediated performances, active discussion, and critically engaged writing, we will consider how theatre uses walls to highlight, question, and perhaps even disrupt regional, cultural, political, and social division.

Full details for PMA 1165 - FWS: Fourth Walls: Barriers, Boundaries, and Borders in Performance

The theater industry has a problem. Despite the advancements made by feminist activists in the last century, data shows that female, trans, and non-binary playwrights, directors, and designers remain woefully underrepresented in the field. Those studies expose an even more dire situation for artists of color. What are feminist theater-makers doing to make the industry more inclusive, equitable, and accessible? How are industry norms and mainstream theatre critics impeding their efforts? This course engages with these questions through the analysis of feminist plays, theater criticism, and scholarship. It introduces students to key concepts in intersectional feminism, while also fostering students' personal writing practices. Through weekly writing assignments, in-class discussions, and collaborative writing workshops students will learn to analyze texts and produce cogent, persuasive prose.

Full details for PMA 1166 - FWS: Feminist Theater in the 21st Century

The Media Production Lab course is a series of self-contained lecture/workshops on various topics in the production of film and video on-set and on-location. The workshops will be hands on experience with cameras, lighting and sound equipment, exploring the technique of cinematography as well as, lighting, sound, and grip techniques for the studio and in the field. We will cover specific areas such as dollies and rigging, location sound, and production protocol.  Open to all skill levels.

Full details for PMA 1410 - Media Production Laboratory

This technology lab will provide students with a foundation of the production process through experiential learning of scenographic practices. Students will learn about the technical production processes as they pertain too: scenery fabrication and installation, properties fabrication, costume fabrication, and lighting installation (primarily lighting for live performance).

Full details for PMA 1610 - Production Technology 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

What makes us laugh, and what doesn't? How does laughter vary from person to person, place to place, and across time? What work does laughter perform? Is it contagious? What does it mean to have (or lack) a sense of humor? What is laughter's relationship to pleasure and pain, health and wellness? In this course, we will experiment with the art of "making funny." Students will explore the science and psychology of humor, construct laughter through language and the body, analyze jokes (to learn how to tell them), and investigate the role of humor in a democratic society.

Full details for PMA 1700 - Laughter

The Colloquium provides opportunities for exchange, reflection, discussion of relevant concepts, and extended engagement with the media objects made in a variety of Making Media courses.

Full details for PMA 2000 - Media Studies Minor Colloquium

The training and practice of skills for the spontaneous collaborative composition of movement performance. Students hone their abilities to invent and respond to each other and their environment to produce dances that engage their audience. This course coaxes inspiration, seeking to make it reliable and to keep it surprising. It offers the possibility of "training" one's movement instincts to respond relevantly and with spontaneity.

Full details for PMA 2280 - Dance Improvisation

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

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

This lab will give students practical experience as an assistant stage manager in the organization and management of a theatrical or mediated production; in rehearsals, in technical rehearsals as the scenographic elements are implemented, and in performance or filming for a fully supported department production under the supervision of the staff stage manager.  The course can only be applied to a fully supported department production with a full rehearsal period and performance.

Full details for PMA 2611 - Stage Management Laboratory

This course aims to give students a good historical and critical grounding in Shakespeare's drama and its central and continuing place in Renaissance culture and beyond. We will read poetry and primarily plays representing the shape of Shakespeare's career as it moves through comedies, histories, tragedies, and a romance.  Specific plays include The Two Gentleman of Verona, Richard II, Henry IV (Part 1), Henry V, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth and The Tempest. We will focus on dramatic forms (genres), Shakespeare's themes, and social and historical contexts. The course combines lectures and hands-on work in weekly discussions.  While we will view some scenes from film adaptations, the main focus is on careful close interaction with the language of the plays. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for PMA 2670 - Shakespeare

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

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

This course explores the rich and diverse history of African American filmmaking.  Focusing on films written and/or directed by African Americans, this seminar traces the history of filmmaking from the silent era to the present day.  In exploring Black cultural production and creative expression, students will consider the ways in which film is used as a medium of protest, resistance, and cultural affirmation.  We will look at films through the critical lenses of race and representation in American cinema while locating our analysis within larger frameworks of Hollywood's representation of African Americans and various cultural and social movements within local and global contexts.

Full details for PMA 3461 - Introduction to African American Cinema

An introduction (without prerequisites) to fundamental problems of current political theory, filmmaking, and film analysis, along with their interrelationship.  Particular emphasis on comparing and contrasting European and alternative cinema with Hollywood in terms of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodernist, and postcolonial types of interpretation.  Filmmakers/theorists might include: David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Kathryn Bigelow, Gilles Deleuze, Rainer Fassbinder, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Marleen Gorris, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen & Albert Hughes, Stanley Kubrick, Fredric Jameson, Chris Marker, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Robert Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, George Romero, Steven Shaviro, Kidlat Tahimik, Maurizio Viano, Slavoj Zizek.  Although this is a lecture course, there will be ample time for class discussions.

Full details for PMA 3490 - Political Theory and Cinema

From White Chicks to Blackkklansman, American film has often depicted characters who conceal their race or gender, like black male cops "passing" as wealthy white women. This class will examine how Hollywood has depicted race and gender "passing" from the early 20th century to the present. While tracing common themes across films, we will also study the ideological role of passing films: how they thrill audiences by challenging social boundaries and hierarchies, only to reestablish familiar boundaries by the end. We will not treat these films as accurate depictions of real-world passing, but rather as cultural tools that help audiences to manage ideological contradictions about race, gender, sexuality, and class. Students will finish the course by creating their own short films about passing.

Full details for PMA 3507 - Hidden Identities Onscreen

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

Full details for PMA 3510 - Documentary Production Fundamentals

This course explores the fundamentals of writing for the screen. The class format will include creative writing assignments, class discussion, screenings and workshop. Students will produce short film scripts, film analysis papers and feedback on student work. The semester will culminate in a revision of a longer film script and presentation.

Full details for PMA 3531 - Screenwriting

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 - Film and Video Production I

This experiential learning class offers performance opportunities in the Department of Performing and Media Arts.  Students selected for 3609 projects will learn how to think about and realize artistic choices, appreciate the discipline and demands of performance craft, be exposed to the uncertainty required to experiment and explore in rehearsal, and understand more fully the strategies of artistic collaboration. Students will be assessed on their participation in the collaboration process, their ability to reflect upon and articulate their role and growth in that process, and their contribution to public performance. Students must commit to a minimum schedule of 5-6 weeks of rehearsal and 2 weeks of live public performance.

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

Based on previous coursework and experience, students may be offered the opportunity to participate as an apprentice in a mentored PMA creative project.  The apprentice experience and number of credits will be defined by the needs of the project, the area of study, and the mentor.  Apprentice roles may include Assistant Director, Assistant Designer, Assistant Choreographer, Dramaturg, or others, as determined by the mentor.  Successful completion of this course is necessary for application to the AUPR program.

Full details for PMA 3610 - Creative Apprenticeship

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 Scenic and Lighting designers are responsible for creating 'the visual world' of the play. From sketches to models, from groundplans to light plots, this intro-level hands-on, project-based course introduces students to the scenic and lighting design processes through text analysis, visual research, beginning drafting practices, model building, light laboratories and beyond. Intended to provide a foundation in scenic and lighting design practices, the teachings of this course will have future applications in all performance disciplines including Theatre, Dance, Film, and Television.

Full details for PMA 3630 - Scenic and Lighting Design for Performance Studio I

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 Performance

Explores major American playwrights from 1900 to 1960, introducing students to American theatre as a significant part of modern American cultural history. We will consider the ways in which theatre has contributed to the construction and deconstruction of a national identity. Similarly, we will examine the influence of the American Theatre on and in film. We will pay special attention to the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of the time period and discuss the shifting popularity of dramatic forms, including melodrama, realism, expressionism, absurdism, and the folk play, in the American theatre canon. Authors include O'Neill, Glaspell, Odets, Rice, Hellman, Hughes, Miller, Williams, and Albee, among others.

Full details for PMA 3757 - American Drama and Theatre

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

This course introduces students to public speaking as a pragmatic endeavor, through tools and types both historical and contemporary. Students will focus on analyzing speech contexts and developing presentational techniques, paired with practical exercises and critical analysis. Students will learn to: harness physical presence, develop vocal production & range, facilitate effective eye contact and gesture in order to present themselves and their material clearly, confidently, and persuasively. Investigating a variety of public speaking modes and situations, this course is designed as a practicum in public speaking skill-sets.

Full details for PMA 3814 - Public Speaking: Contexts, Techniques and Analysis

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 and 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 in 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 are 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

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 - Film and Video Production II

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

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

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 introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

Full details for PMA 6510 - Documentary Production Fundamentals

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 performing and media arts. Attention focuses on pedagogy and the profession in Part I. Part II explores current scholarly trends.

Full details for PMA 6600 - Proseminar in Performing and Media Arts

What are minoritarian aesthetics? How do these inform the production and reception of performance, broadly defined? How does attending to the aesthetics involved in the production of artistic and cultural productions open up new ways of critically understanding the world around us? In seeking to answer these questions, and others, this seminar will introduce graduate students to theories and critiques that attend to the aesthetic dimensions of visual culture, scripted staged performances, performance art, and contemporary media created by Black, queer, Asian, Caribbean, and Latinx/Latin people. Drawing on the work of theorists Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Leticia Alvarado, and Sandra Ruiz amongst others, students will interrogate the dialectical relationship between the artist's subject position and their resultant creative and critical work.

Full details for PMA 6611 - Minoritarian Aesthetics In-And Performance

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 in undergraduate theatre classes in all areas of the curriculum.

Full details for PMA 7100 - The Pedagogy of Performing and Media Arts

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

Full details for PMA 9900 - Thesis and Research Projects