Full details for PMA 1175 - FWS: Hell is a Teenage Girl: Terror and Turmoil of Girlhood in Horror Films

From the Bronx to LA, hip-hop journeys from coast to coast and across oceans. What are the special analytical problems of hip-hop’s dissemination? How can we resolve the contradictions that arise when diasporic groups express themselves through hip-hop? This course is for students who are open to thinking critically about hip-hop’s contradictions while uplifting the culture’s beauty and imagining possibilities. We explore hip-hop’s pillars for answers (DJing, MCing, graffiti writing, breakdancing, and the pursuit of knowledge). We will listen to music, watch films, and read theoretical texts. Key authors include Jeff Chang, Paul Gilroy, and Michelle Wright; key artists: James Brown, Beat Junkies DJ crew, Triple Edge, and La Differénce. Writers will sharpen their skills to articulate strong, original arguments via five formal essays.

Full details for PMA 1183 - FWS: Hip-Hop’s Global Vibrations (NYC, LA, Southeast Asia)

In high school, I wasn’t allowed to use “I” in an essay. But now that I’m in university, “I argue” or “We observe” or something similar is in almost every article or book I’ve been assigned. When or how did “I” enter into an academic argument? When did or how do “I” enter into the university? For those of us who have entered into major spaces from backgrounds considered minor, our class seeks to critically understand the ways minoritarian people have and will make space in academia. Through exercises in “personalized” writing genre like performance reviews and conducting interviews, this course finds meanings in scholarly relations to people, texts, events, and performances through theoretical frameworks and turns these findings into cogent arguments.

Full details for PMA 1184 - FWS: Writing Our Minoritarian Selves in(to) the Academy

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

Students participating in a PMA creative project led by a faculty member or PMA Guest Artist can earn PMA 1611 credit.

Full details for PMA 1611 - Rehearsal and Performance

This course is designed to offer students a broad, foundational introduction to the mission of the Department of Performing and Media Arts. With a focus both on making artistic work in mediated forms and in live performance and on the critical methods for studying such artwork, we explore a variety of topics and concepts, from composition and gesture to sound and movement-and beyond. Joined by visiting guest experts from all across the PMA faculty, the instructors usher students through a range of approaches to creative authorship, design, embodied performance, history, and theory. Organized around a series of keywords, including adaptation, representation, transformation, and world-building, the course also foregrounds ways of thinking about and with categories of identity and social relations, such as ability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality.

Full details for PMA 2100 - Introduction to Performing and Media Arts

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. Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography.

Full details for PMA 2300 - Dance Composition

This course introduces Korean popular culture in global context. Beginning with cultural forms of the late Choson period, the course will also examine popular culture during the Japanese colonial period, the post-war period, the democratization period, and contemporary Korea. Through analysis of numerous forms of media, including films, television, music, literature, and music videos, the course will explore the emergence of the “Korean Wave” in East Asia and its subsequent global impact. In our examination of North and South Korean cultural products, we will discuss theories of transnationalism, globalization, and cultural politics. The course will consider the increasing global circulation of Korean popular culture through new media and K-Pop’s transculturation of forms of American music such as rap. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is required. (SC)

Full details for PMA 2465 - Korean Popular Culture

Contemporary World Cinema offers an introduction to some of the most acclaimed international films of the 21st century. We will consider narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental films from multiple national and transnational contexts. We will examine both dominant and alternative forms of storytelling, how funding institutions, festivals, and awards shape the global circulation of films, how genres get transformed internationally, and how films intervene in how we think about specific social issues and political contexts. Specific films and case studies may vary from year to year.

Full details for PMA 2512 - Contemporary World Cinema

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

The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musical-and how in turn musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent.

Full details for PMA 2650 - The American Musical

In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

Full details for PMA 2660 - Television

This interdisciplinary course offers an introduction to the methods employed in media arts, sound and performance. It provides a comprehensive exploration of the strategies and historical context of these disciplines. Students will engage in an interdisciplinary studio setting with a specific focus on one of these areas. Through hands-on experience, they will delve into contemporary artistic practices, honing their technical skills to develop and realize their creative projects. Potential topics covered include video and animation, digital image production, sound art, performance art, and movement

Full details for PMA 2701 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Intersections

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

In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.

Full details for PMA 3010 - Latinx Theatre Production

Full details for PMA 3105 - Instructions for Art: Text Scores in Art, Music and Performance

Classical Dance Technique is a studio course for the practice and performance of classical concert dance techniques, principles, and elements, including but not limited to Cecchetti and Vaganova ballet methods.

Full details for PMA 3210 - Classical Dance Technique

This course surveys the histories, aesthetics, and politics of music and virtuality, focusing on contemporary manifestations of “virtual music” since the 2010s. We will learn about how music is created, performed, and consumed in virtual environments, focusing specifically on questions of embodiment and identity. Case studies will include virtual and augmented reality concerts; musical performances in video games; virtual bands; and Web3/blockchain music. We will pay particular attention to the ties between virtual worlds, musical aesthetics, and queer and trans community building. Students will learn how to conduct digital musical ethnography and will complete participant observation-based final projects in a virtual music community.

Full details for PMA 3418 - Virtual Music

Anchoring the East and West coasts, New York and Los Angeles have been celebrated and excoriated in films. On the edge literally and metaphorically, these cities seem to be about competing visions of urban form, culture, and modernity. The iconic forms of New York (tenements and skyscrapers) and of Los Angeles (highways and suburban homes) have fascinated film makers from the nineteenth century to the present day. We will both evoke and complicate the contrasts between New York and Los Angeles by mapping the intersections of each city with cinema. We explore how the urban experience gives rise to particular cinematic forms and how cinematic styles are translated or not into urban design.

Full details for PMA 3441 - Edge Cities: Celluloid New York and Los Angeles

The massive success of contemporary novel and film adaptations like Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey as well as television series such as Scandal have generated new interest in media targeted to female audiences. Historically considered a low-form genre, women's media was not considered a legitimate object of academic study until the 1970s and 1980s when feminist media scholars shed crucial light on low form texts such as daytime soaps, Harlequin romance novels, and family melodramas, insisting that each impacted female audiences in a multitude of surprising and significant ways. Through an analysis of historical and contemporary readings, films, and televisual texts, we will explore how media designed for women specifically targets women viewers. We will identify the current debates around women's spectatorship. We will evaluate and offer a multitude of pleasures.

Full details for PMA 3467 - Women Audiences in Film and Television

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 course 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

Today, the legacy of the Middle Ages can be found everywhere, from the game of chess to Game of Thrones, the parliament to the university, the Crusades to the Vikings, the nostalgia for tradition to the very concept of modernity. This course explores the function of the medieval past through the lens of modern visual culture, as part of an emerging field known as “Medievalism.” Along with readings of classic theories of Medievalism (Huizinga, Balázs, Panofsky, Bazin, McLuhan, Eco), screenings will put auteur films (Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Bergman’s Seventh Seal, Kurosawa’s Ran) in dialogue with popular culture (from Monthy Python to A Knight’s Tale) in order to raise the question of a Global Middle Ages. Taught in English.

Full details for PMA 3545 - Imagining the Middle Ages: Films, Games, and Media

What is a comic? How might comics attend to complex historical, social, and political topics? How do comics facilitate a coming to terms with the past or function as an activist medium—spurring on political and cultural shifts? Given this great variety of comics from Germanophone locales this course engages with comics as a key literary form and one that provides a deep engagement with histories, cultures, activisms, and representations thereof. Our readings will include queer/trans comics and zines, early text/image works preceding the comic form, and webcomics on decolonization projects and fantastical places. We will also read comics scholarship and historical texts that will provide a solid foundation from which to approach these literary works. As a way of immersing ourselves into the world of comics, each student will create their own comic over the course of our class—building upon the formal components we locate in class texts. (Drawing skills are not required! Come as you are.) As comics have their own medium-specific vocabulary for visual and textual analysis, we will also spend time building the skills and vocabulary necessary for analyzing the comics we read. Taught in English.

Full details for PMA 3555 - Comics as a Medium

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

Documentary Filmmaking will equip. students with the knowledge to produce quality short, socially and culturally conscious, documentaries that express an interesting story. This course covers the aesthetic and technical fundamentals of directing and producing documentaries. It provides working tools to plan and tell your stories creatively, collaboratively, artistically and professionally. The goal is to produce quality productions designed as a stepping stone to more advanced projects. In the process, we will deeply discuss the principles, history, and ethics of documentary filmmaking.

Full details for PMA 3571 - Documentary Filmmaking

Film is a language that expresses the director's idea and cinematography is a key component of the language of film. You need to develop visual storytelling skills by blending lights, camera movements, frame composition, and color palette to use this film language to convey your idea. In this class we will learn the concept of visual strategies in filmmaking and cameras and lighting and research the various aspects of film cinematography.

Full details for PMA 3580 - Cinematography and Visual Storytelling

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 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).

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

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

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 major methodologies and paradigms for the creation, spectatorship, and interpretation of performances.

Full details for PMA 3750 - Global Theatre and 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

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

Camp is one of the predominant, organizing aesthetic structures of the twentieth century and continues to make important impacts in the twenty-first. With attention to a range of historical, philosophical, and theoretical texts, coupled with a range of artistic artifacts and phenomena, we will develop a clustered set of working definitions of camp as we also challenge some truisms about the concept: that it is or has been apolitical; that its comprehension can be disarticulated from queer cultures and experiences; that it has died and is dead. Paying close attention to systems of sex, gender, and sexuality, we will also explore their inextricable intersection with such categories of identity, relationality, and sociality as (dis)ability, age, class, ethnicity, and race.

Full details for PMA 4711 - Camp: Aesthetics and Politics

An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term is and does, but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Full details for PMA 4835 - Performance Studies: Theories and Methods

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

What is at stake when an artist creates a work through a set of linguistic instructions or textual cues? This class will look at early written scores and instructions from artists, performers, and composers, such as Sol Lewitt, George Lewis, Adrian Piper, Felix Gonzales Torres, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Patterson, Alison Knowles, Anthony Braxton, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. We will also explore early artists’ code-based projects and recent work done with artificial intelligence. In this course we will look at the myriad of reasons artists have used a language-based system to realize an artwork.

Full details for PMA 5105 - Instructions for Art: Text Scores in Art, Music and Performance

In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.

Full details for PMA 6010 - Latinx Theatre Production

The class is dedicated to texts, issues, approaches, histories/archives, and theories in Black Film and Media Studies. With a disciplinary grounding in the field of cinema and media studies, this course explores relevant and revelatory scholarship and creative/critical practices in the study of Black film and media.

Full details for PMA 6402 - Black Film and Media Studies

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

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 is (not) a medium? How have various cultural techniques and media technologies historically informed philosophers and philosophical traditions? To what extent might the very existence of media in the world shape our possibilities of thinking? This seminar introduces the key concepts and scholarly debates around the emergent field of “media philosophy.” We will read and discuss continental philosophers whose thinking about media presents new insights into their work, while also doing rigorous conceptual work on the meanings of “media,” “aesthetics,” “messages,” “intelligence,” “nature,” “technology,” “environments,” “surroundings,” “epistemology,” “ontology,” and “philosophy.” Taught in English.

Full details for PMA 6655 - Media Philosophy

Camp is one of the predominant, organizing aesthetic structures of the twentieth century and continues to make important impacts in the twenty-first. With attention to a range of historical, philosophical, and theoretical texts, coupled with a range of artistic artifacts and phenomena, we will develop a clustered set of working definitions of camp as we also challenge some truisms about the concept: that it is or has been apolitical; that its comprehension can be disarticulated from queer cultures and experiences; that it has died and is dead. Paying close attention to systems of sex, gender, and sexuality, we will also explore their inextricable intersection with such categories of identity, relationality, and sociality as (dis)ability, age, class, ethnicity, and race.

Full details for PMA 6711 - Camp: Aesthetics and Politics

An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term is and does, but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Full details for PMA 6835 - Performance Studies: Theories and Methods

Independent study in performing and media arts 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 Performing and Media Arts

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