Courses

Full details for PMA 1154 - FWS: The Personal is Political: Feminist Performance 1900-Now

Full details for PMA 1156 - FWS: Avant-garde Performances: Experiment in Theaters

Full details for PMA 1159 - FWS: Just Gals Being Pals. Queer Female Fandom Since 2016

Full details for PMA 1160 - FWS:Wonderlands and Other Worlds

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

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

The Student Laboratory Theatre Company (SLTC) is a group of student-actors who earn credit by acting in three scenes directed by students taking PMA 4880. Students enrolling in SLTC for credit earn 1 credit for two projects and 2 credits for three projects. SLTC also meets with directors once a week.

Full details for PMA 1670 - Student Laboratory Theatre Company

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

Full details for PMA 2407 - Reading Cinematic Horror

Japanese pop culture—anime, manga, video games, music and more—has been a major phenomenon with massive worldwide popularity for the last three decades. In this course, we will explore a wide range of Japanese pop cultural forms, exploring the interactions between different media, Japanese pop culture as global pop culture, and a variety of modes of analyzing visual and audio materials. We will also see how pop cultural works themselves, in their content and form, engage with questions of gender, technology, fandom, nation, and the environment. No prior knowledge of Japanese language, culture, or history required. All readings and screenings will be available in English or with English subtitles.

Full details for PMA 2460 - Japanese Pop Culture

What does it mean to call a film is "Jewish"? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews—actors, directors, screenwriters, composers—play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class—an average of one per week—and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

Full details for PMA 2490 - Jewish Films and Filmmakers: Hollywood and Beyond

Learn the skills necessary to produce/curate/mount a film festival from planning to execution. The Centrally Isolated Film Festival (CIFF) involves students in all aspects of film festival organization, and welcomes students with skills in particular areas: publicity, design, administration, management, fundraising, solicitation of films, invitation of guests, reviewing films, curating the program, running the event itself. The course may span 2 semesters. There will be an informational meeting each fall semester to plan the coming year's events and time schedule.

Full details for PMA 2510 - Film Festival Production Lab

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

Why are the undead so long-lived? This course hunts the dangerous and subversive figure of the vampire across a variety of pages, stages and screens. From campy melodramas and raucous stage comedies, to lush cinematic epics and politically savvy television---and all the Draculas that have come and gone in between--we will explore how the vampire changes with medium, period, and genre. Using a variety of critical approaches we will consider why this most persistent cultural metaphor emerges in particular cultural moments, and what social anxieties and desires it articulates. We will interrogate the vampire's relationship to race and gender and analyze how the vampire is constructed, appropriated, adapted, reinvented, and performed in its many contexts, asking what it means for us to consume these texts.

Full details for PMA 2620 - Performing Death and Desire: Vampires on Stage and Screen

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

"Language is a skin," the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: "I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.

Full details for PMA 2680 - Desire

More than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare remains an inescapable part of world culture. His influence can be traced at every level, from traditional art forms like theater, poetry, and opera to popular genres like Broadway musicals, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romcoms. Contemporary adaptations and bold re-stagings of his plays abound that reflect his deep understanding of sexual and gender fluidity, racial and class antipathy, and the complex workings of political power. In this course, we'll focus on five plays that continue to generate creative responses across many media: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth.

Full details for PMA 2681 - Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century

What is distinctive about American Shakespeare? Is it merely a less confident cousin of its more prestigious UK relative; or does it have a character of its own? What is currently happening with 'American Shakespeare' that is not happening anywhere else? This course is designed explicitly to exploit the wide variety of human and material resources of the DC and surrounding area, such as the Folger Shakespeare Library and Theatre, the Shakespeare Theatre and the Blackfriars Playhouse at Staunton. While encountering a number of plays, students will have the opportunity to see at least three live performances and numerous movies, consider the history of Shakespeare in America and learn from actors, directors, scholars and designers.

Full details for PMA 2683 - American Shakespeare

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, English, German Studies, Information Science, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

Full details for PMA 2703 - Thinking Media

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

This seminar offers an introduction to the humanities by exploring the historical, cultural, social and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to local sites relevant to the theme, and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in this seminar will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the Society's annual focus theme and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for PMA 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

Full details for PMA 2762 - Desire and Modern Drama

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

Full details for PMA 2830 - The Expressive Voice

The rap superstar Drake, comedian Ilana Glazer, and muscleman Zac Efron are just three of the millennial Jewish stars examined in this course. We will ask how millennial Jewish stars depict Jewishness in terms of race, gender, sexuality. For instance, why has the rapper Lil Dicky chosen such an emasculating stage name, and why does Ilana Glazer embrace the outdated racial term "Jewess?" How do these names use historical Jewish stereotypes to fuel present-day comedy? We will trace racial, gendered, and sexual tropes about Jews from 19th-century theater to the newest YouTube sketches. We'll cluster these media around themes like women's pleasure, Jewish identity, cultural appropriation, anti-Semitism, and millennial financial struggles. We'll laugh hard, learn a lot, and see today's media through new eyes.

Full details for PMA 2985 - Millennial Jewish Stars: Race, Gender and Sexuality

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

Full details for PMA 3213 - Introduction to Hip Hop

This class explores dance across multiple stages—TikTok videos, concert halls, streets—to assess how people create, sustain, and challenge markers of difference (race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class). How is dance appreciation different from appropriation? What are dancing avatars in video games allowed to do that real persons are not? We will examine genres such as k-pop, hip hop, salsa, modern dance, and ballroom as we develop the tools necessary for viewing dance, analyzing it, and understanding its place in larger social, cultural, historical, and political structures. We will explore how markers of difference affect the practice and the reception of dance forms, and, in turn, how dance helps shape representations of identities. This is a seminar course. Previous performance experience is not necessary.

Full details for PMA 3214 - Dance in America: Cultures, Identities, and Fabrication

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

Formally titled "technosomakinesics," this class works to expand the specific aesthetics related to dance as embodied performance. Included in the process is the analysis of built environments that both inspire and are designed to be inhabited by these disciplines. This studio course explores the resulting neoperformance forms being created within the range of digital media processing; such as gallery installations, multimedia dance-theatre, personal interactive media (games and digital art) and web projects. Computer-imaging and sound-production programs are examined and used in the class work (human form-animation software, vocal recording and digital editing, digital-imaging tools. The new context of digital performance raises questions concerning the use of traditional lighting, set, costume, and sound-design techniques that are examined as they are repositioned by digital-translation tools with the goal of creating experimental and/or conceptual multimedia performance and/or installation work. Theoretical texts on dance and theatrical performance, film studies, the dynamic social body, architecture, and digital technology are also used to support conceptual creative work.

Full details for PMA 3350 - Technology and the Moving Body 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

From Al Capone to Tony Soprano, the mafia has been the subject of numerous films over the course of 70 years, so many in fact that one might well speak of a "mafia obsession" in American popular culture. Drawing upon a large number of American and Italian films, this course examines the cultural history of the mafia through film. We will explore issues related to the figure of the gangster, the gender and class assumptions that underpin it, and the portrayal-almost always stereotypical-of Italian-American immigrant experience that emerges from our viewings. The aim will be to enhance our understanding of the role of mafia plays in American and Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Film screenings will include Little Caesar, Scarface, Shame of the Nation, The Godfather Parts I and II, Goodfellas, The Funeral, Donnie Brasco, episodes from The Sopranos, and Gomorrah.

Full details for PMA 3410 - Screening Cosa Nostra: The Mafia and the Movies from Scarface to The Sopranos

Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, transgender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art.  Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required.

Full details for PMA 3421 - Literary Theory on the Edge

This course considers issues, approaches, and complexities in the contemporary television landscape. As television has changed drastically over the past fifteen years, this course provides students with a deeper understanding of the changes in narratives, technologies, forms, and platforms that structure/restructure the televisual world. Students will grapple with how "new media" forms such as web-series and on-demand internet streaming services have changed primetime television. We will balance our look at television shows with nuanced readings about the televisual media industry. By watching, analyzing, and critiquing the powerful medium of television, students will situate their understanding within a broader consideration of the medium's regulation, production, distribution, and reception in the network and post-network era.

Full details for PMA 3463 - Contemporary Television

The course will offer an overview of video art, alternative documentary video, and digital installation and networked art. It will analyze four phases of video and new media: (1) the development of video from its earliest turn away from television; (2) video's relation to art and installation; (3) video's migration into digital art; (4) the relation of video and new media to visual theory and social movements. Screenings will include early political and feminist video (Ant Farm, Rosler, Paper Tiger TV, Jones), conceptual video of the '80s and '90s (Vasulka, Lucier, Viola, Hill), gay and multicultural video of the '90s (Muntadas, Riggs, Piper, Fung, Parmar), networked and activist new media of the 21st century (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, SubRosa, Preemptive Media). Secondary theoretical readings on postmodernism, video theory, multicultural theory, and digital culture will provide students with a cultural and political context for the discussion of video and new media style, dissemination, and reception.

Full details for PMA 3515 - Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics

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.

Full details for PMA 3551 - Global Cinema II

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

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 a public performance. Students must commit to a minimum schedule of 5-6 weeks of rehearsal and live public performance.

Full details for PMA 3608 - Making Theatre and Performance

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

The storyteller is a master of their own universe. In this course, students will design a fictional society starting from the ground up. From terra forma to the rise of religions and governments, societies and cultures are shaped by the world that surrounds them.  Natural resources, biological evolution, socio-economics, religion, family dynamics, and cultural mores all play a roll in story development. The goal of this course is to explore allegorical thinking processes as they relate to social matrixes useful for telling "human" stories in performance and media. Social diagrams, relatable research, written allegories, concept artwork, and detailed visual representations will be used to express each individual student's unique universe.

Full details for PMA 3631 - Project: Terrarium Imagined; World Building Through Allegory

The production designer is responsible for creating, controlling, and managing 'the look' of narrative films, television & contemporary and digital media from page to screen. This hands-on, project-based course explores the processes of production design, art direction, and lighting direction as related to design for these arenas. From initial Production Design sketches, Storyboards, and 'Feel-Boards' to accommodating desired cinematographic angles and looks when designing a studio set, a designer needs to shape an entire visual world while keeping in mind the story as a whole. The goal of this course is to provide an initial understanding of the Production Design process in practice through studio work and instruction.

Full details for PMA 3632 - Production Design for Film, Television and Contemporary and Digital Media Studio I

Design of costumes for theatre and film, concentrating on script and character analysis, period research, design elements, figure drawing and rendering skills, and an understanding of production style.

Full details for PMA 3660 - Costume 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

After Rome's collapse, drama was gradually re-created from many sources: school-room debates, popular festivals, and, especially, religious liturgy. By the 17th century it was one of the most polished literary arts (and one of the sleaziest). This long span allows us to consider what happened in the middle. This course traces the residues of Roman drama and some "rebeginnings" of European drama, 10th to 13th centuries, then focuses mainly on late medieval drama in English in the 15th century, following that into the drama of the early Renaissance. We'll consider what became "modern"-and what was utterly unlike anything later. Discussion, lecture, regular writing, some experiments with production. English texts will be read in Middle English with lots of help; no previous knowledge required. This class counts as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

Full details for PMA 3720 - Playing God: Medieval and Early Renaissance Drama

Religious beliefs, practices, and conflicts shape our world and influence global politics.  Yet mediatized depictions of religion can be reductive and polarizing.  Moreover, these depictions may be different from what people experience in their everyday lives.  In the contemporary theatre, we have the opportunity to consider representations of individuals' lived religion, the complex questions of belief, and challenges to faith from within and outside religious communities.  Through close readings of plays and related materials engaging with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and other faith traditions, we will explore and discuss together the religious motivations, tensions, and dilemmas facing us today.  Our texts include, among others, Jesus Christ Superstar, Indecent, Angels in America, and Heroes of the Fourth Turning.

Full details for PMA 3747 - Staging Faith: Contemporary Theatre and Lived Religions

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: conquest, commerce, and community.

Full details for PMA 3751 - Global Stages II

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

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

Full details for PMA 3801 - Intermediate Studies in Acting Techniques

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

An intensive study of a particular dramatist, period, form or problem in drama and/or performance. Topics, prerequisites and formats will vary from year to year. Topic for Spring: Power Plays: Contemporary Drama Womxn: This course explores questions of power in contemporary drama written by playwrights identifying as women. Taking feminisms as our main critical lenses, we'll look at plays from the UK, Canada, the USA, India, Australia, and South Africa, asking how these plays stage marginalized bodies and voices, and call in to question hierarchies of power. We'll also interrogate assumptions about canon formation and consider the place of womxn in contemporary theatre and in the cultural hierarchies to which theatre responds and in which it participates. Our reading list will be partly informed by student interests.

Full details for PMA 3900 - Special Topics

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 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

In this seminar we will be exploring media theory in relation to Japan: how media has been thought about, written about, and created within Japan, and how media theorists from across the world have used "Japan" and its cultural products as a key element in their thinking. We will investigate media in Japan in relation to language, nation, gender, technology, disability, the environment, and more, and will both examine and produce creative works (film, poetry, visual art, sound, programming) as a form of critical practice. No Japanese language knowledge required, as all the core readings will be in English; some Japanese-language supplemental readings will be available for graduate students with sufficient language ability.

Full details for PMA 4406 - Media Theory and Japan

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the digital age? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? What are the implications of such questions for what Jacques Ranciere has called the "distribution of the sensible," for democratic consensus and dissensus? Moving among websites, social media, and streaming services, from Poetry Foundation and PennSound to podcasts and serial TV, from FaceBook and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, from Netflix and Amazon to Roku and Hulu, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media and their impact in contemporary culture and politics.

Full details for PMA 4461 - Genres, Platforms, Media

Film festivals are important entry spaces for young filmmakers, but also spaces of cultural politics that promote the year's new films and provide a meeting ground for market forces and cinephilia. This course seeks to understand what cultural work festivals do: What were the political reasons for the foundation of well-known festivals such as Cannes, Venice, and Berlin? How did Sundance become the premier festival for independent film? What significance do festivals have for LGBT and other minority audiences? How do festivals participate in discourses about human rights? How do they negotiate changing exhibition formats (from streaming to virtual reality)? Do they have the power to change the film industry? Possible fieldtrip (e.g. to the Tribeca Film Festival), and participation in Cornell's student film festival.

Full details for PMA 4502 - Film and Media Festivals

This course builds on skills developed in Playwriting I. Focusing on the development of longer scripts and the process of getting them to the stage, students will write a long one act play, and the materials to market it. The class will involve daily exercises, lessons on various issues of craft and the business of playwriting, and substantial workshopping and revision. Students will learn how to research opportunities for sending their work out and will leave the class with a polished script, a sense of themselves as writers, and the skills to take their play into production.

Full details for PMA 4505 - Playwriting II

Focuses on the structure and style of the original web-series and long-form short screenplay, and incorporates extensive peer feedback, workshop, and revision. Students will produce and revise an original mid-length short film and/or show pilot, in addition to crafting a log-line, treatment, and pitch for their film.​

Full details for PMA 4532 - Advanced Screenwriting

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

Full details for PMA 4660 - Adaptation: Text/Theatricality

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

This class explores the increasing presence of all the arts in prisons throughout the country and examines the increasing scholarship surrounding arts programs and their efficacy for incarcerated persons. The course uses video's, archival material, reading material and in-person or Zoom interviews to investigate how and why art is taught in prisons. The class will also look at art produced by incarcerated artists as well as art by those who are still practicing after going home. And finally, the class will explore the increasing scholarship around the impact practicing the arts while incarcerated has on recidivism rates and preparation for re-entry.

Full details for PMA 4681 - Cages and Creativity: Arts in Incarceration

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks.  Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens.  Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for PMA 4701 - Nightlife

Builds on the directing techniques learned in Fundamentals of Directing I. In this course each student directs actors from the Student Laboratory Theatre Company in a series of projects and public presentations focusing on specific directorial challenges.

Full details for PMA 4880 - Fundamentals of Directing II

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

In this seminar we will be exploring media theory in relation to Japan: how media has been thought about, written about, and created within Japan, and how media theorists from across the world have used "Japan" and its cultural products as a key element in their thinking. We will investigate media in Japan in relation to language, nation, gender, technology, disability, the environment, and more, and will both examine and produce creative works (film, poetry, visual art, sound, programming) as a form of critical practice. No Japanese language knowledge required, as all the core readings will be in English; some Japanese-language supplemental readings will be available for graduate students with sufficient language ability.

Full details for PMA 6406 - Media Theory and Japan

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the digital age? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? What are the implications of such questions for what Jacques Ranciere has called the "distribution of the sensible," for democratic consensus and dissensus? Moving among websites, social media, and streaming services, from Poetry Foundation and PennSound to podcasts and serial TV, from FaceBook and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, from Netflix and Amazon to Roku and Hulu, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media and their impact in contemporary culture and politics.

Full details for PMA 6461 - Genres, Platforms, Media

Full details for PMA 6502 - Film and Media Festivals

This course focuses on the structure and style of the original, long-form short screenplay and web-series (approximately 25-35 pages), and incorporates extensive peer feedback, workshop, and revision. Students will produce and revise an original short script or two episodes of a show pilot, in addition to crafting a log-line, treatment, and pitch for their film.

Full details for PMA 6532 - Advanced 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 II covers the period from 1960 to the present. Precise topics will vary from year to year, but may include: "New Waves" in Italy, France, Germany, Japan; cinematic modernism; new modes of documentary; changing technologies of sound and image; avant-garde and experimental cinema; "New" Hollywood; "counter-cinema" and underground film; feminist film theory and practice; Hollywood's enduring importance; popular cinema in China, India, Brazil; the impact of television, video and the digital revolution.

Full details for PMA 6551 - Global Cinema II

This graduate seminar takes a global approach to understanding the influential ways in which live and mediated performances have been theorized. Focusing on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts, we will explore the ways in which different aestheticians, historians, activists, and other philosophically motivated thinkers have conceived such phenomena as kinesthetic performance, embodied spectatorship, (mnemo)technics, spectacularity, liveness, identification, and ludic play. Close analyses of a variety of art objects will complement our intensive readings of dense theoretical texts.

Full details for PMA 6610 - Theorizing Media and Performance

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks.  Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens.  Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for PMA 6701 - Nightlife

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 Performing and Media Arts

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

Full details for PMA 9900 - Thesis and Research Projects