New, Revised, and Special Topics Courses (Fall 2024)

While some PMA instructors will allow students to enroll in classes that overlap, not all do. If your proposed Fall 2024 schedule includes overlaps, please consult with the faculty in question before enrolling so that you can adjust your enrollment plans if necessary.

Instructor: Nick Salvato

Class Schedule: MW 2:55 p.m. - 4:10 p.m. (3 credits)

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.

Instructor: Danielle Russo

Class Schedule: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10:10 a.m. - 12:05 p.m. (4 credits)

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.

Instructor: Danielle Russo

Class schedule: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. (3 credits)

This is a research-to-practice course reconsidering the function, philosophy, and reality of an evolving stage. What is the practice and purpose of performance beyond the traditional proscenium? How does the meaning of choreography operate and expand as its format alters and transforms? How does the performer properly exercise and prepare themselves to address their work in new and different surroundings? Audiences? Students will confront and respond to the psychological, political, historical, and communal orientation and potential of dance in non-traditional spaces. Using exercises based on reactive versus relational movement, students will distinguish between the making of site-sympathetic, site-specific, site-adaptable, environmental, installation, interactive, interventional, and immersive modes of dance performance, production, and world-making.

Instructor: Juanie Fowlkes

Class Schedule: Wednesdays 8:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. (3 credits)

This is a one-semester workshop focusing on the foundational basics of writing for television, with an emphasis on the structure and process of creating a hour long script. Students will individually pitch and break an original episode, and develop an outline, first draft script and rewrite for an existing and currently running hour long television series. Additionally, all participants will work as a "writers' room" to give feedback and pitches on other students' projects. Students will have their work-in-progress read, analyzed, and discussed by all participants.

Instructor: Sabine Haenni

Class Schedule: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. (4 credits) 

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.

Instructor: J. Ellen Gainor

Class Schedule: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 12:20 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. (4 credits) 

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. 

Instructor: Beth Frances Milles

Class schedule: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. (3 credits)

The course traces the history and innovation of the Immersive Theatre Movement. These 21st century projects eliminate "the stage" as the primary location for performance to prioritize more experiential interactive audience engagements - with live-ness and active participation as fundamental goals. Working as collaborative think tank, students will engage, explore and specify examples set by artists such as Kara Walker, RA Walden, Coco Fusco and Marina Abramovics and Tania El Khoury evoking and expanding the definitions of experiential. They will examine the work of companies such as PIEHOLE, PUNCHDRUNK (SLEEP NO MORE), THIRD RAIL PROJECTS (THEN SHE FELL) and EN GARDE ARTS, SPEAKEASY DOLLHOUSE companies seeking to re-create the relationship between performer and spectator focusing on sensory engagement, visceral engagement and accessible spectacle a variety of approach to stimulate and reawaken performativity - expanding theatre towards multimedia applications, AR/VR and also solo interactive and site specific processes intended to surprise startle and instigate.