New, Revised, and Special Topics Courses (Spring 2021)

While some PMA instructors will allow students to enroll in classes that overlap, not all do. If your proposed Spring 2021 schedule includes overlaps, please consult with the faculty in question before enrolling so that you can adjust your enrollment plans if necessary.

Instructor: David Feldshuh

Course Time: TBD. Presentations will be 4:45–6:00 p.m. on Wednesdays
In-Person

A student acting company that will work with Directing 2 directors on three different scenes. Each scene will be presented on stage and will be re-created as a short film. Actors will have the opportunity to work onstage and in front of the camera. Actors receive 1 or 2 credits (S/U) for participating in the SLTC. In-person only.

Instructor: Veronica Fitzpatrick

Course Time: T/R 1:00–2:15 p.m.
Online

In and beyond Film Studies, the horror genre has spawned a wealth of competing critical accounts: of its narrative and aesthetic conventions, its historicity within and beyond film industries, and the sources of its unlikely appeal. This course offers a semester-long immersion in the horror genre through this scholarship: emphasizing the ways experts and enthusiasts have theorized horror's significance and social urgency, the unique properties of horror spectatorship, and the formal attributes of individual films.

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)

Instructor: Karen Jaime

Course Time: T/R 11:25 a.m.–12:40 p.m.
Online

This course investigates historical and contemporary representations of Latina/o/x peoples and communities specifically focusing on race, ethnicity, gender, and "otherness." Throughout the semester we will attend to cultural and artistic productions, including, but not limited to: cinema, television, music, performance art, and theater.

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)

Instructor: Rebekah Maggor

Course Time: T/R 11:20 a.m.–1:15 p.m.
Online

Are you interested in performing and producing podcasts, audiobooks, or radio drama? This course introduces students to the primary components of vocal production, dialects, character voices, and public speaking, with a special emphasis on digital audio production. For the Spring of 2021, we will co-meet with the Sound Design course to cover the basics of spoken audio using ProTools software.

(Embodied Performance rubric)

Instructor: Ben Ortiz, Cornell Hip Hop Collection

Course Time: 8 meetings, every other week on Wednesday evening 7:30–9:25 p.m.; February 10 & 24; March 10 & 24; April 7 & 21; May 5 & 19
Online

Hip hop has had an extraordinary influence on American culture. It is embraced globally as one of the most important movements of the past half-century, offering a unique opportunity to examine issues such as art, music, dance, race, identity, and politics. We will examine hip hop’s trajectory from a 1970s grassroots community-based culture of the Bronx, NYC, to a force that has shaped music, fashion, and other aspects of pop culture and society. This is a discussion-focused course, offering students the opportunity to examine and share their own perspectives. We will learn about hip hop’s core artistic elements and related topics through reading, listening, and viewing a variety of media, and by interacting (virtually) with artifacts from Cornell’s Hip Hop Collection.

Instructor: Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz

Course Time: T/R, 9:40–10:55
Online

This class explores dance and choreography across multiple stages—TikTok videos, Fortnite lands, concert halls, streets—to assess how people create, sustain, and challenge markers of difference (race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class). We will explore dance as a meaning-making expressive cultural form in the United States. How is dance appreciation different from dance appropriation? Who, and under what terms, can claim ownership to specific dances? How are dancing avatars in video games different from people dancing on a concert hall floor, and what permissions are they afforded in those virtual spaces? We will ask these and many more important questions as we examine a range of dance genres that include, but are not limited to k-pop, hip hop, salsa, modern dance, ballroom, and quebradita. We will develop the tools necessary for looking at dance, analyzing it, writing about it, and understanding its place in larger social, cultural, and political structures. We will watch dances and understand them through their historical and cultural contexts in order to explore how issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class affect the practice and the reception of different dance forms, and, in turn, how dance might help shape representations of these identities. This is not a studio-based dance course. Previous performance experience is not necessary.

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)

Instructor: Byron Suber

Course Time: W 7:30–9:25 p.m.
Online

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 classwork (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. (AU)

(Creative Authorship/Embodied Performance rubric)

Instructor: Jason Simms

Course Time: T/R 2:45–4:00 p.m.
Hybrid Online/In-Person

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 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 role 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.

(Design rubric)

Instructor: Jason Simms

Course Time: T/R 11:20 a.m.–1:15 p.m.
Hybrid Online/In-Person

The production designer is responsible for creating, controlling, and managing ‘the look’ of narrative films and television 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 film and television. From initial Production Design sketches, Storyboards, and ‘Feel-Boards’ to accommodating desired cinematographic angles and looks when designing a studio set, design for film requires a designer 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.

(Design rubric)

Instructors: J. Ellen Gainor and Clark West

Course Time: M 9:05–11:00 a.m.
Online

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, Disgraced, Angels in America, and Heroes of the Fourth Turning.

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)

Instructor: Theo Black

Course time: M/W 9:05–11:00 a.m.
Online

Prerequisites: 2800 or 3609

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. The specific focus for this semester will be “Eco-Performance.”

(Embodied Performance rubric)

Instructor: Aoise Stratford

Course Time: TBD
Online

This course explores questions of power in contemporary drama written (primarily) in English 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 western drama and 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.

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)

Instructor: Sabine Haenni

Course Time: T/R 11:25 a.m.–12:40 p.m.
Online

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? During the pandemic many film festivals happen online, which will allow us to "visit."

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)

Instructor: Beth F. Milles

Course Time: T/R 12:55–2:25 p.m.
Online

How do we tell and do justice to our most complex, fantastical (or intangible) stories?

The act of adaptation invokes a response to source material from a variety of inspiration (images, poems, stories, iconic moments, people, legends, events, histories). Artist/creators work to transcend and translate resonant and remnant questions, curiosities, and provocations in their work—the act and very action of making and crafting this work evokes a reconciling or a recontextualizing of event and revelation. Writer/creators are visual and physical explorers, choreographers of language text and imagery, filmmakers and installation artists, playwrights and producers. Some of the work we will explore this year includes the inspiration of Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, William Kentridge, Spike Lee, Suzan Lori Parks, Alora and Callzadilla, Cirque du Soleil, Dael Orlandersmith, Jenny Holzer, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Shonda Rhimes.

This wholly interactive course challenges the boundaries of text/image to uncover the possibilities of performance. How do we translate inspiration (and fascination) into tangible visual/interactive imagery? Working collaboratively—in workshop format—as actors and writers, students explore the process of developing performance pieces based on a variety of sources. Examining the work of artists whose work translates from one medium to another (television/film/live and mediated performance), we investigate take and exploration.

(Creative Authorship/Embodied Performance rubrics)

Instructor: Bruce Levitt

Course Time: W 11:20 a.m.–1:15 p.m.
Online

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 videos, 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.

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)

Instructor: Karen Jaime

Course Time: T/R 1:00–2:15 p.m.
Online

This hybrid (undergraduate seniors/graduate students) 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, 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.

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)

Instructor: Nick Salvato

Course Time: W 12:25–2:20 p.m.
Online

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.

(History, Theory, Criticism rubric)