New, Revised, and Special Topics Courses (Spring 2022)

Note about overlapping courses

While some PMA instructors will allow students to enroll in classes that overlap, not all do. If your proposed Spring 2022 schedule includes overlaps, please consult with the faculty in question before enrolling so that you can adjust your enrollment plans if necessary.

 

PMA 1611: Rehearsal & Performance - Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments

Instructor: Kelly Richmond

Course time: Monday & Wednesday 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm

5 Plays, 5 Rooms, 1 Mystery…

“Welcome, welcome, human beings and micro biomes to the Wartz Entré for Perfectly Forming & Medically Dying – the ancient ruins of a mysterious temple abandoned centuries ago. Our top team of archeologists and ecologists have been attempting to determine when and why the site was abandoned, but we’ve run into some… difficulties. There have been several reports of supernatural disturbances within the walls. We of course cannot take such claims seriously. We do not believe in ghosts. This is a rigorous academic research endeavor.” - Opening Remarks

This spring, the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts becomes a haunted house in… Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments. Through Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments, students in PMA 1611 will have the opportunity to collaboratively create an immersive environmental performance (read: a haunted house!) which will be produced May 6 & 7 2022, taking over the first floor of the Schwartz Center.

Every student in the class will have the opportunity to act in a scripted performance and/or assist in the technical magic of the haunted house. Aspiring actors, designers, technicians, producers, stage managers, and directors are all encouraged to inquire as to how they might participate.

Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments includes excerpts from Nathalie Claude’s The Salon Automaton: A Play for One Flesh-and-Blood Actress and Three Automatons, Marie Clements’ Burning Vision, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Erin Shield’s Paradise Lost and Anne Washburn’s Apparition.

Full details for PMA 1611: Rehearsal & Performance

 

PMA 1611: Rehearsal & Performance - Water

Instructor: Shanti Pillai

Course time: TBA

Water, water everywhere…

70% of our planet and of our brains and hearts.

We drink it, we pump it, we contaminate it, we waste it. We name its chemical parts, we harness it to various ends, we put it at the center of our apocalyptic visions for the future. 

Yet even as we subject it to so much engineering, science, carelessness, and imagination, do we really know it? 

Water is motile; it goes where it likes, soaking, trickling, drenching and quenching. Water is fickle; it plunders with a ferocity no one can subside, and yet it can be our most welcome guest. It’s a shape shifter, steaming, pouring, and freezing its way through the world. It’s salty or sweet, crystalline or clouded.

Swim its depths and you realize it does not give itself to be navigated hastily. Surf its waves and you realize it is not yours to call a “resource.”

Perhaps in dancing and singing we can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel its intelligent liquidity. Perhaps in the giving of gifts we can remember our primal gratitude for its power of plentitude and dissolution. Perhaps in poetry we can know ourselves as the watery children of rivers. 

In this interdisciplinary work of ritual-performance, we search for ways to know water and to know its ways. We will work with the body’s expressivity, with music, with projected image, and with texts – found and created in multiple languages. Our work will build community and communion with one another and with spectators as we explore performance as a pathway towards a more conscious relationship with this essential and magical element. 

Water, water, everywhere…

Full details for PMA 1611: Rehearsal & Performance

 

PMA 2240: Dance Technique Workshop - Intro to (Afro)Latinx Contemporary Dance

Instructor: Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz

Course time: Thursday 2:45 pm - 4:15 pm

This course combines (Afro)Latinx social dance forms with modern concert dance, related forms, and hip hop, including the histories of these dance forms, exploring new fusions across these genres without unmooring each one from their original context. The class will culminate in a public showing. No experience necessary.

Full details for PMA 2240: Dance Technique Workshop

 

PMA 2901: Spanish Performance Studio RVVR Caberet Literario

Instructor: P.A. Angelopoulos

Course time:  Monday & Wednesday 7:30 pm - 9:25 pm

This studio class will introduce students to a range of contemporary performance techniques in a Spanish context.

Full details for PMA 2901: Spanish Performance Studio RVVR Caberet Literario

 

PMA 4020/6020: U.S. Cultures of War and Empire

Instructor: Christine Bacareza Balance

Course time: Wednesday 11:20 am - 1:50 pm

This course examines the history and afterlives of U.S. war and empire across the Asia/Pacific region and the politics they engender for Asian/Pacific Americans. Since the Philippine American war (1898-1904), the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani’s monarchy (1893) and the subsequent annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (1898), the 20th century has been constituted by U.S. wars and colonial conquests across the Asia/Pacific region. From South Korea to Vietnam, Japan to Cambodia, Laos to Okinawa, U.S. presence has been felt in “hot wars” as well as Cold War discourse, in the U.S. military-industrial complex and its socio-political, cultural and environmental impact within the region. Reckoning with this global U.S. history, particularly as it manifests through artistic and popular cultural forms, students will better understand Asian/Pacific Islander racialization in the U.S. At the same time, we will explore Black, indigenous, and Latinx racialization through and against U.S. wars and militarism in Asia. Course themes include: critical refugee studies, U.S. militarism & gender, settler colonialism, transpacific critique, the politics of memory and post-memory.

Full details for PMA 4020/6020: U.S. Cultures of War and Empire 

 

PMA 6400: Thinking Media Studies

Instructors: Roger Moseley and Nick Salvato

Course time: Thursday 2:40 pm - 4:35 pm

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

Full details for PMA 6400: Thinking Media Studies

 

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