Looking for another TDM class to fill out your courseload? Check out TDM 139X/ENGLISH 90EX: The Exorcist! About the course:
Briefly America’s most terrifying movie, now an inexhaustible source of camp, reference, and technique, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is a rich allegory of postwar America. But its very deficiencies, blind spots, and occlusions also make a powerful lens onto the present day. This advanced workshop in devising, adaptation, and critical intervention will perform (literally) an examination of the significance, meaning, and unholy afterlife of The Exorcist, created over the semester using historical research, conversations, attempts at re- staging, religious rites, death-metal growls, and head turns of 180 degrees or more.
Check out this new course being offered next semester! TDM 162DC: Performance and its Documentation will be taught by Matt Wolff, a graphic designer, editor, and developer working in close collaboration with artists, curators, galleries, writers, and cultural institutions. Read more about the class below!
What is it to make an image of a performance, to document? When the live performance ends, a heap of materials remains: moving images, still ones, sketches, props, manuscripts, notes, ephemera, and much more. From the accumulation, selection, and editing of this media, documentation emerges. But beyond the archival and the historical, performance documents offer a new stage of their own. The performance document is a format full of potential and opportunity for the creation of entirely new works.
This studio-based course offers an in-depth exploration of performance documentation and the ways translating between the live event and the document can create complex, multi-faceted experiences for future audiences. Over a wide range of case studies, we will investigate the myriad ways an event can be documented, exploring the formal properties and possibilities afforded by different documentation techniques and the ways they can carry a performance into the future. Alongside these case studies, we will develop a theoretical framework and vocabulary to describe ideas of aura, repetition, re-staging, instruction, evidence, trace, and nuance embedded in the document. Participants can expect to develop their technical and critical skills to (re)consider and (re)present documentation in their own practices.
Looking for a TDM course to add to your spring courseload that counts as either critical or practical? Consider TDM 176MP: Moving Parts, a new course being offered this school year!
ABOUT TDM 176MP: MOVING PARTS
Cross-disciplinary practices have created exciting innovations in contemporary performance, and animated how material is employed in the fine arts. Through collaborations and other forms of cross-fertilization, objects such as set, props, and costumes are no longer backgrounds or dressing for their human protagonists, but integral actors, intrinsic to performative expression. Exhibitions working with time and movement as materials, choreographies with and without bodies, and performers motivated by objects they wear are some of what we will explore during this course.
Moving Parts unfolds over 6 two-week acts. The first week will be a lecture/ seminar/discussion. The second week of each act will be a studio class where students show work and give feedback. Mentoring sessions will help prepare for a final project at the end of the semester.
Through engagements with a diverse list of existing performances and artworks that center the body and movement, we will delve into expanded perspectives of choreography that activate our own interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches. This intermediate course is open to all students with some experience in dance, choreography, costumes, scenic design, video, fine and performing arts.
Interested in taking a class with Fana Fraser after seeing her work here? TDM 146CF: Wild Caribbean Futurisms: Dance, Performance & Radical Playmaking still has space for students this semester!
Wild Caribbean Futurisms is an experimental performance course that places emphasis on dancing with radical abandon, channeling intense feeling into clear theatrical form, and making formations of belonging with others. Given the turbulence of colonization in the Caribbean region and current climate catastrophes, during this course, we will cling to an ethos of care in our decolonization and desecration movement practices; psychic boundary making; and moving toward hope and generous communal innovation as an act of resistance against ongoing systems of alienating oppression. What ideologies can we divine as we imagine patterns towards more sustainable futures? We will dance with mythology making, and pull from sacred texts and other materials. We will hold disability justice as a crucial consideration in making performance. We will play with the timing of making rhythm, the metaphysics of desire, and look to Revolutions and Movements in history that have shaped / reshaped global policies.
Still looking for a TDM class to fill out your spring courseload? Consider TDM 168K: Contemporary Mixed Media Theater Production in Asia!
Contemporary Asian theater has emerged in recent years as a source of influence and inspiration in the global culture industry. Specifically, mixed media productions in Asia have created a provocative performance and compositional space to link past cultural experiences with contemporary creative practitioners' artistic vision and expression. Audiences worldwide are increasingly eager for pathbreaking new media productions that engage with cultural diversity and multiple traditions. Correspondingly, global production theaters have changed their models to satisfy audience demands.
This course combines seminar discussion, lecture, and hands-on practical engagement to introduce students’ understanding and appreciation of mixed media performing arts, especially those that incorporate and innovate upon traditional Asian aesthetics and cultural experiences.
