TAPS

The course examines how blackness has been both constructed and reimagined across Latin America and the Caribbean through an exploration of the performance and cultural practices of Afro-Latin communities. We treat popular and performance traditions as a crucial terrain for discerning how Black people across the region navigate discourses of racial democracy, mestizaje, multiculturalism, and racial fraternity even as they faced the realities of racism in individual nations. The course examines imaginations of blackness in hip hop, reggaetón, rumba, folklore, carnivals, and visual art in varied sites such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. Grounded in Black and Diaspora Studies, the writings of Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Gilroy and others will serve as theoretical touchstones for placing these forms and lived realities in diasporic context. We will also engage the work of noted and upcoming Black artists from the region.

Undergraduates must be in their 3rd or 4th year.

While the course will be taught in English, please note that many of the performances studied will be in Spanish.

This studio-based course with a seminar component offers an overview of the formal practices and contemporary trends that shape dance as an art form. The class is designed for students who seek to gain a working knowledge of dance and deepen their physical skills. A range of contemporary dance forms and practices will be covered. Topics may include modern dance, hip hop, partnering techniques, social dance forms, improvisation, somatic practices, dance composition, and more. Lectures, viewings, and discussion will support experiential practice components. No previous experience with dance or performance is required. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

This course explores the intersection of religion and performance/theatre through the lenses of performance studies that highlight religious practices, investigate worship practices that incorporate theatrical modes, and examine representations of religion and faith practices in and through secular performances. We will study disparate performances of religion (such as prayer, dances, stage plays, music, and art) that involve major religions of the world and some minor ones. Performance activities allow the experimentation and embodied expressions that can authorize normativity as well as enable transgressions. What this homology of religion and performance ultimately shows is a recognition of their mutual expressive force, infinite creative potential, and the power of human imagination. Students will learn practices of meaning that play on all the chords of the sensorium from where cognition and experience emerge or co-arise.

This co-taught, in-person seminar will take up the philosophical, social, and political problem of how love relates to music as both experience and idea with a focus on Greece and the wider Mediterranean. Whether staged and performed, publicly shared, or privately consumed, love and music pervade time and place, shaping diverse genres, engaging different media, and articulating numerous domains of human life and the public sphere. Yet the mediation of love experiences through music remains radically undertheorized. The seminar “Love/ Music” will think about what the love/ music nexus demands as an object of ethnographic and historical study and as a theoretical entity. The course has a binary scope, being both theoretical and hands-on ethnographic (including historical ethnography). Thus its syllabus includes sessions addressing seminal theoretical readings alongside sessions structured as “ethnographic workshops” variously addressing the problematic of the “love / music relation.” 

Over the course of the quarter, students will carry out short ethnographic assignments designed to train them to think theoretically while doing field research or creative projects with an ethnographic sensibility, fusing and playfully unsettling the boundaries between the artistic, the ethnographic, and the philosophical. Assignments will range from experimentation with multimodal and sensory ethnographic methodologies, dialogic, reflexive and (auto)ethnographic narrative, field-note or historical-ethnographic writing, and oral history, to creative work (e.g. making playlists, podcasts, radio essays, short films, sound art, performatively reinventing archival material, or the like), thereby fusing the boundaries between the fictional, the artistic, the ethnographic, and the historical.

Writings by Christina Woolner, Hilton Als, Luis Manuel García-Mispireta, Eva Iliouz, Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou, Martin Stokes, Marta Savigliano, Wayne Koestenbaum, Mladen Dolar, and James Davidson will figure among the readings.

Requirements: Each student will do 1) two small ethnographic projects for the “ethnographic workshops” (held in sessions 4, 6, and 8) and 2) a 4-5,000-word final term paper. In lieu of a fully written term paper, students may do a creative or ethnographic project, developed in consultation with the instructors.

The course will be capped at twelve graduate students. It is open to students from all academic units.

NOTE ON SCHEDULE 

This seminar will meet twice weekly for five weeks on Mondays 1:30-4:20 and Thursdays 2:00-4:50 from April 20 until May 18. A tenth session held on Thurs. May 21 will be devoted to student presentations. Students are required to attend all sessions in person.

Additionally, on Friday, May 15, students will participate in a workshop of the multi-year international project “Love / Music: Problematics of a Relationship.” The workshop, held under the sub-rubric of “Methodologies from across Disciplinary and Practice-based Terrains” and hosted by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, will focus on how different disciplines, diverse in their methods for dealing with love, have been approaching the love /music nexus as a disciplinary issue, and might reconsider it in empirical and theoretical terms.

In film, sound design is expressive, immersive, and dense, but once complete it’s fixed in time forever. This course will explore ways to translate the technical and narrative approaches of cinematic sound design to the dynamic context of live performance (dance, theater, puppetry, etc.). Using a variety of tools and practices from Ableton Live to field recording, students will learn how to create cinematic sonic experiences that are responsive to and imbued with liveness. Final projects will culminate in an evening of live sound-based performances.

This acting course will introduce students to the fundamentals of performing early modern drama. Working with plays by Shakespeare, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Margaret Cavendish and other playwrights of the period, we will draw on performance techniques developed by Shakespeare & Company, which focus on the voice, physical gesture, collaboration, and play. Required readings and viewing assignments will supplement our class work by providing context, inspiration, and an introduction to a variety of artists. The course will culminate in a performance of scenes and monologues.

This course examines key texts from antiquity through the 18th century related to music and sound. “Literature” is construed broadly to include the many genres in which music or sound play a principle part: philosophical and scientific essays; anecdotes, biographies, and tales; poems and informal essays; songbooks, formularies, and scores; encyclopedias and manuals. The course will be organized historically and thematically. Some of the issues we hope to investigate: the role of music in ritual and governance; theories of the voice and sound production; the translation of sound into words, and what is lost and gained; the pictorial representation of sound and listening; the relation between music and emotion; the social roles of musicians and entertainers; and the cultural significance of musical instruments.

Each week will focus on a particular sense or sensation (sound, touch, horror, wonder, etc.) in works of premodern Japanese theater and fiction, paying particular attention to performance (broadly defined to include noh, kabuki, and puppet theater as well as comic storytelling and spectacle shows) as a public site for the exploration of intimacy and alienation, the circulation of feelings, and the staging of somatic difference. Considering, for example, anti-theatrical bias and discourses of contagion, scenes of possession and physical transformation, and the psychologizing of emotion and the senses, the course will engage with theories of embodiment, emotions, disability, and wonder. All readings will be available in English.

The performance score is a visual/textual work unto itself. Scores also provide performers and audiences with a language to understand the work. In this way, scores are documents of performative world-building while at the same time offering pathways into those worlds. This is a course about producing writing, drawing, and trace-making for the purpose of some other action – the performance of some unknown. Students will consider, in particular, how diasporic artists and writers have used writing, drawing, and mark-making as tools for inhabiting and re-enlivening performances of the past, theoretical performances, and those performances difficult to transcribe or translate. Students will have several opportunities over the course of the term to create and perform scores including their own in various media.

This course will cover the rich representation of university life in non-professional Renaissance drama (including student-written plays, hazing plays, moralities, and satirical pamphlets, as well as intriguing fragments from lost plays), and the tantalizing glimpses this subject that the public stage offer. Plays include Love's Labour's Lost, The Parnassus Plays, Michaelmas Term, The Marriage of Wit & Science, and several neo-Latin plays in English translation. It will also provide a deep dive into the student scrapbooks of the late 16th / early 17th centuries; students will assemble their own album amicorum based on this curious and compelling form of self-documentation. Half of the course meetings will be taking place in the Regenstein Library's Special Collections.