This course introduces students to basic questions about 1) how our bodies are subject to multiple kinds of power dynamics 2) the ways in which we move through the world in these bodies navigate, subvert, reinforce, and interfere in these dynamics and 3) what radical change/possibilities may be through physical intervention. We will examine these questions through attention to the spheres of experimental and social performance, sports, everyday activity/interpersonal exchange, and protest movements. We will read theorists from disciplines including history of power and knowledge; dance and performance studies; postcolonial studies/critical theory; and more. This course will act as a segue into Philosophies of the Body P2 thinking about alternative global traditions of thinking about the body and its possibilities for those who choose to take both.

Nakedness of Being is an experiential and experimental performance course taught by Eiko Otake, a New York-based movement artist. This course combines Eiko’s embodied creative practice with the study of postwar Japanese arts. Through the study of movement, readings, videos, and films we will learn that space/time is not a white canvas that stands alone and empty. Here and now are continuous parts of a larger geography (space) and history (time) and as such are dense with memories, shadows, and possibilities. We will see art works and films from postwar Japan as examples of artistic representations of despair and perseverance. What is it to forget, remember, mourn, and pray? How do we transcend violence and loss? How does being or becoming a mover or dancer affect our emotional rigor, seeing/learning, and creativity? These are some of the many questions that we will explore. This is not a dance class, nor is it geared toward performers. We will learn some movement together, but the course encourages students to think about movement as a method of accessing human experiences and building knowledge, a way to explore sensations, thoughts, and reactions to a particular space.

This course introduces the landscape of theatrical production and interdisciplinary performance by women in the African Diaspora / Black Women, specifically in the United States. This course includes close reading, analysis and discussion of play scripts, poetry, related theoretical and historical readings, film and theatrical presentations. Some examples of themes we will explore are Black women and feminism, ritual as performance and meditations on the lived experience(s) and identities and cultural values of Black women in the diaspora. Examples of possible readings include Lorraine Hansberry, Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, Kimberlee Crenshaw, Patrica Hill-Collins, Toni Morrison, Alice Childress, Anne Deveare Smith, Katori Hall, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage, Dominique Morisseau, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Danai Gurira, Christina Anderson and more.

This class explores the relationship between the actor and the camera. We will learn basic technical skills as well as cultivating the emotional adjustments, relaxation, and presence that serve to modulate an authentic performance in front of the camera. We will address audition technique, scene work and monologues through assigned, found and original material.

Rogue Objects is a combined studio/seminar class taught by multimedia artist Janani Balasubramanian. Students spend approximately half their time exploring ethical and cultural implications of emerging brown dwarf astrophysics with insights from feminist science studies, trans studies, critical theory, anti-colonial histories of science, and art history. The rest of the course is focused on creative experiments for the operatic film Rogue Objects, described below. No prerequisites are required other than expansive and rigorous curiosity; the course is ideal for students with interests across math, physics, astronomy, music, STS, computer science, feminist and critical race studies, history, film, performing arts, and visual arts. Made in collaboration with the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History, Rogue Objects is an operatic film for planetaria that explores the emerging science of brown dwarfs: a newer class of in-between celestial bodies, neither planets nor stars. Brown dwarfs are primarily bright in the infrared -- a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum just outside the wavelengths of human sight -- and to observe them we, humanity, had to make the creative leap that darkness was worth looking at. Through animation, renderings from the new JWST and Gaia space telescopes, and an operatic score built from sonified light curves of nearby brown dwarfs, Rogue Objects invites audiences into the wonderful life of these objects that abound and sing in the dark.

Team-taught by CC professors Sara Hanson (Molecular Biology), Ryan Platt (Theatre/Dance), and artist Kathryn Hamilton, the course engages students in a journey to explore the possibilities for creative thinking that might emerge by swapping, mixing, and sometimes just ignoring disciplinary practices. What if we reframed a science experiment as a studio problem, or thought about what happens in a lab as if it were performance? Practicing ‘kitchen sink’ biology, students will learn the fundamentals of molecular biology to grow bacterial cultures sourced from their homes and using easily-found equipment and supplies. The cultures become living maps of students’ personal environments that then become elements in art and performance works that students will create in order to tell stories about biological processes and how the often-invisible microscopic co-inhabitants of our world shape our lives. Course readings and discussions will explore the ways in which art and science influence each other, and throughout the course, students will be challenged to consider critically how social, political, and cultural conditions dictate the trajectory of scientific research, as well as how the languages of science shape social norms and expectations. No previous experience in an arts or discipline is required to take this course. “Students in the course are eligible to receive a Scientific Analysis (SA) or Creative Process (CP) General Education credit.”

Comparative (and connected) exploration of philosophies of the body. In the west, we have inherited a model of the body as object, opposite to the mind - reinforced by a variety of everyday discourses including medical and health discourses as well as those around beauty, capability, and culpability. While this course will historicize continental European theories of mind-body duality, we will dive into specific other philosophical traditions – embodied as well as textual – which offer very different models for the thinking-feeling-subjective body, with their own complexities and critical possibilities. We will address bodies (in motion), perception/cognition, and power (variously defined). Ultimately, these various approaches force us to question what it means to even talk about “a body”.

An introduction to the interdisciplinary field of arts and health, students will engage in daily movement explorations and discussions as well as participate in on-site creative workshops with health professionals. The principles of this arts & health practice will be further explored as they relate to other disciplines such as education, economics, psychology and the health sciences. As a final project, students will create a personal response to their investigations and experiences in an arts discipline of their choosing (dance/movement, theatre, music, voice, visual art, writing.) This in-depth experience will also include a final critical reflection synthesizing their research, theoretical studies and creative work.

In Merida Mexico