In this course, students will immerse in and craft improvisational approaches to movement and performance-developing both a training ground and performance troupe. Together, training in ensemble, solo, and partner work, we will develop skills for group listening, responding to architecture and environment, working with sound and music, and dancing from sensation and perception. There will be opportunities for performance throughout the semester.

How does one sustain a life in the arts? While this question looms large for lovers of the arts, a host of other questions lurk just beneath the surface: How is success defined and redefined? Where are the points of entry and who are the gatekeepers? How do performance, making, educational, community-engaged, curatorial, and scholarly practices relate to one another and to the organizational structures that support them? What is the role of place?

This course is an advanced-beginning level class, which will deepen students' foundational experience with modern and contemporary dance techniques. The studio will be our laboratory as we explore of a wide range of modern dance concepts with a focus on sensation, initiation, expansive use of space, efficiency, safety, connectivity and embodiment of phrase work. Along the way, we will also bring attention to alignment, spatial clarity, use of breath, increasing range of motion and the development of strength and stamina as way to nurture sustainable and deeply engaged dance practice.

This course is a hands-on, practical approach to directing guided by the belief that "directors learn to direct by directing." Our focus is on the collaboration between performer and director and on challenging outdated notions of power by bringing your full selves - in your complexity and with the fullness of your identities - to the embodied practice of directing. The pace will be rapid and the workload significant: every three classes, you will either present a piece that you have directed or perform in a work directed by your peers. Rehearsals will take place outside of class.

Across the country - and around the world - theater artists are creating work with organizers, elders, young people, and those whose stories are rarely on stage but who form the living heart of communities. Rejecting the belief that theater can only happen on traditional stages, this work is made in farming towns, on city blocks, in indigenous communities, and in places in between - and celebrates the ritualistic roots of theatre while building the future through partnerships with movements for justice and healing.

Poetry is an act of discovery. We write to discover what we don't know or understand about ourselves and the world around us. To make these discoveries we must pay attention: practice close observation, question our assumptions, and test our truths. In this way, poetry is a kind of research, and not so different than other fields. In this class, we'll look at poems that have curiosity and research at their score: scientific, historic, cultural and social.

This seminar will explore approaches to writing about people in the outdoors - as they live, die, love, work, play, transform nature, or simply contemplate the world. We will read and study a number of genres including traditional nature writing, historical accounts, creative nonfiction, fiction, and academic analyses. These readings will serve both as models of good writing and as introductions to the rich discourse about people in the outdoors.

What can the hopes and fears of a given society tell us about it and ourselves? Did the gravest "sins" in old Europe and the North American colonies involve food, money, or sex? Among the hallmarks of modernity were the rise of new social formations (classes) and the commercialization of daily activities and relations. Did traditional institutions and belief systems hamper or facilitate the changes? What roles did religious and national contexts play? Did the increase in the sheer number of "things" change the way people thought?

This course will introduce and explore themes in Queer Feminist Science Studies. Among the central questions of this class are: What is queer feminism? What is science studies? How is the study of science important to queer feminist critical and worlding work? How do we understand the boundaries between critiquing and practicing science? What does it mean to read queer / feminist theory as a site of knowledge production about biology's proper objects? What sorts of methodologies can help us to know our worlds beyond the nature/culture binary?

In 1994, to everyone's astonishment, the Zapatistas rose in revolt in Chiapas, Mexico, the same day that NAFTA went into effect-January 1, 1994. How to make sense of the coincidence? Why have so many, in Latin America and in the world, found the Zapatista messages exciting? What challenges face the Zapatistas today, including the election of a "progressive" government in Mexico in 2018?