There are processes designers in the theatre must undertake to realize the physical world of a play. Moving through a series of individual and group exercises, students will begin to develop their own process toward expressing the passion of a theatre work through their designs. Throughout the semester students will develop a design vocabulary that allows for collaboration and interplay, while producing unified and coherent design work.

This course is a hands-on, practical approach to directing guided by the belief that "directors learn to direct by directing." Our central focus is on the collaboration between performer and director. 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.

We will learn how to build stuff that moves! Using wire, sheetmetal, paper, wood, and a range of other media, we will examine and build mechanisms. We will contemplate the basic ingredients of mechanical forces and motion such as bearings, cams, cranks, gear ratios and more. All levels of experience are welcome, but students should be comfortable using hand tools and able to devote at least 8 hours a week outside of scheduled class time working on projects.

Creative Interventions will deeply explore the intersections between global environmental change, sustainability, the arts, education, and social action. In particular, we will highlight the essential role that creativity and art-making plays in organizing, strategizing and initiating powerful and effective social change. Through creative thinking and expanding on one's artistic practice, students will learn powerful and productive ways to be agents of social change.

Students in this course will explore moments in theater history when the way that we tell stories was shaped by the introduction of technical elements - from the role of fire in the beginning of many storytelling traditions to the ways that projection design is redesigning stage space in the present day. Learning will take place in the classroom, where students will read and discuss plays and historical texts, as well as in the shop, where they will create hands-on projects that reflect the role of technical elements as both practical tools and artistic mediums.

Though the use of projections has a long history in the theatre, it is only within the last ten years that projection design has become a significant design element in many theatre productions. More recent advances in projection technology have made projections not only common, but often central to the experience of the performance environment. Continued experimentation with the integration of projections in many theatre productions has influenced other theatrical disciplines such as playwriting, directing and the traditional design areas.

Contemporary ideas in sculpture will be introduced in relation to art production in a range of media including wood, steel, cardboard, fabric and found materials. This course provides training for all equipment in the Art Barn Sculpture Studio. Student generated imagery will foster discussions around representation, abstraction, the body, folk art, craft media, site specific sculpture, and installation art. Readings, slide lectures, and group critiques will inform the development of independent work in three dimensions. The course culminates with a lengthy student defined independent project.

This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We'll analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays in the humanities and natural sciences and follow with a personal essay and a piece of short fiction. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion; students will also meet individually with instructor.

We will explore the complex microbial interactions and succession seen in the production of some ales. This will be a research project-based course focused on questions of interest to brewers. The microbiology of many of the Belgian ales and some American dry hopped beers is quite complex and largely unexplored at the molecular level. The fermentation is natural and often involves mixed cultures of yeasts and bacteria. Some microorganisms may participate in parallel, while others act in a sequential manner with a changing dominant biota during the course of fermentation.

Global environmental change, from increased fertilizer loads to a warming climate, is the new norm faced by the biosphere. This course will explore the scientific context of global change through a biogeochemical lens, with focus on human perturbations to the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles. This course will be split between student-led discussion of primary literature and small group field/laboratory projects.