"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains/ Such shaping phantasies, that apprehend/ More than cool reason ever comprehends." (A Midsummer Night's Dream) In this class we will set in dialogue texts of Shakespeare (five plays) and Virginia Woolf (four novels and selected essays). Our main focus will be on the texts, reading them with close attention to language and form as well as to their widely different literary and cultural assumptions.

This is an advanced production/theory course for video and film students interested in developing and strengthening the element of performance in their work. How does performance for the camera differ from performance for the stage? How do we find a physical language and a camera language that expand upon one another in a way that liberates the imagination? This course will explore performance and directing in their most diverse possibilities, in a context specific to film and videomakers.

Sketchbooks are places of safety and freedom, where artists can do whatever they please: explore unproven paths, go against the grain, experiment with unfamiliar techniques, document the world in deeply personal ways or just doodle without any pressure that out of this engagement a masterpiece will be born... and yet from working in sketchbooks regularly artists develop a discipline of engaging with the world and from the lack of pressure often new directions, new bodies of work are born.

This course will examine dance through the lens of culture and culture through dance. We'll study past and current examples from around the world to consider the many roles dance plays, and the ways dance embodies, creates, transmits, changes and is bound by culture. Students will investigate dance's role in religion, rites of passage, politics, war, identity formation, medicine and social relations, and will discuss such issues as ownership and appropriation, tradition and change, influence and fusion.

A seemingly straightforward question: "What does it mean to translate?" might be one of the trickiest, most paradoxical, and yet liberating questions in the field of language study. This class aims to prepare students for the task of translation by introducing them to various approaches - as a creative process, as a multifaceted profession, as a political and ethical problem in our world today -- and by encouraging its practice. In class we will discuss leading and competing theories of translation as well as works of fiction that highlight the work of the translator.

Making Dances 2 will build upon students' prior study of dance composition. The studio will be our laboratory as we engage in a series of choreographic experiments, with a particular focus on group forms. Employing the elements of movement (weight, time and space), formal structures and play, each experiment which will provide cumulative insight into how compositional choices/strategies lend themselves to embodied meaning-making and serves to frame each students' unique creative impulse.

The Improvisor's Laboratory:This is a class for musicians interested in developing their expressive and creative skills through improvisation. It is open to all instrumentalists, including voice and electronics. It is open to students from any musical background. You will be challenged to expand your instrumental vocabulary, and to use these languages in a context of collective improvisation. We will look at improvisational music making from a multitude of angles, breaking it down and putting it together again.

We will read works by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky paying close attention not only to the context of these works' creation and their aesthetic qualities, but crucially, to how they were received by their readers used for shaping new literary theories in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will look at Russian Formalism, Bakhtin's Circle Structuralism et al. Intended for close readers, theory fiends and aspiring writers alike--we'll work on all these skills.

The American Transcendentalists: Even in its heyday in the 1830's and 40's, the Transcendentalist movement never included more than a few dozen vocal supporters, but it fostered several significant cultural precedents, including a couple of America's first utopian communities (Brook Farm and Fruitlands), an early women's rights manifesto (Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century), the first enthusiastic appropriation of Asian religious ideas, and, in the travel writings of Thoreau, the nation's earliest influential environmentalism.

Writing and Speaking About Art & Architectural History: This writing-intensive course is designed for Division I and Division II students who would like to explore the methods of art history and who want an opportunity to do independent written projects in art, architectural history, and/or visual culture.