This course will examine the life and teachings of influential Asian spiritual leaders in the West such as J. Krishnamurti, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, D.T. Suzuki, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. In addition, our examination will also extend to well-known American spiritual teachers trained in Eastern traditions including Joseph Goldstein, Ken Wilber, and Pema Chodron.

This course will continue to develop skills in imagining and composing dances, now focusing on group forms, and the challenges to creating meaning, referential or abstract, in non-verbal, three-dimensional, motional and, most of all, embodied expression. In class we'll explore a variety of composition strategies used in group work, both classical and contemporary, and work with longer, more complex sequences. We'll play with such methods as layering, subtracting, juxtaposing, multiplicity, simultaneity, ambiguity, image, suggestion and statement.

This photography course will focus on the Connecticut River and the surrounding landscape within the jurisdiction of the Pioneer Valley. Students will research historic and contemporary images and literature that pertain to how the river has been represented and then propose and execute their own unique visual project. Prerequisite: Participants should have completed a college-level Photography I course and be prepared to work at an intermediate to advanced level of photography.

Color is the most relative medium in art. The goal of the course is to develop a vocabulary with color to include its genesis and physical properties, aesthetic and emotional tone, how a variety of photographic materials translate color, its particular expressive characteristics and descriptive properties. Throughout the semester we will view the works of photographic artists who work in color as well as the works of filmmakers and painters. This is a studio course. Hence, emphasis will be on the student's production of work in color photography with weekly critique sessions.

For students who have completed Film Workshop I or Video I, this class will explore the filmmaking process in greater detail with particular attention to the use of the still image within a time-based medium. Whether constructing a dramatic narrative, documentary, animation or experimental film in either a single channel or installation based environment, the still image will be considered for all its formal, conceptual, and theoretical reverberations.

The moving image is a pervasive presence in current culture but film and video history is threatened by the instability of its material existence. Digitization does not solve the problem of the medium's impermanence and the transition from celluloid to digital production and distribution only adding further layers to the medium's ephemerality. This course will explore issues of film preservation by viewing a wide range of films that have been preserved or restored, especially independent films from narrative, documentary and avant-garde cinemas.

For nearly a half century, the prevailing orthodoxy in philosophy, cultural theory, and social theory has been that our access to reality is mediated by our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, and systems of belief - or, even more strongly, that "the real" or "nature" is a social construction. Yet, over the past decade, a number of emerging philosophers have challenged this anti-realist orthodoxy and have offered powerful arguments on behalf of realism, the view that reality is fully independent of human access to it.

This course will stress critical thinking about the history and practices of New York City's Occupy Wall Street mobilization and the "#occupy" movement.

This class will continue the work done in Tonal Theory I. We will be studying part writing and voice leading, as well as continuing the process of understanding and using basic chromatic harmony. Within this study, we will begin to look at large scale forms and structures. Some composition assignments will be included along the way as we assimilate new theoretical knowledge. Topics and repertoire for study are drawn from European classical traditions as well as jazz, popular, and non-western musics. Prerequisite: Tonal Theory I or 5 College equivalent.

A course in reading films and videos as well as considering how they are produced historically, we will take gender as our point of departure. Engaging actively with making visual images will be part of our work. We explore the reasons for the historical absence of women filmmakers and study the works they produced when they won the right to do so. International cinemas, both dominant medias and films and videos made to oppose that system will be examined.