This studio course explores various styles of jazz dance for intermediate to advanced students. Students will continue to deepen their appreciation of jazz dance forms as they increase movement articulation and specificity. Combinations will focus on isolation, coordination, juxtaposition and musicality while also challenging the students to enhance their expressivity and qualitative choices.

The goal of this workshop is to understand the aesthetics and techniques of film directing and to produce and direct a short film based on the screenplay written in the previous fall Semester in DRAM 4750 Writing the Short Film.

Studies basic techniques for moving the costume design from drawing to finished character, including construction, alteration, patterning, fitting, and accessories. Lab required. Instructor permission.

This class will introduce students to the tools, techniques, and problem-solving of building creature puppets. Mentored by professional creature artists, students will explore fabricating skin textures and patterns, structures, material experiments, and mechanisms. Working both individually and collectively, the class will culminate with a wearable creature piece or puppet for the Stan Winston and Steven Warner Festival of the Moving Creature.

An introduction to the art and craft of screenwriting through the writing and discussion of short scripts. Will involve study of screenplays and films, and focus on the basic elements of screenwriting, including story structure, creation of character, and formatting.

This studio course explores various styles of jazz dance. Combinations will focus on isolation, coordination, juxtaposition and musicality. Styles include but are not limited to contemporary, Broadway/musical theatre and lyrical.

This course is designed as an introduction to movement practices for students of all backgrounds and skill levels. Students will work on dynamic alignment, as well as spatial, sensory, and bodily awareness. Through movement prompts, improvisation, and learned combinations students will be challenged to expand movement vocabulary while also increasing range of motion, strength, flexibility, and expressivity.

In this practice-based course, students will reexamine relations to their environment and generate strategies for a new environmental ethics that calls a human-centered world into question. Through reading, conversing, and moving, students consider how somatic and artistic practices might shift ecological understandings. Students will ask questions of and through modes of perception and experiment with an expanding empathy to enact new relations.

Introduces the art and craft of playwriting, focusing on short exercises and in-class writing assignments. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Explores dance making through the investigation of various tools and approaches to movement generation and composition from western choreographic practices. Students will develop their skills as dance makers through movement explorations, readings, discussions, and viewings. Students will create multiple compositional studies to hone their abilities to make dances. Feedback sessions provide opportunities for critical reflection and discussion.