CLASS: DRAMATURGY OF DISRUPTION
Professor: Rubén Polendo
Engaging Theater as an inherently interdisciplinary art form, the course disrupts traditional modes of storytelling and art-making. Framing dramaturgy as the consideration of structural aesthetics and their impact, we’ll investigate a range of dramaturgical approaches for collaboration, process, space, and performance. We will look at dramaturgies across art forms and geographies and land them in theater practice. Source material includes The Upanishads; works by Hijikata and Artaud, juxtaposed with innovative performances by Pina Bausch and Kazuo Ohno; the work of Björk, FKA Twigs, Sevdaliza, Diamanda Galás, and Arca; the works of Frida Kahlo; and the films of David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Matthew Barney. We will also consider cultural innovators such as Theaster Gates, Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovic, and Yoko Ono. Ultimately, the class centers disruption as a means towards innovation and a richer understanding of what it is to be an artist and a human.
CLASS: MAKER’S LAB AND CREATIVE RESEARCH PRACTICE
Professor: Tomi Tsunoda
These courses anchor the Innovation Studio curriculum with a laboratory space where students can synthesize what they're learning in other courses through the development of their own creative research practice. Students will generate and workshop performance material that experiments with the technological, dramaturgical, and physical strategies to which they’ve been introduced, sharing work in class periodically throughout the semester. Students will further archive their own investigations of each new tool introduced in the Integrated Technologies class. They will develop a reflective, personalized bibliography and learn how to work with it as an active and catalytic tool for their creative research practice.
CLASS: INTEGRATED TECHNOLOGY AND WHOLE THEATER LAB
Professor: Michael Littig
Embracing technology as a collaborator and vehicle for innovation, this course challenges students to explore and develop generative and performative technology systems. Through the collision of rigorous physical training, including Kalaripayattu, an ancient martial and spiritual practice from Kerala, India, with digital tools in sound, video, lighting, and interactivity, students investigate technology as a system by understanding the relationship between input, processing, and output. The course positions students as lead artists and researchers, giving them the tools, methods, and processes to engage technology as a dynamic and responsive collaborator with unexpected and unexplored capabilities. By integrating physical virtuosity with technological experimentation, students are challenged to push beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, developing the rigor, curiosity, tools, and systems necessary to create transdisciplinary performance and open pathways to disciplined and transformative artistic work.
CLASS: TIME-BASED PRACTICE
Professor: Corey Sullivan
This course introduces students to the expansive possibilities of time-based media, combining foundational filmmaking techniques with archival exploration, experimental video practices, and emerging technologies. Through an introduction to film theory, students examine how visual composition shapes meaning, tone, and aesthetic experience. Students engage the archive as source material, acquiring, manipulating, and recontextualizing existing footage to produce new work across a range of transdisciplinary applications. Students develop practical skills in shooting, editing, and projection, experimenting with contemporary equipment and legacy technologies to discover how generations of innovative tools can interact in dynamic ways. We will also investigate emerging technologies and their potential to expand the language of moving image. Throughout the course, we bring video into dialogue with performance, sound, design, and dramaturgy, exploring its applications across disciplines. Through hands-on laboratories, critical inquiry, and practice-based research, students develop technical fluency, refine their aesthetic sensibilities, and discover new approaches to transdisciplinary artistic practice.