Overview of the Seminar
Our study of the arts in New York City will take us to plays, operas, shows, musical recitals, dance performances, art exhibits, lectures, walks, and photography exhibits. Before we begin looking outside of ourselves, however, we will look inward at the question of identity. For the first project of the term, each of you will ask and then create a digital story that responds to the following questions: Who are you? What has formed you? And what from your history, your past, and your culture are you bringing to this study?
This term, we will also look to enlarge our understanding of ourselves and our connection to the arts by thinking broadly about theater as encompassing human action that takes place both on-stage and off. Borrowing from Paul Woodruff’s 2008 book, The Necessity of Theater, we will conceive of theater as “all the things that human beings do that can be watched—talking, singing, dancing, playing musical instruments, engaging in contests, eating, drinking, fighting, killing, loving, and so on” (18).
We will, in other words, conceive of the semester as a series of ongoing theatrical performances where watching itself is of paramount importance. Woodruff’s final paragraph in the prologue to his book will serve as a useful starting place:
There is an art to watching and being watched, and that is one of the few arts on which on human living depends. If we are unwatched we diminish, and we cannot be entirely as we wish to be. If we never stop to watch, we will know only how it feels to be us, never how it might feel to be another. Watched too much, or in the wrong way, we become frightened. Watching too much we lose the capacity for action in our own lives. Watching well, together, and being watched well, with limits on both sides, we grow, and grow together. (10)
Throughout the term, you will be describing your ‘watching and being watched’ through writing, blogging, making digital stories, and by studying and presenting on the arts of a particular cultural community. Together we will explore the use of technology, particularly IPhoto and IMovie, so that each of you can discover new ways to describe and present what you have learned and who you have become as a result of this inquiry into art, the artist, and the relationship of artistic expression to particular cultures. In this seminar, then, we will look to grow together as we embark on a study of our encounters with the arts in New York City, as we make our own artistic creations, and as we explore our reactions and responses to them and to one another.
