Global Arc

What is a musical and why should we care? As performers, writers, designers, theater fanatics, or simply pop culture consumers, we are touched by musicals every day. Reaching millions of people, this uniquely collaborative and expansive form continuously shapes our world. Students will explore the history of the American musical and develop tools to analyze musicals and their reception. They will investigate music theater through artist conversations, trips to see musicals, and expanding scholarship in the field. The class will culminate with visions of the future of the musical presented via student-written, collaborative mini-musicals.

Students will explore the world of voice acting and vocal foley design. Students will investigate historical and contemporary techniques used in audiobooks, animation, commercials, and video games. They will utilize industry-standard Logic Pro and user-friendly Garageband to collaborate with the Princeton University Library's Special Collections and reimagine public domain masterpieces through a sonic lens.

This course allows students, working at their own experience level, to analyze, rehearse and perform songs from the canon of dramatic musical theater. Using anything from lyrical arias to power ballads, we will approach lyrics and accompanying music as keys to creating character. We will investigate the "want" that drives a song. An accompanist will be in class for warm-ups, rehearsal and presentations. Students will find songs that suit their voices and challenges that they are looking for. Students will explore and present research on the voice, and will perform in a final celebratory showing. No singing experience necessary.

This course is an embodied exploration of Hip Hop feminism as scholarship, praxis, and performance. At once a multimedia research lab and a performance workshop, the course positions students as both critical investigators and creative practitioners. Students will engage the contributions of women in Hip Hop including MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, Bahamadia, Eternia, and more. Drawing inspiration from the Lyricist Lounge Show's theatrical hybrid (rap, comedy, sketch, and improvisation fused into music theatre), students will devise original short performances that interrogate the intersections of race, gender, class, power, and art.

The most frequently produced musicals are revivals. On Broadway, at universities, at high schools, community theatres, and summer camps, most shows that are performed have been performed before. As musical theater scholars, how do we think about, research, analyze, and interpret revivals? As musical theater artists, how do we navigate revivals and the history of a show? In this seminar, we'll explore the scholarship and the practice of musicals, afterlives, discussing theories of revivals and examining and re-conceptualizing shows. Aspiring directors, music directors, designers, and performers can put your ideas about revivals into practice.

This advanced Kiswahili course will help students gain a higher level of language proficiency by applying grammatical skills learned in Elementary and Intermediate Kiswahili to topics addressing the language and culture of the Swahili speakers in East Africa. Coursework will focus on readings, writings, and oral performance activities on selected issues related to the history, geography, politics, language, literature, and cultural practices of the people of Kenya, Tanzania, and other Swahili speaking regions of Eastern Africa.

The "truths" found in traditional archives are incomplete: books and mainstream film productions are often biased; silences and omissions enter every level of archive-making and historical production. Students will engage in the critical analysis of the historical relationship between race, diaspora, and citizenship as they appear in film, media, and cultural productions. Building on original stories and artistic materials presented in class, students will create their own project (short film, podcast, story map). The goal is to make the archive a tool for teaching, learning and an artistic piece for the larger community.

"Chromopolitics" challenges us to consider color as neither arbitrary nor neutral, but instead deeply enmeshed in powerful social and cultural dynamics. Structured around creative and collaborative student responses to the work of Black, Latinx and Indigenous artists and thinkers this seminar asks students to reexamine their own use and understanding of color by focusing on the resonances and intensities of the color black and adjacent dark tonalities such as browns, blues, and violets, as well as how shadow, night, and negative space register both in the work of artists and theorists of visual culture and in their experience as makers.

What is public art and how does it impact you? What is the role of the artist and the relationship between the use of materials, the site, and the community? Learning from varied concepts of art in public spaces, such as alternative digital spaces, intimate social relations, interventions, books and zines, outdoor public art spaces, we will learn from past and contemporary examples as we imagine the future of art in public spaces. Through hands-on projects created in 3D form and collective collaborative projects, we will redefine and design the future of art in the public.

This course will explore film and visual arts made by and about people who identify as women, trans and/or queer in dialogue with feminist and queer of color critique. Our course will center a transnational, intersectional and comparative perspective that will allow us to think about multiple social movements, styles and aesthetics while centering the lives of people who have experienced the cost of homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny often while fighting against other forms of colonized oppression such as racism and poverty.