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Somatic Studies [clear]
| Title | Offering | Standing | Credits | Credits | When | F | W | S | Su | Description | Preparatory | Faculty | Days | Multiple Standings | Start Quarters | Open Quarters |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Stephanie Kozick and Robert Esposito
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Program | SO–SRSophomore - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day | F 11 Fall | This program is intended for students who are eager to pursue academic and personal explorations of human development. This program will feature inquiry into the richness, density, and complexity of human awareness, development, and relationship by integrating a theoretical and practical study of human development with movement and dance Students will gain a vocabulary for specific ways of talking about human development and movement, which will involve a study of key influences: Kegan’s ideas about the problems and process of human development, Piaget’s developmental expressions of physical knowledge, Laban analysis, and Alwin Nikolais’ formal analysis of space, shape, time, and motion. The concept of "motion" will be addressed as the refinement or qualification of “movement” into an infinity of potential aesthetic expressions. The ways in which we develop as human beings involves a set of areas that include cognitive development, social/emotional development, language development, and physical development. The latter, physical development is an especially fascinating topic. The movement study in this program will be situated historically in the 20th-century. Rudolph Laban, along with many European artists and intelligentsia were influenced by Eastern thought, as well as by advanced science and technology. Historical events such as the World Wars spurred an aesthetic and intellectual diaspora leading to postmodern concepts of integrative thinking and holism in environmental and human affairs. These historical movements mark a pivotal transformational period toward the development of viable, holistic networks of integrative theory and technologies designed to inform and create a human community that respects uniqueness and diversity in service of sustainable living. Studio work will offer a practical mode of human movement study that will develop students’ personal somatic understanding. It will also involve group work by engaging the practice of Laban’s “movement choirs,” an expressive way of exploring human development through motion. Studio work will be placed in the context of living in a world of others that requires free exploration and creative play: fun with intent. This program's curricular activities will take an interdisciplinary approach that includes reading and discussing scholarly material, critiquing films, group and individual movement explorations, writing, and academic workshops. | human development, movement, and dance related fields. | Stephanie Kozick Robert Esposito | Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Fall | Fall | ||||
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Ariel Goldberger
Signature Required:
Spring
|
Program | FR–SRFreshmen - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day and Evening | S 12Spring | This program will immerse students in studying the intense and lively cultural life of New York City, the most active arts production center in the United States, and perhaps the world. Sessions will meet weekly in different cultural institutions to participate in art events as active audience members, to develop an educated and critical appreciation of the richness, complexity and current trends of artistic production in New York.We will spend two weeks on campus doing preparatory research in areas of each student's interest in order to create the structure for an individual project or practicum. Students may choose to create a project by engaging in artistic work, research, or both. Students will be responsible for making all necessary arrangements for room and board, as well as budgeting for individual event tickets. All students will be expected to present a final report of their experience and project.After the initial two weeks of research and preparation, participants in the program will fly to New York City for six or seven weeks, where they will engage in group and individual activities, depending on each student practicum or project. Students will attend some events as a group and some related to their own projects. We will attend events in a wide range of sites, from established world-renowned institutions to emergent art spaces.Depending on the season, performance events may include events in places such as PS 122, La MAMA, The Kitchen, HERE Art Center, off-off-Broadway small theaters, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Broadway productions and Lincoln Center. Regular dance events may include modern dance performances, experimental works, festivals at the Joyce Theater, and more traditional ballet events in venues such as the New York City Ballet. Specific visual arts events may consist of trips to the gallery "scene" in Chelsea, PS1, MOMA, DIA Arts Center, The Met, under the radar spaces and other sites. We may attend poetry readings at places such as The Bowery Poetry Club, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The St. Marks Poetry Project, The Academy of American Poets and The New York Public Library. The class will also endeavor to attend other culturally relevant institutions such as the Japan Society, the Asia Society, The Jewish Museum, The Schomburg Center, The Dwyer Cultural Center and El Museo del Barrio to experience a wide range of cultural diversity. Most weekly group activities will be followed by a discussion or seminar.We will spend the final week of the quarter back on campus in Olympia, completing final report presentations for the whole class. | architecture, community studies, consciousness studies, cultural studies, dance, field studies, language studies, literature, media studies, moving image, music, queer studies, somatic studies, theater, visual arts, and writing. | Ariel Goldberger | Freshmen FR Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Spring | Spring | ||||
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Walter Grodzik and Cynthia Kennedy
Signature Required:
Winter
|
Program | FR–SRFreshmen - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day | F 11 Fall | W 12Winter | This program will explore the interior spaces where performances begin and the exterior spaces where performances are realized. Students will begin with movement and theatre exercises that center and focus the mind and body in order to open oneself to creative possibilities and performance. Students will also study movement/dance and theatre as a means of physical and psychological focus and flexibility that enables them to more fully utilize their bodies and emotional selves in creating theatrical performance.Through the understanding and embodiment of somatic concepts such as awareness, intention, centering, authenticity, and the interplay of mind and body, students will have the opportunity to explore creative imagination as it expresses itself from their own life processes, rather than from externally imposed images, standards and expectations. How does imagination respond to the emotional self, the physiology of the body, and the psychology of the mind? How can we become more expressive and responsive to our inner selves? Students will be invited to explore and enjoy the dance already going on inside their bodies, to learn to perceive, interpret and trust the natural intelligence of intrinsic bodily sensations. The class will use experiential techniques derived from several traditions of somatic philosophy.In seminar, students will read a broad variety of texts about creativity, movement and dance history, and performance, performance history, and Western theatre history and dramatic literature. In particular, students will read Greek tragedy and comedy, the playwrights of the Elizabethan theater, such as Marlowe and Shakespeare, and the feminist comedies of the Restoration. The realism of the Nineteenth century will be seen through the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov and other realists, and students will study, discuss and perform the multicultural theatre of the Twentieth and Twenty-First century, including theatre, drama and performance art as found in the work of Thornton Wilder, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, Henry David Hwang and Anna Devere Smith. The discussion of dramatic literature will be framed from many viewpoints, including structuralist, feminist, Marxist, post colonial and queer.The program will include weekly seminars, workshops in movement/dance and theatre, and film screenings of various dance and theatre productions. This is an all-level program that welcomes students of all abilities that bring their excitement, commitment, discipline and creativity to the performing arts. Regular on-time attendance is fundamental to students' development and continuance in the program. | teaching, theatre, expressive arts, dance and movement theory. | Walter Grodzik Cynthia Kennedy | Freshmen FR Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Fall | Fall Winter | |||
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Ariel Goldberger
Signature Required:
Winter
|
Contract | SO–SRSophomore - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day and Weekend | W 12Winter | Individual study offers students the opportunity to develop self-direction, to learn how to manage a personal project, to focus on unique combinations of subjects, and to pursue original interdisciplinary projects without the constraints of an external structure. Students interested in a self-directed project, research or internship in the humanities, consciousness studies, or projects that include arts, travel or interdisciplinary pursuits are invited to present a proposal to Ariel Goldberger. Students with a lively sense of self-direction, discipline, and intellectual curiosity are strongly encouraged to apply. | humanities, arts, social sciences, interdisciplinary fields, and consciousness studies. | Ariel Goldberger | Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Winter | Winter | ||||
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Walter Grodzik
Signature Required:
Winter
|
Contract | SO–SRSophomore - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day | W 12Winter | Individual study offers individual and groups of students the opportunity to develop self-direction, to learn how to manage a personal project, to focus on unique combinations of subjects, and to pursue original interdisciplinary projects without the constraints of an external structure. Individual and groups of students interested in a self-directed project, research or internships in Queer Studies or the Performing and Visual Arts should contact the faculty by email at | Walter Grodzik | Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Winter | Winter | |||||
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Ariel Goldberger
Signature Required:
Spring
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Contract | FR–SRFreshmen - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day | S 12Spring | Individual study offers students the opportunity to develop self-direction, to learn how to manage a personal project, to focus on unique combinations of subjects, and to pursue original interdisciplinary projects without the constraints of an external structure. Students interested in a self-directed project, research or internship in the humanities, consciousness studies, or projects that include arts, travel or interdisciplinary pursuits are invited to present a proposal to Ariel Goldberger.Students with a lively sense of self-direction, discipline, and intellectual curiosity are strongly encouraged to apply. | Ariel Goldberger | Freshmen FR Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Spring | Spring | |||||
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Bret Weinstein
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Program | SO–SRSophomore - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day | S 12Spring | Complex systems can fail catastrophically. Resent catastrophic failures (such as the global financial collapse of 2008, the Gulf oil spill of 2010 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011) hint at the overall fragility of the systems on which civilization presently depends. Many have wondered if the larger system might be equally vulnerable to a major disruption.This program proceeds from a thought experiment: What if the lights went out and didn’t come back on? What if the gas stations ran dry and no one came to refill them? What if the store shelves went bare and stayed that way?The immediate effect would be unavoidably chaotic, disastrous and tragic. But from the chaos would likely emerge groups of people who had figured out how to provide for themselves.How would those groups be organized? What would they understand? What technologies of the past would they have resurrected, and in what form? What newer technologies would they work to retain? How would they use the rubble of modernity to enhance their lives. What would they eat and drink? How would they stay warm and fed in the winter? Would large-scale social organization arise organically, from the bottom up? How would the answers to these question differ by region?This program will not happen at the front of the room. The faculty will not present answers to these questions. The learning community will confront them together, with analytical rigor proportional to the scenario under consideration. As much as possible, we will attempt to prototype answers in the physical world, and let our successes and failures guide us toward a toolkit for survival.This program is not for passive students, or for those that prefer to stay in the abstract or metaphorical layers. It will require students to be both hard workers and careful thinkers. Students must be bold, collaborative and willing to rise to a serious challenge. | Bret Weinstein | Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Spring | Spring | |||||
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Lara Evans and Sarah Williams
Signature Required:
Winter Spring
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Program | FR–SRFreshmen - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day | F 11 Fall | W 12Winter | S 12Spring | Do museums transform living, changing cultural objects into fixed, preserved, inviolate collections? What stories do museums tell? What stories do objects embody? And what stories do we, visitors, tell ourselves? How do objects housed in museums affect our sense of self-identity? What does it take to become aware of how stories we tell both frame and are framed by objects? Is it possible to heal culture and the self through the interactions of narratives and objects? What happens to historical ideas about human consciousness when we explore the mausoleum-like exhibitions of what this consciousness has exhibited as other? What happens to consciousness when it is framed by neuroscience or to the self when it encounters thinking as an evolutionary internalization of movement?We'll explore the power of narrative objects in a variety of exhibition spaces: museums, galleries, shopping malls, book/web pages. We'll identify curiosities about the relationship between art objects and self-representation, particularly shifts in cultural influences and identities as they relate to shifts between the museological and mausoleum-like aspects of exhibition spaces. A triptych is a narrative object that uses three pictorial panels to convey movement in time, space, and states of being. A triptych, of sorts, is the focus of our fall quarter work and the model for our winter field studies. Consider our left panel: in the lives and other virtual realities of William Gibson's , the effects of narrative objects range from creative to preservative to destructive. Equally significant is how these effects are framed in movements between exhibition spaces experienced as "bird-cages of the muses" and those encountered in computer generated Joseph Cornell-like bird boxes. In the center panel is the narrative power of an artwork in Sheri Tepper's science fiction novel, . Here, alien races experience the consequences when a fresco at the heart of their cultural identity has been violently misinterpreted for a millennium. Now, the right panel. Here, in Catherine Malabou's texts the shifting movement or adaptability of self is called neuroplasticity. Her analysis of Claude Levi-Strauss' fascination with two sides--graphic and plastic--of masks illustrates her definition of neuroplasticity. We'll read this post-Derridean theory of self and do fieldwork with masks available for viewing in collections in this region. During winter quarter faculty and students will explore narrative objects and self-representation through six weeks of fieldwork in museums of their choice. Museums can be exhibitions of art, history or science; even zoos and botanical gardens can be considered museums. Students will document their research on their museum and will return to compile a multi-media presentation of their research project. In studios and workshops during fall and winter quarters students can expect to learn audio recording, digital photography, drawing with color pastels, ethnographic fieldwork, mindfulness practices (yoga, meditation), creative non-fiction writing, blogging and public speaking. During spring quarter students will have the opportunity to integrate individual and peer-group projects into a core all-program curriculum. That is, in addition to the 8-credit all-program activities of seminar, lecture, visiting artists' lecture and film series, a retreat week, and related assignments (e.g., weekly seminar response essays, a theory as evocative object chapter, a mindmap and 3D triptych, and mid-term and final reflective and evaluative writing), each student will design an in-program individual or peer group project for 8 credits. These projects may include (but are not limited to) the curation and/or installation of an exhibition or collection, an internship, a studio-based artistic or technical practice, community-based learning in support of Paddle to Squaxin 2012 ( ; ), or a field-based museum-related study. Partially funded by TESC's Noosphere Award, week 7 retreat week activities will include a range of contemplative practices: 5 rhythm dance; yoga nidra; lectures with Seattle University philosopher and Zen priest, Dr. Jason Wirth; and a retreat day at SU's St. Ignatius Chapel. Students will document their individual or peer-based learning and create a multi-media presentation for week 10. | art history, art, cultural studies, writing, anthropology, feminist theory and contemplative education. | Lara Evans Sarah Williams | Mon Tue Tue Tue Wed Wed Wed Thu Fri | Freshmen FR Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Fall | Fall Winter Spring | |
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Cynthia Kennedy
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Program | FR–SRFreshmen - Senior | 16 | 16 | Day | S 12Spring | The body, a vital component in teaching and learning, has often been neglected in higher education. A possible reason for this neglect lies in the enduring influence of the writings of Rene Descartes who, in the 17th century, wrote "I think therefore I am." He stated that each of us has a mental realm within us that is separate from the sensual nature of the body. This separate realm of the mind was seen as "higher" than the faculties of the body. This way of thinking influences much of education today, as the intellect is seen as the location of rational thought, and therefore, more reliable than the body and its emotions. There is much evidence, however, that Descartes was wrong. This program is devoted to exploring the marriage between the mind and body with an emphasis on the body. We will investigate the central role of the body in many aspects of our lives including decision-making and leadership, creativity, emotional intelligence, health and self-image. Our guiding question will be, "What is the role the body plays in our development as whole human beings?" The approach to answering this question is enjoyable! Students will have an opportunity to learn in many ways using many modalities and multiple intelligences. We will integrate somatic (body-based) learning practices into our study including weekly yoga and dance workshops (no prior experience necessary). Our inquiry will ask us all to attune ourselves to the wisdom that is available and present in our own body awareness. We will participate in community readings, rigorous writing assignments, and critical study of important texts. In addition to the core work for everyone in the program, students will also design their own learning experiences. These can include field studies, research papers, or exploration of body-based practices. | leadership positions, education, movement and expressive arts. | Cynthia Kennedy | Freshmen FR Sophomore SO Junior JR Senior SR | Spring | Spring |
