Arts Workshop
Gallatin offers a large variety of arts workshops in music, dance, theatre, and the visual arts. These workshops are taught by successful New York City artists, performers, and writers; they are designed for both beginning and advanced students. The arts workshops all employ an “artist/scholar-scholar/artist” model that involves giving students experiential training in the practice of particular art forms as well as providing opportunities for critical reflection about the artistic process, aesthetic theory, and the sociology of art.
Examples of courses include
Directing: Theory and Practice
K40.1028, Alycia Smith-Howard
This workshop will cover the fundamentals of theatrical direction: textual analysis, dramaturgy, collaboration, casting, director/actor relationship, ensemble building, composition/blocking and style. A core objective of this course is to increase the student’s ability to communicate and actualize their ideas effectively. Readings and class discussions will be coupled with practical exercises, and a directing Lab component in conjunction with the Gallatin Arts Festival. Students will place their theories into practice by contributing to the artistic and technical direction of the Gallatin Arts Festival (April 2006). Students will be responsible for assisting on technical crew and directing a short one-act play. Written assignments will include dramaturgical critiques, maintaining a directing journal, and a final paper. Texts for the course may include: Aristotle’s The Poetics; Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire; Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; Hodge's Play Directing; and T. Cole & H. K. Chinoy's (eds.) Directors on Directing: A Source Book of the Modern Theatre.
Making Dances in the Twenty-first Century: Concepts, Strategies, Actions
K40.1208, Leslie Satin
Dance composition is, simply, the process through which an artist selects and organizes movements. Less simply, it encompasses not only the interaction with other art forms but the expression of and resistance to cherished, or at least familiar, personal and cultural beliefs about how the body makes meaning. What is “the body”? What are the relationships of our movements, our experiences, our philosophies, our aesthetic frameworks and choices? In this workshop, we will grapple with these questions in the archive and the studio. We’ll read works by and about twentieth– and twenty-first–century choreographers and make dances that take off from their concepts, strategies, and actions. We’ll welcome students’ explorations of principles outside Western concert tradition; we’ll welcome however they wish to move, however they wish to move us. Readings may include essays by Lawrence Halprin, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Dunn, Elena Alexander, and others.
Digital New Media
K40.1635, Cynthia Allen
This workshop seeks to bring students from varying backgrounds together to engage in evaluating and developing digital new media for the Internet. The web makes possible a powerful new kind of student-centered, constructivist learning by collecting at a single site a phenomenal array of learning and creative resources which can be explored with simple point-and-click skills: photos, text, animation, audio and video materials. Because most web sites are highly visual in character many are referred to as Virtual Museums. Each student brings to the class a set of experiences and skills, such as research, writing, design, video, audio, photography, film, performance, illustration, computer literacy, software knowledge or Internet experience. Through lectures, including a survey of digital new media currently on the Internet, group discussions and workshops focusing on their personal skills, students will develop individual projects. The workshop will deconstruct Virtual Museums, digital collections on the web and innovative sites using digital new media, as well as discuss concepts, content strategies, and frameworks that bridge theory and practice. Class projects, readings, writings, and journal keeping are essential components of this course. Students are encouraged to supply their own media.
The Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program
The Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program (GIAP) offers a unique collaborative educational venture between students and faculty. A core of fulltime faculty and adjunct professional artists work closely with students to help them shape an arts curriculum tailored to their individual needs within the collaborative art world. Both undergraduate and graduate programs are modeled on the artist-scholar, scholar-artist philosophy of education, which incorporates intellectual and experiential components along with vehicles for creative expression. Individualized programs combine courses at New York University along with Gallatin's internships, independent studies, private lessons and core curriculum of interdisciplinary seminars and arts workshops. The Gallatin interdisciplinary arts curriculum includes both academic and studio courses in the arts. Areas of concentration include sociology and anthropology of the arts; arts management and cultural policy; gender and performance; performance history; drama and aesthetics, and studio-oriented workshops in dance, acting, music, visual arts, performance art, and creative writing. The GIAP also sponsors an annual student-run arts festival showcasing student performance projects. The Gallatin Arts Council provides a forum for community and networking among Gallatin arts students. The Arts Program also organizes presentations, lecture series and guest performances.
Students of the GIAP include actors, dancers, choreographers, painters, video artists and writers.