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Studio Practice is designed to offer each student a rigorous and immersive dance study experience. A deep-dive into practices of critical physicality, students will be supported in making direct connections across an abundance of dance forms that rearrange and blur the boundaries between traditional and emerging techniques. Studio Practice courses focus on the relationships between curiosity, desire, strength, effort, force, and presence, all while moving within the lineages and histories that inform the ways in which we create and encounter our dancing futures.

The class will be both looking at abstraction as well as more figurative based work. The class will include a mixture of creating assemblages in a variety of means and materials, and using both digital and analogue means from paint, to sand to animated forms. Objects will be cut out with scissors or the laser cutter, animated with pins or digital pins in software (After Effects), layers will be used to create depth in three dimensions, a multiplane or using the Z axis.

Piano Lab I aims to introduce the piano to first-time musicians or first-time pianists. Over the course of the semester, basics in music theory, piano technique, and note reading will be taught, culminating in an end-of-term recital. Please note that this course is meant for beginners, not advanced pianists.

This class will look at the intersection of photography and performance art inside the contributions of feminist and queer practices. Students will respond to different performance prompts, alternating between the roles of performers and photographers, and thinking about ways to use the camera as an artistic and documentation tool. They will also engage in readings and analysis of works from BIPOC, feminist, and queer authors and photographers from the global south.

This course explores music from early Indigenous music right on up to present day practitioners. Some of the traditions studied and practiced will include: Native American, Inuit, Québecois, Appalachian, African-American, Irish, Scottish, British Isle traditions, Cajun, Blues, Gospel, Mariachi, and Conjunto music. Instrumental, dance, and ballad traditions are studied and researched, and experienced first hand. Students must bring a guitar, banjo, mandolin, or fiddle (or other social instrument) to class for purposes of furthering personal music making through traditional forms.

For students with some prior singing experience. This class is designed to refine awareness and coordination of the mind and body and develop a reliable vocal technique applicable to all styles of singing and speaking performance.  

In collaboration with Mass MoCA’s Director of Public Programs, Lisa Dent, this course will combine art history and museum education as modes of inquiry into the unique challenges of presenting and contextualizing Black and brown artists in museums. Students will engage deeply with three solo exhibitions at Mass MoCA: (1) RACE/HUSTLE by Zora J. Murff, whose work “bluntly signifies how the art museum itself is part of the cultural arm of white supremacy and state power,” (2) Vincent Valdez’s Just a Dream, and (3) Jimena Sarno’s Rhapsody. 

Studio Practice is designed to offer each student a rigorous and immersive dance study experience. A deep dive into practices of critical physicality, students will be supported in making direct connections across an abundance of dance forms that rearrange and blur the boundaries between traditional and emerging techniques. Studio Practice courses focus on the relationships between curiosity, desire, strength, effort, force, and presence, all while moving within the lineages and histories that inform the ways in which we create and encounter our dancing futures.

This course is recommended for all students considering working in sculpture and interested in mild steel design/fabrication methods. It is open to anyone with a curiosity about materials and building processes. There are fundamental introductions to gas, arc, electric welding, forging, fabrication techniques like cutting and grinding steel, and general shop safety. Please note that this course may require additional materials to be purchased by the student, ex. Jacket, gloves, hat and safety glasses.