New Class that apparently I suck at keeping a record of

It is hard to believe that we are three weeks into the term and this is my first chronicling. It might make sense to chop this up into smaller chunks. First off – we lost a day due to snow. This totally disrupted the rhythm of how the class was structured. My decision to drop the first project on modernism was, in retrospect, a mistake. I should have kept the beginning of the class the same and dropped something later on. I can chat with the students about modernist ideas – and the book we have covers them fairly well, but they are poor substitutes for having objects and conversations to point to as examples of unified, complete, whole, well-designed items. So, we did the intro day and then just jumped right into project #2 about reappropriation. I love the project and it produced some really interesting answers, but without the counter it doesn’t work as well. There may be other opportunities to swing back around – possible with the mater narratives project.

With 25 students we really needed to spread the presentations of the reappropriation projects across two days – and they took the full two days. Part of the reason to take the time with them is to really dig in an ask basic questions about what students see and what how those elements fit together. Some really unique solutions that have given us a great deal to discuss. The answers to the project gave us a good solid list of terms and ideas to start the term with.

I moved where we discuss the Postmodern book sooner in the term this time – it is really mean to lay out specific ideas and direction based on what the students saw in the book. I must admit that the conversation started at a fairly high theoretical level – which works well with this material – but I also fear students being left out of the conversation that either didn’t read the book or didn’t process the information the same way. Circling back to discuss these ideas over and over may be the best approach.

Third project – which was really the second project – was about movement. The task to execute an everyday movement actually became about a wide range of movement possibilities. Mainly this is near the start of the term since each student has to get up I front of the class and do something a little silly, a little odd. We then mixed these into groups and I whispered instructions to watch the movements as dance, music, theatre, and kinetic sculpture. Again – 25 students in the class is a huge difference from the 20 last time.

We started the next class with defining the terms we have so far and then splitting up into groups to work on using them. Some interesting results. Working to connect the movements to where we were headed I did some connective tissue on Duchamp and Cage. We will dig a bit deeper into Cage later in the term as well as do an exercise on indeterminacy next class.

Today was about postmodern dance – so a brief history from Graham to Cunningham to Judson and we were ready to dive more deeply into Solo olos. It was clear that not everyone had watched the video – so I brought up rehearsal videos and we discussed the structure. Some had seen it in Spring Dance last year and this was the first time they had to talk about it and understand how it was put together. This worked incredibly well as the first clear example we have explored. So far the term has been project heavy at the start – so now we will settle down into digging into the theory a bit. A long way to go and a short time to get there.