Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Emphasizes compositional skills and the rigorous exploration of movement, text, and design. Co-Lab provides directors, performers, writers, sound artists, designers, filmmakers, and choreographers opportunities to devise, rehearse, and perform new public facing performances or events to audiences over the term. May repeat once for credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

Course Description /

CA 253 CO-LAB (4 credits) 

Emphasizes compositional skills and the rigorous exploration of movement, text, and design. Co-Lab provides directors, performers, writers, sound artists, designers, filmmakers, and choreographers opportunities to devise, rehearse, and perform new public facing performances or events to audiences over the term. May repeat once for credit. Prerequisite: One of CA 123, 131, 146, 152, 161, 171 or permission of instructor. All students at the SCA are welcome and invited to take CO-LAB, please email the instructor for permission. 

CO-LAB provides directors, performers, writers, designers, filmmakers and choreographers opportunities to collaborate and explore methods of composing devised performance within an ensemble. CO-LAB is an experimental lab to workshop, develop and define work in front of a live audience where the maker and the audience are integral to the development of a piece.  Drawing from this fall’s theme of DEEP-FAKE students will research, devise, rehearse and perform a triptych of works to be presented to an invited audience on October 17th and 18th in Studio T, November 14th and 15th in Studio T and the final installation will be on December 5th, throughout the SCA building. Students will embark on an investigation of Deepfakes spanning technology, performance, and reality, seeking to question and challenge the concept of authenticity in live performance. By exploring the theme of Deep-Fake within performance contexts, we'll delve into the complexities of creating believable worlds and personas, utilizing technology, emotions, tone, sound, visuals, text and movement.  The class will examine notions of authenticity and the imagined, inviting the audience to join us in exploring the intricate interplay between artifice, reality, and the realms of the imagined within live performance.

Students will be given parameters, a small budget, three to four weeks to rehearse, design and run technical rehearsals for their work-in-progress showings. During the rehearsal phase, students will present their work-in-progress in class to receive constructive feedback from their peers and the instructor to be incorporated in the final public presentations. 

This course encourages a landscape of exquisite pressure, lateral thinking, shared vocabulary, trial and error, and innovation, where ideas and concepts can be discussed and challenged in a constructive environment. CO-LAB creates a working laboratory where students can choose to be inspired to work with, extant plays, new playwrights, a novel, an overheard conversation, an article in the newspaper, collective written text and/or from personal writing. As a collective we will train together, discuss, question and discover through rigorous exploration the relationship between movement, text, architecture, sound, light, site and design. We will experiment and investigate how an audience experiences a given work and how we can translate each project’s concept from a rehearsal room into a live performance.

CO-LAB combines techniques in creating devised live performances, building ensembles and incorporates the vocabulary of composition, improvisation, the language of cinema, the exploration of emotion, desire, movement and working in concert or in contrast with music. 

CO-LAB will look at the process of writing as it relates to the development of the students' devised work in scoring, planning, research, project statements, methodologies, form, point of view, dialogue, characters, plot and editing. 

Students will have the opportunity to incorporate props, costumes, video, sound, sets or new media as tools to create new innovative live performances. Students are encouraged to reach out to collaborators beyond their area and outside the School of Contemporary Art in creating their three works, thereby opening a dialogue of exchange for possible future collaborations.  

Performance + Installation Dates 

• October 17th / 18th  DEEP-FAKE_Performance 1:  Studio T 
• November 14th /15th DEEP-FAKE_Performance 2: Studio T
• December 5th DEEP-FAKE INSTALLATION: SCA Building 

Special Note /

• Please expect to rehearse outside of the class time for all in class progress showings and coordinate your schedules within your ensembles.  Please be aware there will be additional technical rehearsals and performance dates which will fall outside the class time in collaboration with Production Design students.

Budget  /

There will be a small budget given to each ensemble to use for the three public presentations. Each group will be responsible for their receipts in order to be reimbursed after each presentation. *Please note the budget changes year to year for CO-LAB depending on the projects that are happening that year. 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Course Learning Outcomes /


• discuss, analyze, and apply the composition tools: their use and application as both a performer training tool and to create composition for the theater.
• utilize a greater theatrical presence through listening skills and heightened body awareness.
• attain kinesthetic awareness, group listening, strength, flexibility and freeing the physical instrument. 
• ability to perform, direct, design and create a physical performance on stage or site in space and time.
• perform various warm-up exercises, stretches, and ensemble training and be able to lead rehearsals and ensembles.
• experience in working with actors, building a character and physical performance through the use of the training, improvisations, text analysis and research.
• attain a greater understanding of ensemble work by creating, constructing and writing original material.
• attain a greater understanding of source material, translating themes, novels and texts to create time-based work.
• ability to create performance scores, create project proposals and to write clearly about the work generated in class.  
• the ability to conduct rehearsals, delegate and communicate with actors, designers and co-collaborators.
• experience gained in writing original material, creating devised work, time-management and telling a story through light, sound, text, music, new technology and movement.
• a greater knowledge of creating, navigating and encouraging a positive working environment made of discipline, rigor and a shared vocabulary of performance.
• understand the value, discipline and focus it takes to create new innovative work.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING NOTES: