I didn’t know shit when I walked into Adrienne Kennedy’s class. I thought I did (we all do), but she took one look at my work, at the way I moved through the world, and called bullshit on every lazy assumption I’d been carrying around like a backpack full of rocks. Kennedy (you know her: Funnyhouse of a Negro, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, the real deal) didn’t coddle. She made us listen. Actually listen. Not the performative nodding we all do while waiting for our turn to talk, but the kind of listening that makes you uncomfortable because you realize how much you don’t know about the person sitting three feet away from you. She made us write together, argue together, fail together. And somewhere in that messy, collaborative process, I learned how to talk to people who weren’t me. How to communicate across the minefield of identity: mine, yours, everyone’s.
That’s the foundation. Everything I do in the classroom comes back to that.
Here’s the thing about teaching, and I’ve been doing this for twenty years now, across undergraduate and graduate courses in theatre, performance studies, film, and media, whatever label you want to slap on it: you can’t just teach students to consume culture. Anyone can binge-watch. Anyone can scroll. What I teach my students is how to think about why they’re watching, who made it, what it means, and what it costs. And to do that, they need tools. History, so they understand where we’ve been. Language, so they can articulate where we are. Philosophy, so they can question where we’re going. Psychology, because people are complicated and fucked up and beautiful. Politics, because nothing exists in a vacuum.
My pedagogy (and I hate that word, but let’s use it anyway) is built on the understanding that we’re living in this insane, interdisciplinary moment where everything bleeds into everything else. Performance isn’t just theatre. Film isn’t just movies. Media isn’t just your phone or tablet. It’s all connected, all feeding off each other, all evolving faster than we can keep up. Digital media has changed the game entirely, and if we’re not teaching students to navigate that (to understand it, critique it, make it), we’re just teaching them to be spectators.
And now there’s AI. It’s here. Pretending it isn’t, or banning it from the classroom like some contraband, is about as useful as trying to uninvent the internet. I’m not interested in fighting that battle. What I am interested in is teaching students how to work with it, how to understand what it can and can’t do, and most importantly, how to maintain their own critical voice in a world where the machine can spit out an essay in thirty seconds. Because here’s the truth: AI is a tool, like a camera or a word processor or a search engine. It doesn’t replace thinking. It doesn’t replace the messy, human work of figuring out what you actually want to say and why it matters. If anything, it makes that work more important. So we use it in class. We experiment with it. We interrogate it. We figure out where it’s useful and where it falls flat on its face. And in the process, students learn something more valuable than how to avoid detection: they learn how to be better thinkers, better makers, better humans in a world that’s changing whether we like it or not.
So I ask students to get their hands dirty. I want them confronting systems of thought: cultural theory, the history of technology, narrative structures, media theory, comics, games, television, whatever we’re diving into that semester. But here’s the key: they’re not just reading about it. They’re making it. Producing complex texts that pull from multiple disciplines, that combine the historical with the theoretical with the practical. Because that’s how you actually learn. Not by taking notes in the dark, but by doing the work, screwing it up, and doing it again.
I’m not interested in passive students who can regurgitate what they’ve been told. I want people who can think critically, create boldly, and communicate honestly across the messy, beautiful complexity of who we all are. That’s what Adrienne Kennedy taught me. That’s what I’m teaching my students.
The class explores cultural and political resistance through the documentation of performance or Live Art. While class discussions engage with the performance itself, the focus of the lectures will fall on the creativity and authorship of the documentary maker, exploring how performance documentation is a creative collaboration between artists and deserves to be considered a genre in itself. We’ll explore different mediums of performance documentation, including photography, cinema, music videos, and television. The class will begin by considering the social and historical context of the formation of performance documentation as a specific genre within the documentary tradition, and the creation of an authorial position that emerged with graphic art and photography. We will explore photographers such as Alexy Brodovitch, Paul Strand, Agnes Varda, Stanley Kubrick, and continue through with the work of Annie Liebowitz and Hiroshi Sugimoto. As the genre developed cinematically in the 1960s, we will examine artists and media texts such as Shirley Clarke, D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, 1967; Monterey Pop, 1968) Robert Frank (The Rolling Stones, 1972), and later Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz, 1978), as well as Jonathan Deme (Stop Making Sense, 1984; Swimming to Cambodia, 1987). These films allow us to discuss the ways that cinema can be used as a tool of resistance while students also interrogate the limits of the documentary form in representing identities and social issues. The course incorporates other mediums of performance documentaries including television: Louis Valdez (El corrido: Ballad of a Farmworker, 1976), Chris Maker (Junktopia,1981); music videos: Spike Lee, Anton Corbjin; web streaming Beyonce (Homecoming, 2019) and Chris Rock (Total Blackout: The Tamborine Extended Cut, 2021); and social media with K-pop. The course addresses key issues in cultural, film, media and performance theory by pairing these visual texts with readings pulled from those disciplines. Lectures and discussions will focus on analyzing the structures, performers, and acts of resistance, rebellion, and revolt not just in the captured Live Art event but represented in the documentation process (camera angles, editing, coloring, etc.) A main goal of this class will be to explore performance documentation in the context of different cultural and political movements, such as farm labor organizing, the politics of race and representation, and ideas of authenticity. We will also consider the specific aesthetics of the genre of performance documentary which at its best creates intrigue and suspense and prompts questions of ethics, credit, and ownership among artist, subject and audience. Finally, the course requires a hands-on component, encouraging students to experiment with methods of the digital humanities, media art, and other creative practices in their final project.
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As an introductory study of film/media theory, this course is designed to offer you an in-depth foundation in theory through an examination of historically significant writings that analyze media/mediums and their social functions and effects. The course is primarily organized thematically, with a focus on particular theorists, schools of thought, the forums in which many key writings have appeared, and relations between theory and practice. Through this reading list, we will consider how ideas have developed and transformed, often in dialogue with one another. Our purpose will be to understand the arguments at stake in these works and to create our own dialogue with these theories.
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The course aims to help students develop their own answers to such questions as, what does the creative process look like?; under what conditions does it flourish and what ignites a creative spark?; how does technology impact the creative mind; as well as “what should I study when I study media?”; “how should I think about creativity when I am thinking about media, film, or the arts?” by introducing and comparing key theories of creativity, media, and technology. Attempting to answer these questions, our class will explore ways creativity has been understood: what we prize and fear about creativity and its wellsprings; how writers, artists, scientists and inventors describe their own creative processes; how psychologists, philosophers, and scholars theorize it; ways in which creativity has been represented, particularly in 20th-century films; and creativity in everyday life, including our own lives.
Readings include and essays by Lester Bangs, Jim Jarmusch Joan Didion, Guermo Gomez-Peña, Alice Walker, Oliver Sacks, and others. In addition, we will watch video profiles of choreographer Pina Bausch, architect Maya Lin, writer and TV host Anthony Bourdain, and artists Jean-Claude and Christo.
Since the Happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, work labeled “site-specific performance” evolved as highly structured works of art designed around, for, or because of place: on street corners, in fields, deserts, forests, garbage dumps, abandoned buildings, on the border, aboard boats, etc. The design of such performances has the power to mark our sense of locational identity and investigate notions of community and space/place/non- place. As site artists confront the social forces and overlapping communities that relate to a certain place, their aesthetics, creative processes, designs, and goals provoke a myriad of questions including, but not limited to: How are we blurring the lines between art and activism, art and urban renewal, art and spirituality, art and technology, art and real life? How can art and architecture/design renegotiate the “res publica” – a space for a multitude of voices – the fundament for community? Texts by theoreticians such as Bachelard, Lefebvre, Bataille, Foucault, Harvey, Fraser, Hayden, Hollier, Bourdieu, and Klein just to name a few will be intertwined within the lectures.
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Understanding Media is designed for students who have grown up in a rapidly changing global multimedia environment and want to become more literate in different media forms, as well as critical consumers and producers of culture. Through an interdisciplinary, comparative and historical lens, the course defines “media” broadly as including oral, print, theatrical, photographic, broadcast, cinematic, and digital cultural forms and practices. The course looks at the nature of mediated communication, the functions of media, the history of transformations in media, and the institutions that have defined media’s place in society.
Over the course of the quarter, we will explore different theoretical perspectives on the role and power of media in society in influencing social values, political beliefs, identities, and behaviors. Students have the opportunity to analyze specific genres of media (such as films and television shows) and explore the meaning of changes that occur when a particular narrative is adapted into different forms. We will look at the ways in which the politics of class, gender, and race influence both the production and reception of media. Through readings, lectures, and discussions as well as your own writing and final, creative project, students have multiple opportunities to engage with critical debates in the field as well as explore the role of media in their own lives.
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