This program was envisioned as a two-quarter introductory program for first-year students in any discipline, but with an emphasis on the historical development of the performing arts in Europe and the United States. Program faculty included Sean Williams as coordinator and music faculty; Meg Hunt as dance faculty, and Doranne Crable as theater faculty. In addition, staff member Joyce Stahmer participated as the liaison between the students and the College, and Olivia Archibald of the College’s Learning Resource Center worked closely with the students on their writing skills during fall quarter. Students met for three days each week, and participated in lectures, seminars, writing workshops, studio work in music, dance, and theater, and watched films.
“Performing Arts and Culture” introduced students to major trends in the performing arts, beginning with the Ancient Greeks and continuing through the end of the 18th century (the Age of Enlightenment) by the end of fall quarter. In examining the Greeks, the Medieval period, the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment periods, students developed an overall foundation for understanding current trends in philosophy, storytelling, spirituality, politics, psychology, visual arts, and culture. In fall quarter, students heard lectures on such topics as the cult of Dionysus (Crable), Renaissance dance (Hunt), the art of storytelling (Stahmer), and classical music in the Age of Enlightenment (Williams). Between the lectures, readings, seminars, and many other program activities, students gained an understanding of such concepts as the use of archetypes, the separation of the body from the soul in the Middle Ages, the concept of divine madness, and 18th century humanism and the pursuit of happiness. In winter quarter, the focus of the program was primarily on European and American performing arts of the 19th and 20th centuries, noting significant influences on those arts from various Asian and African cultures.
Students continued their foundation work in the philosophy, spirituality, poetry, politics, psychology, and other important aspects of the cultures of each era, from the Romantic poets to the Impressionist composers to the modern choreographers. In winter, students heard lectures on such topics as Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring (Williams), the Exotic Other (Hunt), and Entre Deux Guerres, the period between World Wars I and II in Europe (Crable). As was the case in fall quarter, students synthesized all aspects of the program so that they could grasp, for example, the ways in which both Debussy and Monet would use color and shadow rather than clearly-delineated subjects for their works. As another example, students viewed romantic ballet videos and listened to romantic poetry and music to observe the artistic manifestation of the elusive, mysterious, deadly woman, an important aspect of Romanticism. All faculty dealt with artistic, social, political, and cultural responses to war, from the French Revolution to the dropping of the atomic bomb.
The program used five texts across both quarters: Listen, 3rd edition (by Joseph Kerman); Ballet and Modern Dance: A Concise History, 2nd edition (by Jack Anderson); The Bedford Introduction to Drama, 3rd edition (by Lee A. Jacobus); The World’s Religions (by Huston Smith) and King Lear (by William Shakespeare). Members of the program viewed and discussed a number of films in fall quarter, including “The Prodigal Son,” “The Trojan Women,” “The Gospel at Colonus,” “Night Journey,” “The Name of the Rose,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Ran,” and “Amadeus.” In winter quarter, films included “Babette’s Feast,” “Impromptu,” “Giselle,” “Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune,” “La Bayadère,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Kabuki,” “Bunraku,” and “Fire in the Mirror.” As part of their program activities, the students developed and performed adaptations of some of the stories they encountered during fall quarter. At the end of winter quarter, the students traveled to Ashland, Oregon to see the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s productions of “Henry V,” “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” and “Night of the Iguana.” They also attended a backstage tour of the theaters and heard a lecture which prepared them for “Henry V.”
In the studio portion of the program, faculty divided students into groups to study music, dance and movement, and theater. In the music component, students learned the basics of music theory (notation, intervals, chords, key signatures, time signatures, transcription) and composition (creating a round, a minuet, and a song). The group then performed each round, and students had the choice of performing a minuet or a song for their colleagues in the program. In winter quarter the training time was doubled, so the students not only completed all of the previous quarter’s exercises, but wrote four songs (one of which was for four voices), a rhythmic exercise, and accompanied melodies. In the dance and movement workshop component, students learned the creative use of their existing movement vocabularies, through solo and group improvisations. In the fall, they were required to choreograph and revise one solo dance “in disguise” and one group adaptation of the minuet. In the winter, they were briefly introduced to skeletal anatomy, spinal coordination of movement, basic modern dance technique, and Orissi dance of India. They worked, through improvisation and choreography, with variation in movement parameters (level, direction, tempo, kinesphere size, etc.), with emotional gesture, and with duets. They were required to choreograph two group dances and one other (solo, duo, or group). In the theater component, students learned basic exercises for focus, posture and gesture; integrating text and subtext; voice (projection, enunciation, modulation); intention, motivation, and follow-through. They were required to present three assignments (an inner dialogue improvisation; a poem, performed twice, in two separate “personae;” and a scene from one of the plays assigned in the program). In winter, they focused on monologue and scene work preparation. They practiced skills in critical voice by critiquing each others’ work. Scenes and monologues were chosen from both program assignments and outside sources.
Each person was required to submit a journal recording responses and preparation skills covering the the quarter’s study. In the final week of each quarter, students from each of the three studio sections performed selections for an audience comprised of their colleagues in the other sections. Every first-year program at Evergreen includes a strong writing component. Students in “Performing Arts and Culture” developed three papers in fall quarter: the first two were in thesis-based style (on the performing arts in Ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, respectively), and the third was a creative assignment in which the student was able to select the format (but the paper needed to be set between the 15th and 18th centuries in Europe). In winter quarter, students developed collaborative projects on specific themes or eras. Each project required independent research and writing, collaborative deliberation on expected outcomes, collaborative performance planning and execution, and group critiques. In addition, each student worked on a take-home examination toward the end of each term, in which they were required to respond to specific questions about the European performing arts prior to the 19th century for fall quarter, and the 19th and 20th centuries for winter quarter.