IRMA MAYORGA
//TEACHING
GRINNELL COLLEGE, REHEARSAL FOR DANCE NATION BY CLARE BARRON, SPRING 2020 - 1 week before lockdown
NORTH HENNEPIN COMMUNITY
COLLEGE
(2021-PRESENT)
TFT 1210: INTRODUCTION TO THEATER
TFT 1500: ACTING I
TFT 2550: ACTING II
TFT 2150: PLAY ANALYSIS
TFT 1600: THEATER PRACTICUM: PERFORMANCE
TFT 1610: THEATER PRACTICUM: TECHNICAL
GCST 1301: INTRODUCTION TO ETHNIC STUDIES
GRINNELL
COLLEGE
(2019-2021)
THD 201 - DRAMATIC LITERATURE I
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In-person
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From the Grinnell Course Catalogue: “Study of major works in Western dramatic literature to 1850, with reference to cultural contexts, interpretive problems, and dramatic theory, beginning with Aristotle’s Poetics. Includes plays and performances (in translation) of Greek tragedy and Aristophanic comedy, English medieval cycle plays, Machiavelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tempest, Webster’s White Devil, Ben Jonson, Spanish Golden Age, Racine and Moliere, a Restoration comedy, the Brook Mahabharata, and Goethe’s Faust.”
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N.B. For Fall 2019 THD: 201 also examined plays and performance traditions belonging to non-Western societies.
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THD 395 - SPECIAL TOPICS: PLAYWRITING
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In-person FALL 2019 + Synchronous online SPRING 2021
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The primary goals of THD295: Playwriting are to hone basic playwriting craft, nurture imagination, and create a writing workshop environment that will guide the writer’s exploration of their individual voice as an emerging playwright. We will concentrate on developing fundamental components of dramatic writing including: storytelling through the medium of liveness, character formation, shaping narrative, developing the language of visual imagery, crafting dialogue, and fostering a theatrical imagination and voice. This course navigates between overlapping perspectives of traditional and alternative techniques in playwriting. The traditional approach is rooted in developing character and structural principles that follow a linear tradition of Aristotelian form: a beginning, turning point, and ending. The second approach will engage playwriting as collage, emphasizing the power of image, non-naturalistic approaches to theatermaking, and non-linear storytelling. We will deepen our understanding of these approaches by reading leading plays that inform and expand our theatrical knowledge, engaging in in-class writing exercises, providing and receiving feedback of original work as a workshop community, engaging in play analysis and dramaturgy, and viewing both recorded and live performances.
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This course was formatted in the writers workshop tradition of producing creative work; knowledge is gained through a series of experiential activities that rely upon independent work as well as exchange and insight gained from a community of writers. Students completed weekly writing assignments.
THD 202 - DRAMATIC LITERATURE II
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In-person & asynchronous online
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This course began the term as an in-person lecture/seminar in dramatic literature and theater history. With the onset of Coronavirus in March 2020, Grinnell College commenced distance-learning. I then transposed my course and its materials into an asynchronous, distance-learning mode for the semester’s second half.
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From the Grinnell Course Catalogue: “Study of major works in Western dramatic literature from 1850 to the present, with reference to cultural contexts, interpretive problems, and dramatic theory. From the ‘classic moderns’ of realism and naturalism through the Symbolists, Expressionists, SuRrealists and Absurdists; dramatists and theorists include Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Buechner, Kaiser, Artaud, Pirandello, Lorca, Brecht, Sartre, Genet, Beckett, Grotowski, Weiss, Pinter, Cixous, and Stoppard.”
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N.B. THD202/Spring 2020 expanded on the intentions stated above with the conscious inclusion of landmark works by BIPOC theatermakers and women.
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THD 395 - SPECIAL TOPICS: RACE AND GENDER ON STAGE
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In-person & asynchronous online
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This course began the term as an in-person seminar. With the onset of Coronavirus in March 2020, Grinnell College commenced distance-learning. I then transposed my course and its materials into an asynchronous, distance-learning mode for the semester’s second half.
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THD395: Race & Gender on Stage delves into questions concerning the social categories of race and gender by investigating the theatrical works of people of color and women. Our study will engage a spectrum that includes landmark plays of the mid and late twentieth century and also recent twenty-first century works. Particularly, we will attend closely to theatrical works by African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American theatermakers. Our discussions, critical writing, and creative engagements with plays by and about people of color and women will help us develop a more thorough comprehension of the ways in which playwrights of color and women have deployed theater to interrogate and theorize their racialized and gendered social contexts, histories, and subjectivities.
THD 395 - SPECIAL TOPICS: SOLO PERFORMANCE
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Synchronous online
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For AY 2020-21, Grinnell College initiated shortened academic terms to ensure flexibility and public safety in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. This course features synchronous, distance-learning sessions over a 7.5 week term
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THD395: Solo Performance will introduce and engage the history, texts, topics, theoretical guideposts, and landmark figures/performances central to the genre of solo performance. Working between critical examination and creative practice, participants will analyze the form and content of leading solo performers while also composing a series of playwriting and performance exercises that activate solo performance strategies and methods. The course will culminate in the creation and performance of a participant's self-authored, short solo performance work.
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For the in-person version of this course, instruction and experimentation relied on intimate, sustained interaction in the classroom, which also relied upon each participant’s intensive out of class creative development of their work. In the grip of our global pandemic and the constraints of distance-learning, I will be relying heavily, nearly exclusively, on synchronous course sessions in order to foster and engender the intensity of a creative laboratory. Prerequisites: THD-111, 113, 115 or 117.
THD 195-04 - ONLINE THEATRE: PERFORM
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Synchronous/online rehearsals & Zoom performances of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl
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For AY 2020-21, Grinnell College initiated shortened academic terms to ensure flexibility and public safety in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. This course will engage students in mounting a digital theater performance through the means of a synchronous, online, page-to-stage rehearsal process within a 7.5 week term. This production is a mainstage season offering of the Department of Theatre and Dance.
THD 397 - INDEPENDENT STUDY
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Asynchronous online
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Instructor for Malcolm Davis’ (’21) guided research and creative work to develop a senior project in the major/solo performance production for Spring Term 2, 2021. Title of Ind. Study: “Uplifting Historical African Figures: Staging the Remarkable Lives of Yasuke and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas through development of an original Solo Performance Work.”
THD 201 - DRAMATIC LITERATURE I
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Asynchronous online
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For AY 2020-21, Grinnell College initiated shortened academic terms to ensure flexibility and public safety in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. This lecture/seminar in dramatic literature and theater history will be comprised of asynchronous & synchronous, distance-learning sessions over a 7.5 week term.
-
From the Grinnell Course Catalogue: “Study of major works in Western dramatic literature to 1850, with reference to cultural contexts, interpretive problems, and dramatic theory, beginning with Aristotle’s Poetics. Includes plays and performances (in translation) of Greek tragedy and Aristophanic comedy, English medieval cycle plays, Machiavelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tempest, Webster’s White Devil, Ben Jonson, Spanish Golden Age, Racine and Moliere, a Restoration comedy, the Brook Mahabharata, and Goethe’s Faust.”
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N.B. For Fall 2019 THD: 201 also examined plays and performance traditions belonging to non-Western societies.
-
THD 202 - DRAMATIC LITERATURE II
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Asynchronous online
-
For AY 2020-21, Grinnell College initiated shortened academic terms to ensure flexibility and public safety in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. This lecture/seminar in dramatic literature and theater history will be comprised of asynchronous & synchronous, distance-learning sessions over a 7.5 week term.
-
From the Grinnell Course Catalogue: “Study of major works in Western dramatic literature from 1850 to the present, with reference to cultural contexts, interpretive problems, and dramatic theory. From the ‘classic moderns’ of realism and naturalism through the Symbolists, Expressionists, SuRrealists and Absurdists; dramatists and theorists include Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Buechner, Kaiser, Artaud, Pirandello, Lorca, Brecht, Sartre, Genet, Beckett, Grotowski, Weiss, Pinter, Cixous, and Stoppard.”
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N.B. THD202/Spring 2020 will expand on the intentions stated above with the conscious inclusion of landmark works by people of color and women.
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THD 397 - INDEPENDENT STUDY
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Synchronous online
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Instructor/advisor for Malcolm Davis’ (’21) senior project in the major/solo performance production scheduled for Spring Term 2, 2021.
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, before class begins
DARTMOUTH
COLLEGE
(2011-2018)
THEA 01 - INTRODUCTION TO THEATER
As a set of staged practices rich with social context, theater has sought to document, engage, and affect communities. THEA 1 introduces and explores theater from page to stage. Topics include the relationship between theater and society (historical and contemporary), dramatic structure, theatrical representation, and the specialties of theater artists such as directors, designers, playwrights, and actors. The course also engages with live performances and media archives of past performances.
To this end, THEA 01 is not solely a text centered course but also strongly based in experiential knowledge, critical engagement, and spectatorial experiences. Lectures, discussions, videos of past live performances, and, more importantly, the fieldwork of attending live performances are mandatory and enable participants to explore the community of an audience as well as the aesthetic paradigms used by theater/live performance works. This enables a deeper, more sophisticated critical engagement with live performance in order to unpack and examine its complexity.
THEA 15 - THEATER & SOCIETY I: CLASSICAL & MEDIEVAL PERFORMANCE
THEA 15 explores selected examples of world performance during the classical and medieval periods in Western Europe and eastern Asia. Plays to be discussed might include those by Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Seneca, Plautus, Terence, and Zeami. Through the reading and discussion of primary and secondary texts, THEA 15 seeks to situate selected performance texts within their sociopolitical and artistic contexts.
As this course argues, the study of theater history allows those who make and enjoy the theater to discover how theatrical practices of the past continue to influence trends in theater, film, and storytelling in the present day. Learning about the history and the historical context of specific plays, artists, and performance practices enables makers of theater as well as spectators to formulate connections between the ways in which theater and society work to shape one another. Questions the course engages include: How do performances try to support—or change—the cultures that produce them? What are some of the very different functions that performances can serve in a society? How do the reasons that audiences go to theater change over time? These are some of the questions we will be asking as we journey through thousands of years of changes, challenges, risks, and struggles in the story of theater and performance.
THEA 17 - THEATER & SOCIETY III: 19TH & 20TH CENTURY PERFORMANCE
THEA 17 explores selected examples of world performance of the 19th and 20th centuries. Plays discussed include those by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Lorca, Ionesco, Beckett, Williams, Miller, and Brecht, as well as contemporary U.S. playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks and Charles Mee. Through the reading and discussion of primary and secondary texts, the course seeks to situate selected performance texts within their sociopolitical and artistic contexts. The course also includes explorations of dramaturgy (how the theatrical past comes alive on contemporary stages), historiography (current debates and concerns in the writing of theater history), and dramatic and performance theory.
THEA 21 - RACE, GENDER, AND PERFORMANCE
Participants explore the perspectives of contemporary Latina/o/x, Asian American, Black, and Native American theatermakers. THEA 21's examinations also consider the socio-historical and political contexts engaged through these performance-makers' works. The course also guides students to consider the relationship between the construction of identity and the formal strategies of performance used by performanc-makers to describe race, gender, sexuality, class, subjectivity, and ideas of belonging. Texts examined nclude works by Cherríe Moraga, Tomson Highway, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Philip Kan Gotanda, and Margaret Cho among other leading artitsts of color.
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Cross-listed with Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies
THEA 25 - SOLO PERFORMANCE (FORMERLY THEA 10)
THEA 25 introduces and engages the history, texts, topics, theoretical guideposts, and landmark figures/performances central to the genre of solo performance. Working between critical examination and practice, participants analyze the form and content of leading solo performers while also composing a series of short exercises that activate solo performance strategies and methodologies. The course culminates with the creation of participants' self-authored, short solo performance piece.
THEA 10.3/LATS 35.1 - CONTEMPORARY U.S. LATINA/O THEATER & PERFORMANCE
Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Theater and Performance focuses on a study of plays, performance work, and other theatrical modes of representation written by U.S. Latina/o playwrights/performers from 1965 to the present. Secondary readings in the course illuminate the context and content of plays and performances and consist of theoretical considerations about representation and identity, the sociopolitical contexts of U.S. Latinas/os, dramatic criticism, and historical essays that situate Latina/os in the Americas. Primary examinations study performance-makers representative of Puerto Rican, Mexican American, Dominican, and Cuban American ethnic heritages.
A primary objective of this course is not only to deepen participants’ knowledge of contemporary American drama but also to strengthen their understanding of contemporary U.S. race relations, U.S. colonization in the Americas, and the immigrant experience in the U.S. With issues as well as socio-cultural tensions raised in these creative expressions. Latina/o theater and performance offers the opportunity to examine critically attitudes, constructions, and insights about: gender, class, race/ethnicity, culture, nationality, language, sexuality, aesthetics, identity and difference as they manifest in U.S. Latina/o realities and theatrical imaginations.
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Cross-listed with the program in Latin American, Latina/o & Caribbean Studies
THEA 62: PLAYS IN PERFORMANCE - PERCEPTION AND AND ANALYSIS (LONDON FOREIGN STUDY ABROAD PROGRAM)
Offered as a part of Darmouth Theater Department's Theater Foreign Study Program in London, this seminar integrates the study of theater with the experience of plays in performance. By providing an intense, comparative experience of playgoing, the course seeks to broaden students' knowledge of the dramatic repertoire, to heighten their awareness of production approaches and values, and to encourage them to develop considered critical responses to theater. Students attend thirty required performances and in addition attend performances of their own choosing - normally a total of three plays per week. Productions will represent a variety of periods and styles of playwriting, and a similarly diverse range of production companies and approaches to performance. Weekly seminar meetings will focus on critical responses to plays and productions, with background provided by guests from the professional theater (directors, writers, performers, designers, critics). Students also attend many of London's prime cultural institutions.
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
(2007-2011)
THE 2020 - INTRODUCTION TO THEATRE FOR MAJORS (supervision of two graduate Teaching Assistants)
Course Description from the FSU course catalogue: "THE 2020: Introduction to Theatre for Majors (3). A survey course of the field of theatre, its various divisions, and the School of Theatre. Preparation for independent research and communication about the profession and the school. Additionally, THE 2020 fulfills the Florida State University Oral Communication Competency required of all undergraduate students."
Course Objectives by I. Mayorga: The principal goals of THE 2020 are to prepare prospective theater majors of all undergraduate degree programs in the School of Theater to begin their studies in theater. This course introduces students to the School of Theatre in general and specific aspects in particular, as well as introduces basic theater vocabulary, research methods, and techniques for communicating knowledge with an emphasis on oral communication. THE 2020 also serves as "clearing house" for happenings, events, and opportunities in the School of Theatre.
An additional goal of this course sought to introduce participants (usually new to the School of Theater/first years) to as many theater specializations as possible and thus increase their participation in the School of Theatre's many opportunities. Students have the opportunity to learn about these specializations from visiting artists and lecturers drawn from the School of Theatre faculty and the profession at large.
THE 4233/5238 - AFRICAN AMERICAN PERFORMANCE (undergraduate and graduate level)
African American Performance surveys the history and plays of African American drama from the mid-19th century to the present. Course explorations also include examining leading plays, actors, directors, and aesthetic movements through a combination of lecture, discussion, and analysis of plays and other media documentation. Examinations also take into consideration the historical and political context for the creation of performance. As well, students investigate specific cultural practices that contributed to the aesthetic expression of theater by African Americans.
Issues examined within creative works interrogate attitudes, constructions, and insights about: gender, class, race/ethnicity, culture, nationality, language, sexuality, aesthetics, identity and difference as they manifest in African American performance.
THE 4305 - PLAY ANALYSIS (undergraduate)
Course Description from the FSU Course Catalogue: "THE 4305: Line by line script examination, analyzing how playwrights of various periods achieved characterization, structure, and plotting. Prerequisite for TPP 4310 and THE 4481."
Instructor personalization of course objectives: THE 4305: Play Analysis provides students with methodological and analytical tools that focuses on examining, analyzing, and unpacking plays. This course intends to instruct students with how to carefully analyze a variety of theatrical styles and script/play formats through methodologies such as close reading, structural analysis, deconstruction, and socio-cultural contextualization in order to thoroughly understand the relationship between form and content in drama, the meaning of theatrical representation, and the organizational strategies employed in theatermaking. In conjunction with the plays, the course will also study secondary materials that provide important tools and strategies of analysis to enable understanding of theatrical representation. Secondary readings will also illuminate by helping participants to locate the playtexts within historical and contemporary discourses.
THE 4433/5437 - GENDER, RACE, AND PERFORMANCE (undergraduate and graduate)
THE 4433 and 5437 examine the construction of race and gender in the United States through the lens of performance.The course allows students to analyze and identify the diversity of ethnoracial experiences in relation to subject positions such as race, class, culture, and gender. As well, the course reviews and assesses the strategies used by performance-makers to describe their perspectives of U.S. American society as racialized or gendered subjects. THE 4433/5437 also considers the politics of representation in live performance. In conjunction with dramatic texts, participants also engage secondary materials on culture, ethnicity, class, race, gender, history, and sexuality. Secondary readings will also illuminate by helping participants to locate the playtexts within historical and contemporary discourses.
THE 4917: UNDERGRADUATE HONORS WORK
In the auspices of this course, undergraduate students receive individual guidance, pedagogy, and advisement for a research-based Honors Thesis Project for the B.A. in Theater.
THE 4935/5273 - U.S. LATINA/O CONTEMPORARY THEATER AND PERFORMANCE (undergraduate and graduate)
This seminar course offers a study of contemporary plays, performance work, and other theatrical modes of representation written by U.S. Latina/o performance-makers. Readings and discussions focus on play scripts but also consist of theoretical writings about representation and identity, sociopolitical contexts of U.S. Latina/os, dramatic criticism, and historical essays that situate Latina/os in the Americas. Primary examinations study an array of playwrights/ performers representative of subgroup identities: Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and Cuban American. A leading goal of the course seeks to present the diversity of this large ethnoracial group that shares a common history of Spanish colonization in the Americas. Fluency in Spanish is not a prerequisite, but access to a Spanish dictionary and willingness to comprehend beyond monolingual English fluency is needed.
THE 5770 - THEATRE HISTORY AND LITERATURE I FOR THEATRE EDUCATORS, MASTER OF SCIENCE PROGRAM
Description from the FSU course catalogue: "THE 5770: Theatre History and Literature I for Theatre Educators explores the staging practices and dramatic literature of classical Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, 18th-century Europe, and classical Japan. The course emphasizes the realization of the plays in performance in both historical and modern contexts."
This course is specifically geared to educators in secondary eduation for their attenation of an advanced degree in theater. As such, the course emphasizes not only the study of theater history but also imparts numerous creative and diverse pedagogical methodologies for the teaching of theater history.
THE 5772 - THEATRE HISTORY AND LITERATURE III FOR THEATRE EDUCATORS, MASTER OF SCIENCE PROGRAM
THE 5772-01 examines the construction of race and gender in the United States through the lens of performance.The course allows students to analyze and identify the diversity of ethnoracial experiences in relation to subject positions such as race, class, culture, and gender. As well, the course reviews and assesses the strategies used by performance-makers to describe their perspectives of U.S. American society as racialized or gendered subjects. THE 4433/5437 also considers the politics of representation in live performance. In conjunction with dramatic texts, participants also engage secondary materials on culture, ethnicity, class, race, gender, history, and sexuality. Secondary readings will also illuminate by helping participants to locate the playtexts within historical and contemporary discourses.
THE 5910 - RESEARCH AND BIBLIOGRAPHY (graduate)
FSU University Bulletin Course Description: "THE 5910: Theatre Bibliography and Research (3). The basic graduate course designed to introduce the student to library resources, methods, and the reporting of research in theatre."
Course Description Supplement by I. Mayorga: Research and Bibliography is constructed to “de-mystify” graduate-level research and writing. The course is also meant to serve as an introduction to theory, methodologies, and practices of the field of theatre studies.
THE 5971 - THESIS (PROSPECTUS DEVELOPMENT) (graduate)
Guide, advise, and mentor graduate students in the Master of Arts in Theater degree program in the development of their M.A. thesis subject area, research objectives, objects of study, methodological approaches, and theoretical frameworks.
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, SAN ANTONIO
(2006)
BBL 2023 - LATINA/O CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS (undergraduate)
BBL 2023 provides an introduction to the cultural and artistic expressions of U.S. Latina/os. The course explores issues of history, race, ethnicity, class, and gender through various cultural expressions including: visual art, public art projects, theater, literature, and film. Special focus placed on Mexican American cultural production.
This course also meets the goals of UTSA Core Curriculum Domain III: “To achieve the objectives of Domain III, students should demonstrate an understanding of the conceptual approaches and history of at least one of the arts, as a means of comprehending the aesthetic patterns that underlie human creativity; and an understanding of literary concepts and contemporary trends in interpretation, as a means of comprehending the metaphoric or analogical potential of human language.” Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies.
BBL 3023 - MEXICAN-AMERCIAN CULTURE (undergraduate)
A survey of Mexican American cultural distinctiveness in the areas of biculturalism, cultural production, and social organization. Topics include history and culture, family and kinship, arts, folklore, music, health, languagee, etc. Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies.
WILLIAMS COLLEGE
(2001-2002)
THEATRE 214 - PLAYWRITING (undergraduate)
THEATRE 216 - PLAYWRITING (undergraduate)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
(2000)
DRAMATIC ART 25AC - STAGES OF DIFFERENCE (undergraduate)
(The Drama of American Cultures). "Dramatic Art, Stages of Difference" examined how issues of race, class, and gender intersect in the cultural formations of African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinxs. The course used the lens of works in contemporary American drama to undertake this examination. In the study of American literature, dramatic works are often ignored for critical analysis. Further, the works of playwrights of color are rarely considered. As the course's plays evidenced, the dramatic work of each group’s most formative playwrights/artists serves as a pivotal point of departure to engage in an examination of the conditions of a multivalent American experience that has unfolded over time and continues to congeal and contest the idea of U.S. national identity.
COLLEGE OF
ST. BENEDICT/
ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY
(1995-1997)
SET DESIGN (undergraduate)
TECHNICAL PRODUCTION I (undergraduate)
THEATER AUDIENCE (Introduction to Theater for non-Majors, undergraduate)
PERFORMANCE AND SOCIETY (undergraduate)
WOMEN'S 20TH CENTURY FASHION HISTORY (undergraduate)
INTRODUCTION TO COSTUMING (undergraduate)
THEATER MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES (SCENIC DESIGN)(undergraduate)
COSTUME DESIGN (undergraduate)