The Arts in New York City: Awakenings
Macaulay Honors College: IDC 1001H
Professor Roslyn Bernstein (roz_bernstein@baruch.cuny.edu)
Baruch College, Fall 2007
Office Hours: Tuesday, 1 PM to 3:00 PM (By Appointment)
Room 7-270, Vertical Campus (1 Bernard Baruch Way)
Tech Fellow:
Craig Willse (cwillse@gmail.com
Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday, 12 noon to 3:00 PM
Room 320 (Honors College lounge), 137. E. 25th Street
AWAKENINGS
This class will explore the theme of awakenings. How do works of art in theater, opera, film photography, and visual art explore the theme of awakenings? What is illusion and what is reality? Who are we and how do we grow and evolve? We will study the way theater, opera, photography and the visual arts, by relying on acting, singing, stage directions, editing, and visual techniques, engage their audiences. Supported by the CUNY Honors College Cultural Passport, we will look at major artistic works, studying their components and reflecting on how the arts contribute to the rich cultural landscape of New York City.
How does an artistic work define and illuminate an awakening? How does a playwright, a composer, an artist mold materials to expose an audience to new and challenging ideas? How do different texts and media illuminate the human condition –the twisting and turning, the metamorphosis, which we all experience as we struggle to understand who we are and why we exist? How do artists bring together disparate elements to create magical creative collages?
This fall, we began the semester by seeing a performance of Spring Awakening, a prize-winning musical based on Frank Wedekind’s controversial play, written in 1891 and first performed in 1906. Set in a19th-century German school, the contemporary musical explored the theme of sexual awakening, adding rock music to the text of the play. The result was an original and bold performance, one that engaged and shocked the audience.
Several weeks later, the class saw a performance of Tings Dey Happen at The Culture Project in SoHo. A one-man play, written and performed by Dan Hoyle, the docudrama focused on oil interests in Nigeria. This time, the awakening was political, with Hoyle, a former Fulbright Scholar in Nigeria, switching from role to role—in his effort to awaken the audience to the charged reality of African oil politics.
Rounding out our theater unit, the class saw the National Asian American Theater Company’s of Blind Mouth Singing, by Jorge Ignacio Cortinas. Working in the magic realism tradition, the play explores the theme of awakening from the perspective of personal fulfillment: how does one become (or not become) the person he/she wants to be? After seeing the performance, we were honored to have Ruben Polendo, the director, Hilary Austin, the stage manager, and Jon Norman Schneider, the actor who played the character Reiderico, visit our class to talk about the challenges of putting on an off-Broadway production.
Next on our reading list was Samuel Freedman’s fine book, Who She Was, a brilliantly researched look into his mother’s early life in the Bronx. Freedman visited our class and spoke in great detail about the two years that he spent researching this book. By discovering the mother that he did not know, he grew closer to his past, gaining insight into his mother and her world—before she married his father. The book and Freedman’s subsequent visit to Baruch were included in the syllabus to help students research and write their Who SheWas/Who He Was stories.
The Bronx was also the setting for A Feather on the Breath of God, Sigrid Nunez’s powerful novel about an immigrant family struggling to survive. Once again, the reading was coupled with a chance to hear the author speak. This time, the class heard Nunez speak and read from her work at a Harman Writer-in Residence event on October 23rd (www.baruch.cuny.edu/wsas/harman ).