The Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley aims to better integrate the arts into general education at Berkeley and ensure that more students reflect on and experience the arts available to them. To this end, we are offer support to Berkeley faculty who will develop interdisciplinary courses that focus on the arts, using whenever possible the arts resources available on campus (Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Cal Performances, productions in Music, Dramatic Art & Dance, etc). For examples of Consortium-supported curriculum design, please visit our Curriculum Archive.

Fall 2008 Consortium Sponsored Courses/Seminars
(Please click on course title to jump down to full description.)
Border-Crossings: Aesthetics and Politics
Performing Body: Understanding How We Experience Performance through Our Phenomenal Selves
Transnational Science, Technology and New Media
Multi-Disciplinary Collaborative Design Studio

Border-Crossings: Aesthetics and Politics
Theater R1A, Section 6, CCN 88018, TuTh 2-3:30pm, 206 Dwinelle, 4 units
Instructor: Chia-Yi Seetoo (and faculty supervisor)
This course examines different kinds of "border-crossings" in the aesthetics and politics of performance.
How do "performance texts" cross representational borders-between literary texts and bodies, between
stage and screen? What kinds of translation, adaptation, and appropriation are taking place in performances
that seek to cross cultural borders? How do experiences of physical border-crossing-traveling, migration,
diaspora, and exile-figure in works of art? How do we participate in them, experientially and intellectually?
We will address the aesthetics of border-crossings and its political implications by engaging with a range of
critical readings and creative texts, such as intercultural encounters historically and in the present, dance
and stage-plays reframed in film, Shakespeare in Chinese opera, and Asian diasporic literature and film.
We will also make use of live performance experiences available at Cal Performances and the Department
of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. We will practice our own border-crossing—and reflect on its
challenges-as we move from a live performance to writing its review. Through writing exercises and
assignments, we will learn how to identify a research question, do close readings of a text, formulate an
argument and craft a critical essay.
Prerequisite: UC Entry Level Writing Requirement or UC Analytical Writing Placement Exam.
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Performing Body: Understanding How We Experience Performance through Our Phenomenal Selves
Theater R1A, section 2, CCN 88006, TuTh 3:30-5pm, 235 Dwinelle, 4 units
Instructor: Joanne Taylor (and faculty supervisor)
Performance is often taken for granted as an experience that moves, and moves through, our bodies.
When we attend the theater, or go see a film, it is not simply our minds and emotions that are activated,
but our physical selves as well. In this course we will examine the concept of performance as one that
pushes beyond traditional proscenium circumscriptions: we will consider performance as part of our
everyday existence, as something we encounter all the time but take for granted; we will examine traditional
modes of performance such as theater, dance, music and film; and we will look at more unusual modes of
performance in visual art, ritual, and activism. Key to this examination is a focus on the body: how we
experience a performance, no matter its genre, in psychic, emotional, and visceral ways. Additionally,
we will pay attention to the difference between experiencing performance as a performer and as a spectator,
and what it means when that line is blurred. In order to activate our discussions we will read traditional texts
(plays, critical essays), but more importantly we will engage a number of non-print performance texts (Cal
Performances, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, Theater Department, Music Department, and
the myriad events occurring throughout the campus). In this course students will complete performance
reviews, short critical response essays, as well as a series of slightly longer essays with peer reviews.
Prerequisite: UC Entry Level Writing Requirement or UC Analytical Writing Placement Exam.
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Transnational Science, Technology and New Media
Gender & Women’s Studies 237, CCN 33037, Wed 2-5pm, 190 Barrows, 4 units
Instructor: Charis Thompson
This is a core class of the newly proposed Ph.D in Transnational Gender and Women's Studies. It will expose
students to critical thinking about science, technology, and new media. The class explores intersections of
gender and women's studies with science, technology, medicine, and new media around the world; including
women in science; transnational feminist science and technology studies; technologies of reproduction,
production and destruction; divisions of scientific and technical labor; embodiment and subjectivity; digital
divides, digital consumption, embodiment, and circulation; modernist projects of categorization; and the
making and breaking of gendered bodies. It mixes secondary sources with primary sources, and among
the primary sources mixes scientific and technical documents with new media and the arts.
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Multi-Disciplinary Collaborative Design Studio
Architecture 101, Section 2, CCN 03718, Mon & Wed 2-6pm, 801 Wurster, 5 units
Instructors: Yehuda Kalay & Gary Black
The objective of this studio is to use collaborative design to achieve the heightened states of excitement,
accomplishment, and satisfaction that ensue from the contemporaneous exploration of design by architecture,
engineering, and construction management students. The studio will focus on designing office space for
high-tech firms. Such firms represent a growing segment of the economy. They organize themselves in
non-traditional work groups, requiring flexible and adaptable spaces. Typically, they also want to project
an “image” that reflects their business and their culture, both inside and outside the building. Since they
compete with other firms for skilled, highly paid employees, they must provide an environment that will not
only be attractive and functional, but also provide all kinds of “extras.” The project selected for this studio
is the restoration, modernization, and seismic retrofit of an existing building located in downtown Oakland.
The studio will use computers for modeling (FormZ, 3DMax), structural analysis (SAP 2000), lighting (Radiance),
visual simulation (PhotoShop), and communication (the Web).
Prerequisite: See online schedule of classes for details.
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Please visit the Registrar's Office website at http://registrar.berkeley.edu/ for current course registration information