HAS Courses in Drama and Film
Pete Porter
Animals in Film
Mark Berrettini
Wildlife Film and Television
This course will cover a range of film and television texts, fiction and non-fiction, that represent nonhuman and human animals, nature and "wildlife". We will examine concepts such as: anthropomorphism, human-animal interactions, the cultural construction of nature and wilderness, the animal "world" as an extension of humanity, the definition and boundary of wildlife, subjectivity, and the popularity of animal and nature genres in film and television.
Una Chaudhuri
Performing Beyond the Human: Animals, Ecology, Theatre
This course will explore intersections between theatre practice, performance theory and the emerging fields of animal studies and ecocriticism. How has performance, and specifically theater, reflected, affirmed, contested or flagrantly ignored the growing cultural awareness of threats to the environment? What models has it proposed for encountering, understanding and responding to these threats? Although the course will focus on dramatic literature and performance from the modern period, the age of ecology, we will compare modern and post modern "animal plays" and "eco-plays" with classical plays on similar themes. Among the themes and topics to be explored in relation to modern and contemporary theatre practice are: eco-catastrophe, eco-apocalypse, animality and the construction of the human, zoo culture and post humanism. A fundamental inquiry of the course will concern the intersection of ecocritique and theatrical semiosis: Can performance, by virtue of its unique ontology and phenomenology, offer new and unique approaches to the ecological crisis before us?
