Spring 2021

Studio instruction in cello. There will be an emphasis on creating and working towards an end-of-term project for each student. Students must have had at least three years of cello study.

Comedy while fun is a lot of work and, unlike, the more traditional "actor's" life, it's all about self-generating material. Characters Welcome is a course designed to help you create original characters and impressions that can sharpen your comedic voice and create content that can eventually (hopefully) be monetized. While we actors toil away in the dank dark basements of

Based on the circus making style of the Bread and Puppet Theater, this is a class for anyone interested in making a fast, cheap, beautiful, frenetic dance/puppet circus. Students will learn techniques in: lo-tech, fast puppet/mask building with basic tools and materials; Cantastoria (story-singer) crafting; choreographing for large groups; singing/ music making; and editing

Molecular behavior is very important and impacts all aspects of life.  Everything from the efficacy of a drug to how many summers a plastic pool float will last can be altered by modifying something’s chemical structure.  A molecule’s structure is important because it influences the molecule’s reactivity.  In this course students will hone their ability to

Chemistry 3 builds on the principles covered in the prior courses of the chemistry sequence and takes a detailed look at reaction mechanisms and how they are studied. Beginning with chemical kinetics, we will spend time examining how mechanisms of several classes of organic reactions are thought to proceed, what evidence supports those theories, and how alternative hypotheses

Introduced in France after a complex trajectory from the "New World", chocolate constituted, when it arrived in Paris, a medical and cultural catalyst on French seventeenth-century aristocracy and bourgeoisie. In this course, students will explore the economic, historical, social, political, artistic and cultural legacy of chocolate production and consumption in French-speaking

Attention is a primary way we shape experience from perception. In this class, makers in all disciplines are invited to examine the movements of attention in relation to their work and how this choreography affects the experience of the viewer, the reader, the listener, the participant. Through readings, we will deepen our understanding of attention as seen from different

In this course students will learn how to use simple and inexpensive logic-integrated chips to build synthesizers, amplifiers and distortion pedals for performance or sound installations. The class will cover the types and uses of electronic components and strategies for interaction. Using the classic Nicolas Collins book Handmade Electronic Music as a source,

This course offers students the opportunity to explore the history of color photography and to research a wide range of work from the 20th 21st centuries. Working with either analog or digital capture, students will solve a series of creative assignments and conclude the term by producing a final portfolio of personal work that demonstrates sustained inquiry and engagement.

Political institutions are the decision norms and organizations that govern political life. Academic and policy interest in such institutions is flourishing as previously authoritarian states seek to craft democratic constitutions, while established and new democracies contend with non-democratic, illiberal, or populist challenges to their political systems. This course

Computational Craft is an intro course in industry standard 3D modeling software Rhinoceros. This course will cover a wide breadth of techniques that range from basic 2D drawing to complex 3D construction. While this course is aimed at teaching technical skills, it will also have a rigorous focus on aesthetics and design concepts. It’s ultimate goal being a feedback

The Twenty-four Stories of Filial Piety are well-known Chinese stories that exemplify the devotion of children to their parents that is the chief virtue in Confucianism. The Daoist Tales of Zhuangzi, on the other hand, offer a much different set of values. These tales "translated" from classical Chinese into modern Mandarin at the student's language level will serve as a

This course will explore the world of artificial or constructed languages (“ConLangs”), and examine their characteristics, their use, and the motivations behind their development.  ConLangs have captured the public imagination as a creative product in literature, film, television, and gaming; this enriches the lesser known but equally engrossing history of artificial

While the language of classical Chinese poetry is practically inaccessible to even today’s native speakers of Chinese, the poetry of the five contemporary poets studied in this course is written in the vernacular and serves as a rich source of authentic texts for this course, which integrates language learning with poetry study. The five poets, all born after 1980, each offers

Today, Japanese manga, anime, J-pop, and film have a global audience. But these exports can only be truly understood in light of longstanding domestic anxieties about sex, violence, “the kids these days,” and vulnerability to natural and anthropogenic disaster. This course traces some of these anxieties through critical examinations of manga, anime, teen fiction (light novels),

This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from around 1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan’s war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with traditional Japanese aesthetics, artistic confrontation with state and society, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality. We will explore these and

This course is the result of two years of planning, prompted by student need and informed by conversations with the National Center for State Courts, a task force of experts led by the Vermont Office of the Court Administrator, and The Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education. On the one hand, its purpose is linguistic, seeking to improve performance on the

The amount of data in the world is vast and is increasing exponentially. It is easy to become overwhelmed and lose sight of the goal of data: to answer questions we have about the world in a specific, concise manner. The goal of this course is to help craft answerable questions—and then answer them. In order to do this, we will be using a programming language (“R”) to help us

This course is designed for students of all disciplines who are interested in connecting their discrete creations (a poem, a drawing, an artwork, a product, an event) to larger systems, organizations, and possible art worlds. In this course, we will examine the ways in which every aspect of your production and distribution process — from sourcing materials to

In this course, we will explore the creative possibilities of the podcast medium and push the edges of verbal storytelling. We will investigate the forms of audio journalism and poetic soundscapes. We will use creative voice processing techniques working with electronics to transform the human voice. There will be an emphasis on production and experiential learning through

What if everything you want to understand about music is already within you, innate, instinctive, indelible? When Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) first taught harmony to students at the Geneva Conservatory in the 1890s, he found a disconnect between their aural perception and physical coordination, and devised a coursework to re-unite the two. He called it Eurhythmics,

Dance Workshop has been held at Bennington College since its beginning in 1932. It is a meeting place for all dance students, dance faculty, and staff. Here, students of all levels, undergraduate through graduate, show and discuss works in progress. All of the participants practice articulating and refining their own processes, and all are involved in learning how to see and

Dance Workshop has been held at Bennington College since its beginning in 1932. It is a meeting place for all dance students, dance faculty, and staff. Here, students of all levels, undergraduate through graduate, show and discuss works in progress. All of the participants practice articulating and refining their own processes, and all are involved in learning how to see and

Much of modern biology is rooted in insights of a series of 18th and 19th-century naturalist-scientist-explorers who built upon extensive and inspired observation, sometimes in the course of travels in (then) remote and challenging parts of the world. Their writings often took the form of journals interlarded with theoretical speculation, and some achieved great popularity

What does it mean to decolonize a field of study? Ethnomusicologists are currently grappling with this question, rethinking how to research, write, teach, and listen in ways that engage with people and perspectives that have been historically suppressed, marginalized, and silenced. Social justice is at the heart of the decolonial project. How can ethnomusicology empower the