This course will focus on a number of foundational skills for making documentary work, including multimedia production skills as well as the skills of collaboration. The course will introduce students to the materials, design and structure of nonfiction story as well as the ethics of truth, representation, and author-subject relationships, carrying MDOCS' signature emphasis on interdisciplinary breadth, multimedia experimentation, and engagement with off-campus communities.

This course explores the body as a technology for channeling creativity. This course is a lab, a dance class, a song space, an exercise in clowning and reverence, an inquiry into presence. Be you a writer, musician, dancer, painter, sculptor, filmmaker, or artist of another form, the body is home to your pursuits. Each meeting will contain a landing activity (icebreakers, go arounds), warming the body (dance, song, good old fashioned working out), somatic exercises (sometimes outside), and creative digesting (journaling, collaging, art making). During the week we will critically engage with readings and materials that support our explorations. The course will culminate with student creation of a portfolio that may span artistic mediums. The course will be grounded by the instructor’s professional backgrounds in poetry, dance, and somatics, but will be accessible to all interested in cultivating their ability to tell a story.We will explore the questions: Where does creativity come from? Can we tune the body to make space for creativity? Can the exercise/pursuit of embodiment help us create compelling and true stories? What is our relationship to embodiment in the age of distraction? What is embodied storytelling?

This brand new Bridge Course, creative production course treats the newspaper as an artistic and subversive medium. Inspired by artist newspapers, zines, Dada publications, and other alternative media practices, students work across text, image, and experimental design to rethink what a newspaper can be. Emphasizing collaboration and collective authorship, the course explores publishing as a creative act and a form of public intervention. The semester culminates in the creation and circulation of a one-time, artist-driven publication.

How have communities collectively organized gatherings in public space and for what purposes? What stories are expressed through processions and parades? What about assemblies for protest and demand?In this course, we explore 'performance in motion,' looking at varying processional forms, demonstrations, and more in public space through historical, sociological, political, and artistic lenses.We examine historical and contemporary examples of artistic performance, political protest and demonstrations, civic parades, cultural gatherings, and religious procession. We look at geographic and temporal contexts as well as the psycho-social and emotive tones (from celebratory to mournful) of processional gatherings. Through both participatory and reflective activities, drawing from our own parade experiences, we will study parades, processions, and protests as collaboratively produced social practices. For the final weeks of the class, we will work with local community partners as we turn our attention to the history of parades in Saratoga Springs. Prerequisite: SSP 100 (Fulfills Bridge Experience requirement)

In this class, we will study the theory and craft of audio production, documentary storytelling, and sound design, with a strong but non-exclusive focus on narrative, voice-driven storytelling, i.e. what we hear on public radio and in podcasts. In the course of learning the tools and techniques of the audio recordist/editor, sound designer/mixer, and radio writer/performer, we will produce a substantial portfolio of creative audio works, which we will extensively critique and revise. Meanwhile, we will engage with the history and breadth of documentary approaches to sound and become fluent with theoretical and practical issues in the business and art of contemporary audio storytelling.

The world is full of stories waiting to be told, but what makes a story worth telling? Who should tell it? How should a story be told to relay intent? These are some of the most crucial questions any documentarian must answer. From initial concept through to the final edit this course will ask students to grapple with this process of documentary development in order to acquire a robust set of practices from which to tell the stories of the world around us. Major topics include: How to develop, nurture and test a story idea: when to know it has ‘legs’, the value of conceptualizing story form and methodology, how to ethically obtain access to a story, finding the story in the footage—the importance of the editing room forming narrative arc, becoming proficient in the use of filming equipment and editing software. This course requires no pre-existing knowledge or experience of documentary practice or technical expertise, and will be of interest to anyone curious about telling documentary stories. (Fulfills Artistic Inquiry requirement.)

Darning It! Repair as Transformative Worldview - Something is broken in America, and it seems that most people are ready to throw that thing away. Scattered all around us are example of its breakage —fast fashion, planned obsolescence, and single-use objects of all kinds, alongside mountains of their recent predecessors, all destined for the trash bin. Repair offers an alternative perspective to consumption culture, and not just in relation to damaged goods, but as a conceptual framework through which to view the world. In this course, students will learn through careful observation, systems thinking, direct experimentation, and inventive ideation. Assignments will require students to conduct extensive research, create cohesive diagrams, engage in collaborative care, and to write about and document their work. In-class workshops will introduce them to the use of various hand tools, material processes, and conceptual frameworks for mending, darning, fixing, hacking, modifying, altering, and restoring.