The Popular Arts in America: Performing Arts

Catalog description

The development of the performing arts of American popular culture; emphasis on popular music, dance, theatre, and variety arts. INART 015 The Popular Arts in America: Performing Arts (3) (GA)(BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. INART 015 examines the Popular performing arts and their place in American popular culture. broken into four units: popular music, popular stage dance, popular theatre, and acts like the circus and stand up comedy. The course will highlight important influences, artists, events, works, and effects such as:1) Popular Music: This unit will trace the development of the American popular music from the emergence of the popular songwriter in the 1830s to the beginnings of rock and roll. Jazz, country, blues, and mainstream pop will be major genres examined. 2) Popular Stage Dance: This unit will cover the evolution of dance as a popular performance art from percussive dances performed in the minstrel show to rock and roll choreography in music videos. 3) Popular Theatre: This unit examines the founding forms of popular theatre (minstrelsy, vaudeville, and burlesque) and their effect on later arts like motion pictures and television. 4) Popular Variety Arts: This unit deals with those performing arts that fall outside of the broader categories of dance, music, and theatre.The circus, stand up comedy, and stage magic will be highlighted. There will be three equally weighted objective tests in the course, each covering approximately one-third of the course's content. These examinations account for 75% of the semester grade (25% each). Students in INART 01 5 also participate in the Popular Arts Forum, a semester-long examination of an important contemporary issue in popular culture (cultural imperialism and censorship; sexuality in popular culture; gender, ethnicity, and race in the popular arts; etc.) that requires research, critical thinking, the formation of objective opinions, and discussion. The Popular Arts Forum is conducted online utilizing resources held on the Forum website and World Wide Web. Asynchronous online discussions on the topic will occur three times during the semester. The class will be broken into groups of fifteen students for the purpose of discussion. Participation in the Popular Music Forum will account for 25% of the semester grade. The discussion grade will be determined by the quality of participation and degree of involvement in the discussion.