Course Info: HACU-0208
| Course | HACU-0208 Introduction to "Asia" |
| Long Title | Introduction to "Asia" through Traditional Music and Performing Arts |
| Term | 2017F |
| Note(s) |
Satisfies Distribution Textbook information |
| Meeting Info | Music and Dance Building RECITAL on T,TH from 12:30-1:50 |
| Faculty | Junko Oba |
| Capacity | 23 |
| Available | 8 |
| Waitlist | 0 |
| Distribution(s) |
Culture, Humanities, and Languages |
| Cumulative Skill(s) | Independent Work Multiple Cultural Perspectives Writing and Research |
| Additional Info | In this course, students are expected to spend 6-8 hours weekly on work and preparation outside of class time. |
| Description | Introduction to "Asia" through Traditional Music and Performing Arts: "Asia" is a diverse, dynamic, and complex cultural entity that encompasses a vast geographic area and a long complicated history. In this course we will investigate some representative performing arts traditions of South, Southeast, and East Asia, e.g., Indian classical music, Javanese gamelan, Japanese noh theatre, as a way of learning about the regions' unique history, different value systems, aesthetic sensibilities, spiritual beliefs, philosophies, and ways of life. We will also cross-culturally examine these performing arts traditions to understand the past and ongoing trans-regional cultural interactions. This is not a performance course. No previous music training is necessary but the students are expected to engage in critical listening and basic musical analysis of various music examples. In many places in Asia, storytelling is an ancient art that people have cherished for many centuries. Old stories are told over and over with new interpretations each time. Many stories have been adopted by different communities and shared with new audiences with new characters, perspectives, moral lessons, and agendas as they have conformed to different cultural climates of the new settings. In this course, students studied select case studies of such retellings of old stories of Asia as performed in traditional music, dance, and theatre in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan. We also studied a long history of Orientalist imagining, consumption, and appropriation of “Asia” by the West, and wrote a response essay on the subject for midterm. In the second half of the semester, building upon these preparatory work, we engaged in the complicated undertaking of story retelling ourselves and started working for our final group project. Each group (2-3 members) chose their source stories, examined different versions of them, rewrote them with their own interpretations, and presented them as puppet theatre in class. They then wrote short reflection essays, reexamining their collaborative work and their engagement with “Asia” through this project. |