Arts, Music, and Theater

Students study how music can engage and advocate for those on the margins of society, inspiring social justice movements. Analyzing historical and current events, class members design a musical project that can empower a people, group or organization in addressing moral and social problems such as racial inequality, rural or urban violence, or prison reform. A Christian normative framework, along with religious and secular alternatives, help guide the ethics implications pertaining to this subject.

ACE Component: Four evening visits the Women’s Correctional Facility in Shakopee, MN to work with their women’s choir, plus generating musical advocacy program/project ideas in conjunction with Northfield area nonprofits (Northfield Arts Guild, Union of Youth/The Key, Greenvale Park Community School, Cannon River Watershed Partnership).

This studio course focuses on advanced techniques of acting and singing for the musical stage with emphasis on opera. Students explore voice, movement, improvisation, and characterization at an advanced level. Participants receive coaching in musical and dramatic style through solo and small ensemble literature and prepare scenes for class performance. The course culminates with public performances of a fully staged and costumed lyric theater work. St. Olaf students in the course, “Acting for the Lyrical Stage” performed in full Commedia dell Arte costumes for students in local elementary schools.  The performance included singing, dancing, and improvising to involve the younger students.  This course is part of the Music department’s school outreach program.  See photos from the event.

The Mozart Experiment: This class will research, interpret, compare, rehearse, and perform a variety of ensembles and recitative scenes from Mozart’s operas in order to develop a sensitivity and ease with the collaborative dynamic of effective lyric communication in an ensemble setting. Performances by the class will be offered to the public free of charge.

In 2016, St. Olaf students devised and created an opera about immigration with students from Prairie Creek Charter School.

This course provides an overview of the key issues that face arts administrators. Topics addressed include strategic planning, budgeting, fund raising, audience development, and human resource management as each relates to the unique setting of the arts. Case analysis and guest speakers provide opportunities to explore application of key concepts. Teams of students will research and write grants for various local arts organizations and present their projects to the community partners at the end of the semester.

This course develops and stimulates research into the emotional/expressive properties of painting. By investigating thematic, compositional, and technical problems, students develop a personalized approach to ideas and content. Students learn the importance of process, flexibility, alternatives, and the recognition that a painting has a life of its own. Materials fee. Offered annually. Prerequisite: ART 102.

ACE Component: Creating paintings in response to community spaces that will be used in the May 2018 event, “The Northfield Experience,” produced and directed by internationally-renowned choreographer and director Stephan Koplowitz.

This sculpture course introduces students to metal forming, shaping, fastening and brazing, and welding, building upon concepts from the foundation course and presenting the next level of sculpture topics, issues and concerns. Both majors and non-majors discover an art and industrial process that has great artistic and practical application

ACE Component: Students will create a sculpture float for use in the May performance event, “The Northfield Experience,” a project being facilitated by guest artist Stephen Koplowitz.

This course focuses on the creative use of animation techniques. Students study the principles of animation and produce projects utilizing a variety of techniques including flipbooks, stop motion photography, animated GIFs, and 2D and 3D computer-generated animation software. Students regularly screen, analyze, and discuss contemporary and historic animations.

ACE Component: Students will create animated shorts for use in the May performance event, “The Northfield Experience,” a project being facilitated by guest artist Stephen Koplowitz.

For the ACE component of this course, students will plan, research, and develop graphic design projects for local non-profit organizations.

In this intermediate photography course, students explore a variety of techniques and topics. Techniques include historic processes such as cyanotype and salted paper printing, digital photography, large-scale color printing, and traditional black and white photography. Students investigate experimental approaches and nontraditional forms for presentation, and they investigate photography from broad historical, aesthetic, and social perspectives. This course includes field trips, readings, discussion, and slide presentations. For the ACE portion of this course in 2014-15, students photographed Rice Creek watershed during the winter and spring thaw in order to study nature photography as well as to document the hydrologic patterns for the benefit of the local management unit for the watershed. For the ACE portion of this course in 2018, students captured images of the various spaces being utilized for Stephen Koplowitz’s The Northfield Experience. Select photos were then showcased in “The Northfield Experience” gallery exhibition at the Northfield Arts Guild.

This course enables the advanced studio art student to pursue further work in any chosen two or three dimensional medium or combination of media including performance, installation, and collaborative ways of working. This course is organized around an interdisciplinary theme set each year by the instructor. Within a seminar format, students read, discuss, and write on the selected topic in conjunction with topic-driven individual studio work and critiques.

Students engaged in numerous public art projects as part of this course.

• Students created temporary public art sculptures at Way Park in the first week of class. Students rearranged nature to create the pieces. This project was inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy.
• Students toured Public Art in Minneapolis and St. Paul with Jack Becker of Forecast Public Art.
• St. Paul Public Artist-in-residence, Amada Lovelee, visited the class to share her work and to engage students in a short workshop.
• The course instructor and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, Michon Weeks, shared about her recent showing of 36 of her new paintings in a public art event in Indianapolis. The event was called “Art in Odd Places.”
• Students researched a range of topics related to public art including: public art controversies; temporary vs. permanent; monuments & memorials; relational aesthetics & public practice; the business of public art; and site specificity.
• Students proposed designs to a set of community stakeholders for painting the warming house at Way Park. The class painted the warming house based on the winning design.
• Students invited kids and adults from the Way Park neighborhood to create drawings for a pop-up gallery in the warming house. They shared candy, played music, and created a well-attended casual art show opening within the warming house.
• Students created individual mock public art grant proposals. The proposals were exhibited in the Groot Gallery Opening on Dec. 4th.

In this course, we ask students to develop projects that reflect their interest in theater and what they want to do with theater once they graduate.  This project incorporates research work that they have pursued on their own and they put that research into a material project. Interested students had the option of working with elementary students from Greenvale Schools’ PLUS program to lead an afterschool theater club.

This seminar course for senior Dance majors focuses on career development. Students design and carry out a senior capstone project with assistance from a team of faculty advisors. This year, several students chose to work with area choreographers to create solo performances, others elected to carry out a research project and presentation, and still others chose to develop a dance performance engaging fellow students. The performances will be offered to the public free of charge.

This year’s performance is titled, “Beyond Boundaries”. Students will be presenting multiple, integrative aspects of their St. Olaf experiences through dance. Eight distinct students will perform and give presentations that go beyond the boundaries of how movement interacts with their lives. The evening will begin with four performances that explore emotions from life, the feelings of loss and hurt, chaos in movement, and issues of colonization, race and power. The performances feature collaborations with Twin Cities artists Stuart Pimsler, Brian Evans, and Timmy Wagner. The second half of the evening will consist of four presentations that explore how dance can be used as an intervention for individuals on the autism spectrum, the use of Dance Movement Therapy with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, the role of dance in occupational therapy, and how psychology, dance, and creativity can inform one another.