Tag: Humanities

Honors Alumnus, Jordan Rosin ’11, Produces ‘Butoh Electra’ at the Historic Irondale Center

Butoh Electra

Hello Honors Community,

We write to you today to share some amazing work by an Honors Alumnus and an important fundraising campaign to help support his work! Jordan Rosin, Class of 2011, is the Creator and Producer of Butoh Electra, a physical theatre performance event that follows the story of Electra, from Greek mythology, whose inner life stood at odds with the world of the walking dead in which she lived.

Last year he and his team put on the show at FringeNYC and the show sold out every performance; being named a highlight of the entire Festival by a range of news outlets including The Village Voice! Now, this August, they have been invited to present Butoh Electra again! This time it will have a two-week run as part of the kick-off to the 2012-2013 season at the historic Irondale Center, an enormous and well-regarded multi-arts venue in the heart of the BAM Cultural District in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY. As the host, the Irondale Center is generously providing the production with:

  • a gorgeous space to perform the show
  • access to their state-of-the-art sound, lighting, and projection equipment
  • box office & front-of-house support
  • inclusion in their season-related marketing materials

However, that means the show’s creators are responsible for all of the other major costs associated with producing the show, including, but not limited to:

  • costumes
  • scenery
  • props
  • production staff
  • marketing
  • production materials i.e. copies of the script

The cost of putting on the show will run just about $4,000 in all and this is where we are calling on the Honors Community to support your fellow student and Alum in his amazing, creative venture! With everyone’s help, they can make this production even bigger and better than the last and continue to build towards a more sustainable model of making theatre. So, would you like to support Jordan and the production? Perhaps you still have some questions? Jordan’s team has setup a Kickstarter.com page to make that easy! Just visit -> Kickstarter.com <- and you can choose to “BACK THIS PROJECT”, “Like” the project on Facebook, “Tweet” about it on Twitter, or otherwise share the word with your friends.  If you are a local to New York City, you’ll want to donate soon since the first 20 people to pledge $15 or more get a special code for discount tickets to the show!

 We congratulate Jordan Rosin and his team for all of their hard work, hope you share in our excitement for them, and encourage you to show your support!

Seats Still Open in ETS 115, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes

Welcome back to Spring semester 2012!

Image of William Shakespeare There are still open spaces in ETS 115, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes (#60778 section M002). It meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11am – 12:20pm.

Below is the course description.

In this course we will be reading six of Shakespeare’s tragedies, with particular emphasis on the playwright’s characterization of each play’s tragic heroes and heroines. We will first seek out a definition of what constitutes the tragic form (e.g. Aristotle’s Poetics, Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy) with readings from early examples of this genre (e.g. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex), before questioning why this genre became so popular in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. There are several sub-genres within the tragic form (love tragedy, political tragedy, domestic tragedy, revenge tragedy), often with unclear generic boundaries dividing them, and we will observe how Shakespeare is responding to other contemporary tragic modes. During the course we will be discussing moral intent and the tragic form, dramatic resolution, censorship, and contemporary playing conditions and players. We will discuss six of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and heroines, from the fierce but pitiful Titus to the ambitious but conscience-stricken Macbeth, and identify recurring trends, concerns and motifs in Shakespeare’s tragic writing. The six plays we will be reading are Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.

Other Honors Courses are filling up fast!  Check out our Honors Courses for Spring 2012 for more listings.