Join Professors Julie Buckler, Daria Khitrova, and Stephanie Sandler to learn about a new pop-up course this year: Slavic 199hf Russian Culture in Performance.

Slavic 199hf is being offered around a visiting performance from Petersburg’s Bolshoi Drama Theater, a one-woman show based on the life and work of the poet Elena Shvarts: The Visible Side of Life. The performance will be on Wednesday, October 19, 2016. The actor, Yana Savitskaya and the director, Boris Pavlovich, will be on campus for a few days that week, and we hope to have informal meetings with them and a public panel discussion on the production, on contemporary theater in Russia, and on their work in social and educational theater.

As an “hf” course, Slavic 199hf is a one-semester (four-credit) course spread out over fall and spring. The course will meet four or five times in the fall, including for the performance, with structured sessions led by one or more of us. The fall meetings will be set once we know who is in the course and what works for everyone. In the spring, students will work independently with one or more of the faculty to do a research project.

This is an opportunity to develop or initiate your own interests in performance, theater, drama, and poetry, and we hope it will also give a little jolt of energy to us all for the fall semester. Shvarts was a poet who wrote larger-than-life dramatic poetry and she is a perfect subject for an evening of theater; and this is a moment when the study of Russian performances is also gathering momentum.