This class includes 3 classroom sessions and 1 ticket to the Opening Night performance. 

Performance: Attend A Beat of Our Own on October 7, 2026, 7:30 pm 

Artists & industry leaders take you behind the scenes of A Beat of Our Own, a vibrant new musical comedy from the Tony Award-winning producers of Hadestown that celebrates community, identity, and the transformative power of dance. The class will learn how the creative experts (director, producers, playwright, choreographer, designers, casting) work together to bring an exhilarating new production to life and explore the show’s themes of cultural intersection and creative collaboration. Because on stage and off, making great theater always requires all the right moves. 

Format: Auditors will attend the very first preview performance of A Beat of Our Own at McCarter’s Matthews Theater. Classes will be held in-person at McCarter. 

Some Themes/Topics we will cover:

• Identity, Belonging, and the Politics of Artistic Ownership the show wrestles with questions of cultural authenticity, generational tension, and what it means to claim an art form as your own, we will touch on how those same questions shape the way a production is marketed and positioned to the world.
• The Dramaturgy of Comedy and the Art of Choreographic Storytelling structure, timing, and character dynamics are engineered to make an audience laugh; we will talk about how movement carries narrative and emotion in ways that words alone cannot.
• Page to Stage: Architecture of a New Musical a brand, new work evolves over many years and through the hands of many, a director, book writers, composer, choreographer, host theater, producer, cast members we may also touch on how creative disagreements can become creative breakthroughs.
• Producing and Selling a New Work: The business of theater involves risk, vision and reading your market we will have a conversation about what it takes to develop, mount, and market a musical today from financing and casting to building a visual brand, reaching new, different audiences, and navigating the journey a show makes from workshop to opening night. 

Show Synopsis: From the Tony Award-winning producers of Hadestown comes A Beat of Our Own, a brand-new musical comedy that pulls you straight into the pulsating rhythms, kaleidoscopic colors and raw energy of competitive bhangra dance. 

After leading their college team to victory at the Michigan State Championships, teammates Mary and Preeti find themselves bound for Nationals. 

But when they clash over Mary’s plan to fuse multiple Indian styles into their routine, Mary breaks off and forms her own squad. There’s only one problem: aside from her chaotic roommate Sunita, none of the new recruits have ever danced before. Armed with a new sense of purpose and a little help from a former Bollywood star Mary sets out to mold a ragtag group of lovable misfits into title-worthy contenders. But do they stand a chance against Preeti and her team of bhangra all-stars? 

Directed by Olivier Award nominee Stafford Arima and featuring choreography from Rujuta Vaidya, music and lyrics by Sam Willmott, and a book by Rehana Lew Mirza and Mike Lew, this hilarious, heartfelt show is a proud celebration of what happens when a fractured community finds common ground through the power of dance, creativity and understanding. 

Our course will emphasize each book’s distinctive artistry and the historical, social, and cultural contexts that shape each work. Our analysis will investigate the artistic fusion of American literary realism and high modernism, examining the experiments with narrative structure and point of view as well as the mastery of characterization and style.

Sept. 18:   Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Sept. 25:   Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)

Oct.    2:    William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)

Oct.    9:    Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

We begin with Sherwood Anderson who produced some of the finest short fiction of his time and mentored both Hemingway and Faulkner.  His influential masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio, established the short-story cycle as a major form of 20^th and 21^st century American fiction. Anderson’s masterpiece combines the traditional realistic portrayal of a place with a coming-of-age story that offers both a Portrait of the Artist as a Young American and a searching critique of the limits of small-town life. These themes and an equally ambitious experimentation with form also shape the portrait of midwestern life in Willa Cather’s most powerful novel, My Antonia.  The deceptive simplicity of language and graceful flow of narrative mark Jim Burden’s complex attempt to recover a past that tells us much about the immigrant experience, rural America, and the possibilities and limitations of American life.  In our final two books, we move from the Midwest to the South. The 59 short chapters of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying immerse us in the narrative consciousness of fifteen different narrators set against a mock-epic journey that is both a confrontation with the reality of death and a richly philosophical inquiry into the meaning of language and human experience.  Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God provides a capstone to our examination of how various American authors transformed experimental fictional narratives into new confrontations with the meaning of human identity in an increasingly dehumanizing world. Hurston’s portrayal of Janie’s three marriages dramatizes the fluid nature of identity and African American life in a world marked by rapid change and social turmoil.  and ultimately affirm the possibility of a transcendent. This course should provide a fuller understanding of both this literary period and the enormous possibilities embedded in narrative forms.

Explore how iconic relationships between artists shaped the course of nineteenth-century French paintings. From Jacques-Louis David's atelier to Claude Monet's backyard, discover the guidance and interconnections that sparked creativity and technical experimentation. Each week a different artist will serve as the focus of a case study of crucial ways that teaching, friendship, and mentorship shaped their practice. The course will be taught in the Princeton University Art Museum and will highlight major works in the collections. Participants will have the opportunity to view works in the galleries after the class sessions.

1. Jacques-Louis David and his Students
2. Of Teachers and Allies: Mary Cassat, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Edgar Degas
3. Painting the Night: Degas's Influence on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
4. Generations: Eugène Boudin, Claude Monet, and Blanche Hoschedé-Mon

Virginia Woolf may have begun Orlando as a joke, relishing the chance to take a much needed “writer’s holiday” from her ‘serious poetic experimental books,” but eventually the joke—a fantasy/love letter to Vita Sackville West –developed into a compelling, but still playful satire on biography, stultifying gender roles, the flusters and frustrations of desire, and the notion that the self, any self, is stable and knowable. 

This course will probe the iconoclastic satire that animates Woolf’s most original work and inspires two of its most intriguing contemporary adaptations: Sally Potter’s film version and a live concert version of Orlando performed by mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska and guitarist Sean Shibe at Princeton University Concerts. A concert ticket is included as part of this course.   

Book: Orlando: A Biography (Harcourt, 2026 edition preferred).

Lecture Dates: November 6, 13, 20, 2026    Time: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Concert Details: October 27, 2026, 6:00 pm | Ema Nikolovksa, Mezzo-soprano & Sean Shibe, Guitar: “Orlando” | Richardson Auditorium, 68 Nassau Street, Alexander Hall.

The concert is inspired by the character, spirit, and enduring relevance of Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking 1928 novel Orlando. The program explores themes of love and identity through songs ranging from Dowland to Dylan. Auditors will be seated in the balcony. More information: https://puc.princeton.edu/events/26-27-nikolovska-shibe/