Class Action Listings

Theater & Performing Arts
Since 1984, Primary Stages has produced more than 100 new plays. As this apparently represents an insufficient accomplishment, they’ve opened the Marvin and Anne Einhorn School of Performing Arts, designed to produce new playwrights, directors, and actors, on East 59th Street. Upcoming courses for the histrionically inclined include “Voiceover Technique” and “Building Your Book: The Contemporary Monologue.” primarystages.org

Annoying one’s neighbors is one of the great delights of urban living, and African drumming seems like a particularly apt way to accomplish it. If you’re looking for a way to make the downstairs tenants wish they’d never signed that lease, roll up to Gowanus’s Keur Djembe African Drum Shop. For $20 per two-hour class, the Senegalese owner, Ibrahima Diokhane, will instruct you in the finer points of hitting the goat skins. Private instruction is also available. keurdjembe.net

Fashion
Seneca once quipped, “We live not according to reason, but according to fashion.” As that remains the case even two millennia on, you might as well make the effort to become more fashionable. The Fashion Institute of Technology can assist, with master classes in its department of continuing education. Newer fashionistas can register for “Beginning Fashion Drawing Studio,” “Fashion Drawing Studio,” or “Fashion Design Portfolio”; seasoned couturiers can attempt “Fashion Design Studio.” fitnyc.edu

Though sewing has never struck us as particularly hilarious, Chelsea’s City Quilter promises to have you in stitches. Many of its 50 classes each term focus, as the name suggests, on quilting, but students are also encouraged to use the Bernina Aurora sewing machines to craft clothing and handbags. The coming months boast such classes as “Basic Sewing: Lounge Pants,” “Color, Line, and Texture,” and an “Open Sewing Forum.” cityquilter.com

Writing
Last year, Battery Park City got a lot more literate when Poets House and its 50,000-volume library relocated there. When not sponsoring public programs, such as readings, symposia, lectures, and conversations, the organization also holds seminars and workshops. Late-fall offerings include “Structural Excavations With Lisa Jarnot,” “Poems, Prayers & Possession With Gabrielle Calvocoressi,” and a master class with National Book Critics Circle Award winner Edward Hirsch. poetshouse.org

Writing a novel is a marvelously impressive feat, though rather less so if the result sits moldering on your hard drive. Happily, 92nd Street Y offers a four-session course in “How to Get Published” starting November 16. By the end of the course, ink-stained wretches and carpal-tunnel casualties alike will emerge with packages all ready to be sent to agents and editors. Now, if someone would only offer a class on coping with rejection letters. 92y.org

Art & Architecture
The Museum of Modern Art boasts a very impressive collection: some 150,000 pieces of painting, drawing, and sculpture; 22,000 films; 4 million film stills. You can get much better acquainted with several of these works—or learn to craft your own—by signing up for MOMA’s art history and studio offerings. Upcoming opportunities include “The Gesture and the Painter’s Ethos,” “Modern Art, 1915–1945,” and “Contemporary Painting: The Nineties and Noughties.” Online courses are also available. moma.org

Perhaps you’ve walked by the Parsons campus and felt a pang of envy as you’ve eyed the students, so slender, so insouciant, so imaginative. Now you can join their ranks, by registering for an art class in late fall. You might learn “Acrylic Painting Basics” or “Mixed Media: A Contemporary Fusion.” If you’d rather not get your hands dirty, consider “Gallery Management.” newschool.edu/parsons/continuing-education

Film & Video
Some auteurs spend years developing their first film. You can make yours in just two weeks. In January, the New York City College of Technology in Downtown Brooklyn will offer “Make a Film Class: Production.” In just 14 days, “skilled workers, electricians, carpenters, hair stylists,” or the like interested in crossing over to TV or film work can learn pre-production, production design, and storyboarding, culminating in a two-day film shoot. Brooklyn Young Filmmakers leads the course. www.citytech.cuny.edu

If you think the coming revolutions should be televised, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies offers several late-fall courses in documentary film. Students can learn the basics of “Digital Video Production,” then progress on toward “Editing Documentary Footage” and “Documentary Distribution and Marketing.” The highly motivated can enroll in all three at once. scps.nyu.edu

For Children & Teens
Teenagers are nature’s great critics: They can find something to censure in every word, gesture, and mannerism you employ. Instead, encourage them to put their faculties of judgment to better use, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s classes for teens in art appreciation and criticism. Fall offerings for ages 11 to 18 include “Art Explore–Fabulous Furniture,” “Art Explore–Mosaics,” and “A Conversation With Conservators.” metmuseum.org

Many scholars suggest that China’s economy will soon outpace the U.S.’s. If you’d like your child to remain competitive in this new world order, send them to Planet Han on the Upper West Side, which offers fun and friendly Mandarin classes especially for kids. And Mandarin is, as Planet Han reminds you, already “the most widely spoken language in the world.” planethanchinese.com