Being and Doing: Dance for Every Body

This studio course is open to everyone. We’ll explore dance as a way to deepen both our self-knowledge and engagement with others. We’ll delve into dance as meditation, using tools from ecstatic dance, yin yoga, and improvisation to establish a personal practice. We’ll examine genre-bending performances occurring outside of theaters and study how dance reflects and can change (and whether it should try to change) contemporary issues, taking up such topics as power, class, race, and gender. In final creative projects, students take aspects of being and/or doing further into their own lives and communities.

Sample reading list:

Ralph Lemon, Tree: Belief/Culture/Balance
Rebecca Solnit, Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable
Miguel Gutierrez, When You Rise Up
Jill Sigman, Notes on Gender
Mark Franko, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement & Identity in the 1930s
Nato Thompson, ed, Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011
See instructor for complete list

Reading/Writing assignments:
Ongoing creative and reflective assignments (approx. 2 hours outside class/week); reading, viewing live and videotaped performances (approx. 2 hours outside classes/week), several short response papers and a final project.

Other Requirements:
United States travel required.

Other information:
DAN 214 is designed for both beginning and advanced dance students and meets twice a week. Attendance in all classes and completion of all work required including: creative assignments, papers and participation in final public project is required to pass the course. There are seats reserved for each class year. All unused reserved seats will be released to all class years for further enrollment during the Drop/Add period.

 

 

Faculty

Sections

U01

Tuesdays and Thursdays
2:30 - 4:20 pm

Instructor(s)

Aynsley Vandenbroucke