We will explore the foundations of black performance theory, drawing from the fields of performance studies, theater, dance, and black studies. Using methods of ethnography, archival studies, and black theatrical and dance paradigms, we will learn how scholars and artists imagine, complicate, and manifest various forms of blackness across time and space. In particular, we will focus on blackness as both lived experience and as a mode of theoretical inquiry.
In this studio course open to all, we will dive into experiences in which body and language meet. We'll think about these from aesthetic, cultural, political, medical, personal, and philosophical perspectives. We'll explore language from, in, around, and about (our) bodies.
A studio course introducing students to African dance practices and aesthetics, with a focus on how its evolution has influenced American and African American culture, choreographers, and dancers. An ongoing study of movement practices from traditional African dances and those of the African Diaspora, touching on American jazz dance, modern dance, and American ballet. Studio work will be complemented by readings, video viewings, guest speakers, and dance studies. Coursework will require cultural analysis to examine how people interpret meaning within and across cultures.
This course is for all students, whether you've never danced before or have lots of experience in any style. We'll develop a community together, gather tools from multiple dance and somatic forms. We'll learn to create structures that support presence, trust, and playfulness in the unknown. We'll dive into personal, social, and performance practices, think about improvisation as both end in itself and a key aspect of creative processes in other art forms and fields as diverse as science, philosophy, and religion. On Wednesdays we'll build our skills and resources; on Fridays we'll put them to use in a co-created improv jam.
This course offers a broad introduction to the experimental world of contemporary dance. The class will emphasize embodied exploration; you will collaborate, improvise, learn technical sequences, and deploy choreographic strategies to build a timeline and map of the lineages of a field with no particular center. Through readings and viewing live concerts we will engage with creators in the field to gain insight into their cultural, historical, and stylistic perspectives. Students will choreograph and perform dances which move across forms, in order to unearth a particular voice inside dance's unique expressive and communicative environment.
This course introduces students to human anatomy using movement, drawing, and dance practices. We will study the structure and function of the body from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on relationships between cognition, the nervous system and movement. Class time will be shared between anatomy/kinesiology lectures and exploring the material through experiential and creative activities. We will discuss common problems encountered in fitness and every day life, while looking at the human structure in depth to evaluate possible solutions. Creative and research projects explore multiple ways the arts and sciences intersect.
This introductory course gives equal weight to scholarly study and embodied practice, using both approaches to explore the flow, power and cultural contexts of Breaking. This course will focus on developing a clear foundational Breaking technique in order to build a strong basis for exploring other Hip-Hop forms. By critically exploring this form physically and historically, individuals will adapt and apply their own philosophies to dance in order to eventually develop a personalized style.
This seminar is designed for junior students pursuing the minor who are planning to choreograph a senior independent project. Part study and discussion of the processes, aesthetics and politics involved in dance making and viewing - part independent creative practice and critique - this course invites students to a deeper understanding of their own art-making perspectives and to those of their classmates. A practical lighting workshop and other workshops of particular interest to the class prepare students for some of the directional, collaborative and interpersonal challenges involved in leading a significant choreographic enterprise.
Raving: Encounters & Collisions in Night/Life will explore the lives and afterlives of queer rave culture as aesthetic, political, and subjective complex societal networks that implicate us as cultural consumers, producers, and participants. As an operating system for overriding the present, situated at the confluence of Blackness, queerness, and transness, rave culture propels and alters conditions for practicing temporary liveness through rapture & rupture. Through dancing explorations, lectures, discussions, as well as collectively imagined and constructed raves, this course will invite us to continuously renew our habits of assembly.
Live Art, also known as Performance Art, integrates several disciplines: dance, drama, and visual art as well as architecture, anthropology, sociology, and political science. This course includes classes in creative movement, voice and text, improvisation, mixed media, and technology in performance practice. Composition of the site-specific works provides experiences of space and architecture. Theoretical perspectives consider the principles of interdisciplinary practices from early twentieth century and will focus on socio-political contexts that Live Art historically responds to, giving this innovative practice immediacy and relevance.
This seminar examines the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness, fitness, and wellness using a performance studies perspective, critical qualitative interdisciplinary scholarship, journalistic and popular accounts, and memoir. Intersectional dimensions of fatness are central to the course. The seminar's key questions include: How does this "f-word" discipline and regulate bodies in/as public? What is the "ideal" American public body and who gets to occupy that position? How are health, fitness, and wellness commercial, media, political, and religious projects?
This advanced studio course compares practices and performance methods of diverse approaches to the body and community in contemporary dance. Through a comparative embodied approach, students will train intensively with a rotating faculty to develop physical research built on a synthesis of experiences. The course exposes students to leading developments in improvisation and choreography and examines their philosophical, cultural and physiological underpinnings.
This advanced studio course explores the Hip-Hop dance aesthetic from multiple perspectives, in order to help students develop their own personal relationship to the culture and its influences. Structured around a different series of guest workshops each year by dancers from a range of traditions, the course will engage with these forms on their own terms, but also with an eye towards exploring the more abstract artistic options that Hip-Hop dance offers.
A studio course in Classical and Contemporary Ballet technique for advanced dancers, with explorations into neoclassical and contemporary choreography through readings, viewings, and the learning of and creation of repertory. Students will also examine ballet's response to recent social movements.