This studio course is open to everyone. We’ll use dance as a way to deepen our self-knowledge and engagement with others as we search for a relationship between being and doing. We’ll explore embodiment tools from ecstatic dance, yin yoga, and improvisation to establish a personal practice and delve into dance as meditation. 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. Students invent final creative projects of their own design.
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 Word 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.
