Course Description
Summary
Even now, or perhaps especially now, the state of our moving and breathing bodies is critical to how we operate in the world. Dance Studies is an emergent interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry that considers dance, corporeality and embodied experience as important and valuable forms of knowledge in the creation and distribution of cultural discourse. This course will introduce students to some of the principal concerns and approaches undertaken by Dance Studies scholars and will ask students to apply these concepts to real-world examples. Dance Studies considers dancing bodies as cultural constructs and cultural agents, providing a crucial framework in how we understand categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and national identity, among others. Dance Studies also challenges the authority of the written word and the non-participant observer within traditional ethnographic and scholarly practices by giving value to the often marginalized and under-represented knowledge of a great breadth of embodied experience.
This is an intensive 7-week course in which students are expected to do a significant amount of reading and viewing lectures, films and performance documentation; produce multiple writing projects; and present a short movement-based creative experiment in collaboration with fellow students (no performance experience necessary).
