Time Traveling Through the Sentient Archive
Course Description
Summary
This is a multi-modal course that examines how the body serves as a repository for knowledge. It is open to any student who wishes to explore the complex ways in which histories form around discourses of the body, culture, aesthetic philosophy, and power. Specifically, we will examine the theoretical proposals embedded in the history of modern and postmodern dance, and place this work within a larger social, cultural and political context. We will activate our understanding of these histories through embodied movement practices. Additionally, students will engage with course materials through written work as well as movement-based artistic responses throughout the term.
Through recent and contemporary scholarship in the field of Dance Studies in particular, we will locate modern and postmodern dance within the socio-cultural values of its time. We will explore the significance of the innovations associated with these movements and what they offer to our cultural understanding of dance, while also considering the exclusions and inequities sometimes perpetuated. We will also challenge the notion of modern dance as an exclusively Western phenomenon by looking at modern and postmodern experiments from other global locations, thereby complicating a singular understanding of modern dance history.
This is a reading, writing and movement-based course, in which students will be expected to produce written papers, research-based class presentations, and artistic movement responses to the material.
Learning Outcomes
- Gain an understanding of how modern and postmodern dance has been represented historically within Western culture.
- Engage with contemporary scholarship on dance that incorporates critical analyses from often overlooked perspectives of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and other frequently marginalized points of view.
- Develop research methodologies to discuss and produce written and verbal analyses of historical representations of dances.
- Reflect on their understanding of how dance and related physical practices shape their own world view through artistic response.