2016-17 Academic Catalog

This course will look at dance as a field in which bodies articulate a history of sexuality, nation, gender, and race. Students will survey a range of dance forms in the United States and indigenous communities of the Americas as well as the Caribbean, South Asia, and South Africa. Specific explorations will include classical Indian dance, Native American performance, jazz, contact improvisation, and Hip-Hop performance. Through reading comprehension, written reflections and analyses, classroom dialogue, and oral presentation work, we will outline dance history in terms of anti-colonial and civil rights movements from Modernism through Post-Modernism—that is, from the imperialism at the dawn of the twentieth century to current late-capitalism. Students will be introduced to interdisciplinary methodologies in dance studies by learning to: conduct dance analysis in their accounts for gesture and social context; theorize according to the intersection of multiple social categories; and write autoethnographies or critical inquiries into personal experience.