Dance Courses

Contact

Director

E-mail

914.395.2628

The Sarah Lawrence College MFA in Dance is based on the premise that the art of dance is an integration of body, mind, and spirit learned through creative, technical, and intellectual practices.

Students are exposed to vital aspects of the art as performers, creators, and observers and are encouraged to study broadly, widen their definitions of dance and performance, and engage in explorations of form and function. The program combines seminars in reading, writing, and research; choreographic inquiry; and a daily physical practice chosen from contemporary dance, classical ballet, African dance, yoga, t’ai chi ch’uan, and studies in world dance. All students also study experiential anatomy, dance history, lighting design and stagecraft, and music for dancers.

MFA Dance 2023-2024 Courses

Writing On, With, and Through Dance: A Dance Writing Seminar

Graduate Seminar—Fall

When we write about dance, movement arts, and performance practice, how can we address and unpack the politics and power dynamics inherently at play in authorship, spectatorship, participatory experience, and research? How might our individual intersectional subjectivities be avenues into engaging the act of meaning-making while witnessing, conversing with, and archiving dance and performance?

In this seminar, we will study various historical and current relationships of writing to movement-based performance practice, tracing the legacy of dance criticism and its subsequent evolution, as a point of departure. We will look at a myriad of forms of dance writing that exemplify different potentials for relationship to between performer and witness, including but not be limited to: dance criticism, embedded criticism, autotheory, writing on advocacy and ethics within the dance field, transcribed interviews and conversations with dance and movement artists, and artists’ “process notes”. We will also look at texts that are not directly situated within dance studies, but that emerge from various feminist and queer lineages in which theory, research, and critique have become modes that evoke a deepening of relationship between subjectivity, environment, and art-making.

In addition to reading and discussing various forms of dance writing, students will develop their own writing practice in conversation with filmed footage of dance performances and rehearsals, and live dance performances and rehearsals. Students will be expectedto attend 2 live performances over the course of the semester. 

Faculty

Dance Teaching Methods

Graduate Seminar—Spring

Throughout the semester we will work collectively to prioritize questions and dialogue that support an understanding of what movement styles we are drawn to, how we create, interpret, and organize ideas in movement, and how we might begin to share this information with each other. Students will develop a self practice and investigate the intersection between this personal movement study and teaching inquiries. During the semester students will imagine, plan, develop a class that is supportive to and inclusive of multiple movement levels and abilities. Working to describe the intangible and the experience of movement itself we will refine how we filter this inside the dance class and how it might be initiated or shared to enhance one's ability to access movement, increase awareness, understand rhythm, technical structures, perception, and humanity within the exchange of teaching.

Faculty

Dancing in Progress: Perspectives on Teaching and Learning

Graduate Seminar—Fall

Students in this course will develop skills to bring their artistry into a teaching setting, combining practical and theoretical studies. We will work systematically and imaginatively to develop teaching practices in dance and movement forms that move us most deeply, addressing individual and collective concerns throughout the process.  We will explore strategies for teaching a variety of techniques, from codified dance forms to generative forms, including improvisation and composition.

Over the course of the semester, with all members of the class serving as both teachers and students, each participant will develop a cohesive plan for teaching in professional settings.  Studio practices including movement, observation, discussion, and class exercises will support in-depth exploration of teaching and learning as intrinsically related aspects of education at its best.  

In addition to work in the studio, independent research will entail surveying literature in the field of dance education and training, as well as potential sources beyond the field according to individual interests.

Practical and theoretical research will form the basis of a final presentation (teaching one or more sections of the curricular plan), and a final written report with annotated bibliography, summarizing and documenting the development process as well as providing a basis for future promotional material. 

Faculty

Movement Materials Lab

Graduate Seminar—Fall

This course is a laboratory focused on the creative potential of human movement. We will explore how work can come into being through the material itself, transformed through the phenomenon of dancing.

While movements will be considered in terms of their compositional relationships to one another, the embodied experience of our dancing and its kinesthetic resonance will be prioritized over cognitively defined, conceptual concerns.  The course will respect the intelligence of intuition as we build aptitudes for play, manipulation, and expansion of movement palettes.  A key focus throughout the course will be the honing of an artistic voice in the creation of resonant dancing.

Faculty

Graduate Seminar: Independent Study in Dance and Graduate Thesis Prep

Graduate Seminar—Year

This is course provides an opportunity to explore foundational texts in dance and performance, in the context of the Master of Fine Arts in Dance program.  With our programmatic focus on performance and choreography, there are significant writings and discussions in this field that will be important for students to engage as they prepare for careers in dance and performance.  Emphasis is on developing a line or lines of inquiry, devising strategies with which to effectively and meaningfully follow learning pathways to produce well-crafted writing.  Projects will evolve throughout the year, culminating in a final revision of writing and in-class presentation.  Students will also have the opportunity serve as readers for colleagues.

This is a tutorial course for students in the second year of the program, to generate the written portion of the MFA in Dance thesis. Class meetings will be combined and coordinated with Graduate Seminar: Independent Research in Dance, allowing for expanded discussion of research with all students in the MFA in Dance program. In the fall semester, participants will conceptualize and submit a thesis proposal, literature review, annotated bibliography, outline of thesis, and introduction. This may draw inspiration and/ or build upon work completed in the first year of the program. In the spring semester, first and subsequent revised/final drafts will be completed and submitted. With instructor’s approval, theses may be submitted for publication on the Sarah Lawrence Digital Commons platform. At the end of the semester, all participants will make a presentation with discussion of each aspect of the thesis (choreography, performance and written material). Preparation of the presentation will be supported through class discussion.

Faculty

Alexander Technique

Component—Fall

The Alexander Technique is a system of neuromuscular re-education that enables the student to identify and change poor and inefficient habits that may be causing stress and fatigue. With gentle, hands-on guidance and verbal instruction, the student learns to replace faulty habits with improved coordination by locating and releasing undue muscular tensions. This includes easing of the breath, introducing greater freedom, and optimizing performance in all activities. It is a technique that has proven to be profoundly useful for dancers, musicians, and actors and has been widely acclaimed by leading figures in the performing arts, education, and medicine.

Faculty

Anatomy

Component—Year

Students who wish to join this yearlong class in the second semester may do so with permission of the instructor.

Prior experience in dance and/or athletics is necessary.  Students who wish to join this yearlong class in the second semester may do so with permission of the instructor.

Throughout the year, we will use movement as a powerful vehicle for experiencing, in detail, our profoundly adaptable musculoskeletal anatomy. In the fall semester, students will learn sections of Irene Dowd’s Spirals, a comprehensive warm-up/cool-down for dancing that coordinates all joints and muscles through their fullest range of motion, facilitating study of the musculoskeletal system. In addition to movement practice, drawings are made as part of each week’s lecture (drawing materials provided); problem-solving activities are incorporated throughout the semester. Several short readings and responses will provide opportunities for students to engage primary texts in the field of functional anatomy.

In the spring semester, a weekly lecture with definitions, palpation of bony landmarks, and accompanying movement-based activities will support an in-depth understanding of each anatomical component. Development and refinement of technical training, as well as addressing injury prevention and rehabilitation, are central to this semester’s work. Students will be expected to show critical-thinking skills around the concepts presented in class through discussion and written reflection. New perspectives and skills developed in this course will benefit technical development for dancers and movers, as well as provide inspiration in the process of movement invention and composition.

Faculty

Ballet

Component—Year

Students may enter this yearlong course in the second semester with permission of the instructor. There will be two levels for this course; placement will be determined during registration. Megan Williams will teach this course in the fall; Caitlin Scranton in the spring.

Ballet students at all levels will be guided toward creative and expressive freedom in their dancing, enhancing the qualities of ease, grace, musicality, and symmetry that define this form. We will explore alignment, with an emphasis on anatomical principles; we will cultivate awareness of how to enlist the appropriate neuromuscular effort for efficient movement; and we will coordinate all aspects of body, mind, and spirit, integrating them harmoniously.

Faculty

Choreographing Light for the Stage

Component stand-alone

This course will examine the fundamentals of design and how to both think compositionally and work collaboratively as an artist. The medium of light will be used to explore the relationship of art, technology, and movement. Discussion and experimentation will reveal how light defines and shapes an environment. Students will learn a vocabulary to speak about light and to express their artistic ideas. Through hands-on experience, students will practice installing, programming, and operating lighting fixtures and consoles. The artistic and technical skills that they build will then be demonstrated together by creating original lighting designs for the works developed in the Live Time-Based Art course.

Faculty

Dance Meeting

Component

Dance Meeting convenes all undergraduate students enrolled in a five-credit Dance Third, a three-credit dance study, or a one-credit dance study—along with all of the MFA in Dance graduate students—in meetings that occur roughly once a month. We gather for a variety of activities that enrich and inform the dance curriculum. In addition to sharing department news and information, Dance Meeting features master classes by guest artists from New York City and beyond; workshops with practitioners in dance-related health fields; panels and presentations by distinguished guests, SLC dance faculty, and alumnae; and casting sessions for departmental performances created by the Live Time-Based Art class.

Faculty

Various Guests

Guest Artist Lab

Component

This course is an experimental laboratory that aims to expose students to a diverse set of current voices and approaches to contemporary dance making. Each guest artist will lead a module of three-to-seven class sessions. These mini-workshops will introduce students to that artist and his/her creative process. Guests will present both emergent and established voices and a wide range of approaches to contemporary artistic practice.

Faculty

TBA

Hip-Hop

Component—Fall

In this open-level course, teaching and facilitating the practice of hip-hop/urban dance technique and performance, the class will examine the theory, technique, and vocabulary of hip-hop dance. The course will facilitate the student’s development and ability to execute and perform hip-hop/urban dance steps.

Faculty

Improvisation

Component—Fall

This is a required component course for all FYS in Dance students.

Whenever we make something, we are improvising—making it up as we go. But imagination and creativity aren’t random. Artists of all disciplines indeed have eureka moments and epiphanies, but those “aha” moments are born of practices that engage experimentation, strategies, observation, and decision-making—supported by states of concentration. Similarly, the notions of “perfect forms” and “free improvisation” are theoretical impossibilities. Nothing is ever totally fixed—nor is it ever completely open. No matter what creative endeavor in which we are engaged, we are always in the real world, in a space between the two extremes. In this course, we will make dances in real time with varying degrees and types of determinacy. We’ll be guided by various concerns and ways of focusing our choices but will be consistently aware that we are composing dance in real time. That will require honing our perceptual skills, as well as our skills of articulation and communication, with our collaborators. Throughout the semester, we’ll develop our abilities both to build coherent structures that will guide our choice making and to notice and use the serendipity that chance brings. This component is open to students with prior experience in improvisation and dance-making, as well as to those new to the form.

Faculty

Live Time-Based Art

Component—Fall and Spring

This course is open to juniors and seniors. The course will be taught by John Jasperse and Juliana May in fall, Beth Gill in spring.

In this class, graduates and upper-class undergraduates with a special interest and experience in the creation of time-based artworks that include live performance will design and direct individual projects. Students and faculty will meet weekly to view works-in-progress and discuss relevant artistic and practical problems, both in class on Tuesday evenings and in conferences taking place on Thursday afternoons. Attributes of the work across multiple disciplines of artistic endeavor will be discussed as integral and interdependent elements in the work. Participation in mentored, critical-response feedback sessions with your peers is a key aspect of the course. The engagement with the medium of time in live performance, the constraints of presentation of the works, both in works-in-progress and in a shared program of events, and the need to respect the classroom and presentation space of the dance studio will be the constraints imposed on the students’ artistic proposals. Students working within any number of live performance traditions are as welcome in this course as those seeking to transgress orthodox conventions. While all of the works will engage in some way with embodied action, student proposals need not fall neatly into a traditional notion of what constitutes dance. The cultivation of open discourse across traditional disciplinary artistic boundaries, both in the process of developing the works and in the context of presentation to the public, is a central goal of the course. The faculty members leading this course have roots in dance practice but also have practiced expansive definitions of dance within their own creative work. This course will culminate in performances of the works toward the end of the semester in a shared program with all enrolled students and within the context of winter and spring time-based art events. Performances of the works will take place in the Bessie Schönberg Dance Theatre or elsewhere on campus in the case of site-specific work.

Faculty

Movement Studio Practice

Component—Year

This course will be taught by various faculty, and there will be various levels of the course.

These classes will emphasize the steady development of movement skills, energy use, strength, and articulation relevant to each teacher's technical and aesthetic orientations. Instructors will change at either the end of each semester or midway through the semester, allowing students to experience present-day dance practice across diverse styles and cultural lineages. At all levels, attention will be given to sharpening each student’s awareness of time and energy and training rhythmically, precisely, and according to sound anatomical principles. Degrees of complexity in movement patterns will vary within the leveled class structure. All students will investigate sensory experience and the various demands of performance.

Faculty

Moving the Movement: A Study of American Dance History Through A Political Lens

Component—Spring

All dance is political, simply because it is created by a human being who is of a particular place and time. Thus, the work is inherently commenting on that particular place and time. Using this framework, we will take a deep dive into American dance history from Reconstruction to today with an eye on tackling the questions:

1) How did this thing we refer to as American dance come to be?

2) Who or what is missing from the canon, and why?

3) How do we place ourselves inside of this lineage?

We will examine a combination of video and live performance, newspaper archives, historical pop culture, and scholarly and philosophical writings that range from aesthetics to African diaspora principles, as well as feminist, queer, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, AAPI, and disability theory, in order to create a timeline of American movement from the 19th century to the 21st century:

  • 1860–2023, African-American social dance from Reconstruction through your Tik-Tok feed
  • 1890–1930s, the mothers of American modern dance
  • 1920–1940s, power to the people—the democratization of concert dance and the WPA; 1940–1960s, the “no” generation: on Judson and the emergence of post-modern dance
  • 1960s–1990s, the return to “I”—on coming home to the self
  • 2000s–2010s, hit me baby one more time—the maximilism of the millenium
  • 2010s–2024: say their name—the urgency of the now

With a keen understanding of the state of the world at the point of creation, students will develop a critical eye through which to view performance: Moving beyond an aesthetic understanding of choreographic forms, how were these choreographic forms influenced by the political and social norms of the day? Further, students will begin to develop an understanding of how contemporary American dance is in constant conversation with dance of the past, sharpening their skill sets by capturing reflections in a weekly journal entry. Additionally, students will create a dance family tree, using their artistic interest as the groundwork to trace their own movement lineage across time. Simply, how did you come to dance the way that you do? Students will also be expected to attend two performances over the course of the semester, one contemporary and one historical work. This course should be pretty light in terms of weekly homework; weekly journaling should take about a half-hour. I anticipate framing that journaling in respect to students’ thinking about their own artistic interests so that they are developing source material to create their dance family tree over the course of the semester. The performances and the family tree project will be the most time-consuming. We could also dedicate some class time to peer-to-peer workshopping of that project in order to ease the homework load.

Faculty

Music for Dancers

Component—Spring

This component will provide students with the opportunity to play a full array of percussion instruments from around the globe: African djembes, Brazilian zurdos, Argentinian bombo, Peruvian cajon and quijada, Indian tabla, traditional traps, and more. Students will also be able to program and execute electronic drums such as the Wavedrum and Handsonic. The focus will be prevalent toward enhancing a dancer's full knowledge of music but also will expand the vocabulary for choreographers, actors, and composers, as well. The component will grant students the tools needed to fully immerse themselves in the understanding of the relation of music, dance, and the performing arts. Students will expand their knowledge of terminology and execution and will be able to learn the basic rudiments of notation. We will analyze the interaction of music from both intellectual and cultural points of view. We will learn how to scan musical scores with various degrees of complexity and explore the diverse rhythmic styles that have developed through time and through different geographical and social conditions. Classes will consist of group playing. All instruments will be provided and available for practice.

Faculty

Performance Project

Component—Spring

This course will be taught by TBA in fall, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd in spring.

Performance Project is a component in which a visiting artist or company is invited to create a work with students or to set an existing piece of choreography. The works are performed for the College community at the end of the semester.

Faculty

West African Dance

Component—Spring

This course will use physical embodiment as a mode of learning about and understanding various West African cultures. In addition to physical practice, supplementary study materials will be used to explore the breadth, diversity, history, and technique of dances found in West Africa. Traditional and social/contemporary dances from countries such as Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast will be explored. Participation in end-of-semester or year-end showings will provide students with the opportunity to apply studies in a performative context.

Faculty

N'tifafa Akoko Tete-Rosenthal

Yoga

Component—Spring

This yoga class is designed with the interests of dancers and theatre students in mind. Various categories of postures will be practiced, with attention to alignment, breath awareness, strength, and flexibility. The physical practice includes seated and standing poses, twists, forward bends and backbends, traditional yogic breathing practices, and short meditations. Emphasis is placed on mindfulness and presence. This approach allows the student to gain tools for reducing stress and addressing unsupportive habits to carry into other aspects of their lives. Attention will be given to the chakra system as a means and metaphor for postural, movement, and character choices. The instructor has a background in dance and object theatre, in addition to various somatically-based practices that she draws upon for designing the classes to meet the individual needs of the class members.

Faculty

Anatomy Research Seminar

Component

This is an opportunity for students who have completed a full year of anatomy study in the SLC dance program to pursue functional anatomy studies in greater depth. In open consultation with the instructor during class meetings, each student engages in independent research, developing one or more lines of inquiry that utilize functional anatomy perspectives and texts as an organizing framework. Research topics in recent years have included investigation of micropolitics in established dance training techniques, examining connections between movement and emotion, exploring implications of movement disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease, motor and experiential learning, development of a unique warm-up sequence to address specific individual technical issues, inquiry into kinetic experience and its linguistic expression, detailed study of knee-joint anatomy, and study of kinematics and rehabilitation in knee injury. The class meets biweekly to discuss progress, questions, and methods for reporting, writing, and presenting research—alternating with weekly studio/practice sessions for individual and/or group research consultations.

Faculty