Dance Courses

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. 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.

If ambivalence refers to “having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone,” what might dancing ambivalently imply? Why might the desire to dance ambivalently present itself? What are the social and aesthetic concerns of an ambivalent Dance historical lineage?

In Arabella Stanger’s, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession, Stanger analyzes how state and federal agencies collaborated with Euro-American Modernist pioneers of Dance and Architecture. Reviewing seminal dance works like that of Martha Graham’s, Frontier (1935), and Graham’s collaboration with the United States Indian Removal Act (IRA), Stanger illustrates how contemporary techniques of Euro-American dance and choreography, such as “taking up space”, are referential to choreographies of urban renewal and settler colonialism. Following this underside of reading Euro-American dance history, Saidiya Hartman’s, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, identifies how mandated dances served as a measure of management and surveillance upon the enslaved in the plantation economy and Great Migration passage aboard ships of the Trans-Atlantic. Within Hartman’s speculative and archival text, a counter-archive of Dance is presented to readers – an archive resistant to colonial impositions (Jasmine Johnson, Black Laws of Dance) – wherein the testimony of an enslaved woman, Mary Glover, appears through an act of refusal to dance: “[…] the promotion of innocent amusements and harmless pleasures was a central strategy in the slave owner’s effort to cultivate contented subjection. However, the complicity of pleasure with the instrumental ends of slaveholder domination led those like Mary Glover to declare emphatically, “I don't want [that kind of pleasure].” (Hartman, 11)

How might an orientation of ambivalence lead us to towards a multidirectional understanding of dance and choreography?

How might thinking with dance, beyond the dominant discourse of consent and pleasure, reveal Dance’s entanglement with aesthetic, sociopolitical, and necro-political practices for disciplining the body?

Reaching for an underside comprehension and counter-archive of Dance, inspired by the orientation of ambivalence, students will engage scholarship across forms of film, essay, poetry, image, sound, performance and choreographic exercises. A dialogical setting will allow us to familiarize ourselves to the coursework, and pose queries of its relation to our own ongoing scholarship. The conclusion of the semester will require an original work in response to the course material.

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.

How is it possible for us to move in the countless ways that we do? Learn to develop your X-ray vision of human beings in motion through functional anatomical study that combines movement practice, drawing, lecture, and problem solving. In this course, movement is a powerful vehicle for experiencing in detail our profoundly adaptable musculoskeletal anatomy. We will learn 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 entire musculoskeletal system. In addition to movement practice, drawings are made as part of each week’s lecture (drawing materials provided), and three short assignments are submitted each semester. Insights and skills developed in this course can provide tremendous inspiration in the process of movement invention and composition.

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 aging and longevity in dance, discussion of functional anatomy in relation to linguistics, pedagogy, choreography and performance, investigation of micropolitics in established dance training techniques, examining connections between movement and emotion, development of a unique warm-up sequence to address specific individual technical issues, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this course, we will examine and hone the tools needed for propelling your creative work into the professional landscape. Taught from the perspective of an active artist/arts professional in the nonprofit sector, the course will attempt to achieve fluency for all makers by providing practical encounters with key areas of budgeting and finance, fundraising and grant writing, presenting and touring, and self-producing components (including marketing, press, audience-development and engagement strategies, digital and social interactions, and production administration). We will explore various dance and theatre financial models, from being an independent solo artist to starting your own ensemble. The class will be participatory, asking each student to craft project descriptions, grant narratives, and budgets for their thesis projects or other works shown in the previous semester or first year. We will develop and stage mock applications and peer/panel reviews for real-world funding opportunities, undertake group budgeting for productions that occur in each department, and develop concurrent fundraising plans and crowdsourcing campaigns. The aim of this course is to provide a greater level of competitive preparedness for graduating dance and performance makers on the cusp of representing themselves and their work in their chosen field(s).

This course is an introduction to butoh through the lens of LEIMAY’s Ludus practice, which is the embodied research being taught today by LEIMAY Artistic Director Ximena Garnica. Butoh is a Japanese performing-art form that was created by Tatsumi Hijikata in the 1950s and 1960s. The course will start with an introduction to Hijikata’s butoh-fu, a choreographic method that physicalizes imagery through words. The course will then expand into LEIMAY’s Ludus practice, using multiple physical explorations to embody imagery and enlarge states of consciousness, enabling multiple realms of perception while challenging Eurocentric notions of body, space, and time. Each dancer’s physical potential will be cultivated to develop a unique movement language that is rooted in butoh's ideas of transformation. Simultaneously, we will focus on the conditioning of a conductive body through the identification of the body’s own weight in relation to gravity, along with the cultivation of internal rhythm and fluidity. Together, we will decentralize self-centered 34 Dance approaches to movement and explore the possibilities of “being danced by” instead of “I dance,” “becoming spacebody” rather than occupying space. We will challenge our body’s materiality and enliven our sensorium through listening to the rhythms and textures of the nonhuman. And we will use impossibility as a spark to enrich the ways in which we create and inhabit the world. This course is based on principles developed through Garnica’s nearly two decades of study of butoh. Historical and cultural context will be offered throughout the course. This class is open to dance, theatre, and any other students who are curious and interested in discovering alternative approaches to body and movement practices.

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.

This conditioning uses embodied anatomy, Pilates-based strengthening, body weight exercises, information about cardiovascular fitness, and artistic reflection to build healthy groundwork from which to build a sustained physical dance practice. Each week, we will address a different area of the body with an anatomical lecture, definition and palpation of bony landmarks and activation of specific support structures, and targeted exercises to help build deeper understanding and support. This more intellectual investigation will be applied directly to movement to help develop technical training, as well as to encourage injury prevention and rehabilitation. Students will be expected to show critical-thinking skills around the concepts presented in class. They are expected to be present, attempt exercises, and develop personal modifications when necessary and to show some physical progress throughout the semester. Discussion in class is encouraged, as this is a time to display internal process. It is suggested, though not required, for students to maintain a journal throughout the semester.

This course is an introduction to designing costumes for dance/time-based art. The course will emphasize collaborations with a choreographer and include topics such as: The Creative Process of Design, Where to Begin When Designing for Dance, The Language of Clothes, The Elements of Design, Color Theory, Movement and the Functionality of Dance Costumes, Figure Drawing/Rendering Costumes, and Fabric Dictionary/Fabric Terminology. The course will also cover learning numerous hand and machine stitches, as well as various design-room techniques such as taking measurements, how to fit and alter costumes, and various wardrobe maintenance techniques. Each student in this course will eventually be paired with a student choreographer, with whom he or she will collaborate to realize costumes for the choreographer’s work and which will be presented during the fall or spring departmental dance productions. Throughout the year, students will also create, in a loose-leaf binder, their own Resource Book, which will comprise all handouts, in-class exercises, and notes. The Resource Book will be a useful reference tool as students work on various class assignments and/or departmental productions. This course is designed to give students a basic knowledge of the many intricate creative and technical steps involved in the design process when creating costumes. A deeper understanding of the various aspects of costume design for dance is an enormous tool that can not only enhance one’s overall design skills but also allow the student to communicate more fully during the creative process—whether with fellow designers or as a choreographer or director collaborating with a production team. The Resource Book will also serve as a helpful guide in the future, as the student embarks on his or her own productions at Sarah Lawrence and beyond.

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.

This course is both an introduction to various skills involved in working with tactile partnership in dance and a creative laboratory to explore the expressive potential of touch. Contact Improvisation (CI) dates back to the early 1970s, but this is not a course in CI, per se. We will explore many exercises and principles drawn from CI work, as well as principles that CI has drawn from movement forms as diverse as aikido and ballroom dancing. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we already work in partnership whether dancing or walking down the street. The force of gravity is always pulling our weight toward the Earth, and the ground (or the floor) is pushing back. We’ve become so good at standing on our own two feet that we may no longer realize that we are constantly navigating this interrelationship. As we move out of balance, which is part of all dancing, we need to build skills on how to fall. As such, we’ll start this semester with a focus on floor work, challenging ourselves to move safely on and off the floor with increasing speed and force. As we build skills, we’ll gradually adapt these principles to our work in contact with our peers. While we’ll begin with a very light touch, we’ll gradually build into mutual support structures and, possibly, try out a few lifts. This adds to the complexity of navigating forces that originate from our partner. As this work progresses, the integrity of our support structure will become more and more critical. The structure of the class will alternate between skill building/practice and creative exploration with these skills. We will also learn some existing partnered sequences from my own choreography to serve as a kind of springboard to our own creative investigations. A foundation of working in physical partnership with others is navigating consent. We will begin our work together by exploring recent discourse on touch, consent, and boundaries in the fields of dance and performance. Each student will be empowered to understand and articulate his/her own boundaries, which may be constantly in flux. We will engage this as both a right and a responsibility for each of us to exercise individually so that we can build a functional, honest, and empowering community for our work together. The core work in this class is about exploring physiological touch and sharing weight with the floor and your peers, as described above. If doing so in each class session with a variety of partners throughout the semester is not of interest or does not feel safe/supportive at this time, this course might not be a good fit for you this semester. If you are somewhat unsure but want to explore touch and potentially expand your comfort zone with partner work in dance, please reach out during registration (Aug. 19-21, 2024), and we can have a conversation (jjasperse@sarahlawrence.edu). 

Each student enrolled in a three-credit dance study, five-credit Dance Third, five-credit dance FYS, or Dance MFA program of study is REQUIRED to complete one tech/production job each semester in order to receive full credit for dance courses. In completing Dance Tech/Production, students are exposed to the "behind the scenes" operations required to put on a dance performance. All students do this work, so you may be performing on stage in one concert and working a crew position in the next. The production process is much the same here at Sarah Lawrence as in the professional world. For each concert, the technical crew works during the performances and during the “tech week” before the show. You will receive instruction for every tech job, so don’t worry if you are assigned to do something that you’ve never done before.

Inspired by the work of Katherine Dunham, you will be invited to explore her movement vocabulary, often used in jazz dance, and then find the interconnections between Dunham’s contributions to film and concert stage with the current techniques used in commercial and concert dance, as well as learn vernacular Jazz movement. Open to all levels, this high-energy class inspires fun and freedom of expression through artistry, improvisation, and embellishment of choreography—regardless of skill and dance experience, yet challenging enough for more experienced dancers.  For each meeting, a classic Dunham warm-up will be given, followed by lively, Dunham-inspired jazz progressions and a combo. Join us for a transformative exploration of jazz dance, honoring tradition while embracing innovation!

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.

This studio practice course introduces students to hip-hop culture through the classic hip-hop styles of dance. Cumulative technical dance training brings to light the ethos of the street-dance culture and how it counteracts and sometimes adopts mainstream media misconceptions. Through the study of classic hip-hop dance styles, students expand their awareness of connections between various dance forms that pre-date hip-hop while exploring the dilemma of belonging, yet standing apart. Through dialogue, students will begin learning about the history of the original dance styles in their communities and then discuss mainstream factors that either helped or harmed the evolution of the community. Occasional guest teachers will offer a class in a club or street style that will help students get a feel for the New York City dance scene of the 1980s, which influenced today’s trends. Students will watch Internet footage to aid them in understanding the similarities and differences between previous trends and today’s social exchanges in dance. Students will receive dance training at a beginner level done to hip-hop music from past to present. If there are intermediate-level dancers, they will be taught at respective levels in order to make advancements in their grasp of vocabulary.

This beginning-level dance class is designed to introduce students to Hawaiian hula dance through percussion, song, and dance. The hula class structure is designed to give student a hands-on journey into the heart of the hula. At the same time, in the classroom, students will explore the broader issues of culture and its artistic expressions. This multidisciplinary approach incorporates social studies, language arts, dance, visual arts, and music. The instructor and the students work collaboratively in class, bringing together their various skills and expertise. Students will focus on the arts and traditions of a cultural group, building a contextual frame for the study of the hula, its origins and meanings. In the course of the class, many basic skills are put to use—oral and written language, coordination, listening, observation, description, analysis, and evaluation. This blend of artistic and academic learning provides students with an in-depth artistic experience while also exploring the larger themes of cultures and their artistic expressions.

Improvisation is a potentially limitless resource. Arising from our perceptions of movement itself, responding to environmental elements including sound and music, taking direction from conceptual/imaginary sources, improvisation can yield raw materials for making dances and performance works in multiple disciplines. Improvisation can form the basis for community-building activities. Improvisation reliably supports refinement of our technical skills in dance, from conceptual and choreographic to performative, by giving us greater access to our unique and infinite connections to movement. In this course, we will engage in a variety of approaches to improvisation. We will investigate properties of movement (including speed, force, time, space/range, quality, momentum), using activities that range from highly structured to virtually unstructured. We will work in a variety of environmental settings, from the dance studio to outdoor sites around the campus. Throughout the year, our goals will include building capabilities for sustained exploration of movement instincts and appetites, honing perceptive and communicative skills, and learning to use improvisation to advance movement technique. All of these will support the development of a durable foundation from which to work creatively in any discipline.

In this class, graduate and upperclass undergraduate students 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. The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This course introduces students to singular choreographic possibilities offered by cinematographic tools, promoting new ways to engage with dance through new media and its platforms. The course focuses on “why and how” to convey a choreographic idea into a filmic practice, how the encounter between moving images and moving bodies can expand the development of a choreographic language beyond live performance. The course dwells on fundamental questions: How are we positioning our work in relation to these two fields—historically, aesthetically, and conceptually? Is there a broad and thorough blending of concepts, philosophy, processes, and tools? Moving Bodies in Frame is a mix of analytical and production classes, introducing students to the history of video/experimental film/choreocinema; moving to contemporary videos and installations,; and, finally, addressing the opportunities offered by the new platforms available at this moment in time. Students will have a series of hands-on exercises and assignments, individually and/or in groups, suggested every week. These exercises explore concepts of framing, camera movement, planes, deconstruction of space and time, the relationship of audio X image, special effects, postproduction, installation, etc. Students will create a final assignment, a project where they define a concept, shoot the video, and address postproduction decisions like sound and editing. Finally, we will discuss how the project should be presented and experienced: Is it an intimate or communal experience? Does it ask for projection or monitor, small or big screen, one or multiple screens, viewer mobility, and interactiveness? The course welcomes choreographers, performers, filmmakers, photographers, cinematographers, media artists, or anyone interested in this process. A camera will not be necessary; all assignments can be done with participants’ phones.

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? Why? 3) How do we place ourselves inside of this lineage? 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—the how and the why of creation having equal footing with the physical forms. Further, students will begin to develop an understanding of how contemporary American dance is in constant conversation with dance of the past.

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.

Students will be introduced to the traditional Chinese practices of Tai Chi and Qi Gong. These practices engage with slow, deliberate movements, focusing on the breath, meditative practice, and posture to restore and balance energy—called chi or Qi. The postures flow together, creating graceful dances of continuous motion. Sometimes referred to as one of the soft or internal martial arts, Tai Chi and Qi Gong are foundational practices within a lifelong, holistic self-cultivation in traditional Chinese culture.

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.

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.

This class focuses on the personal and creative process in building an approach to dance pedagogy, as well as naming the skills involved to facilitate and support  dance/body/movement-based classrooms. We will work together to BUILD A CURIOSITY that will appear in the form of your pedagogical approach to teaching dance. To assemble this, we will be inquiring deeply into ourselves, our histories, patterns, cultures, desires, inhibitions, and much more. We will draw as much as we can from ourselves to look at, discuss, and dream up approaches to dance pedagogy that inspire us and keep us activated.

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 between performer and audience member or 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.