Dance Courses

This course is designed as an imaginative laboratory in choreographic practice. It is time and space for rigorous play, where we will engage critically with our own respective creative processes. All class sessions will be devoted to choreographic practice in a mentored laboratory setting. Students will be charged with bringing in choreographic proposals or ideas on which to work with their peers during these sessions. Throughout the course, specific compositional and/or artistic concerns will be highlighted that will frame our investigations. Those concerns will be used to focus our critical analysis on an aspect of our choice rather than as a score that defines the choreographic proposal itself. Much of our work will focus on refining the process of choreographic practice in order to better understand how the processes with which we engage to make work shapes what we make.

In this course, graduates and upper-class undergraduates with a special interest and experience in the creation of time-based art works 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 and in conferences. 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 peers will be 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 the works will engage in some way with embodied action, student proposals need not neatly fall 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 leading this course have roots in dance practice but have also 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. Performances of the works will take place on campus.

In this course, graduates and upper-class undergraduates with a special interest and experience in the creation of time-based art works 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 and in conferences. 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 peers will be 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 the works will engage in some way with embodied action, student proposals need not neatly fall 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 leading this course have roots in dance practice but have also 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. Performances of the works will take place on campus.

This course will be an experimental lab 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 their creative process. Guests will present emergent, as well as established, voices and a wide range of approaches to contemporary artistic practice.

In this course, we will explore varied entry points toward the creation and practice of a personal dance teaching philosophy and pedagogy. We will interrogate our varied and unique histories, values, patterns, cultures, and aesthetic desires, observing how they illuminate or limit our teaching goals. Our experience and assumptions around teaching and being taught will help us amplify and name integral skills and tools that support our work in dance/body/movement-based classrooms. How do we build a class architecture that nurtures growth? How do we create a safe and equitable space for reciprocal learning? How do we find a balance between planning and improvising? How do we clarify and hone our intentions while using clear language and communication? These questions and many more will ignite us to observe, support, and inspire one another, as we imagine new and engaged approaches to our teaching practices.

This course, required for first- and second-year MFA candidates, provides opportunities to explore foundational texts in dance and performance, in order to refine skills for developing new insights, questions, and knowledge of our subject matter. In the context of the Master of Fine Arts in Dance program, with curricular focus centered on the practices of performance and choreography, there are nevertheless important writings and discussions in the area of Dance Studies and beyond, which will be essential for students to engage as they prepare for careers in the performing arts. Emphasis will be on developing a line or lines of inquiry, devising strategies with which to effectively and meaningfully follow learning pathways to connect with both reading and writing, and to extend knowledge in support of individual interests. Careful consideration of all sources, consistent participation in class discussions, and periodic presentations of the research and writing in progress are the tools employed for this research tutorial course. In the fourth and final semester, focus is brought to the culmination of research and preparation for oral presentation.

This course will serve as a research tutorial, providing a space for students to engage in and share individualized research into lineages of study and art-making, as well as research on specific texts and works of performance and art that contextualize, influence, and sit in conversation with their creative research and practice in the Master of Fine Arts in Dance program. As a class, we will encounter shared readings and works of art situated within dance studies, performance studies, phenomenology, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, disability studies, authotheory, and autohistoria, as well as other experimental forms that do not claim or fit into a singular discipline or field. These core sources will provide a frame of discourse for students to extend, deepen, push against, trouble, and complicate, as they develop and follow their own lines of creative and scholarly inquiry that map the particular ecosystems of thought and work their dance and movement practices exist within and in relationship to. In Lauren Fournier’s Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, she asks, “What kinds of knowledge are understood as legitimately critical or rigorous, and by whom?” This question, echoed by many others within and beyond academia at large as well as dance and “body-based forms”, will serve as an underbelly for our group discussions. As artists working within dance and embodiment, how do we bring all of our sensory knowledge and intelligence to our scholarship? How can we honor non-verbal communication as it exists in a kaleidoscopic relationship with verbal communication? How do we produce, transmit, and archive the multiplicity of knowledge channels that exist within dance, performance, and time-based art? For whom do we do this? This course will also serve as preparation for the submission of the written thesis in students’ second year of the program. First year and second year graduate students will build an annotated bibliography of sources relevant to their performance practice, creative research, and scholarship. Written assignments for second year graduate students will include a thesis proposal and outline, while first year graduate students will submit writing that reflects their engagement with course readings and sources from their individualized research. All students in the course will deliver a final presentation on their work over the course of the semester that can weave elements of formal and/or experimental delivery of research, taking the shape of a performance, a reading, or other form as discussed in consultation with the instructor.