EmmaGrace Skove-Epes

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 artmaking, 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 that 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 nonverbal 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 may 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.

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.

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.