Courses

Required Courses

The cluster in Critical Dance Studies requires three graduate seminars: a foundational course in methods for dance studies (DANCE 465) and two additional courses at the graduate level that either incorporate significant dance content or allow the student to pursue independent research on a dance topic. Cluster students will confer with the cluster director to select the two additional courses and to plan a course of study that supports their research interests.

Consult with the Cluster Director about elective courses that may count.

The following requirements are in addition to, or further elaborate upon, those requirements outlined in The Graduate School Policy Guide.

Dance, Performance, Ethnography*

Melissa Blanco Borelli

Theatre and Drama 503

Wednesdays 2 to 5

Men Dancing

Susan Manning

Dance 335/English 312

Wednesdays 9:30 to 12:30

Corporeality Theories*

Thomas DeFrantz

Seminar: Dance for Camera

Brendan Fernandes

Art, Theory, Practice 372

Tuesdays 1 to 4

Seminar, TBD

Brendan Fernandes

Art, Theory, Practice 372

Weimar Dance and its Afterlives

Susan Manning

Modernisms in Motion

Susan Manning

DANCE 465

Wednesdays 9:30-12:00AM

This course examines how artists and scholars have theorized dance modernisms. Starting with choreographers long canonized for their abstract aesthetics—Vaslav Nijinsky, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham—the class asks how their aesthetics negotiated the social identities of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality. The course then turns to alternate embodiments of modernism and social identity in the dances of Katherine Dunham, Waldeen, Ramiro Guerra, Rex Nettleford, Saddayakko, Michio Ito, Takaya Eguchi, Rukmini Devi, and Uday Shankar. In the end, this course proposes an understanding of dance modernisms as intersecting networks across the Global South and Global North. Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. This course fulfills a core requirement for the new graduate cluster in Critical Dance Studies.

Dancing the Post War Avant-Garde

Susan Manning

Dance 335/English 312

Fridays, 9:30-12:00PM

This course surveys experimental movement-based performance from the 1950s to the present in the U.S., Europe, Japan, India, and West Africa. Starting with the New York avant-garde of the 1950s, the course looks at Butoh, Tanztheater, Judson Dance Theatre, conceptual dance, Black postmodernism, and contemporary dance in Asia and Africa. After situating each movement within the time and place of its initial formation, we’ll follow its ideas and practices across national borders. Along the way, we’ll discover surprising alliances—Katherine Dunham’s impact on Tatsumi Hijikata, the interrelations between Judson and conceptual dance, and the mutual influences of Pina Bausch and Chandralekha. At issue is how to account for the power differentials between the Global North and Global South while also acknowledging the multidimensionality of global circulation.

Bodies, Theories, Performance

Melissa Blanco Borelli

TH&DRAMA 503

Tuesdays 2-5PM

Bodies, Theories, Performance asks us to consider what a “body” is, how it theorizes, and through what performance practices does it act, react and counter-act. How do we move from the idea of the body as a flesh and bone entity, to a corporeality rife with meaning?  We start with the premise that a “body” is a social, meaning-making physicality made real through its enactments in and with the world. We then move on to see how dance and performance scholars theorize through interdisciplinary analyses that include history, ethnography, critical race theory, queer theory, crip theory, Black studies, visual culture, feminisms and indigenous epistemologies. These theoretical interventions broaden our epistemological understandings of the powerful and political potential of bodies in action and allow us to see how embodied performance practices offer a multiplicity of possibilities for world-making.