Courses

Required Courses

The cluster in Critical Dance Studies requires three graduate seminars: a foundational course in methods for dance studies and two additional courses 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 their courses and to plan a course of study that supports their research interests.

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

Dance & Performance Historiography

Susan Manning

Theatre & Drama 503

Wednesdays 2-4:50PM

This seminar examines diverse approaches to dance and performance history. What sources of evidence are available for dance and performance scholars? How do researchers interpret and analyze their evidence and narrate their conclusions? How do the formats of documentary film and museum exhibition complement published scholarship? Case studies are selected from dance and theatrical modernisms in a global context. Genres surveyed include critical biography, transnational history, social dance history, institutional history, and microhistory. This course fulfills a core requirement for the cluster on Critical Dance Studies and a history/theory/culture requirement for the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama.

Weimar Dance and its Afterlives

Susan Manning

ENG 312/DANCE 335

Wednesdays 2-4:50PM

Focusing on dance and other performance genres during the Weimar Republic, this seminar examines works in the historical context of interwar Germany, a time of intense fracturing between the right and the left. Perhaps for this reason, contemporary artists have often deployed Weimar performance as a source for their own works. Highlighting the complex relations between history and memory, this seminar looks at works by Mary Wigman, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Oskar Schlemmer, and Bertolt Brecht and by contemporary artists who have reperformed their predecessors. Readings and discussion in English; students may deploy German or other modern languages for their independent research.

Dance Theory

Thomas DeFrantz

Theatre & Drama 503

How does dance emerge?  When and whom have its processes served?  What theoretical lines of inquiry have served those processes, and how have they fared over time? What tools do scholars bring to bear on the study of dance, and where are these tools most effective? This course explores the theoretical frameworks that underpin the study of dance as an art form, cultural practice, and means of communication. Students will engage with critical texts, choreographic examples, and interdisciplinary approaches to examine dance through lenses of identity, embodiment, history, politics, and aesthetics. Required reading and film viewing will collude and collide with classroom discussion.

Seminar: Dance for Camera

Brendan Fernandes

Art, Theory, Practice 372

Tuesdays 1 to 4

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

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.