Critical Dance Processes: Action Studies

DAN2509B.01
Course System Home Terms Fall 2026 Critical Dance Processes: Action Studies

Course Description

Summary

Critical Dance Processes: Action Studies moves students through intensive and collaborative dance research practices including guided improvisation, the making of solo performance studies, and the co-creative design of collective movement research scores. Reading and writing assignments complement and inform work done in the studio. The course culminates in the presentation of a collaboratively created dance work to be shared publicly. 

Throughout the class, we will engage practices where seeing and being seen by each other are central, studying the ways in which witnessing one another in process stimulates and deepens learning. Critical Dance Processes: Action Studies will serve as a space where civic thinking is enacted - where we study and create ways to re-imagine our relationships to sociality, theory, poetics and practice. Our process will bring us to face urgent questions surrounding how to work together, how to shape research as action in and for the world we live in.

This course is a requirement for first and second-year BFA Dance Lab students.

Learning Outcomes

  • Students will generate individual and collective compositional and performative actions/studies.
  • Students will be able to identify and construct methodologies that enable co-creative artistic processes.
  • Students will create written projects that integrate and reflect on experiences of physical research, critical reading and collective discourse.
  • Students will create individual and collective systems of self-reflection and peer review to expand capacities for choreographic thinking and relational engagement.

Instructor

  • Jesse Zaritt

Day and Time

MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm

Delivery Method

Fully in-person

Length of Course

Full Term

Academic Term

Fall 2026

Area of Study

Credits

4

Course Level

2000

Maximum Enrollment

15

Course Frequency

Once a year