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Performance Production: Dancing at Lughnasa — DRA4214.01

Fall 2014

Instructor: jenny rohn

Days & Time: TBA

Credits: 4

This course is for students cast in a faculty-directed drama production, representing the hours of study both in and out of rehearsal necessary for an actor to build a successful performance in production. Rehearsals, techs, and performances constitute the student's commitment.

Drama

Performance Production: Daughters of Io — DRA4306.01

Fall 2015

Instructor: Kathleen Dimmick

Days & Time: TBA

Credits:

Greek Tragedy comes to Bennington as Collegiate Comedy! In the fall of 2015 Drama will present Daughters of Io, Quincy Longʹs adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women. In Long’s comic version of the classic Greek play, local milkmaids beset by bestial farm boys seek sanctuary on the campus of a progressive women’s college in rural 1930’s New England. Eight women play twenty

Drama

Performance Project : Ephemeral Archive — DAN4138.01

Fall 2019

Instructor: Hilary Clark, MFA Teaching Fellow

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

We will collectively generate a new work; each person will play an integral role in the development of the project. We will amass a large kind of historical archive from which we choose how to stage the work. Using the voice and text, we will push into rigorous physicality, exploring range and nuance. We will perform this in a concert at the end of the term.

Dance

Performance Project: A New Collective Work — DAN4136.01

Spring 2019

Instructor: Souleymane Badolo

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

In this performance project, we will begin with a series of improvisations to help investigate and develop movements for individuals and the group as a whole. During this process, we will be building together a simple set for our performance space. This collective work, formed from new pathways of thinking together, will result in a piece for performance by the end of the term.

Dance

Performance Project: Activating the Ambiguous Zone — DAN4222.01

Spring 2022

Instructor: Maura Gahan, MFA Teaching Fellow

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

There’s a ‘place’ where the front of the body meets the back of the body– the inner meets the outer–fabric becomes clothing and clothing becomes a movement score for the body–an object transforms from a tool in motion to a puppet in motion–flesh becomes cardboard and cardboard becomes flesh–light turns into dark and dark to light. We will call these places–these in-between

Dance

Performance Project: Adaptable Score — DAN4679.02; section 2

Spring 2016

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time:

Credits: 4

With new movement material crafted by both the instructor and the participants, we will delve into multiple variations of the phrases made, exploring the qualities, inherent technical challenges, spatial use, and timing. The final score will weave the developed phrase material with light, integrating both formal structural concerns and liquid interpretation. The new

Dance

Performance Project: Adaptable Score — DAN4679.01

Fall 2018

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

With new movement material crafted around the movement tendencies of each of the participants, we will delve into multiple variations of the phrases made. Throughout the term, we will be exploring the movement qualities, inherent technical challenges, spatial use, and timing. The final score will weave the developed phrase material with light, integrating both formal

Dance

Performance Project: Adaptable Score — DAN4679.01) (cancelled

Spring 2021

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

With new movement material crafted around the movement tendencies of each of the participants, we will delve into multiple variations of the phrases made. Throughout the term, we will be exploring movement qualities, inherent technical challenges, spatial use, and timing. We will investigate the interrelationship of movement and environment, and will use costume as an essential

Dance

Performance Project: Adaptable Score — DAN4679.01; section 1

Spring 2016

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

Dance

Performance Project: BRUJX — DAN4362.01

Fall 2023

Instructor: luciana achugar, MFA Teaching Fellow

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

In this course we will make a dance, directed by achugar, and perform it at the end of the semester. It is for students with a deep awareness of their bodies in movement and with prior experience performing onstage and being part of a creative dance process, that are interested in being challenged as performers with a rigorous rehearsal process. This work will further explore

Dance

Performance Project: Cultivating Resilience: A Score for Movement & Light — DAN4377.01

Spring 2026

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time: MO,TH 3:40pm-5:30pm

Credits: 4

Resilience deals with not only the expected but also the unexpected. During this period of time, Dana Reitz will create a new dance work with the entire group, in sections and as a whole, that will rise from the participants. During class and outside of class, everyone will be involved in creating individual movement material and delving

Dance

Performance Project: Dancing Chavela Vargas — DAN4375.01

Fall 2025

Instructor: Levi Gonzalez

Days & Time: TU,FR 4:10pm-6:00pm

Credits: 2

Chavela Vargas has often been called “la voz de México”. An iconoclastic figure, a publicly queer woman singing rancheras and comporting with radical artists and activists, her life is a

Dance

Performance Project: Dancing Chavela Vargas — DAN4365.01) (cancelled 9/30/2024

Spring 2025

Instructor: Levi Gonzalez

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

Chavela Vargas has often been called “la voz de México”. An iconoclastic figure, a publicly queer woman singing rancheras and comporting with radical artists and activists, her life is a study in refusing to submit to social norms and embracing the power of art as an act of solidarity, resistance and love. In this course, students will participate in a rehearsal process that

Performance Project: Exchange — DAN4126.01

Spring 2018

Instructor: Terry Creach

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

In this performance project, we’ll work with close encounters and with the physical puzzles that result. We’ll work individually and collectively to generate movement materials that build toward small group patterns that mix, combine, and sometimes clash. For those interested in challenging their athleticism, movement invention and negotiating skills. The new work will be

Dance

Performance Project: Hanou — DAN4122.01

Spring 2017

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

Hanou, from the language of Gurunsi, means “myself.” This piece will be built upon the individual stories of the participants who will contribute not only fragments of their own histories but also spatial scenarios. The collected scenarios will form the base of the larger structure that will weave them into an interconnected fabric of movement, sound and space. The

Dance

Performance Project: Liminality Portal; Dancing Within and Beyond the Frame — DAN4421.01

Fall 2023

Instructor: Erin Ellen Kelly, MFA Teaching Fellow

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

In this creative process lab, we will be developing dance and site responsive movement scores to be performed live and in relation to video. During the first seven weeks, we will be cultivating/creating these scores based on rigorous somatic investigation and dance practice, both within the studio and within specific predetermined locations. Throughout this process, students

Dance Visual Arts

Performance Project: Living Sculpture — DAN4237.01

Spring 2016

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

In this performance project, we will be investigating how to build content and how to look at dance as a living sculpture. Multiple locations will be chosen for multiple new sculptures. We will use the architectural elements of a space to inform the building of our content. Each “living structure” will be made in only a few weeks and made only to exist in that specific location

Dance

Performance Project: Natural State of Error — DAN2125.01

Fall 2017

Instructor: Elena Demyanenko

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

In this performance project, we will build on the body knowledge of each participant. We will explore the nuance and precision of impulses and will inhibit them when necessary. Keenly aware of our relationship to space and each other, we can intuit others’ actions just as inanimate bodies might repel and attract in a magnetic field. Attunement at the level of reflex, habit, and

Dance

Performance Project: Natural State of Error — DAN4225.01

Spring 2019

Instructor: Elena Demyanenko

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

Dance

Performance Project: New Territory / Place — DAN4369.01

Spring 2025

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

In this course we will create a new dance project together. The ensemble work will allow participants to engage in a rigorous approach to the practice of performing. Each performer is invited to bring what they know with them to the project, yet leave room for each to express a complex and indefinable range of experience through the humor, intelligence and emotional engagement

Dance

Performance Project: Not Knowing — DAN4108.01

Fall 2015

Instructor: Jian Dai (MFA Teaching Fellow, supervised by Terry Creach Dana Reitz)

Days & Time: TBA

Credits: 2

I know I don’t know what I know or don’t know. I start with the passion to make something. I don’t know what it will be. I like the process of learning and searching, understanding myself more as I work through it. Who am I? What do I want? What makes me interested? What can I make? Who are these people who work with me? Starting from scratch, without a particular image

Dance

Performance Project: Object as a Mirror — DAN4123.01

Spring 2017

Instructor: Dana Reitz

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

In this dance project, we will investigate how to apply the body as both tool and material. We will observe our responses to and projections upon multiple objects, combining our personal understandings with the generally held definitions of those objects. Our practice will be to deconstruct these findings and transfer them to physical actions. Then, these will be woven into a

Dance

Performance Project: ONE-ish — DAN4033.01

Spring 2027

Instructor: Mina Nishimura

Days & Time: TU,FR 10:30am-12:20pm

Credits: 2

In this performance project, we will create a new original work in which a single “figure” is composed collectively by all participants. Like an AI-generated image built from multiple faces, this piece emerges through layering—of movement, personal text, and presence—into a shared body.

Dance

Performance Project: Overly Engineered — DAN2133.01

Spring 2018

Instructor: Stuart Shugg, MFA Teaching Fellow

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

I am interested in making dances that reveal the unique personalities of group members while they work towards achieving a particular goal. Through using improvisation and set material, we will work to accomplish simple tasks in an overly contrived fashion. As with the mechanisms found in a Rube Goldberg Machine, the multiple components will add up to a needlessly complex and

Dance

Performance Project: Pressing Face Against That Window — DAN2017.01

Fall 2023

Instructor: Mina Nishimura

Days & Time:

Credits: 2

This performance project course is open to anyone who is interested in a text-based experimental performance, which may not fit in a frame of dance or theater in the traditional sense. Mina Nishimura will facilitate the creative process of making a new text-based performance, Pressing Face Against That Window [working title], written and directed by co-facilitator Kota

Dance Drama