Course Description
Summary
This course is open to any student who wishes to explore the complicated ways in which histories form around discourses of the body, culture, aesthetic philosophy, and power. We will examine the aesthetic principles of modern and postmodern dance history; explore the artistic work of key and neglected figures from this history; and place this work within a larger social, cultural and political context.
Through recent and contemporary scholarship in the field of Dance Studies in particular, we will locate modern and postmodern dance within the socio-cultural values of its time. We will explore the significance of the innovations that artists associated with these movements offered to our cultural understanding of dance, while also considering the exclusions and social inequities sometimes perpetuated. We will also challenge the notion of modern dance as an exclusively Western phenomenon by looking at modern and postmodern experiments from other global locations, thereby complicating a singular understanding of modern dance history.
This is a reading and writing intensive course, in which students will be expected to produce written papers, creative responses to the material, and research-based class presentations.
