Dance After 1960

Dance After 1960: Virtuosity, Deskilling, and the
Postdramatic interrogates international and local
developments in concert, popular, screen, and
subcultural dance, within and across decades,
focusing on the 1960s to the present. It is a
critical dance studies course in which students
will continue to practice multiple approaches to
researching and writing about dance. Because
dance studies is an interdisciplinary field that
engages with performance studies, history,
anthropology, literary studies, critical race
studies, gender studies, disability studies, film
studies, and postcolonial studies, students will
learn to identify and employ various lenses in
their readings and analyses. Methodologies
practiced in this course are ethnography,
performance analysis, and the argumentative
essay. Students will also have the opportunity to
embody theory through praxis, improvising
informally in various locations throughout the
semester. Keeping in mind relevant historical and
political events, concepts explored include the
body, race, class, gender/sexuality, nation,
virtuosity/disability, postmodernism, dramaturgy,
deskilling, and the postdramatic. Dance works and
practices from the U.S., Africa, Europe, Latin
America, Asia, "home," and the internet will be
represented. The following are examples of
artists, movements, and works considered in this
course: The Judson Dance Theater, Merce
Cunningham, contact improvisation, aerobics,
Fame, MTV, voguing, Twyla Tharp, William
Forsythe, Pina Bausch, Narcissister, Miguel
Guttierez, John Jasperse, Trajal Harrell, Desmond
Richardson, Ralph Lemon, and Faustin Linyekula.
Theorists and historians include Susan Foster,
Mark Franko, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, André
Lepecki, Judith Butler, Shannon Jackson, Tavia
Nyong'o, Susan Stryker, Claire Bishop, Ramsay
Burt, Hans Thies Lehmann, and more. This is a
participatory seminar course. Students will be
expected to attend all classes, attend two
performances in Los Angeles as a class, write
weekly responses to readings and performances,
write three short essays, and give a final
presentation. While this course is designed as
the third semester BFA dance studies course in a
series of four, it is open to students outside of
dance with an interest in the material.

Students should expect to spend approx. $100 for
books and performances.