Critical Dance Studies

Critical Dance Studies: Corporealities and
Cultures is a graduate course that familiarizes
students with the interdisciplinary field of
critical dance studies and its historical,
ethnographic, and theoretical approaches. Dance
studies provides students with ways of analyzing
bodies in socio-cultural contexts while also
developing an understanding of historical
trajectories of dance on and off stage. Students
in this course will learn and generate vocabulary
to analyze formal aspects of choreography. This
course pays special attention to issues of race,
gender, sexuality, and class. The types of dance
examined include concert dance (ballet, modern,
contemporary), social dance (from salsa to
hip-hop), and dance on screen in contexts as
diverse as the proscenium stage, the museum, the
space of ritual, the club, television, and other
public and domestic spaces. This course will
address the ways in which bodies, dancing and
otherwise, reflect concepts and realities of
nation, politics, gender performance, racial
dynamics, power, taste, and labor. In addition to
gaining a background in the history of dance
discourse itself, students will acquire facility
with critical concepts such as "choreography,"
"corporeality," "embodiment," and "performance."
Students will engage in close readings of texts
and dance, developing discursive tools of
analysis (formal/aesthetic and cultural) in
written and presentation form. Students will also
develop an understanding of how dance interacts
with other arts. This course will be conducted in
seminar format; as such, it is participatory.
Requirements include weekly readings, writing
assignments in response to readings as well as
live and recorded dance, two short essays, one
research paper, one presentation, and attending
up to two live performances in Los Angeles as a
class. While this course fulfills a Dance MFA
requirement, it is open to graduate students
across campus.

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