Choreography & Textuality

Choreography and Textuality: Bodies on the Page,
Words on the Stage is a graduate course that will
explore relationships between choreography and
writing. Presumably, choreography is to dance
what writing is to language; what would it mean
to "choreograph" words onto the page or to
"write" dance onto the stage? Alternatively, what
does text bring to questions of the corporeal,
and what do dance and the body bring to questions
of the textual? In mining such questions, we will
attune ourselves to works of dance, performance,
prose, and poetry that deconstruct and rearrange
conventions of meaning, representation,
communication, embodiment, and abstraction
through unexpected treatments of form and
content. When and how do choreographic, poetic,
and critical modes coexist? This course inquires
into William Forsythe's engagements with the work
of Anne Carson and Virginia Woolf, Germaine
Acogny and Kota Yamazaki's collaborative
choreography based on a novel by Boubacar Boris
Diop, work by The Wooster Group that draws from
William Forsythe and Gertrude Stein, Ralph
Lemon's parachoreographic texts and use of Kathy
Acker's writing, Richard Move's archival work on
Martha Graham, Arthur Pita's production of
Kafka's Metamorphosis, Nijinsky's diaries, Pina
Bausch's tanztheater, Gelsey Kirkland's
autobiography, choreography by Miguel Guttierez,
Jerome Bel, and Ohad Naharin, and writing by
Franz Kafka, Barbara Browning, Maggie Nelson,
Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Robert Grenier, and
Elfride Jelinek that takes up the body,
explicitly or otherwise. Students will write
several essays, engage in live writing during
performances, and have the opportunity to
experiment with "performative" writing. Placing
importance on issues of race, gender, sexuality,
and class, this course will be informed by
critical paradigms such as corporeality,
embodiment, "difficulty," reperformance,
reenactment, reskilling, translation, and
gesture. This interdisciplinary course brings
together performance studies, critical dance
studies, and literary studies. While this course
fulfills a Dance MFA requirement, it is open to
graduate students across campus.