ARTD

Dancing Histories/Writing Dance has three overlapping aims: 1) to learn about concert dance histories through historical sources, scholarship, and embodiment, 2) to understand the processes of historiography, and 3) to prepare students to undertake their own historical research and scholarship.


The course is designed to illustrate how our understanding of the past is dynamic and evolving rather than fixed and static. Through critical engagement with concert dance history’s canons, values, and ideological premises, Dancing Histories/Writing Dance emphasizes how history is written, questioned, and rewritten.


Throughout the semester, we will explore a range of concert/art dance genres as they emerged across Europe, the United States, and Japan; these particular sites exemplify how concert dance draws from both Western and non-Western dance forms and aesthetics, often pointing to larger paradigms of sociocultural and political inequity. Moving from 16th century court ballet through 20th century jazz, modern, and postmodern dance to international “contemporary” stages, assigned readings will enable recognition of how dance scholars have employed national and transnational frameworks to write, and revise, dance histories.


Students will develop a strong methodological framework that will allow them to grasp the significance of source material, the effects of cultural competence and critical bias, and the ways in which the writing of history is a creative, political, and ideological process.

Course Objectives (Students will be able to):

• Conduct historical research via archives, libraries, and their own bodies

• Describe dancing vividly and understand description as interpretation

• Situate works/events within broader historical, sociocultural, and political contexts

• Understand the ideological paradigms inherent in historical claims


In this writing-attentive course, students will write a dance history research paper that incorporates a variety of primary and secondary material and uses vivid descriptive/interpretive writing. They will strengthen their writing via rigorous instructor and peer feedback, multiple drafts, revising of ideas, and attention to organization and style. When relevant, we will engage in movement activities to support and enrich our grasp of historical material.



Students are equipped with the tools necessary to undertake their own historical investigations, develop archival skills and generate a bibliography, an abstract, and write a research paper that investigates a specific work of dance or dance event, situating the work or event under investigation within sociocultural and historical contexts.



Assigned material includes book chapters, articles, and essays from the fields of dance and performance studies as well as public-facing dance history podcasts and documentary films. Special attention will be given to how dance histories are entangled within complex politics of race, gender, sexuality, ableism, and class. In-class discussion, embodied research activities, and online discussion boards will support students' critical engagement with assigned materials.