Course Overview

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.

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. 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 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 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 politics of race, gender, sexuality, ableism, and class. In-class discussion, embodied activities, and online discussion boards will support students' critical engagement with assigned materials.

Students will develop an understanding of 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. In this writing-attentive course, students will develop tools to undertake their own historical investigations, generate a bibliography, an abstract, and write a research paper that investigates a specific work of dance or dance event, situating it within sociocultural and historical contexts by incorporating a variety of primary and secondary material and vivid descriptive/interpretive writing. Students will strengthen their writing via rigorous instructor and peer feedback, multiple drafts, revising of ideas, and attention to organization and style.

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