DANC 102
Skills Fall 2013
Division I
Cross-listed ARTS 110
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Skills is a physical training lab for dancers, actors, performance artists, and anyone interested in expanding their kinesthetic awareness, physical range, perceptual sensitivity, and ability to communicate and work with others in an embodied way. The course proposes that developing these skills has the potential to ignite, inform and/or complicate one’s creative practice, social perspectives, and citizenship. The class provides students with highly specific exercises for building strength, flexibility, endurance, and physical range, while also prioritizing improvisational techniques for moving and vocalizing on our own, with partners, and as a group. Combining these approaches allows us to examine how the attention, freedom, play, and curiosity of improvisation can illuminate set exercises, and how the specifications and limits of set work might inform and clarify our more open-ended practice. Skills draws from a variety of approaches including Yoga, Body Weather Laboratory, Contact Improvisation, Jazz Dance, Authentic Movement, Mindfulness Meditation, and the work of La Pocha Nostra, Deborah Hay, and d. Sabela Grimes. We will experiment with repetitive tasks, acts of physical and mental endurance, touch and trust, blind walks, heightening one’s senses, and composing still and moving bodies in a variety of environments. Some reading will be given in order to contextualize our practices, and students will complete regular informal writing and a final collaborative project.
The Class: Format: studio
Limit: 20
Expected: 15
Class#: 1960
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: class participation, a weekly written response, and final experiential project
Prerequisites: previous experience with movement, performance art, theater, and meditation may be useful, but no performing or dance experience is necessary
Enrollment Preferences: juniors and seniors; if over enrolled instructor may ask for statement of interest
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
DANC 102 Division I ARTS 110 Division I

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