DANC 302
Experimental Choreography/Ways of Working Fall 2013
Division I
Cross-listed ARTS 302
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Conceptual and visual artists in Europe and the U.S. have long borrowed techniques and aesthetics from their contemporaries in dance and theater. In the 1960s the Judson Dance Theater and other dance makers often took cues from their colleagues in visual art and music. Today there is a renewed interest in the body and performance in gallery and museum contexts while at the same time the contemporary dance world is re-visiting interdisciplinary sensibilities and techniques, newly challenging how “dance” can be defined. Stillness and quotidian action are again being framed as choreography, dancers are using technology and materials to create visual and sonic products from their movements, obsessively repetitive actions and physical exhaustion and endurance, trends long popular in live art/performance, are being re-contextualized by choreographers and/or in traditional theatrical settings, dance and dancers are regularly performing outside of traditional theaters, and projects featuring humans moving in collaboration with urban and natural environments are commonplace. Dismissing the need to determine weather or not a given performance is in fact dance, this course proposes the reclamation of the word choreography to include any movement (or stillness) of bodies in space and time. Expanding definitions of choreography, the class calls on compositional techniques from dance as well as strategies not traditionally considered for application to choreography. Through in-class experiential exercises, readings, video and performance viewing (of contemporary and historical work by well-known and lesser-known artists), discussion, and individual performance-making, the class will employ several interdisciplinary ways of inventing and organizing movement, a handful of approaches to how a maker transmits ideas to a performer, and a variety of examples of how and for what purpose an artist frames these particular actions and inactions in a given context. We will look at a number of works categorized within the field of dance, while also considering examples from live/performance art, conceptual practice, music/sound, installation and sculpture. Students will make several performances, working on their own as solo performers, as directors of group projects, and as a collaborative team of makers.
The Class: Format: studio
Limit: 10
Expected: 10
Class#: 1961
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: class participation, regular written and choreographic assignments, and final research/performance project
Prerequisites: expierence in dance, theater, performance, video or literary arts
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:
ARTS 302 Division I DANC 302 Division I

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