From Nutcracker to Night Creature: Music/Dance Intersections

This interdisciplinary seminar explores cross-pollinations between concert music and dance in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A portion of our class time will be devoted to developing a shared level of discourse—musicianship for dancers, and dance fundamentals for musicians. Most of our time will be structured around repertoire case studies, which will include Giselle, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, The Rite of Spring, Oklahoma!, Appalachian Spring, Agon, and Revelations. More broadly, we will consider themes such as: sonic and visual constructions of gender; exoticism and cultural appropriation; “modernity” and “modernism” in their various manifestations; and wartime and Cold War-era cultural politics. The semester will culminate in presentations of individual projects, which can either involve a research topic or creative/performance work.