Movement and Meaning: Dance in a Global Context

3 units

This course introduces students to various approaches to studying dance in a humanities context. We will explore how people create meaning through dance and how dance, in turn, influences social norms, political institutions, aesthetic ideals and cultural practices. As we compare dance forms across the globe, we will also examine issues of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, analyzing how dance literally embodies identity. At the same time, we will discover how contemporary unequal power hierarchies bear on our designation of some dance forms as Western and others as world or ethnic. Tensions around assessment of authenticity/creativity, adaptation/appropriation, agency/resistance, and cultural hierarchies shift with social and political hegemony and with the individual's position as insider or outsider (a position that can shift depending on context). Throughout the semester, the usual process of the course will be discussion of assigned reading and viewing and analyzing together dance videos shown in class. A few dance workshops will be included (for which no previous dance training is necessary). Required work includes short papers and a final project.